The Barnard Observer
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Home Picks Figures Great Investors Vault Misc Contact c2003-06 Thomas Barnard
[Disclaimer: I have found the information below largely on
the internet. I make mistakes, so do your own research before changing your
habits.]
Getting to
the Heart of Heart Disease
[A work in
progress]
The number one killer is heart disease, so it makes sense to take a look. Certainly I’m interested, my grandfather died of it. According to longevity expert, Leonard Hayflick, writing in 1994, if cancer were cured immediately, it would add 3.1 years to the life of a newborn, and 1.9 years to a sixty-five year-old, but a cure for heart disease would add 13.9 years to the life of a newborn, and 14.3 years to a sixty-five-year-old.[1]
If you believed the pharmaceutical companies, heart disease is all about cholesterol and blood thinners. But cholesterol is a substance produced and native to the body, so we want to be very careful before we start calling names.
Angioplasties Suspect
Angioplasties were developed as a less dangerous method of dealing with clogged vessels. Instead of sawing through all the bones, such as when you have quadruple bypass surgery, they snake a tube up through your legs to your heart and then to the blood vessel in question, and either use a ballon to clear it out, or they put in a stent to keep it open, meanwhile putting the circulatory system on a mchine pump until they sewed in the new blood vessel, or four vessels, in the case of a quadruple bypass.
Radiologists Joon Yun and Patrick Lee noticed something odd about the angioplasties with the balloon tip. What they noticed was while an angioplasty may help alleviate the problem of that particular blood vessel in the short run, in the long run they believe the body reacts in trauma mode. In roughly one third of cases, the arteries narrowed again.[2]
And this is supported by a recent Dutch study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which found that in patients who had mild heart attacks anti-clotting drugs were just as effective as angioplasties and stents.[3] It seems to me this is less dangerous, too.
But these particular doctors are also investment managers, so their role is to find places to put money to make more money. They aren’t keen on angioplasties with balloons, or stents, which they think will also make the body respond to an enemy within. However, they have given their blessing to a catheter that comes with a rotor blade that chops away at the plaque on the artery walls, and then sucks it up. Vessels are minimally stressed.
But as investors, their goal is not in the least expensive, most effective treatment. Their interest is in an effective treatment that will generate lots of profits. But the goal of this book is to direct consumers to the most effective, least expensive treatments.
If
we were lucky enough to have the medical profession follow what has happened in
telephony, we would have no medical inflation to worry about. With my current service I can call
Treating the Whole Cardiovascular System
The main practice among cardiologists has been to treat the particular thing in the heart that has gone wrong. The main arteries of the heart, for example. Bypass surgery was developed to replace vessels that were 90% or more blocked with vessels from the legs which were unblocked or less blocked.
They say there is a 2%-6% chance of death resulting from bypass surgery. But you never know when that 2%-6% will hit you. A favorite uncle of mine died a day or two after successful bypass surgery had been performed. You have to wonder if the doctors felt so bad that they waived the cost of the surgery. Or do you suppose they billed Medicare anyway, even though the patient was no longer alive? After all, they did the work.
You can tell that conventional wisdom is slowly coming along because now I see advertised P.A.D. Peripheral Artery Disease. The commercial tells you that trouble in your legs may also mean there could be trouble with your heart. They are a stone’s throw away from conceding, God forbid, that the heart is part of a whole system of blood delivery.
The Real Cause of Heart Disease
Further, there is the whole question about whether cholesterol, which your body needs and manufactures in the liver, is really to blame.
There is a lecture on tape that you can purchase[4] in which Linus Pauling says that he came across the work of two Nobel prize winners, Brown and Goldstein who stated in a paper that heart disease is caused by lesions in the blood vessels. These lesions occur in places of intense pressure, near the heart, for example. The body then makes all manner of effort to fill in the cracks, these lesions, in the blood vessels. A particular form of LDL cholesterol called lipoprotein (a), fibrogen, and foam cells fill these vascular divots.
Pauling lights up and says he has the solution to the blood vessels breaking down, and that is vitamin C. Vitamin C is critical in the formation of the binding protein, collagen, which holds the vessel together.
