The CM Vitals Program
Your risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes might be related to your family history, weight issues or from laboratory tests numbers like cholesterol, insulin, blood sugar or triglycerides. While you may need a prescription drug, the most powerful agent to reduce your risk is you!
Making healthy lifestyle choices is the most powerful way to reduce your risk of diabetes. The “side effect” of lifestyle therapies is that you also reduce your risk of nearly every other chronic disease, such as cardiovascular disease, dementia and cancer. The CM Vitals program will help you focus on the changes that will have the greatest impact on your health, especially those that can help you reduce the risk for cardiovascular disease. Some of these steps will take time and won’t be easy…. but the added health benefit will more than make up for the effort you invest.
What determines your risk?
A number of factors are used to determine your overall risk and where you are along the Metabolic Continuum. They will include these traditional risk factors:
- Age: the older you are, the higher the risk
- Family history: family members with early heart disease or diabetes
- Cholesterol levels: total, LDL and HDL
- Triglyceride levels: these are measured with cholesterol
- Blood pressure: high blood pressure puts stress on all the blood vessels
- Weight/waist circumference and body mass index (BMI)
The CM Vitals approach includes additional measurements such as some of the following:
- Cardiovascular inflammation: C-Reactive Protein (CRP) – strongly predicts risk
- Advanced Lipid test: measures how cholesterol is transported and whether your risk is higher or lower than your cholesterol numbers would predict
- Homocysteine test: to see how your methylation metabolism is working
- Genetic test: to see if you have specific cardiovascular genes that require special nutritional needs.
Reducing Cardiometabolic Risk Factors
It has been known for decades that adult diabetics have two to five times the number of cardiovascular events as non-diabetics. The new term “cardiometabolic risk” refers to the relationship between diabetes and increased risk of cardiovascular disease, which is primarily driven by insulin resistance.
About 30 percent of Americans are at elevated risk for adverse insulin-related cardio-metabolic events.
Reducing Diabetic Risk Factors
Diabetes develops over many years in your body, causing damage as it progresses to a point where it can be diagnosed. However, this damage can be detected by measuring the levels of specific biomarkers in your blood—levels that will be either too high or too low in response to the damage occurring along different biological pathways linked to the development of diabetes.
The blood test from Spectracell Lab measures 2 biomarkers that can help determine your risk of developing diabetes.
The CM Vitals Program will help you:
- Get testing to evaluate your cardiometabolic risk factors
- Understand your cardiometabolic risk factors
- Learn about successful lifestyle therapies including nutrition, supplementation and stress reduction
- Reduce your cardiometabolic risk factors by:
- Following individualized recommendations
- Learning about key natural pointers to support cardio-metabolic health
Lifestyle—Your most powerful therapy
We have all seen the drug ads telling us that diet and exercise should be included in every treatment strategy; but did you know that when it comes to diabetes and related cardiometabolic disease, lifestyle changes are the most powerful risk reducing therapy? Well, it’s true!
If you want the most powerful benefits, go beyond just diet and exercise alone. Lifestyle changes should also include getting the right amount of sleep, reducing your stress, avoiding other habits that increase your risk (smoking, excessive alcohol and recreational drugs), nutrition and supplementation. Add all of these together and you will have one of the most potent risk-reducing therapies. You will feel great getting healthy while you stop or even reverse the metabolic continuum.
The path to the cardiovascular and diabetic prevention starts with identifying the risks.
To understand your risks and reduce your diabetes and cardiovascular tendencies, please contact Helen at mailto:options@mtco.com and schedule an appointment.
