Our Top 5 Nutrients for Heart Health

By Andrea Bartels CNP NNCP RNT Registered Nutritional Therapist 04 Feb 2025

Our Top 5 Nutrients for Heart Health

Keeping your “ticker” in tiptop shape involves a commitment to exercise, stress management and good nutrition.  Which nutrients play a pivotal role in supporting good cardiovascular function? Here, we’ll explore 5 nutrients and how they contribute to your heart’s health.

Taurine

When it comes to cardiovascular health, the amino acid taurine is a powerhouse.  Its primary benefits include:

• Regulating Blood Pressure: Taurine helps maintain healthy blood pressure levels by promoting the relaxation of blood vessels and improving blood flow via vasodilation.
• Improving Heart Function: Taurine supports heart muscle contractions, vital to ensuring steady heart rhythms. 

Ubiquinol

Ubiquinol, the most bioavailable form of coenzyme Q10, is vital for cellular energy production and heart function. Its benefits include:

• Enhancing Cellular Energy: The heart requires high amounts of energy, and ubiquinol aids in producing ATP (the body’s energy currency).
• Powerful Antioxidant: Ubiquinol protects heart cells from oxidative damage caused by free radicals.
• Supporting Statin Users: For those on cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, ubiquinol supplementation can restore energy levels and reduce muscle-related side effects caused by statins, which deplete CoQ10 levels. 

Magnesium

Magnesium is well-known for its role in muscle function, but what about its importance to cardiac function? After all, the heart is composed largely of muscle. Magnesium offers several cardiovascular benefits:

• Maintaining Heart Rhythms: Since magnesium is an electrolyte it stabilizes electrical signals in the heart, helping to maintain a regular heartbeat.
• Relaxing Blood Vessels: Magnesium helps lower blood pressure by relaxing blood vessels, which allows more space for blood to travel through the body’s circulatory system.

Trusted by patients and practitioners since 2002, Pure Lab’s Magnesium Glycinate is a gut-friendly formula with superior absorption. It’s available in several formats, including pure, unflavoured powder, capsules, and also as a raspberry-lemon flavoured powder mix. 

Vitamin B6

Vitamin B6 is integral to cardiovascular health through its role in several biochemical and physiological processes:

• Lowering Homocysteine Levels: High levels of homocysteine, an amino acid, are linked to heart disease. Together with vitamins B12 and folate, vitamin B6 helps break down homocysteine, reducing cardiovascular risk.
• Supporting Red Blood Cell Production: Vitamin B6 aids in the production of hemoglobin, ensuring efficient oxygen transport throughout the body.
• Boosting Heart Energy: Vitamin B6 supports enzymatic processes critical for energy production in the heart.
• Supporting Healthy Blood Pressure: Due to its diuretic effect at higher intakes, vitamin B6 helps eliminate excess water that accumulates between cells and counteract the blood pressure-elevating effects of excess dietary sodium consumption.

Pure Lab’s Slow Release BioActive B6 supports more consistent blood levels of the biologically active form of vitamin B6 through its slow-release formulation, for longer-lasting benefits.

L-Theanine

Not technically an essential nutrient, L-theanine is an amino acid found in green tea that’s known for its mind-relaxing effects. This gives it potential benefits for the heart, too:

• Stress-busting: By promoting relaxation without sedation, L-theanine helps lower heart-taxing stress-related hormones like cortisol.
• Improving Blood Pressure: L-theanine has been shown to reduce high blood pressure, and heart rate, particularly when these are stress-induced.
• Antioxidant Effects: L-theanine’s antioxidant properties combat oxidative stress, reducing damage to blood vessels and heart tissue.

Pure Lab’s L-Theanine is available in regular, slow release and chewable formats to suit individual relaxation requirements throughout your day.

Take Advantage of the Synergies

While each of these 5 nutrients offers unique benefits, they work even better together. For example:

• Pure Lab’s Magnesium Glycinate + L-Theanine capsules provide relaxation of the nervous system, without the side effects and contraindications associated with using herbal remedies for this purpose. Up to 3 capsules may be taken daily.

• Pure Lab’s Magnesium Glycinate+Taurine+ CoQ10 combines ubiquinol, the biologically active form of CoQ10 with the synergistic duo of magnesium and taurine to enhance cellular energy and combat oxidative stress, ensuring optimal heart muscle performance. To reap the benefits of this 3-in-1 formulation, 2 capsules may be taken twice daily.

Alternatively, you can take individual nutrients to create your own personalized heart-healthy regime.

The Heart of the Matter

We suggest beginning with this proactive step toward protecting your cardiovascular system to better ensure long-term health: aim to improve your lab results using lifestyle changes. How you achieve this is up to you: eating less processed foods, cooking and exercising more, and taking supplementary vital heart nutrients are great ways to start. Whether your risk factors include smoking, diabetes, high cholesterol, sedentary lifestyle, high blood pressure, a diet low in fresh fruits and vegetables, sleep apnea, or a family history of heart disease, take heart in the fact that supplementation can be an easy way to make sure your cardiovascular system gets what it needs to function at its best.

Now that you know 5 of the top heart-supportive nutrients, how will you proceed?

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