Category Archives: Cardiovascular disease

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“Food: Weapon of MASS Destruction”

This is a very timely and important video clip. We all need to hear this message and make fundamental, and in some cases radical, changes in the way we grow, process and consume our food. It also points out the absolute necessity for whole-food supplementation of vitamins and especially minerals. The soil that our food is grown in has been depleted of minerals since the 1940’s. Without minerals, vitamins can’t be utilized, leading to malnutrition; glandular (iodine for the thyroid) function fails leading to all sorts of health issues, obesity included. The bottom line is SUPPLEMENT your diet with whole food nutritional supplements. I use Standard Process Labs and Medi-Herb in my practice, the very best in supplementation and botanicals. View the video and be informed. (Click on the YouTube icon at the bottom to enlarge the screen)

My best to your health

Dr. Anthony Palombo

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The Big Fat Lie Exposed by BMJ

British Medical Journal Study Without Vested Interests in Statin Drugs

by Paul Fassa
Health Impact News

The saturated fat lie is officially exposed now that the British Journal of Sports Medicine, a division of the BMJ (British Medical Journal), emphatically declared:

Saturated fat does not clog the arteries: coronary heart disease is a chronic inflammatory condition, the risk of which can be effectively reduced from healthy lifestyle interventions. (Emphasis added)

Of course, the lie may persist for some time. Health Impact News readers and a relative handful of knowledgeable consumers already know this.

Even so, most mainstream and even holistic doctors, nutritionists, and most health writers, orthodox and alternative, still maintain the prevailing false dogma of saturated fat as the villain creating poor heart health. More on that here.

Cholesterol is Essential to Your Body

Some health experts out of the saturated fat dogma box even call cholesterol an innocent bystander trying to help curb inflammation. The importance of cholesterol for overall health has been observed by many over the past decade.

They include the first phase of our skin for transforming sunlight into vitamin D3, building cell walls throughout our bodies, and comprising most of our brains’ structure. Reducing cholesterol artificially with statin drugs often leads to early dementia and other serious side effects. More on that here.

Other sources say the plaque could be formed from excessive calcium intake that doesn’t get into bone-matter because other nutrients that help calcium get into bone-matter are missing. Magnesium, silica, and vitamin K2 are vital for keeping calcium out of the blood where it can collect and form plaque in blood vessels. (Source)

None of this is new to Health Impact News‘ extensive coverage of false fat dogma and promotion. But the BMJ paper disclosed a surprising cardiac inflammatory source: unresolved childhood trauma. Their study determined that:

chronic stress increases glucocorticoid receptor resistance, which results in failure to downregulate the inflammatory response.

For the whole story go to: http://healthimpactnews.com/2017/the-big-fat-lie-is-officially-exposed-in-the-british-medical-journal/

I have been saying this for years!

Here’s to your health!

Dr. Anthony Palombo

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“Is Cholesterol Really an Issue?” –The Chopra Center

My Chorale PicIt’s always interesting to hear another healthcare professional, especially a medical doctor and researcher, say what I and many of my colleagues in the field of clinical nutrition have been saying for many years now.  The following is news only to those with ears attuned only to Medical Research and whose minds – to their misfortune – are closed to any professionals with anything less than an “M.D.” degree behind their name.  It is not news to the rest of us who have been using our minds for critical thinking. Nevertheless, this is worth reading as it details the facts about cholesterol production in the body. That said, I am pleased to know that the rest of the world is finally getting this information from a source they allow to do their thinking for them.  Yes, I admit to and own my cynicism. Please forgive me and do read on . . . .

Why Cholesterol May Not Be Such a Bad Thing

When arteries are damaged by a lifestyle event such as stress, high blood pressure, nicotine, or other toxins, cholesterol is the body’s first response to help repair the artery, according to Dr. Alejandro Junger, M.D.., cardiologist and author of Clean Gut. Similar to forming a scab on a wound, the body sends cholesterol plaque to help repair the damage. This is the small, high-density type of cholesterol. In a healthy body, healthy cells would then continue to repair the artery, and the cholesterol plaque would be reabsorbed back into the body and not accumulate and become a health issue.

