CM Vitals Digital Resources

Introduction

The heart, blood vessels and blood make up one of the most amazing and unique organ systems in the human body: the cardiovascular system. Often referred to as the body’s form of plumbing, the cardiovascular system is responsible for transporting nutrients and oxygen and removing gaseous waste. The cardiovascular system also provides immune protection and regulates body temperature, fluid pH, and water content of cells.

1 These actions are completed with the help of the autonomic nervous system, which regulates the cardiovascular system by monitoring receptors throughout the body on a second-by-second basis.

² This process allows the heart to respond to stimuli instantaneously and beat over 100,000 times each day, without you having to do anything!

The overwhelming amount of work accomplished by the cardiovascular system each day places stress on both the heart and coronary arteries. Over time, this stress can lead to chronic inflammation, insulin resistance and ultimately cardiometabolic disease.

3 Cardiometabolic disease is comprised of three of the top six most commonly diagnosed chronic diseases among Americans: cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and stroke.

4 In fact, preventing and managing cardiometabolic risk is the most common conversation patients have with their clinicians.

Traditionally, treating and preventing cardiometabolic disease has focused on managing lab values such as blood glucose, blood pressure, HDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and total cholesterol with the use of prescription drugs. Unfortunately, this strategy has not lowered the rate of cardiometabolic disease. In fact, more and more Americans are diagnosed each year and at increasingly younger ages.

However, we now know the cardiovascular system is highly influenced by lifestyle choices we make every day, such as diet, physical activity, stress response, and the environment. If health-focused choices are not practiced daily, chronic inflammation, insulin resistance and, over time, cardiometabolic disease can damage our overall health.5, 6

The CM Vitals Patient Handbook provides a specialized lifestyle plan to help you begin the journey of taking control of your cardiometabolic risk.
Cardiometabolic disease refers to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and stroke.

Understanding Cardiometabolic Risk

Cardiometabolic risk is a collection of factors that help determine a patient’s overall risk for cardiometabolic disease.
Based on population data, professional organizations such as the American Diabetics Association (ADA) and the
American Heart Association (AHA) have established these guidelines for measuring cardiometabolic risk.

As you can see, regardless of your risk level, the recommended course of treatment is often focused on drug therapies aimed at reducing an individual lab value (e.g., a statin for high LDL). This type of management is a reactive way of helping you lower your risk, but it clearly does not attack the underlying cause of the problem. An abnormal lab value is a signal of multiple levels of body functions failing; therefore, simply addressing the lab value will not solve the many layers of dysfunction that continue to persist. In order to truly improve risk, we must be proactive and attack the underlying cause of the problem. The cause of increased cardiometabolic risk is often a decreased physiological resilience and metabolic reserve caused by chronic inflammation and insulin resistance stemming from poor lifestyle choices such as obesity, physical inactivity, stress, environmental factors, and nutrient deficiencies.

Controlling Your Cardiometabolic Risk

We all have an aunt or uncle who lives a very unhealthy lifestyle and still lived to be 95 years old. On the flip side, we all know someone who practiced a very healthy lifestyle, but unfortunately was diagnosed with cardiometabolic disease before the age of 60. These two groups of people are anomalies, and they represent a very small portion of the general population. Even though your genes play a role in disease progression, they are not the deciding factor for a majority of the population.

Your risk for cardiometabolic disease takes years to develop. The cumulative burden of years of poor choices eventually add up to create your risk or health profile. This is called the metabolic continuum. If you’ve made some unhealthy choices over your lifetime, you can change your course. However, if you take no action, the risk for disease will snowball as the years progress.

With your clinician’s guidance, the CM Vitals Patient Handbook will help you understand where you fall on the metabolic continuum, and how you can take steps to improve your trajectory as needed.

