Michael Pollan
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 Yet the beauty of a processed food like margarine is that it can be endlessly reengineered to overcome even the most embarrassing about-face in nutritional thinking—including the real wincer that its main ingredient might cause heart attacks and cancer. So now the trans fats are gone, and margarine marches on, unfazed and apparently unkillable. Too bad the same cannot be said of an unknown number of margarine eaters. |
Mike Adams
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 People who have heart attacks or serious arteriosclerosis have a marked decrease in plasmalogen, and the increased incidence of heart attacks in the United States and other countries very closely parallels the increased use of homogenized milk.
- Debra Lynn Dadd, Home Safe Home
Homogenized milk fats are metabolic disruptors
This is why homogenized milk fats earn the label of Metabolic Disruptor in my book: they clearly interfere with the normal digestion of milk fats and appear to directly contribute to cardiovascular disease. |
| All those in the study had already had heart attacks, but those receiving the good fat had a 70 percent decrease in subsequent heart attacks.
- Arthur Agatston, M.D., The South Beach Diet
Also, it's important to note that it is the processing of the oil that matters as much (if not more) as the nature of the original oil. Many natural plant-based oils, such as canola oil, are considered rather healthy in their natural form. But by hydrogenating them, food producers transform them into highly toxic substances. |
Michael Pollan
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| Some researchers no longer do, pointing out that half the people who get heart attacks don't have elevated cholesterol levels, and about half the people with elevated cholesterol do not suffer from CHD.) One other little grenade is dropped in the paper's conclusion: Although "a major purported benefit of a low-fat diet is weight loss," a review of the literature failed to turn up any convincing evidence of this proposition. |
| Americans appeared to be moving in the direction of a "prudent diet" and yet, paradoxically, having more heart attacks on it, not fewer.*
As for the precipitous decline in heart disease during the years of World War II, that could just as easily be attributed to factors other than the scarcity of meat, butter, and eggs. Not just animal protein, but sugar and gasoline were also strictly rationed during the war. Americans generally ate less of everything, including, notably, refined carbohydrates; they did, however, eat more fish. |
| Both these links have held up, but it doesn't necessarily follow from them that consumption of saturated
*In 1945, 217,000 deaths in the United States were attributed to heart attacks. By 1960 there were 500,000. By 2001 that number had fallen to 185,000. (It's important to note that the diagnostic criteria for heart attack have changed over time, as has the size of the population.) fat leads to heart disease, unless you can also demonstrate that serum cholesterol is a cause of heart disease and not, say, just a symptom of it. |
Dr. Timothy Scott
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 Subsequent research has found that long-term use of hormones results in more breast cancer,13 ovarian and endometrial cancers,14 heart attacks, strokes (including TIAs), asthma, cognitive declines and twice the chance of developing Alzheimer's disease—though there is less osteoporosis and less colon cancer.15
What Went Wrong
How could a drug which we now know causes heart attacks, strokes, endometrial cancer, breast cancer and so many other physical dangers become the most prescribed pill in the nation? |
Tori Hudson, N.D.
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 Women in the hormone group also appeared to have higher rates of strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots than the placebo group. The HRT users also had a reduced risk of colorectal cancer and fractures, but overall the risks outweighed the benefits. This study marked a significant moment in history for HRT, and millions of women discontinued their HRT as a result of the findings. |
Michael Pollan
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| Don't forget that trans-fat-rich margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim it was healthier than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. Since that debacle, the FDA, under tremendous pressure from industry, has made it only easier for food companies to make increasingly doubtful health claims, such as the one Frito-Lay now puts on some of its chips—that eating them is somehow good for your heart. |
Tori Hudson, N.D.
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| Recurrence rates for heart attacks are also consistently lower in women (and men) who already have coronary disease when they are treated with a low dose of aspirin.389 In a meta-analysis of four large primary prevention trials using low-dose aspirin, a 15 percent reduction was seen in cardiovascular events and a 30 percent reduction was observed in MI rates.390 More recently, a large randomized placebo-controlled trial of low-dose aspirin was done in the Women's Health Study (WHS). |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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 It almost always involves problems in circulation and is a great predictor of strokes and heart attacks. Whether in the inner part of the arteries (endothelium) or in the sex organs, poor circulation and impaired blood flow show up as dysfunction—and both are helped greatly by getting your heart pumping and your tissues flooded with blood and nutrients. Plus the improved mood, outlook, and physical appearance that go with regular exercise never hurt anyone in the bedroom department. It's hard to feel sexy (and to perform) if you're feeling crummy all the time. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 David Graham, a senior drug safety researcher at the FDA, the drug Vioxx likely killed well over 60,000 Americans all by itself by causing an alarming increase in the rate of heart attacks and strokes. Cherries have killed no one! In fact, the only side effects of cherries are all beneficial: Improved cardiovascular health, nervous system protection, reversal of gout and so on.
Cherries are 100% biocompatible with the human body (synthethic pharmaceuticals are not). Cherries are grown by nature and contain natural phytonutrients that your body recognizes. |
Anne Harrington
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 When assessed at eight and a half years as already mentioned, it appeared that men with Type A traits were twice as likely to die of heart attacks as the so-called Type B men. On a longer timescale, however, the trend had failed to hold—in fact, the follow-up data showed heart disease to be modestly lower among Type A than among Type B men. |
Tori Hudson, N.D.