However, in a chronic situation like ongoing stress, high blood pressure, or exposure to toxins (all inflammation producers), the signal to stop sending cholesterol to that damaged area never gets turned off and the cholesterol plaque continues to build up. Chronic inflammation can exacerbate this process and keep the plaque building until the affected artery is clogged.

Living a healthy, low-stress lifestyle, including mindfulness practices like meditation and yoga, can help turn off the conveyer  belt of plaque being sent to a damaged artery.

Need one say more?  If  you want the whole story, go to the Chopra website at the link below. It’s a good read.

Here’s to your health and longevity.

Anthony Palombo, D.C.

http://www.chopra.com/ccl/is-cholesterol-really-an-issue?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=CCL%20Newsletter%20160119&utm_campaign=January

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“d-alpha tocopherol” Is NOT Vitamin E

My Chorale PicAre you taking 800 units of “vitamin E” every day? If so, you may be doing more harm to your body than good. Read this report by John Courtney, former head of Research & Development for Standard Process Laboratories for thirty years. When you’re finished reading, you will have a clear understanding of what vitamin E is and is not..

IT’S ABOUT FUNCTION, NOT POTENCY

Functions of Vitamin E: promotes cell repair, anti-scarring, increases tissue resistance to stress, (supports skin, muscles, ligaments, tendons), specific support to cardiovascular system, source of manganese and selenium and aids in pituitary function.

John Courtney: Our VITAMIN E Complex product (CATAPLEX E) presents a situation similar to our other vitamin formulas. Dr. George Goodheart, for instance, who has developed this muscle testing technique, AK, frequently lectures to doctors, and he always calls one up and checks him for vitamin E. He will say: “You’re deficient in vitamin E.” The doctor usually says, “That’s impossible. I take 800 units of vitamin E every day.” So George says, “Take one
now.” So the doctor takes one and George tests him and there is no change. So he gives the doctor one of our two-unit CATAPLEX E tablets and the doctor becomes stronger.

This is what I mean by function. We are interested in making a product that has function, and we give it to the doctor no matter what it looks like on the label. Granted, they would not sell in health food stores because people try to read labels and they don’t understand them. Instead of reading the ingredients, they read how many units of something and that throws them off.

We talked about vitamin E as classified by the government as “tocopherol.” There are seven tocopherols in all, alpha being one of them. The government has decided to rate any vitamin E product according to the amount of alpha tocopherol it contains. The tocopherols are antioxidants, just like ascorbic acid. They are a part of the E complex, but they are not the active ingredients. Their function is to preserve the active factor. Tocopherols are measured on the basis of cell growth.

Kids who have acne have it at a time when their sex organs are beginning to develop and require vitamin E. If they’re not getting enough vitamin E in their diet, the gonads begin to take the vitamin E that would otherwise be used in the maintenance of the health of the skin. So there begins to be abnormal skin growth.

On the other hand, the entire E complex contains the polyunsaturated fatty acids. Vitamin F is part of the E complex, as are Vitamins A and K. There are some forms of vitamin D and manganese in the E complex as well. The traditional source for vitamin E is vegetable oils. But the best quality vitamin E comes from whole vegetables. Green lettuce is one of the best sources, and the pea plant is what we use and is about equally as good. We raise green peas on our farms and press the juice out and vacuum dry it. This is our E concentrate. It is high in manganese. The manganese is combined with the protein, vitamins and other
trace minerals in the plant in the growing process. You could call our CATAPLEX E a “naturally chelated” product.

“Chelated” means “combined.” If you take any high potency laboratory-chelated products, your body has to do some combining in order to make them work. But if you take your minerals the way nature provides them, combined with protein and vitamins through the growing process of plants, they are bound to work.

For example, we could take vitamin E and separate the tocopherols from the manganese. Putting them back together in the laboratory, chelating them artificially, we would find they wouldn’t work. But they worked before you took them apart. Dr. Lee used an analogy to illustrate this point.

