Guest guest Posted May 8, 2006 Report Share Posted May 8, 2006 Dr Saul's website is one of my favourites. www.doctoryourself.com blessings Shan Prescription for A Happy Heart http://www.vitalitymagazine.com/prescription_for_a_happy_heart February 2006 Features Key Nutrients for Healing Atherosclerosis, and Preventing Stroke and Heart Attack By Andrew W. Saul, Ph.D. Excerpt from Andrew W. Saul’s Fire Your Doctor! – How to Be Independently Healthy (Basic Health Publications, Laguna Beach CA, 2005) Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is by far the number-one killer of both men and women. And yet, most cardiovascular illness can be prevented. This makes it the perfect place to fire your doctor in a big way, because many heart and circulatory ailments can be halted and even reversed through nutritional therapy. While a detailed consideration of this topic is far too big for this book, I present here a working summation of natural cardiovascular therapies to get you started right now. 1. Eat less fat: This you already know; a near-vegetarian diet is the simplest, cheapest way to do it. 2. Don’t smoke: This you know, too, but are you doing it? For ways to kick the tobacco habit, see the Tobacco Addiction section. 3. Lose excess weight. For practical, natural suggestions, please see he section labeled Weight, Excess. 4. Exercise more: Moderate exercise makes your ticker strong, your pipes clear, and your blood pressure healthfully low. Try walking or workout videos. If you can, exercise with a friend or a family member. Just how good are the above four measures? The American Heart Association says heart disease deaths could be reduced by a third if people just ate better and exercised. Cigarettes kill over 400,000 Americans annually; stop smoking and CVD mortality will sink like a stone. Add supplements and take away meat, and the death rate would drop even farther. You could say that about most chronic illnesses, but with cardiovascular disease there is really no scientific controversy about it – it’s smoking, failing to eat right, and refusal to exercise that is damaging our heart and its attendant plumbing. There is far less agreement over the cure for CVD. There is money in arteries; as long as surgeons become millionaires from open-heart surgery, we can expect them to give short shrift to competitive, curative nutrition. After all, vitamins and a near-vegetarian diet are immeasurably cheaper and safer than bypass surgery. I have often wondered how replacing a few inches of coronary arteries is any kind of cure. Unless the patient changes his diet and lifestyle, won ’t the grafted blood vessels get all gummed up the way the first set did? And if you plan to change your diet to prevent that, why wait for surgery to force it? The fact that bypass grafts will sometimes be performed more than once on the same patient shows that some people are just not getting the message. And the message is good news, indeed: “alternative†therapies work and are well proven. The stress-reduction and vegetarian-diet plan of Dean Ornish, M.D., has been demonstrated to reduce arterial blockages without surgery. Lecithin and other supplements have been in use for decades and high doses of vitamin E for CVD disease spans an incredible seventy years. Atherosclerosis or “hardening of the arteries†is the underlying pathology behind most cardiovascular disease. Narrowed blood vessels prevent proper blood circulation, raise blood pressure, and catch wandering blood clots more easily. The result may be slow decline or instant death. The answer is neither surgical or pharmaceutical, it is nutritional. Lecithin – Take 2-4 tablespoons per day. Lecithin is a lipotrophic (fat-moving) agent that helps keep fatty deposits off the inside of your arteries. This both prevents and reverses atherosclerosis. As too much fat is a problem for your body and its blood vessels, too little of the essential fatty acids (EFAs) is a problem for the ticker. Actually, your body does not need to eat any fat at all. Aside from taste and texture, the only role of dietary fat is to provide the EFAs, linolenic acid, and linoleic acid. Fatty acids are the preferred food source for the heart. Lecithin contains abundant linoleic acid and some linolenic as well. Heart-happy linolenic acid, found in fish oils, is also available in seeds, walnuts, and vegetables. This is why a near-vegetarian diet, which includes some fish, is best for health maintenance. Fish oils (for linolenic acid) and