Category Archives: Diabetes

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MD Admits to “Great Cholesterol Lie”

This is what I and other alternative healthcare doctors have been saying for years!  My own cardiologist couldn’t afford to change his approach . . . and here’s why!

 (This is long, but read it if you want to fully understand coronary heart disease.)

 Seven years ago I had by-pass surgery due to clogged coronary arteries.  My cardiologist and surgeon said the culprit was cholesterol and that it was hereditary.  The real culprit turned out to be chronic inflammation due to several factors, primary of which was an allergy to high fructose corn syrup and corn products in general – all of which I found out visiting a colleague in Houston, Texas, Dr. Stuart White.  The hereditary factor is only 5%.  My dad died of coronary heart disease at age 61. I was 62 when I had my bypass.

Against my cardiologist’s strong recommendations, I opted not to take the Statin and other drugs and instead addressed my condition naturally with dietary and lifestyle changes, which included therapeutic dosages of critical nutritional supplements.   I am, non-the-less, eternally grateful to my cardiologist and heart surgeon for my second lease on life – which, ironically, allowed me to pursue my search for the real cause of coronary heart disease and to be alive today to tell my story and report on my findings.

When I showed my cardiologist the evidence against cholesterol as a marker for coronary heart disease, his reply was that all the medical literature pointed in the direction of statin drugs to reduce the production of cholesterol by the liver.  Now I know that he couldn’t, and probably still cannot, go against the literature without risking a malpractice suit.  He has to follow the protocol dictated by the AMA and the pharmaceutical industry.  Here’s an MD who fessed up to the big mistake medicine has made and is still making.  Thank you Dr. Dwight Lundell!

“Without inflammation, cholesterol won’t accumulate in blood vessel walls and cause heart disease”Heart Surgeon Admits Huge Mistake! 

 
By Dwight Lundell, MD
We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is.  I freely admit to being wrong..  As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries,today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.
I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled “opinion makers.” Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.
The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake.  The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease.  Deviations from these
recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice
It Is Not Working!

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.
The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.

 

Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.

  Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.

Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes.  Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended.  It is inflammation
that causes cholesterol to become trapped.

Inflammation is not complicated — it is quite simply your body’s natural defense to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus.

The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders.  However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process,a condition occurs called chronic inflammation.

Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.

What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body?

Well,smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully

The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream diet that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels.

This repeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease,
stroke, diabetes and obesity.

Let me repeat that. The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine.

What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years.. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury.

This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.

Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall.

Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation

While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war. Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.

How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?

Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

 When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.
 
What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.
While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator — inflammation in their arteries.
 
Let’s get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6’s are essential –they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell —they must be in the correct balance with omega-3’s. If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation.
 
Today’s mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That’s a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today’s food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal
and healthy.
To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes
and finally, Alzheimer’s disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated. 
 There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.
There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that isreturning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation- causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them.
One tablespoon of corn oil contains 7,280 mg of omega-6; soybean contains 6,940 mg. Instead, use olive oil or butterfrom grass-fed beef.
 
 Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labelled polyunsaturated. Forget the “science” that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.
 
The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.
 
What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.
 
[Ed.. Note: Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital, Mesa, AZ. His private practice, Cardiac
Care Center was in Mesa, AZ.

Recently Dr. Lundell left surgery to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease. He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation that promotes human health with a focus on helping large corporations promote wellness.

He is the author of The Cure for Heart
Disease and The Great Cholesterol Lie .

For a nutritional protocol to support your cardiovascular integrity, write to me at: tpal70@gmail.com  To your health,

Dr. Tony Palombo, DC, ACN (Applied Clinical Nutrition)

 
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What to know when buying food supplements

NATURAL VS. SYNTHETIC VITAMINS

 It could be said that never in history has so much money been spent on the advertising and purchasing of any merchandise, with so little knowledge of the product itself, on the part of either the seller or the buyer, as has been spent on vitamin and mineral supplements.

Billions are being spent annually, and most of the purchasers, wholesalers, retailers or direct-to-consumer salespeople do not know the difference between a synthetic, a crystalline, and a truly natural vitamin, or the difference between a chelated organic and an inorganic mineral.

What’s the difference between natural and synthetic? In short, it’s the difference between something that’s living and something that’s dead. That’s a big difference.

