I was wondering who had posted that they had a cardiac arrythmia. I remember reading something here a few weeks ago. Any clue?

That was me - it was either in Jan or Feb.

Here, I made it easy for you - here's the link to the thread and I also re-posted it right here:

[www.rawfoodsupport.com]



Hello,

I wanted to share my story in hopes that it might help someone else. As a young, healthy, fit raw foodist for 2 years now, the last thing I ever would’ve expected was to develop heart problems. I thought you could only get heart problems if you were older and ate a standard western type diet.

For months I had ignored tiredness, muscle twitches, skipped heartbeats and occasional tightness in my chest as nothing to worry about. Later I also started experiencing abdominal cramping that wasn’t PMS-related. Then one day my heart started racing and I got really panicked so I went to the emergency room and was diagnosed with heart palpitations. They said it was nothing serious, just stay away from caffeine, etc. I was pretty shocked that I had had an abnormal EKG, since my EKG’s have always been normal. I had an EKG a few months into raw and I was fine. So what happened?? I was baffled. The only thing I could think of was that maybe the zeolite I was taking had depleted some heart-essential mineral? I certainly didn't think my diet could be the problem.

For the next few days I continued to experience intermittent racing heartbeats lasting an hour or two at a time. I would have to close my eyes and meditate in order to slow my heart rate. This happened even while I was just laying in bed. I had been researching Natural Hygiene at the time, so I decided that as a last resort I would fast. I couldn’t think of anything I could do to improve my diet, so I decided to just eat nothing and let my body heal itself. I lay in bed for 3 days eating nothing and my heart only seemed to be getting worse, not better. I was terrified. I had chest pain all the time, my heart would race and all the hairs on the back of my neck would stand up and feel prickly several times a day, I was really scared. I had an impending sense of doom and was frustrated because I couldn’t think of what else I could be doing right.

For days I stayed away from the internet because anytime I started searching for answers I would see the words “heart attack” everywhere which would just signal another panic attack and racing heart, and I would have to lay my head on a pillow and focus on meditation to slow my heart and calm me down. For the most part I was too weak to get out of bed at all. Even when my heart wasn’t racing, I felt nowhere near normal. I didn’t tell anyone what was going on because my worst fear was that someone would send an ambulance to come get me, and I’d wake up in the ER with disastrous heart medications injected into me and end up with permanent heart damage. By this time I had read plenty about the medical treatments for cardiac problems, and I wanted nothing to do with any of them. They all sounded grim and barbaric. Reading about the treatments, and thinking about any of them being performed on me, made me nearly pass out.

I was having frequent and recurring heart palpitations even while resting. Somehow my heart rhythm had become de-stabilized.

Through all my fear and panic, I still had some lucid moments where deep down I knew there was a natural cure and I was determined to find it. However, it was taking me a long time because I kept having to take breaks from the internet in order to calm down.

Since fasting wasn’t working, I decided to start trying raw foods one by one to see what might help. I had some vague notion that potassium was important for the heart, and then on the internet the other heart-essential mineral I found was magnesium. Magnesium? I didn’t think I was deficient in magnesium, but I suppose that’s just because I knew nothing about it.

Magnesium is found in things like wheatgrass juice, lima beans, nuts, seeds, beans, whole grains, spinach and other leafy greens, and chocolate. Basically, things that as a raw foodist, I had kind of stopped eating or been eating much less of during my past 2 years eating raw.

I decided to give spinach & wheatgrass juices a try to see if maybe they would help. I didn’t want to touch nuts or cooked food after several days of fasting. The spinach & wheatgrass worked. AMAZINGLY. A miracle happened when I drank 2 ounces of wheatgrass – there was sudden calmness in my chest. My heart stopped racing. Woohoo! I was ecstatic.

Within a day or two of drinking wheatgrass juice and large green juices, I was up and moving about. Whenever my heart started racing, I walked to the corner health food store and got more wheatgrass shots & green juices. I drank a lot of wheatgrass shots & green juices. Quite a lot. And the scary, crazy racing heartbeats tapered off and normalized. I knew I was going to be ok. Then over the next month my remaining occasional chest pain also tapered off as I continued to eat a magnesium-rich diet. By this time I had started eating cooked lima beans, as well. Funny thing about lima beans – I was craving them before, but chose not to eat them because they weren’t raw. How foolish of me.