lecithin (for linoleic acid) are essential for a healthy circulatory system. Each tablespoon (7.5g) of lecithin granules contains about 1,700 milligrams of phosphatidyl choline, 1,000 milligrams of phosphatidyl inositol, and about 2,200 milligrams of essential fatty acids. These valuable substances tend to be undersupplied by our daily diet. Lecithin tastes crummy, which is why lecithin in capsules is so popular. These are admittedly convenient, but are also expensive. In order to get one tablespoon of lecithin, you have to take eight to twelve capsules. Since an effective supplemental dose is three or more tablespoons daily, that’s a lot of capsules to swallow. Much less costly is liquid lecithin. A taste for liquid lecithin has to be acquired; it is easier to take if you first coat the spoon with milk or molasses. After taking liquid lecithin, have a “chaser†of any dairy product or molasses. Lecithin is cheapest bought in bulk at a health food store as granular lecithin. Probably the best way to take a lot of lecithin easily is to stir the granules quickly into juice or milk. Personally, I think milk best covers the taste, but pineapple juice works well, too. Lecithin granules won’t dissolve, but rather will drift about as you drink. They can also be used as a topping on any cold food. All supplemental forms of lecithin are made from soybeans. An alternate, but minimal, nonsoy source is egg yolk. Generally, maximum benefit is obtained when you eat the yolk lightly cooked (such as in a soft-boiled egg). (Ed. note: Since most soybeans on the market are genetically modified, it is impossible to find organic lecithin. However, after some research we found an excellent product at the Big Carrot Wholistic Dispensary at 348 Danforth Avenue, 416-466-8432. These lecithin granules by Blue Stream Botanicals are made from non-GMO soybeans. A 400-gram bottle is $12.49) Diet – Eat less sugar. Even if you ate little or no cholesterol, your body will still make it. Sugar can cause your body to produce excess cholesterol. Sugar also raises your body’s insulin levels and your triglyceride with it. Eat less meat as well. Even lean meat contains fat and cholesterol. High protein diets are not healthy in the long run. Incorporate more fibre into your diet. While the scientists are figuring out why high-fibre diets reduce cardiovascular disease, just do it because it works. Eat, if you can, more wheat germ and brewer’s (nutritional) yeast. Wheat germ is a much better than average source of magnesium and vitamin E, while nutritional yeast is a source of chromium and vitamin B12. Additional Nutrients – Take more niacin (vitamin B3), between 1,000 and 3,000 milligrams per day. Abram Hoffer, M.D., one of the originators of niacin therapy to lower cholesterol, explains the difference between the common kinds of niacin: “niacin lowers cholesterol, elevates high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, and reduces the ravages of heart disease, but causes flushing when it is first taken. The flushing reaction dissipates in time and in most cases is gone or very minor within a matter of weeks. Niacinamide has no effect on blood fats (lipids), but is not a vasodilator. A third form, inositol hexaniacinate, will lower cholesterol without the flushing side effect, although not quite as well as pure niacin will.†Take chromium, 200-400 micrograms per day; this mineral helps keep blood sugar (and therefore insulin) levels constant. Also add magnesium, 300-600 milligrams per day. This amount includes your diet, so if you eat a lot of vegetables and well-chewed nuts, you will need less in supplement form. Magnesium citrate is one of the best absorbed forms of magnesium; magnesium oxide, which is more common, is also acceptable. Take coenzyme Q10, a vitaminlike substance that is absolute first aid for any cardiac case. It is not cheap, but 300-600 milligrams a day can save lives. Also take 400-800 IU (and possibly more) of natural vitamin E (D-alpha tocopherol plus natural mixed tocopherols) daily. Eat more lysine (2,000-6,000 mg per day). The amino acid lysine is available as a supplement, but it is also found in fish, eggs, dairy products, and potatoes. The best source is legumes (beans, peas, lentils); use them as a main dish for two meals a day and you can easily eat enough lysine at no supplemental cost. Take more vitamin C, several thousand milligrams per day. Vitamin C supplementation prevents atherosclerosis by stopping the buildup of artery-clogging