Chronic Inflammation and Cardiometabolic Risk

The body’s immune system responds to unknown, damaged and harmful particles by initiating inflammation. Inflammation is your body’s defense and repair system. For example, healthy short-term inflammation ensures you can defend yourself from a virus or repair your skin after getting a cut. Depending on how long the trigger of inflammation lasts, inflammation can be either acute (healthy) or chronic (unhealthy). Chronic inflammation is commonly the cause of your cardiometabolic risk. If unaddressed and unstopped, your risk can then turn into full cardiometabolic disease. Luckily, your risk setting can be significantly improved by using the power of lifestyle medicine to help lower and control chronic inflammation.

Inflammation is a necessary function of the body, so a certain level is considered protective. But diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and stroke manifest at early ages when inflammation is chronic and uncontrolled.9-11 Practicing proactive lifestyle medicine daily will help dampen and control chronic inflammation.

Low Risk Factors

• Exercise

• No sugar

• No smoking

• Clean water

• Plant-based Mediterranean diet

Prioritizing Insulin Resistance

Daily lifestyle choices have a profound effect on our blood sugar levels. Good choices like making time for a workout or poor choices like skipping breakfast on a busy morning have either a healthy or harmful effect on our blood sugar levels, insulin resistance risks and chronic inflammation levels

WHAT CAUSES INSULIN RECOVERY?

Physical activity, avoiding toxins, plant-based Mediterranean diet, weight management, meditation

By understanding and prioritizing your drivers of insulin resistance, you can profoundly reverse your overall cardiometabolic risks and disease status.

Determining Your Place on the Metabolic Continuum

Understanding Your Lab Values

Lab values are a very important piece of understanding your risk setting. They provide your health care practitioner with a snapshot of how your body is managing various life signals and progressing through the aging process. Lab values are not to be treated in isolation, but are best evaluated in light of the big picture of your risk and/or disease status. Your health care practitioner is trained to understand when a particular lab value is a sign of a deeper problem that must be addressed.

Identifying Drivers of Insulin Resistance and Inflammation

The CM Vitals Advanced Cardiometabolic Analysis will help you identify the underlying causes of insulin resistance and chronic inflammation. 2

Stress and Cardiometabolic Disease

Chronic stress can significantly increase inflammation in the body, leading to cell damage, insulin resistance and increased risks for cardiometabolic disease.

Stress indirectly causes additional risks. During stressful periods, we often engage in unhealthy coping strategies such as overindulging in junk food, smoking or drinking excessive amounts of alcohol. Additionally, stress can interfere with our routine healthy habits such as exercise, sleep and healthy meal preparation. It is unreasonable to reduce all types of stress. Often, the goal of stress management is to view the stress trigger differently or change the situation and reduce the impact of stress on you. Stress is a contributor to almost 90% of all diseases, so reducing your stress level is a powerful step in improving your overall health.

If you need additional support for reducing stress and its impact on your body, talk with your health care practitioner about using the SOS Stress Recovery Program, a comprehensive program for personalized stress support.

Blood Sugar and Stress

We’ve all heard of, and perhaps fallen victim to, the term “stress-eating,” which refers to either overconsuming highly processed and refined calories or making a poor food choice after a difficult situation. We turn to this eating pattern because we believe it will comfort us and relieve our stress.

Even though these food choices are temporarily comforting, this pattern of coping can lead to erratic blood sugar levels, a common problem for patients with chronic stress. When you stress-eat, blood sugar levels skyrocket well above normal ranges, forcing the pancreas to produce unhealthy amounts of insulin. This rush of insulin causes blood sugar levels to quickly drop below normal levels, leading to fatigue and drowsiness.

As a response to the rapidly dropping blood sugar levels, your body will tell the adrenal glands to produce high amounts of cortisol to stimulate glucose production from stored energy and raise blood sugar back to safer, normal levels.

If this becomes a regular pattern, this dramatic rise and fall in blood sugar levels will place a constant burden on many hormone systems. This can initiate a vicious cycle of chronic inflammation, the root cause of many diseases.