NATURAL WHOLE FOOD VITAMINSOn vitamin labels the word “natural” has no specific definition other than that the substance exists somewhere on the planet or in outer space. The key words to look for are “Whole Food Vitamins” — this means vitamins as they are found in food, not tampered with in any way that would change their molecular structure, their biological or biochemical combination, or their actions. 
  
 SYNTHETIC means that a chemist attempted to reconstruct the exact structure of the crystalline molecule by chemically combining molecules from other sources. These sources are not living foods, but dead chemicals. For example, Vitamin B1 is made from a coal tar derivative, and d-alpha tocopherol (so-called Vitamin E) is a byproduct of materials used by the Eastman Kodak company to make film. However, it is not legally necessary to give the source from which the synthetic “vitamin” is derived. Synthetic “vitamins” should more accurately be called drugs.  

HOW TO READ A VITAMIN LABEL
  
To identify synthetics on the label, look to see if a source is given. If it isn’t, assume the product is synthetic. These terms also identify a vitamin as synthetic: acetate, bitartrate, chloride, gluconate, hydro-chloride, nitrate, succinate. Carbonate always indicates the mineral is in-organic and therefore of no use to your body. All minerals have to be organically chelated and arranged in their proper ratios by vegetables in order for humans to be able to use them. All of them.
  
Whole-food natural supplements never come in high dosages. It is only possible to create high-dosage “vitamins” if you isolate one fraction as a crystalline, or synthesize one fraction as in synthetics. For example, take Vitamin C and E. In naturally-occurring Vitamin C Complex, the ascorbic acid portion comprises only about 5% of the whole complex. Similarly, alpha tocopherol only comprises a small percentage of Vitamin E Complex. Both serve as anti-oxidants for the vitamin complexes.
Legally, according to the FDA, the only portion of the Vitamin C Complex that is allowed to be called “Vitamin C” is the ascorbic acid portion, and the only part of the Vitamin E Complex that can be called “Vitamin E” is the alpha tocopherol piece—(the “d” in front of alpha means it’s synthetic, as in d-alpha tocopherol).

We, as consumers, have been thoroughly fooled and misled about vitamins and minerals. We have been hoodwinked into believing that large quantities of dead chemicals are more nutritionally potent than smaller amounts of high-quality living compounds. These chemicals are stimulants (drugs), not nutrients, and should therefore be under FDA control – better still, condemned for the toxins they are.

Relatively small amounts of whole-food natural vitamins, with all of their naturally-occurring synergists, are far more potent than high doses of synthetic imitation “vitamins.” They alone are nourishing to the cells. It is sheer arrogance for us to think that we can synthesize or in any way alter a natural design that is so crucial to our health and wellness and that we do not understand. There was one man who did understand human nutrition and that was Dr. Royal Lee, founder of Standard Process Laboratories. I thank God every day for him and for those who carry forward his work, providing the highest quality of nutritional and herbal products possible.

 To your good health

 Dr. Palombo

 tpal70@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

Vitamins in their natural state always exist as living complexes with specific synergistic co-factors, enzymes, phytonutrients and organic mineral-activators, and never as isolated single factors. A vitamin needs all of its synergists to function. Further, there are literally hundreds of such synergists, most of which have not yet been studied but are nevertheless very important.

 

CRYSTALLINE means that a natural food has been treated with various chemicals, solvents, heat and distillations to reduce it down to one specific “pure” crystalline vitamin. In this process all the synergists, which are termed “impurities,” are destroyed. There is no longer anything natural in the action of crystalline “vitamins”— they should more accurately be termed drugs.
 

 

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Facts about Agave

Oh No!!!  Not Agave too!!!

Well,  just when I thought it was safe to sweeten my coffee with Agave, unfavorable facts about this high fructose sweetener surfaced through all the false and misleading reports put forth by the producers and distributors of this nectar of the agave plant. 