lipoprotein A or Lp(a). However, the use of vitamin C to prevent and reverse atherosclerosis does not really represent new knowledge. For decades it has been known that vitamin C deficiency raises cholesterol levels. What’s more, vitamin C also prevents stroke. It does so by strengthening intercellular collagen, which prevents damage and bleeding (and subsequent clotting) on the inside wall of your blood vessels. Stress Reduction – While most of the suggestions offered in this section are dietary, there is one other big way to help your heart: meditate. According to cardiologist John Zamarra, M.D., “There is more research on the benefits of the TM (Transcendental Meditation) program than any other medical procedure to improve health.†Hospital admissions for cardiovascular disease were reduced by an astounding 87 percent among long-time meditators using the TM technique. The research was well controlled; these patients still had routine medical exams and physicals, so there was no confounding reason that they might have been merely avoiding medical care. If there were a cardiovascular drug that even approached 87 percent effectiveness, it would be considered a miracle drug. Plus, meditation also lowers high blood pressure by 11 mm Hg (systolic). Imagine, meditation beats medication! Stroke and Heart Attack A stroke is a loose blood clot lodged in the brain. There is a stroke every minute in America and over half a million annually. One-third are fatal, making strokes one of the leading causes of death in this country. A heart attack (myocardial infarction) is a blood clot caught in the heart’s coronary arteries. Half of all heart attacks are fatal. In the United States, there are nearly three heart attacks per minute. Their common cause is a blood clot. Clots are the result of bleeding. The source of such bleeding can be too little vitamin C: a vitamin C-deficient (scorbutic) artery can literally “bleed†into itself. William J. McCormick, M.D., reviewed the nutritional causes of heart disease and noted that four out of five coronary cases in hospitals show vitamin C deficiency. As early as 1941, low vitamin C status was seen as the cause of coronary thrombosis cases. Supplementation with even a moderate quantity of vitamin C has been shown to prevent disease and save lives. Just 500 milligrams daily results in a 42 percent lower risk of death from heart disease and a 35 percent lower risk of death from any cause. Vitamin B6 (pyridoxine) is also important to cardiovascular health. For thirty years, it has been known that laboratory animals receiving the human B6 dose equivalent of just 75 milligrams daily do not get strokes, even when fed a high-fat diet. Since women on oral contraceptives are three times more likely at any age to have a stroke, B6 supplementation is vital. A B6 deficiency is serious and can also cause hardening of the arteries. Furthermore, B6 is necessary for your body to produce its own lecithin, and lecithin has been used clinically to clear out fatty livers and even clogged arteries. Vitamin D has been shown to have therapeutic as well as preventive use in cardiovascular disease. For example, hypertension appears to decline with vitamin D supplementation, whether or not the person is deficient. It is also thought that a shortage of vitamin D may contribute to abnormal mineral metabolism, leading to congestive heart failure. Vitamin E – During the 1940s and 1950s, Drs. Wilfrid and Evan Shute gave their coronary thrombosis patients 450-1600 IU of natural vitamin E per day. In acute cases, they started with the high amount; in existing cases, they started with the lower amount and gradually worked up. Thrombophlebitis patients received 600-1,600 IU daily; patients with angina symptoms received twice that amount. My dad was one of them: on 1,600 IU per day, he never had angina again. Gradually increasing the dose eliminates this issue. And, over time, high doses of vitamin E have been shown to reduce high blood pressure.One of vitamin E’ s many properties is that it helps strengthen and regulate the heartbeat. This is usually very desirable, but there are exceptions to every rule. Much cardiovascular disease is caused by, or accompanied by, hypertension (high blood pressure). The Shutes started hypertensive patients on 75 IU per day for a few weeks, increased to 150 IU for a few weeks more, then gave 300 IU, and then higher over time. The caution is due to the fact that in some hypertensives, a sudden blast of vitamin