Casein or Calcium from Dairy Exacerbates Palpitations?

I haven't posted in a long time, because I've largely completed my brain dump of what I've learned about MVPS and MVP from personal experience.

But I've been thinking lately about palpitations, and what makes them worse. I've gotten so good at controlling them that I can basically shut them off with diet and exercise protocol. As I've mentioned in the past, cheese appears to be a prime contributor. Cottage cheese and milk seem almost as bad. However, I can consume 50 or 100g of butter in a day, and have no palpitations at all. So I'm starting to revise my theory that omega-6 is the culprit, as it's present in all these. But casein is one of the few ingredients common to cheese, cottage cheese, and milk, but absent from butter.

I've also observed that some cheeses cause palpitations more intensively than others. The difference appears to be protein content; the more protein (equivalently, the less fat) by percentage, the worse the palpitations.

Now why would a dairy protein, which surely doesn't much influence blood viscosity, contribute to palpitations? I have no idea. I'm just following the data where it leads me. Perhaps palpitations are more influenced by heart rhythm than blood viscosity, and perhaps casein does something disruptive in this regard. If you're a cardiology PhD student, then you just found your thesis study topic!

I would be remiss if I didn't mention here how cheese made from grass-fed cows is rich in conjugated linoleic acid and vitamin K2, which may serve to protect us from cancer and thwart vascular calcification, respectively. But these nutrients are found in the fat. So you might switch from your skim or part-skim cheese to the richer stuff. But if it comes from grain-fed cows or a nonsense processed food company, look elsewhere. If you think I'm nuts, then read what this PhD neurobiologist and nutrition researcher has to say about the matter.

I have to wonder whether casein is also the culprit in the association between skim milk and prostate cancer, as described in this Reuters article. A friend of mine, who is as much a nutrition nut as I am, once told me that rodents who obtained more than 5% of calories from casein, developed atypically high rates of cancer. Consider that heresay, but perhaps you can Google around and find the data.

By the way, I finally got off my longterm addiction to milk last year. For that matter, I rarely consume cottage cheese anymore, either (although it's a good sugar-free calcium source). But I do eat a stick of butter every 3 days or so, an egg almost daily, and probably a 300g of cheese a week. My high-fat diet (which, critically, is omega-3-6-balanced) keeps me lean and allows me to avoid the "afternoon drowsies" so familiar to those who eat lots of refined carbohydrate.

In writing this, it just dawned on me that calcium, like casein, is common to most dairy foods except butter. I wonder if it's actually the calcium that's to blame. As this study and many others appear to confirm, low serum magnesium exacerbates MVP. Magnesium and calcium have similar chemical properties; the same can be said of sodium and potassium. We find that ions with such similarities tend to compete with one another in the body. I wonder if these high-calcium dairy foods are causing magnesium to be out-competed in its role in regulating heart rhythm, for a period of several hours following digestion.

Let's not forget that calcium is a necessary nutrient. I haven't noticed palpitations from other sources. Perhaps there is something about the dairy delivery mechanism of this nutrient that's to blame.

So it could be casein, calcium, both, or neither. If it turns out that casein or dairy-delivered calcium drives palpitations, then I want 5% of your Nobel Prize! ;-)

Red Wine and Mitral Valve Prolapse

Every month or so, I have a look at my blog statistics, which tell me which keywords people use to find me. Occasionally, the keywords themselves suggest new insights into the MVP(S) phenomena which I had never considered, particularly when I see multiple occurrences of similar word combinations at different times. Today, I found these three entries relating wine to MVP, which accounted for about 6% of this month's traffic from Google queries -- statistically significant, considering that any food might be suspected of causing PVCs, particularly those (unlike red wine) which most people associate with heart disease. Have a look:

1. what is the effect of wine on mitro valve prolapse?

2. wine chemicals mitral valve prolapse

3. "red wine" +"premature ventricular contractions" pizza

In the last case, I would bet that it was the cheese on the pizza. But taken as a whole, these queries suggest that there may be an association between wine and MVP. Even if such an association exists, it might not be causal, i.e. perhaps wine and cheese are indeed commonly consumed together, so people erroneously suspect that the wine is to blame for PVCs, when in fact the cheese is causing the problem (as discussed in previous posts). But then again, maybe not. Maybe the alcohol content in wine results in mild dehydration, promoting small blood volume changes or excessive water consumption that may result in PVCs.

Granted, I'm presuming that the first two queries were entered by people who had noticed a spike in their MVP activity (most commonly, PVCs or the associated head spins). But perhaps there was some other reason for these two. Still, it suggests an association between MVP and wine.

Incidentally, red wine appears to contain several compounds conducive to heart health. Ethanol is somewhat debatable in this regard: On the one hand, it dilates blood vessels, reducing the probability of arterial blockage. On the other, it's frankly a poison which the liver must work to neutralize. It may also serve to amplify the rate of absorption of the beneficial compounds, which are probably more soluble in aqueous ethanol than pure water. And while you could get all the same good compounds from grape juice, you'd also get plenty of fructose, which in my opinion is highly undesirable. For my part, I just pour the contents of a grape extract capsule (from Life Extension Foundation, with whom I have no affiliation) into water, and dissolve them. The result is cold grape skin tea -- not delicious, but an acquired taste, and probably a healthier way to obtain grape compounds than either wine or water.

Anyhow, I doubt that wine in moderation causes PVCs, but the queries are noteworthy. Looking at the very different query styles exhibited above, it appears that they were entered by three different people. So researchers, you might want to keep this in mind for your next study on MVP agonists...