The same point applies to all of our products. He said you can give a chemist a watch and he can analyze it for content. Then hit it with a hammer and give it back to him. Although it is the same watch, it has now lost its function. A nutritional concentrate is an organized mechanism that has a function. If you break the function by separating the parts, the body can no longer use the mechanism. High potency’ vitamin E products are made this way.

Tocopherols are broken down and separated from oils, the natural tocopherols are separated from vegetable oil. Then they are packed into a gelatin perle and you have a high potency vitamin E product, a 200 or 500 International Unit vitamin E product. That means 200 or 500 International Units of alpha tocopherol, because the government insists that the potency of the product is measured by the amount of alpha tocopherol it contains. Of course, the reason for doing this is to give the public a “high potency” product. Although the label of such a product will say “all natural” or “organic” – it was taken from oil, a natural source – it’s still not food. It’s an incomplete product. You are getting lots of tocopherols, but none of the active components of the E complex: the F, A, K, D, manganese, etc.

Our VITAMIN E is a two International Unit product. Each tablet contains two International Units of alpha tocopherol. The remainder of the tablet is composed of all the other vitamin E components. How do the high potency vitamin E products work? By preserving the active components of the E complex which still remain in the patient’s tissues. If you recall, the tocopherols are an antioxidant. So the patient’s symptoms, such as angina, will disappear, but often only temporarily. The body is designed to utilize food in its whole form. If you eat incomplete foods, such as refined tocopherols, all the missing factors are borrowed from the tissue reserves in order to make the partial food usable. Sooner or later, depending on the patient’s past eating habits, there will be a deficiency of those nutrients, causing what’s referred to as a “reversal of symptoms.” This means there is a recurrence of the same symptoms, which were causing the problem in the first place, often to a more serious degree.  

Bicknell and Prescott, in their book THE VITAMINS IN MEDICINE, talk about bone decalcification and other problems caused by the use of excessive alpha tocopherol. So, high potency vitamins are similar to drugs in their effect. They cause a masking of symptoms, which eventually creates additional problems. Dr. Lee used to say that using high potency vitamins was like whipping a tired horse; he would be stimulated to run faster but sooner or later he collapses because you never fed him. Sometimes doctors call us for help with patients with cramps. This could be cramps anywhere in the body-the legs, abdomen, heart, etc. They will say, “I’ve tried everything I could nutritionally, calcium, magnesium, etc., and the patient still has cramps.” Then we ask if the patient is taking high potency vitamin E. Many times they are, and the cramps developed after they started taking the high potency vitamin E. Then, of course, we suggest the doctor take the patient off the high potency vitamin E product.

Our approach is to give the patient the specific food factors which he’s lacking, along with the associated factors, which make it work. In the case of angina, we would recommend CATAPLEX E2. It’s the part of the vitamin E complex, which preserves calcium in the tissues. A person with angina is usually deficient in this food factor, so he develops cramps in the muscles of his heart. One final word about our CATAPLEX E, and this applies to our other products as well. Sometimes tablets from different lots will be different in color, This is due to variables in the conditions under which the peas were grown — moisture in the air and soil, the mineral: content in the soil, etc. Since we don’t color or sugar-coat our tablets, they don’t always look alike. We have always felt this better than having to use artificial dyes or coating in order to give the tablets a uniform appearance.

Now you have a complete picture of what vitamin E actually is. The same applies to so-called “vitamin C” which the FDA says is ascorbic acid. Ascorbic acid is no more vitamin C than an orange peal is the whole orange. Ascorbic acid is the anti-oxidant envelope in which the active and functional ingredients of vitamin C are contained and protected. More on this in my next blog.

Here’s to your health

Anthony Palombo, DC, ACN – Chiroparctor and certified practitioner of Applied Clinical Nutrition.

Visit my HealingTones.org blog for more informative and inspiring articles.

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“The Cholesterol Myths” — A Book Review

My Chorale PicFrom my Health Light Newsletter — Rethinking Healthcare in the New Paradigm — of December, 2006. Enjoy!

