Is Pot good for your heart?

[JihadJoe75]

I read over some of the articles that granny posted. Most of them all say that very small amounts of THC can somehow reduce the buildup of fat in the arteries.

I'm wondering if the effects of the heart rate increase you get from smoking pot is similar to the heart rate increase you get from common exercise. I know also that weed relaxes your muscles allowing for increased blood flow to you extremities, so I'm sure that cant be bad for you.

Either way, it would be really awesome to burn more calories while smoking, that is, considering you can resist the munchies.

[Everyday Struggle]

I was wondering about this before i even came across the thread...

It must be true because it increases heart rate AND it's a vasodilator.
So it definitely does get your blood pumping
In contrast to nicotine which increases your heart rate while constricting your blood vessels...

[birdgirl73]

Jihad, do a Google search on "cannabis heart disease" and read what's there. The links above are not the whole story by any means. They're only the positive side of the story, and they don't cite the effects of whole cannabis on heart disease and heart disease risk, only the effects of isolated compounds like THC. The testing that's reflected in those links hasn't been on whole, smoked cannabis because testing of that sort isn't allowed.

My husband is a cardiologist, and he's adamantly opposed to smoked cannabis for patients with heart disease. It definitely increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes, particularly within the first couple of hours of smoking. Before the active compounds in the cannabis kick in, smoking first causes a vaso-constrictive response. My personal belief is that it's the act of smoking itself, since it changes the way your body uses oxygen, that causes that vaso-constrictive effect. You can feel it yourself, most likely. It's that period after smoking in which the heart rate speeds up and your heart's having to work harder to oxygenate your blood since inhaled smoke also contains carbon dioxide and all sorts of nasty particulate matter and byproducts of combustion. It's that period of the increased heart rate and increased blood pressure right after smoking that is the most risky period for heart/vascular risk. If you read at any length, you'll see that smoked cannabis isn't good for the lungs, either. If folks could just take in THC and CBD and let that be it, it'd be great for both lung and heart health. But they take in lots more than that, which is where the risk lies.

My husband may sign on later. He'll tell you that while the active compounds in cannabis are relatively harmless, the act of smoking all the nasty crap contained in whole smoke is an irritant to the arteries and veins and is, from what he and his colleagues see in their patients, an aggravator of arteriosclerosis. Again, that's because it's the whole smoke and not just the active compounds. The thing about the patients that go to him and his colleagues, though, is that they wouldn't go to him if they didn't already have heart disease, so I'm not sure that's a completely unbiased assessment. He doesn't want his heart patients smoking anything, but he'll tell them under the table that if they want to use cannabis they should eat or vape it.

[Everyday Struggle]

Wow well thanks for the information birdgirl.
so this is true as long as you vape or eat your cannabis
which makes plenty of sense, i hate all that coughing anyway..

[RollaBone]

I can tell you one thing it does for sure, is it lowers my blood sugar when its high. I have diabetes and when I start to feel numbness in my legs, I'll toke up and amazingly, my blood surgar drops from 250 to 125 and the numbness is far gone. Its no joke. So I guess you can say it does the body good.

[birdgirl73]

It lowers most everyone's blood sugar! That's why we get the munchies.

[MVP]

This is a very interesting topic... I sure hope Dr Byrd logs in and shares an opinion and some med facts too.

[burnable]

my inept guess, based on nothing, is that: all things being equal, cannabis doesn't influence potential heart disease to any significant degree

[Dave Byrd]

Bird pretty much said exactly what I'd have said above. Only she said it better than I could have.

My gut and everything I've seen in practice and read in articles tells me smoked cannabis isn't good for the heart. Most of that is because of the act of smoking and not so much the cannabis content. The by products of combustion are not healthy chemicals for anyone's heart or lungs. Anything that affects the lungs negatively also affects the heart negatively. If people could eat or vaporize their cannabis, they'd get the beneficial effects and not the negative ones, at least those who don't have arrhythmias. I don't know that cannabis aggravates heart disease or brings it on if it doesn't exist beforehand, but I do know that for people with a risk, it can increase that risk because it competes for oxygen, puts new stresses on the heart by doing so, and brings in bad chemicals and particulate that can irritate vascular walls and aggravate arteriosclerosis If it just brought in THC and CBD, that'd be a lot better, but all the crap comes along with an inhalation, too.

I don't want my patients smoking anything, as Bird said. I'm not stupid enough to believe they abstain just because I say that, though. I'd sure as hell rather they smoke cannabis than cigarettes. Bird was showing me the lung health studies a while back, and after I saw those I decided that I wished that cigarette smokers would all take up cannabis as protection against pulmonary carcinomas. The studies that that Dr. Tashkin at UCLA has done are very persuasive about it lowering the cancer risk.

Cannabis, as we learned first hand at home last year and as I've seen repeatedly in my patients, is not good for people with diseases of arrhythmia. Even eaten cannabis seems to trigger rhythm changes in people with that problem.

[birdgirl73]

Cannabis, as we learned first hand at home last year and as I've seen repeatedly in my patients, is not good for people with diseases of arrhythmia. Even eaten cannabis seems to trigger rhythm changes in people with that problem.

Yessiree. I was the one he was talking about "at home" last year. It was almost scary what it did to my heart electricity. I want to try vaping if the time ever comes when I can try it again. My fondest desire would be for the stuff to be legal if and when that happens.