ANCIENT CURES - Heart on Vedic diet beats smoothly

Eating a Vedic diet of fresh uncooked vegetables and raw sprouts will stabilise the heart and prevent possibly fatal arrhythmia.

In a study at the Russian Medical Academy, rats were fed on three diets mentioned in ancient Indian texts. Rats fed with vegetables, grains, sprouts, minimum oil and raw foods showed rhythmic heart beat.

The study, conducted by Dr P Ravi Shankar and others, showed that cells of the same tissue would exist with different resting potential depending on the diet.

Seventy five male Wistar rats were used in the study, divided into five groups of 15 each. Three groups were fed with diets referred to in the ancient Indian scriptures. The other two were control groups.

The researchers used the action potentials in the heart muscle as a reference parameter.

The average resting potential was about minus-84.5 millivolts. At the end of the study, the rats were killed and action potentials mea sured from their intact hearts.The values of action potentials in the rats fed with a diet made up of raw vegetables and grains were very close to the resting potential.

The figures for rats fed with spicy foods varied between 86.5 millivolts and 93.5 millivolts. A third group which received cooked foods with lot of oil and sweets had action potentials between 105.28 millivolts and 112.28 millivolts.

“The findings prove that the more the resting potential, the lesser the external stimulus needed to excite and generate an action potential which gives a greater understanding of arrhythmias in cardiac muscles and various nervous and other disorders,” the researchers reported.