A BOOK REVIEW

The Cholesterol Myths — Exposing the Fallacy that Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease

by Uffe Ravnskov, MD, PhD

Without question, the author did his homework  before writing this layman-friendly book. The bottom line: all the testing and studies done on cholesterol and heart health are flawed by bad science, bias and manipulation. Cholesterol has absolutely nothing to do with coronary heart disease (CHD). It seems it is a mere “innocent bystander” and that the real cause of cardiovascular disease is battered and worn out arteries the repair of which the body uses fat to patch up breaches in their walls, to reinforce them by making them thicker. What causes the arteries to wear out? Toxins and other free-radicals circulating through them, the primary offenders being insulin from high carbohydrate consumption and food allergies.

Homocystine and C-Reactive Protein are the more accurate markers for CHD. Their presence in the blood stream indicates inflammation caused by free-radical assault to the inner lining of the blood arteries and consequent impairment of blood supply to the heart, as well as other vital organs.

Myths Dr. Ravnskov proved to be false:

Myth I: High-fat foods cause heart disease.

Myth 2: High cholesterol causes heart disease.

Myth 3: High-fat foods raise cholesterol.

Myth 4: Cholesterol blocks arteries.

Myth 5. Animal studies prove the diet-heart idea [that heart disease is related to diet].

Myth 6: Lowering your cholesterol will lengthen your life.

Myth 7: Polyunsaturated oils are good for you.

Myth 8: The cholesterol campaign is based on good science.

Myth 9: All scientists support the diet-heart idea.

I would encourage anyone reading this who is on Statin drugs, or even considering taking them, to READ THIS BOOK! There are doctors who will not see you if you think for yourself and refuse to take their medicine. If you can’t educate your doctor, then you may need to find one who is more open.

Here are some facts substantiated in this book that may guide you in making important choices in the care of your cardiovascular system.

  1. Cholesterol is a substance vital to the cells of your body. Your Iiver produces three to four times more cholesterol than you eat. The production increases when you eat on Iy small amounts of cholesterol and decreases when you eat large amounts.
  2. The “prudent” diet, low in saturated fat and cholesterol, cannot lower your cholesterol more than a small percentage.
  3. The only effective way to lower cholesterol is with drugs. Many of the cholesterol-lowering drugs are dangerous to your health and may shorten your life.
  4. The new cholesterol-lowering drugs, called Statins, do lower heart disease mortality, but this is because of effects other than cholesterol-lowering. Unfortunately, they also stimulate cancer, at least in rodents.
  5. You may become aggressive or suicidal if you lower your cholesterol too much.
  6. Polyunsaturated fatty acids [such as margarine and hydrogenated oils], those which are claimed to prevent heart attacks, stimulate infections and cancer in rats. If you eat too much polyunsaturated oil you will age faster than normal. You will see this on the outside as wrinkled skin. You can’t see the effects of premature aging on the inside of your body, but you will certainly feel them. Too much polyunsaturated oil may provoke atherosclerosis.
  7. People whose blood cholesterol is low develop just as many plaques in their blood vessels as people whose cholesterol is high.
  8. More than thirty studies of more then 150,000 individuals have shown that people who have had a heart attack haven’t eaten more saturated fat or less polyunsaturated oil than other people.
  9. Older women with high cholesterol live longer than those with low cholesterol.
  10. Many of these facts have been presented in scientific journals and books for decades but proponents of the diet-heart hypothesis never tell them to the public.
  11. The diet-heart idea and the cholesterol campaign create immense prosperity for researchers, doctors, drug producers and the food industry.
  12. The Chance of not dying from a heart attack over four to six years for a patient with CHD and high cholesterol is about 92 percent without treatment, and increases slightly to 95 percent with Statin treatment.