The only couple times thereafter that I noticed chest pain again was in the few days before my period. Magnesium levels drop in those PMS days. That’s also why we crave chocolate. Chocolate, like most other beany things, is high in magnesium.

MAGNESIUM DEFICIENCY SYMPTOMS:

Low energy, irritability, moodiness, cramps, sensitivity to noise, anorexia, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, muscle twitches, headaches, poor memory, apathy, confusion, skipped heartbeats, hair loss, weak bones & teeth, digestive problems, constipation, heart palpitations, angina, arrhythmia, tingling, numbness, sustained contraction of the muscles, hallucinations, delirium, and heart attack.

When I read that exercise & sweating deplete magnesium, it suddenly made sense to me why you sometimes hear about young, fit, healthy people who suddenly just “drop dead” of a heart attack despite having no known risk factors.

Places that have a higher magnesium to calcium ratio in their drinking water also have the lowest rates of sudden death from cardiac arrest.

SUPPLEMENTS & FRUIT:

I’m generally against supplements although I did buy a magnesium supplement. The bottle said take 1 400mg tablet twice daily. Ok, sure – if you happen to be really low in magnesium that day. There were a couple days when apparently I wasn’t so low, and just 1 tablet overdosed me. Later I read that the daily Upper Tolerable Limit for magnesium supplements is 350mg. grrr. Why do supplement manufacturers do that?? Anyone who says magnesium is not dangerous to overdose on has apparently never experienced the discomfort of taking too much. My heart felt really weird from it. So if you take a magnesium supplement, be careful. It’s much better to get it from food.

The couple days I took too much magnesium, I had to search for non-magnesium foods to eat. The only foods I could find (besides meat – no thanks) that contained little to no magnesium were fruit. Some fruit does contain magnesium but most fruit contains very little.

I found this to be an extremely important discovery – that magnesium is our most important mineral yet fruit is generally low in it. I think this could answer a lot of people’s health issues on raw.

Spinach & chocolate:

If you decide to use these as magnesium sources, don’t do like I did and use them exclusively. After weeks of eating a lot of spinach & chocolate everyday, I ended up nearly poisoning myself. I had forgotten that both are high in oxalic acid. I felt really “off” for a couple days. Wheatgrass is now my favorite because it’s raw and doesn’t have the oxalic acid problem.

Rebuilding my body’s magnesium took quite a while. I got progressively better over 1-2 months. I eat magnesium foods everyday now. They keep me energetic, happy, and calm. I read somewhere that the body stores 25,000mg of magnesium, and that the body keeps the circulating blood levels at a constant, since it is such an essential mineral. This is why low magnesium doesn’t show up on a routine blood test.

Eating enough magnesium foods, I feel better now than I ever have in my entire life.

Thanks

Also, I think I didn't add this to my original story but before I discovered the wheatgrass juice I came upon the weirdest remedy that sounded just plain crazy but I was desperate enough to try it - hot cayenne pepper tea.

I found it in a website and the person had all this information on the positive effect of cayenne pepper for the heart. It said that cayenne is heart food and that a piece of heart tissue was kept alive in a petri dish solely on cayenne pepper for 15 years.

It said that to make the tea you just heat up some water and add cayenne pepper (like the powdered spice kind) and put it in a mug - like a teaspoon or so of the cayenne - it doesn't have to be an exact amount (I used less). And when you drink this, it will re-set your heart rhythm to normal. I was like, okayyy, whatever. I had no faith in this remedy but when I accidently caught a whiff of the cayenne in the hot water, even from that my heart rhythm calmed! I was like WOW that really does work. When I drank the tea it was RELIEF, finally, from several days of racing, irregular heart rhythms. Oh I was so happy.

I have to say, though, that the relief was temporary... whereas the wheatgrass put me on a path of real recovery. But I did go through many cups of cayenne pepper tea over the course of the next few weeks, whenever my heart felt a little off, it was instant comfort and relief. That website said that hot cayenne pepper tea will even stop a heart attack within minutes.

Very intresting story

yes i had it. i started taking the herb hawthorn, and it vanished and never returned. i took it for about a month or so....