Dr. Julian Whitaker MD has a bit of a rant on the subject of invasive heart disease procedures vs non-invasive remedies in his newsletter this month. He has been practicing medicine for over 30 years and has a wellness clinic in California where he practices all of the alternative medicine and therapies he preaches about with great success.

So I wanted to pass along some of his information on these procedures and keep someone off of the operating table who might not have to be there.

Dr. Whitaker titled his article “A Saner, Gentler Approach to Heart Disease.” Any surgery–especially those which use general anesthesia–is potentially dangerous. Bypass surgery–which I have been in an OR and witnessed–is hours long, complicated and carries with it a long painful healing process. Not only is the chest “cracked” to make room for the surgeon, a vein must be harvested from the leg which leaves a long incision to heal as well. If this is an unnecessary surgery, who in their right mind would have it anyway?

Dr. Whitaker points out that “patients with serious heart disease who are treated without surgical intervention have an annual death rate of under 2%. It’s hard to improve upon a survival rate this high (over 98% per year.)” He goes on to say, (I love this line) “Bottom line, surgery is not going to save the life of someone who isn’t going to die!”

In the ’80s a study involving 780 patients, half of whom had bypass surgery and half of whom had drug therapy, showed no statistical difference in the mortality rate of either group regardless of how many arteries were bypassed.

The business of bypass surgery generates one billion dollars per year, nice. How this happens is in part intimidation by the white coats whose business it is to get people onto operating tables. Countless unnecessary surgeries are performed because a patient has not been told of options. Dr. Whitaker’s clinic has treated thousands of people who said “No” to surgery and “yes” to alternative practices, supplements and lifestyle changes. Taking on lifestyle change is not as sexy as a hospital gown and a scar dividing you down the middle but it’s a story I’d rather tell than the one about the bedpan and the stitches.

20 years ago I worked for one of the best heart surgeons in the country at the time. He hired me to help him create an award winning quick healthy food restaurant. And we did, Daily’s Fit & Fresh. Why? Because he believed that 70% of the patients he operated on didn’t need the operation and he wanted to teach them the importance of eating well and living well. He was way ahead of his time and his colleagues all thought he was nuts. So this idea that bypass surgeries are not needed in a large number of cases is not new.

So let’s spread the word. If you or someone you know is facing this horrific surgery get a second opinion from a doc who practices complimentary medicine. Take a look at the Whitaker Institute–no I’m not an affiliate. I’m just passionate about helping people avoid the pain and almost certain life altering results of a surgery they may not need. You can reverse heart disease, diabetes, and all of the attendant side effects of those illnesses through what you put in the pie hole and how much you move it move it.

If you need help, drop me a line and we’ll talk options.

You’ve probably never thought about whether or not your blood is healthy. One might ask, “If I’m healthy, isn’t my blood healthy?” Maybe we should back up and ask, “What makes for healthy blood?”

Blood is the essence of life. It moves cells, oxygen, proteins, nutrients, and waste materials through the body every second. It is a life support transport vehicle. In order to flow freely our blood must be just the right consistency, or viscosity. Poor lifestyle choices, stress, drugs, and more can thicken the blood by various means. Thick blood cannot flow freely through the capillaries. The system becomes sluggish. While cholesterol gets all the attention in terms of heart disease and diabetes it’s inflammation that leads to toxic blood which leads those problems.

According to Dr. Steven Sinatra, “Toxic Blood Syndrome is an early warning sign for heart trouble to come.”

When blood is toxic and inflamed it is inefficient and is prone to clotting. Elevated viscosity, or thickness, is a starting point for coronary and peripheral artery disease. Inflammation and increased blood thickness have been linked to age related cognitive decline, increased long term risk of CVD in men, depression, heart disease, diabetes, and more.

How to keep your blood healthy?

Test don’t guess. This is one of my midlife health mantras and blood work is at the top of the list of tests I recommend. If you haven’t already ask your doc for a CRP test. CRP is manufactured in the liver in response to inflammation and is a reliable marker. Ideally your level will be below 1 mg/L. If your level is very high that could indicate an auto-immune problem or cancer so you must work with a knowledgeable doc on this. Add in a test for your Fibrinogen levels. Fib is a clot-regulating protein and a marker for your blood’s stickiness and viscosity. If yours is over 350 mg/dL-you will want to dive right into the prevention strategies below.

