We’re back again. Here we are. Coach Garey. And we were going to talk some more about the circulatory system. All right, rolling.

Let’s start with heartbeats. Our heart is beating all the time. It’s expressing blood out and it’s resting and pushing and resting. So, that pushing creates a certain amount of pressure on the arteries. And this is a continual process.

Your heart never takes a day off. Even when you go to sleep, your beats per minute can go down from say 80 per minute during the waking hours, 80 to 100, you can go down to 60 or even 50 beats per minute, but it never stops your whole life.

Say you live to be 75 or 80, your heart has pumped over two and a half billion times. That’s a big number. It’s a continuous process. The resting between beats is where the heart is able to gather its forces again and create that next beat. There’s an electrical part to the heartbeat, and part of the spark that makes the beat begin, and there’s a rhythm to it. There’s another thing that we track in health, it’s called the heart rate variability. These are really important things just to keep in the back of your mind.

That one heartbeat expresses two ounces of blood, approximately, with every beat, which means in a minute you’ve expressed five quarts. Five quarts of blood every single minute of every single hour of every single day. How many quarts is that in say 70 years? It’s 220 million quarts, get the picture? Blood is flowing constantly all the time. Now, what is the job of the blood? There are two main functions of blood flow, circulating blood throughout the body. One is to deliver oxygen to every cell in your body. Your body needs oxygen.

We say this often, but you can only survive a few weeks without food, you can survive a few days without water, and you can survive about four or five minutes without oxygen. Oxygen is the primary number one nutrient, and breath is so important. This is going to become evident later when we talk about solutions. But just a little tip-off, how you breathe is extremely important. I was speaking with a yoga instructor, interview this morning, and she said that baby when a baby’s born the baby breathes with its whole body. Every breath it takes, the front of the body is moving, the back of the body’s moving. Babies breathe with the entire body.

And then, as we grow up and become adults, and we sit in classrooms, we sit at the desk, we sit in the office, we sit in front of the TV. We’re cramped, we’re hunched, and our breathing becomes very shallow. We’re only breathing in the top portions of our lungs. When in fact, we really need to use these muscles right here, the diaphragmatic muscles in order to really fill up that breath and get that posture going. Blood flow depends on oxygen. It picks up oxygen from the lungs and then proceeds to travel throughout the entire 70,000 miles of blood vessels in order to oxygenate every cell in your body. That’s a pretty important point.

About a half of the blood is made of plasma, and white and red blood cells make up the rest of it. So it’s a liquid tissue, it’s the tissue that’s actually liquified. And those red blood cells and those white blood cells, they have a job. The red blood cells are delivering oxygen to every cell. As it’s giving off the oxygen, it picks up metabolic waste, it picks up carbon dioxide. And the carbon dioxide is going to continue with the blood until it’s back to the lungs and you breathe. You breathe out, you exhale. That carbon dioxide leaves your body.

The job of the white blood cells is part of your immune system to pick up any straggling particles that should not be in the blood.

So what could those particles be?

Well, we say quite often that disease begins in the gut. And basically what happens is, there’s a syndrome called a leaky gut syndrome, where if you’re eating a lot of junk food, a lot of sugar, even a lot of salt. In the processed food, you have a lot of salt. Much more than a human needs to survive. And we’re not counterbalancing that sodium with potassium and magnesium, we become very deficient in magnesium and potassium, and we get a lot of sodium, which creates intestinal leakages.

There’s the endothelial lining of the intestines, and that’s to prevent those bacteria and food particles from leaving the digestive system prematurely. We need to be aware and be consistent in learning how to take care of ourselves through the nutrition that we eat. That’s one of the main messages here at Optimal Health Bridge. We’re getting onto some more facts about the circuitry system, and then we’re going to dive right into hypertension.

What it means, how it hurts us, how we can avoid it, what we can do to remedy it. Be right back.