If you have angina or congestive heart failure, a daily glass of hawthorn tea can greatly enhance your health. Hawthorn is both extraordinarily safe and extraordinarily effective in treating various forms of heart disease, as was finally recognized by the American Heart Association in an article printed in its journal in May 2002. This herb contains a variety of flavonoids. Some increase blood flow through the coronary arteries. Some increase left ventricular pressure, making each heartbeat stronger. Some accelerate the heart rate-and some decelerate it. But the most important property of hawthorn is its ability to protect the heart from the effects of oxygen deprivation.
Heart cells, like many other tissues, are able to adapt to oxygen deprivation. They shift their energy production from pathways requiring the use of oxygen to pathways requiring the use of fatty acids. However, when their oxygen supply is restored they are sometimes damaged and sometimes destroyed.
When heart pain is induced by the failure of the heart muscle to pump blood, the neutrophils of the immune release a compound known as human neutrophil elastase (HNE), allowing the arteries to stretch back to a more normal size. The process of relaxing the artery, however, releases massive quantities of free radicals that disrupt the cholesterol coats of heart cells and interfere with the action of L-carnitine. At least one of the flavonoid compounds in hawthorn counteracts HNE.
Hawthorn has several other beneficial effects. Animal studies have found that hawthorn stimulates the liver to use LDL cholesterol to make bile salts, cholesterol salts that are flushed out of the liver into the stool. Other studies with laboratory animals have found that the hawthorn compound monoacetyl-vitexin rhamnoside relaxes the linings of the arteries, permitting greater blood flow, through a complicated chemical process. And at least one animal study suggests that hawthorn can prevent irreversible tissue damage during heart attack
Hawthorn is also helpful for people who have lupus. Hawthorn reduces fatigue caused by exercise or exertion by counteracting blood-clotting factor called canavanine that is overabundant in lupus patients. Hawthorn is especially useful when lupus is aggravated by certain foods in the diet, especially alfalfa sprouts.
There are very few precautions for the use of hawthorn. It is almost completely nontoxic. Like many other natural treatments for angina, however, it can cause diarrhea the first few days you take it.
The easiest way to make hawthorn tea is to use tea bags. Most blends emphasize hawthorn flowers rather than hawthorn berries. Sicilian Nights Tea combines hawthorn flowers with cherries, lemon peel, hibiscus, and rose hips for a sweet and sour combination. Blue Mountains Paradise Hawthorn Tea combines hawthorn and vanilla. Hawthorn berry teas are usually a little less expensive but not quite as cardioprotective. If you use hawthorn berries to make tea, you will probably want to add honey or stevia as a sweetener.
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