QUIT SMOKING! Smoke increases fibrinogen levels among other things you already know.

Eat an Anti-Inflammatory diet–This would be very low in sugar which is terribly inflammatory, high in vegetables, low glycemic carbs, with plenty of healthy fats like olive oil, coconut oil, avocados and avo oil, nuts, grass fed proteins and wild fish.

Take Your Supplements–You can deny they make a difference or you can just get on the program recommended by Harvard, Mayo, Cleveland Clinic, and many more bastions of conservative medicine who are on the leading edge. A basic multi, fish oil, 2 grams per day, Vitamin D, 2 grams per day, Magnesium and potassium from foods and an extra 400- 500 mgs as a supplement.

Reduce your stress Everything about the stress response is designed to thicken blood so in the case of a Saber tooth tiger claw to the gut you don’t bleed out. Of course that seems ridiculous to us today but the physiological process remains the same.

Take care of your teeth and gums–one source of heart disease and inflammation is periodontal disease. Brush, floss, gargle with something natural not full of sugar and alcohol.

Drink plenty of hydrating fluids. You know that you should be drinking half of your body weight in ounces of water per day right? Well go grab a glass!

Exercise No need to beat this one to death. Add in healthy blood vessels and reduced inflammation to the benefits.

Ground yourself This is a topic I’ll cover extensively in another post because I’m really excited about the potential but let’s just say that with all the EMFs flying around, we need to rid them from our systems. The best way to do this is to put your hands or feet in contact with the ground, the sand, or the grass. “The known effect of grounding is that it discharges and prevents the buildup of electrical stress. Walking barefoot on the Earth, as humans have done throughout history, naturally grounds and discharges the body. The most reported benefit from people who place their bare feet directly on the Earth and ground themselves is that they “feel better.” You know I live to find ways to help us midlife women feel better and this is revolutionary.

If you want more information right now head over to this site and spend some time reading. If you can’t get barefoot on the ground there are all sorts of mats, and sheets etc one can buy to get the same results.

What will you do right now to help your blood stay healthy and free flowing? In this case prevention is much easier and less painful than the alternative.

Statins are America’s best selling drugs as of 11/07–the lastest stat I can find. Lipitor sold $9 Billion worth and Zocor $4.7 Billion. 12 Million Americans take one and more are being fed into the pipeline all the time. According to an ABC news online article from Dec. 2009,” The joke in the world of heart disease is that “they should put statins in the water,” but to a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel that has recommended giving statins to “healthy” people, it’s no joke. The panel voted 12 to four with one abstention to recommend that the potent statin Crestor (rosuvastatin) be approved to prevent heart attacks in people who have no history of heart disease and don’t fit the traditional profile of an “at risk” population.”

The results of the trail of about 17,000 people from 25 countries is this, of the half that got Crestor, levels of mortality and morbidity were reduced vs the half that got a placebo.By how much? 70 or so people out of 8901. The reduction in events was tied to reduction of CRP– or C-reactive protein which is a marker of inflammation and an important test for anyone with a history of heart disease or any symptoms of heart problems. Did I mention that this trial was sponsored–that means paid for–by Crestor? And that some cardiologists pointed to the increase in diabetes in the subjects who got the drug vs the placebo group? That last finding was not mentioned by the people who published the findings.

This was not meant to be a diatribe against yet another fatal flaw in the current illness care system but I had to point out some startling and (should be) scary statistics. A statin drug could be coming your way, ill health or no. My point in this post is to tell you about the importance of taking the supplement CoQ10 if you are on a statin–or considering one. (It’s important for cardiovascular health and a supp I recommend even for those of us not on statins but it’s imperative for statin users as you’ll see.)

CoQ10 is the raw material needed for energy production within the cells. (That’s the reader’s digest version) It is also a scavenger of the free radicals produced by this process. Statin drugs not only suppress cholesterol production  they suppress production of CoQ10. Muscles are the biggest consumers of energy–the heart is the muscle that uses most because it never rests. Can you see the problem here? Less CoQ10 means less energy being made for the heart which is supposed to benefit from the use of a statin drug.

So what really occurs with too little CoQ10 on board? Let me quote one of the best integrative cardiologists I know. Dr. Steven Sinatra reported in his 2/09 newsletter, “The cascade effect that results from statin therapy goes something like this: lower CoQ10 levels lead to decreased ATP production, (energy production) which leads to diastolic dysfunction of the left ventricle, which leads to heart failure.”