Working backwards, he asks, what happens in scurvy (the total lack of vitamin C)? One of two things. The sufferer gets an infectious disease and dies. Or what I would call collagen breakdown occurs. When this important binding protein is not holding, your teeth fall out, and your blood vessels crack and eventually you die of internal bleeding.
Further, he cites a Canadian study that showed that there was much less heart disease among those who took vitamin C.
This is fine except for people who already have encrustations of plaque. For this he suggests that the amino acid lysine could help to clear out the plaque. Pauling tried this in rats. When the rats were sacrificed to check their blood vessels (something not possible with humans), they found that the blood vessels were clear. There were other substances in the patent.
While it is certainly laudatory to find less and less dangerous interventions, these are still more dangerous than say taking vitamin C with lysine, drinking pomegranate juice, or doing IVs with EDTA.
The Body’s System for Dealing with Cholesterol
The body makes about 4,000 mg of cholesterol in the liver. Evidently, LDL (low density lipoproteins) carries it throughout the body, and HDL (high density lipoproteins) carries it back to the liver.
From the liver, cholesterol is passed from the body through the (gall bladder) via the bile acids into the intestines. If it finds something in the intestines to latch on to, such as soluble fiber, cholesterol will pass out of the body; otherwise, it may be absorbed in the lower intestine and be passed back to the liver for processing again.
Part of the body’s mechanism for balancing cholesterol are the statins, which scientists found in the liver. They can slow production of cholesterol, and hence bring the numbers down substantially.
Statins are proteins found in the liver, where scientists found a number of such proteins which reduce the production of LDL cholesterol. Niacin, is another part of this mechanism. Because the work is done in the liver, that is why doctors keep want to keep tab on liver enzymes.
HDL
has statistically been linked with lower rates of heart disease; however, the
interesting thing is that researchers found a population in
What are the problems with the statin approach?
While it appears to reduce heart disease, it creates no overall improvement in rates of mortality. Translated, this means you still die on schedule. You don’t live any longer. You just die from something else (like liver disease or something else).
If you take statins, you need to take Coenzyme Q10. This is because statins and Coenzyme Q10 are competing for the use of the same metabolic pathway, and because coenzyme Q10 is important for producing energy for the heart, you can develop what is term statin-induced cardiomyopathy if Q10 production is reduced.
One possible alternative - oatmeal
We said that HDL brings cholesterol back to the liver and then from the liver to the gall bladder and from there to the intestines. We also said that cholesterol in the intestines can be re-absorbed if it has nothing to latch on to – such as oatmeal.
My neighbor who has had a couple of heart bypass surgeries said his doctor put him on to oatmeal, and his cholesterol went down. Now, I hadn’t had my cholesterol measured in years. And the last time they did it, it was at 251.
So, I started the oatmeal every morning with some berries to get it down. I like blueberries and strawberries. Blueberries are very high in antioxidants, and recent research shows they are good for memory. But don’t forget that I eat two eggs a day because I like getting the complete protein they offer even if they have been attacked as contributing to cholesterol. And remember also I take a bunch of other supplements – niacin (Inositol Hexanicotinate), CoQ, betasitosterol, vitamin C and other things. Generally, I exercise. The latest reading was 193. My neighbor felt I could do even better than that.
Studies show that heart risk can be reduced by 15% by eating 25 grams of soluble fiber per day.[5]
Lycopene
While I have read a fair amount about lycopene, I have never really seen studies that showed the effectiveness of lycopene supplements. The studies seem to favor tomato-based foods. Tomato paste, tomato sauce seemed to be particularly effective, and cooked tomato products were more effective than raw tomatoes.[6] It is a fat soluble nutrient, so it works best when taken with fat.[7]
A study in
A study published by Harvard researchers found that women with the highest lycopene intake had a reduced risk compared with those with the lowest intake. Further, women who consumed 7 or more servings of tomato-based foods weekly enjoyed a 30% risk reduction in cardiovascular disease compared with a group who consumed less than 1.5 servings per week.[9]
Coenzyme Q10
See the Chapter “Coenzyme Q10, a Special Case.” Heart muscle cells require more energy than other cells; hence, they have more mitochondria and more coenzyme Q10. Mitochondria is the furnace for cell energy and Q10 helps to generate more energy. Coenzyme Q10 is produced by the body but its production slows with age. Hence, you probably need very little supplementation as a child or young adult, but as you age, your requirement increases.