E can cause a temporary rise in blood pressure. Persons taking drugs such as Coumadin (warfarin) commonly find that their prothrombin clotting time tests indicate a decreased need for “blood-thinning†drugs. The intelligent way to deal with this is to work with your doctor, who is responsible for your prescription. Commonsense caution: Since the effective dose of vitamin E varies with the individual condition, it is always a good idea to have medical supervision. Vitamin E, according to the Shutes, can “melt†fresh clots like an antithrombic drug and prevent embolism. In high doses, the vitamin also improves collateral (small blood vessel) circulation, which is potentially more important than you might think: In just one square inch of your skin, there are 19 feet of blood vessels. The doctors also found that vitamin E mildly dilates blood vessels, keeps capillary walls healthy and flexible, raises low platelet counts, and prevents hemolysis of red blood cells. The Shutes were among the very first medical doctors to clinically employ large doses of a vitamin in place of conventional drug therapy. Like many pioneers, they caught all the arrows. Almost all of the criticism seemed to come from the medical press, which seemed singularly resistant to even try the Shute’s approach, let alone endorse it. One can only wonder what failed to get the medical profession’s attention sooner, given the spectacular, wonder drug-style patient recoveries that the Shutes had already seen by mid-century: 1936: Vitamin E-rich wheat germ oil cures angina. 1940: Vitamin E suspected as preventive of fibroids and endometriosis, and curative of atherosclerosis. 1946:Vitamin E demonstrated effective in cases of claudication, thrombosis, cirrhosis, and phlebitis. Vitamin E strengthens and regulates heartbeat. 1947: Vitamin E successfully used as therapy for gangrene and inflammation of blood vessels. 1950: Vitamin E shown effective treatment for varicose veins. It is not easy to understand how such promise could be ignored for long. But it was. The American Medical Association even refused to let the Shutes present their findings at national medical conventions. Before the Shutes’ viewpoint on vitamin E can be disregarded, we must consider that they successfully treated more than 30,000 cardiac patients over a period of more than thirty years. Vitamin E is a fat-soluble vitamin with no known toxicity. Vitamin E is remarkably safe; the Shutes gave quantities as high as 3,200 IU per day without causing harm. The natural form of vitamin E is called D-alpha tocopherol and is made from vegetable oil. The synthetic form is DL-alpha tocopherol. Not a big difference in name, but there is evidence that the natural “D†(dextro-) molecular form of vitamin E is much more useful to the body than is the synthetic form. A person in good health may typically begin with a supplemental amount of 200 IU of vitamin E per day and try it for a couple of weeks. Then, 400 IU might be taken daily for another two weeks. For the next two weeks, 600 IU daily, and for the next two weeks, 800 IU per day, and so on. One ultimately takes the l east amount that gives the best results. (Ed. note: According to Townsend Letter for Doctors, the ideal dosage is, for the average person, 400-600 IU vitamin E as mixed tocopherols. Please consult your health professional in regards to all of the nutrients suggested above, in order to determine your constitutional type and optimal dosages. Some of the nutrient dosages suggested above are not recommended for everyone, particularly niacin.) About the book: The above excerpt was reprinted with permission from the publisher – Basic Health Publications, Inc., Laguna Beach, California. The book is distributed in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, and is available at Chapters. Or you can order Saul’s books directly from the publisher by either calling toll-free at 1-800-575-8890 or on-line at www.basichealthpub.com About the author: Andrew W. Saul is Contributing Editor for the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, and is the author of the books Doctor Yourself: Natural Healing that Works and Fire Your Doctor! How to be Independently Healthy. His peer-reviewed natural healing website, www.doctoryourself.com , has hundreds of articles and thousands of medical references. It now welcomes nearly two million visitors anually. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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