That’s heart failure, the very thing the statin is supposed to be protecting you from. In countries like Japan, Germany and others in the EU, statin drugs come with a warning that it is recommended that you supplement with CoQ10 if you are taking this drug. Doctors prescribe it when people are in their offices. Clearly if other countries not so tied to their pharmaceutical behemoths can warn patients of a necessary, safe, and easy to use adjunct to the statin therapy, our government has that option.

Low CoQ10 also leads to muscle pain and weakness and fuzzy thinking. I don’t know about you but at this age I don’t need any help in that area. If you are on a statin, please do not stop it abruptly! If you want to add CoQ10 the best form is ubiquinone according to Dr. Sinatra. That’s because it’s converted, in the body, into ubiquinol, the antioxidant form of CoQ10. And the form you’ll see most often.) You can get a hydrosoluble product or a gel cap type. If you are on a statin, many of the docs I follow suggest 200 mgs per day in divided doses. You can talk to your MD about this but many will be unaware of the statin/CoQ10 connection. Drs. Sinatra, Julian Whitaker, Jim Roberts, and many other integrative cardiologists can be found online with more information.

One last quote, from the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, a bastion of all things conservative and Big Pharma focused. They reported a study that proved that higher levels of CoQ10 was related to longer life for heart failure patients. It wasn’t a very well publicized finding. I wonder why?

In the second in a series of 4 articles on the truth about cholesterol–why you want it and how lowering it by all means is not healthy–begins by looking at the different “parts” if you will of the cholesterol molecules.
We most commonly talk about and test for LDL or “bad” cholesterol and HDL or “good.” The L in those two acronyms stands for lipoprotein and is basically a coating around the cholesterol that allows it to be water soluble and therefore move around and work in our blood.
LDL cholesterol-low density lipoproteins carry cholesterol to the cells for repair work as well as the many other important functions they have. HDL, high density lipoproteins carry cholesterol away from the cells and arterial walls and back to the liver to be used or disposed of.

Here’s the sixty-four millions dollar question: how can one part of cholesterol be good and the other bad just because one travels in one direction and the other moves in another?

Here’s a little history:
In 1948 The Framingham Study was begun. It was designed to study heart disease and followed 5,000 men and women to determine some common traits among those who succumbed to the disease.
Here’s an important point, this study was observational, not a double blind, placebo controlled testing environment. It simply tracked people and checked in with them over the years to see what they were eating, their lifestyle habits, and it checked blood levels and health markers looking for commonalities in those that ended up with heart disease.
In 1961 cholesterol was “discovered’ and although the Framingham study had to date uncovered important lifestyle factors that promoted heart disease, like smoking, once cholesterol was “outed” the medical world locked on to it as a way to prevent heart disease. It may have made sense initially but the thousands of tests and research papers that were produced to prove it was the culprit have never been able to do so.

Enter Ancel Keys, by all reports a blustery, self important scientist from the U of Minnesota. According to Dr. Dwight Lundel “Keys’ theory, one he actively promoted to an increasingly health conscious public, was that an association existed between the rate of cardiovascular disease of a population, serum cholesterol and their intake of saturated fats.”

Keys was able to convince the US government that dietary fat equaled increased rates of heart disease and death but the proof is in the health statistics.
Consumption of dietary fat decreased from the 1960’s to the 1990’s but the rate of heart disease did not and instead, the incidence of obesity and Type II diabetes soared. As the fat got stripped from our diet–as did the Yumm factor–heart disease rates soared and so did rates of depression and anti-depression drug sales.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The people in the Framingham study ate what they wanted and the amount of saturated fats varied widely. No matter how they twisted their findings they could not prove a cause and effect relationship between the fat participants ate and the cholesterol floating in their blood.

At the end of the study–22 years after they began to compile research–the scientists concluded:

“There is, in short, no suggestion of any relation between diet and

the subsequent development of chronic heart disease in the study group.”

I’m going to end here today. Tomorrow I’ll explain a little bit about how low-fat-diets-save-lives became the nation’s health dogma. As you might expect is has something to do with politics, lobbyists and Big Pharma.

I’ll also reveal what aspects of cholesterol do relate to food and what foods are dangerous ones, the ones to avoid.