There have been at least nine placebo studies which all showed a benefit to hearts from the intake of coenzyme Q10.[10]
I think this substance should be a part of any heart recuperation or maintenance program.
Niacin
Niacin is a bile acid sequestrant which lowers LDL cholesterol, and has been shown in controlled clinical trials to reduce the risk for coronary heart disease. Straight niacin will produce really annoying flushing on the skin, so look for no-flush niacin (Inositol Hexanicotinate). The American Heart Association rightly points out that commercial niacin may have anywhere from zero to the amount claimed on the bottle. Testing commercial products is a non-invasive service that the Food and Drug Administration could perform for all of us. But then disappointingly, the AHA insists that you must not confuse prescription niacin with commercially available niacin. The warning about variability of commercial forms is enough. As Linus Pauling said, vitamin C is vitamin C. Although, to be fair, there are special forms and combinations of niacin that may have additional value.[11]
What the AHA site fails to mention,[12] is that on the positive side, niacin is the best means of raising HDL, including drugs, providing increases in HDL in the range 25 to 30%.[13]
Vitamin E and the Tocotrienols
There has been a lot of controversy
over vitamin E. A recent study from the
They
found that none of the patients enjoyed any benefit from vitamin E, in fact, a
small number died as a result of taking that size dose of vitamin E.[14]
The
1996 Cambridge Heart Anti-Oxidant Study (CHAOS) had less heart attacks, but the
vitamin E group had more deaths.[15]
Tocotrienols,
part of the vitamin E complex, have been shown to be effective in reversing arterial blockage of the carotid
artery, and so important against strokes.[16]
With this, I personally have decided to reduce
my vitamin E intake from 800 IU to 350 IU, and I have added tocotrienols.
Aspirin
A
British study showed that patients who had been put on any kind of antiplatelet
medication, including aspirin, had an overall 25% reduced risk of a serious
vascular event compared with patients who did not receive such treatment. Also, it says the appropriate dose of aspirin
is between 80 mg and 160 mg.[17]
On the other hand, I found on Dr. Joseph Mercola’s website, an interesting piece citing a British meta-analysis of aspirin as inconclusive. He recommends the use of nattokinase, an enzyme with clot-dissolving properties.[18]
Nattokinase
Dr. Hiroyuki
Sumi discovered nattokinase in 1980 while working as a researcher at the
Dr. Sumi feels natto is perfectly safe to eat, but what is not clear is the taking of the pure form of the enzyme. It would be nice to see some safety studies.
The problem with sugar
Table sugar, sucrose, breaks down into glucose and fructose. Glucose is readily absorbed by the body, but fructose is not. Fructose is converted to acetate, and acetate is the precursor to cholesterol.
So, it is a straightforward proposition, that one way to reduce cholesterol is to reduce your use of table sugar. In fact, removing fructose from the diet will lower cholesterol levels, and it follows that a diet where glucose is the only carbohydrate will also reduce cholesterol levels. This turns out to be true.[20]
The problem with tests
The problem with tests like cholesterol tests is that it tells you about the cholesterol levels in the body, but it tells you nothing of the state of your blood vessels. It does not tell you how clogged they are, or about the elasticity of the vessels. And as we stated above, for a lucky group of Italians their HDL levels might turn up dangerously low, but because they produce the particular large HDL molecule that really cleans up blood vessels, they are actually much healthier than most of us.
Exercise
A study by Dr. Martha Gulati, study author and preventive cardiologist at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, of 5700 women found that women who could not do 85% of their age predicted exercise level on an exercise stress test have 2 times greater risk for heart problems and death.[21],[22] Also, as might seem an intuitive inference, increases in exercise capability decreases in risk of death.[23]
Stanford researcher T. Edwin Atwood told CNN: "It's not how long you exercise...It doesn't take marathons or running. Walking briskly every day for half an hour is a great risk modifier."[24]