I like this conclusion by the author:

“In conclusion, the new guidelines may possibly prevent cardiovascular death in a small minority of patients with cardiovascular disease. But at the same time they may increase mortality from other diseases, transform healthy individuals into unhappy hypochondriacs obsessed with the chemical composition of their food and their blood, reduce the income of ranchers and dairy farmers, undermine the art of cuisine, destroy the joy of eating, and divert health care money from the sick and the poor to the rich and the healthy. The only winners are the drug companies and imitation food industry, and the researchers that they support.”

Most people I have talked with are intimidated into drug therapy by their physician. Here’s what Dr. Pinckney, former co-editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, had to say about that:

“Your fear of dying … may well have made you a victim of the cholesterol controversy. For, if you have come to believe that you can ward off death from heart disease by altering the amount of cholesterol in your blood, whether by diet or by drugs, you are following a regime that still has no basis in fact. Rather, you as a consumer have been taken in by certain commercial interests and health groups who are more interested in your money than in your life .”

American experimental psychologist Dr. Russell Smith studied the diet-cholesterol-heart issue with extreme thoroughness and concluded:

“The current campaign to convince every American to change his or her diet and, in many cases, to initiate drug ‘therapy’ for life is based on fabrications, erroneous interpretations and/or gross exaggerations of findings and, very importantly, the ignoring of massive amounts of unsupportive data . . . it does not seem possible that objective scientists without vested interests could ever interpret the literature as supportive ….”

Dr. Stehbens of the Department of Pathology at Wellington School of Medicine, and director of the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research in Wellington, New Zealand, after doing his own extensive research and review of the literature, says:

“The perpetuation of the cholesterol myth and the alleged preventive measures are doing the dairy and meat industries of this and other countries much harm quite apart from their potential to endanger optimum nutrition levels and t he health of the populace at large . . . .  It is essential to adhere to hard scientific facts and logic. Scientific evidence for the role of dietary fat and hypercholesterolemia in the causation of atherosclerosis is seriously lacking. . . .  The lipid hypothesis has enjoyed undeserved longevity and respectability. Readers should be aware of the unscientific nature of claims used to support it and see it as little more than a pernicious bum steer.”

The author continues:

“Dr. Russell Smith criticizes a large number of leading scientists from National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the American Heart Association, which he calls the ‘alliance.’ He considers their work “incompetent and sloppy …. The fraud is so blatant and so pervasive that it was considered necessary to take some liberties with the usual staid rhetoric of a scientific review and inject stronger language to emphasize the problem.'”

Noted Professor George Mann, now retired from teaching medicine and biochemistry at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, presented his arguments against the diet-heart idea as far back as 1977 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Ravnskov writes:

“Eight years later, when the cholesterol education campaign was getting into gear, Professor Mann summarized his criticism of the diet-heart idea in Nutrition Today. The diet-heart idea is the greatest scientific deception of our times, he said. Mann is especially critical of the cholesterol-lowering trials. Never in the history of science have so many costly experiments failed so consistently, he declared . . . .  People who are faced with the many distorted facts about diet, cholesterol and heart disease often ask me why almost all scientists unquestioningly accept the diet-heart idea. And you may have asked the same question after reading this book. Here is Professor Mann’s comment: “to loose their soft money funding, the academicians who should speak up and stop this wasteful anti-science are strangely quiet. Their silence has delayed a solution for coronary heart disease by a generation’. Professor Mann offers a little glimpse of hope at the end of his article in Nutrition Today:

‘Those who manipulate data do not appreciate that understanding the nature of things cannot be permanently distorted-the true explanation cannot be permanently ignored. Inexorably, truth is revealed and deception is exposed…. In due time truth will come out. This is the relieving grace in this sorry sequence ….'”

I have done my part to apprise my readers of this deception and to reveal the truth as I have discerned it in order to provide information that may help my readers in making intelligent and informed choices in their healthcare. [Portions of this report
were italicized by the author for emphasis.]

Reference: Dr. Ravnskov’s book was published in Sweden in 1991 and in Finland a year later. To order his book ask for ISBN 0-9670897-0-0.

Visit my HealingTones.org blog for inspiring articles. The Current theme is “Human Relations — Man-Woman Equality”