I developed a high sensitivity and intolerance to high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) over the years, which very quickly landed me in the hospital under the heart-surgeon’s knife.  The inflammatory process, triggered by the presence of artery-damaging corn protein in my blood , resulted in high-cholesterol production by my liver to patch up the eroding lining of my coronary arteries.  You see, I’ve had a sweet tooth since my childhood years.  With the introduction of HFCS in nearly everything I liked to eat and drink, my heart didn’t stand a chance against arterial blockages.  I had six bypasses in 2003 right here in Fort Collins, Colorado.  The cardiologist and heart surgeon attributed my high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease to hereditary factors, which apparently account for 5% of  cardiovascular cases. My dad and his Italian forbears had it, so I was destined to have it too.  Or so I was assured.

Well, I didn’t buy into this common explanation, and went in search for the real cause. My search led me to a clinical nutritionist in Houston, Dr. Stuart White of Whole Health Associates, who uncovered a food-intolerance related to corn and all corn-derived products, which he attributed to my European background.  Europeans, he explained, and their progeny appear not to have sufficient reserves of the kind of enzymes that break down the protein in corn, just as  Native Americans and their progeny don’t have the enzymes to break down the protein (gluten) in wheat.  If you remember from your American history, the Europeans died after eating corn the indian natives gave them in exchange for their wheat, and the indians died from eating the Europeans’ wheat.  So, depending on what your hereditary background is, you may have an intolerance to either wheat or corn — or  both if you have a mixture, which many living on this melting-pot American continent have.   

Note:  The undigested protein from corn or wheat finds its way into the bloodstream through the lining of the gut.  Here is where the inflammatory process kicks in to deal with undigested food matter, such as corn protein and wheat gluten.  With chronic inflammation comes irritable bowel syndrome (ibs) and Crohn’s disease, which leads to what is called “leaky-gut syndrome.”  The eroded lining of the gut allows protein molecules to enter the blood sream.  This triggers an immune response of histamine production to literally flush the protein out of the blood through the mucous membranes of the lungs and sinuses. Thus we have what are often called “food allergies” but are more accurately called “food intolerances.” Much of what is back of  “COPD”, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, which is really a chronic cough, is a food intolerance triggering histamine production that congests the bronchial tubes, resulting in a chronic cough to get the protein-laden mucous up and out. 

So, the cardiologist was accurate in attributing my cardiovascular disease to genetic factors, only the genes responsible are not cardiovascular genes, as though my body was programed genetically to have coronary heart disease.  It is rather that my European genes lack the factors that help produce enzymes to break down protein in corn, which can lead to inflammation – which can lead to erosion of the inner lining of blood arteries – which triggers  cholesterol production in the liver – which can lead to plaque in the arteries to prevent them from leaking – which can lead to heart-attack and bypass surgery.  In short, I did not inherit heart disease from my father.  I simply inherited his European genes with their shortcomings in digesting corn protein.  What an important revelation!  Thank you Dr. White!

Today one of my associates forwarded the following to me and I found it so important that I felt I should pass it on to my readers.  Needless to say, after reading this, I’m back to using raw sugar in my coffee instead of Agave!  All things in moderation, of course. 

 

Is this Popular Natural Sweetener Worse than High Fructose Corn Syrup?

Posted By Dr. Mercola | July 03 2010 | 155,922 views

By Dr. Mercola

Many people interested in staying healthy have switched to agave as a safer “natural” sweetener. They want to avoid well documented dangerous sweeteners like HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) but are unaware that most agave is actually WORSE than HFCS.

Once I realized this, I wrote a special report on agave to inform the public of this danger. I was somewhat surprised that the report would prompt such a firestorm of debate within the industry.

A number of natural agave manufacturers and health conscious consumers still proclaim agave is a safe, all-natural sweetener that is good for everyone.

Some have even criticized me for having ulterior motives. But nothing could be further from the truth. Although I do offer natural health products for sale on this site, I sell no competing products to agave.

Rather, I recommend other options such as stevia products. You can also use xylitol in small amounts or glucose, which is sold commercially as dextrose, and can easily be purchased on Amazon for $1 per pound. I do not sell any of these products.

My only purpose for sharing this information is to help people understand the truth about health. In case you haven’t noticed, we have an epidemic of obesity in the US and it wasn’t until recently that my eyes opened up to the primary cause — fructose.

Yes, it is all about freedom of choice. It is hard to have freedom if you aren’t given the entire story, and up until now that has been the case with agave.

Read more on his website:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/07/03/can-this-popular-alternative-sweetener-spike-uric-acid-into-the-danger-zone.aspx