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| Continued research has now demonstrated that doses between 400 and 800 IU per day dramatically reduce the risk of nonfatal heart attacks, but do not reduce the number of deaths from CAD.173 Doses of 400 to 1,000 IU per day provide additional cardiovascular benefit by inhibiting platelet aggregation, increasing HDL-cholesterol, and stimulating the breakdown of fibrin (a clot-forming protein).
Levels of vitamin E in the blood may be more directly related to the development of a heart attack or stroke than are total cholesterol levels. |
| In the large population-based Rotterdam Study of Dutch men and women, the risk of heart attacks was lower in those who drank more than 375 ml (one and a half cups) per day.295
Garlic {Allium Sativum). Garlic is popular as a lipid-lowering agent, but it has a modest effect. While analyses have demonstrated that garlic can reduce total cholesterol levels by 5 to 12 percent, recent reports suggest these studies may have been too brief to draw conclusions. |
| It soon became apparent that cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, and pulmonary emboli, was more frequent in women who used birth control pills. But even though "more frequent," these diseases are still exceedingly rare in the healthy population of young women who are the usual pill takers. It is also true that these risks are dose related and have fallen measurably as the estrogen and progestin content of pills has fallen 4 and 10 times respectively since their initial use. |
Mike Adams
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| All those in the study had already had heart attacks, but those receiving the good fat had a 70 percent decrease in subsequent heart attacks.
- Arthur Agatston, M.D., The South Beach Diet
Also, it's important to note that it is the processing of the oil that matters as much (if not more) as the nature of the original oil. Many natural plant-based oils, such as canola oil, are considered rather healthy in their natural form. But by hydrogenating them, food producers transform them into highly toxic substances. |
Michael Pollan
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| One objection to the theory was genetic: Different races were apt to be susceptible to different diseases went the argument; white people were disposed to heart attacks, brown people to things like leprosy. Yet as Burkitt and others pointed out, blacks living in America suffered from the same chronic diseases as whites living there. Simply by moving to places like America, immigrants from nations with low rates of chronic disease seemed to quickly acquire them.
The other objection to the concept of Western diseases, one you sometimes still hear, was demographic. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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 At the end of five years, you compare outcomes (i.e., heart attacks) between the two groups. It took so long to do such studies because it was argued that it would be unethical to give a sugar pill to women when HRT had such obvious benefits.
Controlled trials have since been performed. The Women's Health Initiative (WHI) involved the random assignment of 16,608 postmenopausal women to estrogen and progestin (equine estrogen and medroxyprogesterone, or Prempro) vs. a placebo from 1993 to 1998. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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| This is absolutely not the place to get into the enormous controversy generated by preliminary findings from the Women's Health Initiative that reported a slightly increased risk of heart attacks and breast cancer for women on HRT.
I just want to point out two things and then urge you to speak to a knowledgeable healthcare practitioner about them: One, the findings are controversial, and may apply only to women who started taking the hormones later in life. |
Ray D. Strand
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 McCully to wonder whether mild to moderate elevations of homocysteine that were present over a lifetime could be a cause of heart attacks and strokes in the average patient.2
As seen in the case of the two boys, homocysteine is an intermediate byproduct that we produce when our bodies metabolize (break down) an essential amino acid called methionine. Methionine is found in large quantities in our meats, eggs, milk, cheese, white flour, canned foods, and highly processed foods. |
| This finding is revolutionary to the treatment and prevention of heart attacks. Rather than concentrating only on lowering cholesterol, you need to understand the necessary steps to decreasing the cause of the inflammation in your arteries. This approach could have significant and dramatic implications in the prevention and reversal of heart disease.
What About Cholesterol?
Did you know that elevated cholesterol in the blood was not always considered a risk factor for coronary artery disease and stroke? |
| The pharmaceutical companies quickly responded to this negative report by convincing the doctors that the benefits of HRT far outweighed the risks, often boasting that other clinical trials had shown that patients who took HRT decreased their risk of heart attacks, strokes, and Alzheimer's dementia.10
Two other major studies, however, the Heart and Estrogen/Progestin
Replacement Study (HERS) and The Women's Health Initiative Study, did not show any slowing of the progression of heart disease. |
Lester A. Mitscher and Victoria Toews
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 The French Paradox results from the fact that the French outlive Americans and suffer significantly fewer heart attacks, despite the fact that smoking is a national pastime in France and the typical French diet is swimming in saturated fat. It just didn't seem to make sense that the French would have healthy hearts despite the double whammy of smoking and saturated fat. The answer seems to lie in the red wine swirling in French wine glasses, wine that is an excellent source of polyphenols (the same class of nutrients to which green tea's active ingredients belong). |
| Doctors with patients who had enviably low cholesterol levels, yet still suffered heart attacks or other cardiovascular diseases concluded, understandably, that cholesterol levels were not the full explanation. Pieces of the cardiovascular disease puzzle were obviously missing.
In the continued search for the missing factors, some researchers focused on the effects of free radical damage to cholesterol. Several recent studies indicate that LDL-cholesterol is one of the prime targets of free radicals, and once LDL-cholesterol is oxidized it becomes a very nasty substance. |
| Based on a seventy-five-year life span, premature deaths from heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular diseases result in the loss of almost five million years of potential life annually. Green tea's polyphenols can help turn the tide against this loss of life. The following chapters will show the many ways in which green tea polyphenols also improve the quality of life, including detoxifying the body, boosting immune function, and keeping the teeth healthy.
CHAPTER 7
Longevi-tea
Have you ever tried to read your fortune in tea leaves? |
| Angina is often a symptom of atherosclerosis and can be a warning sign of future heart attacks. Fourteen of the twenty-eight patients also had high fibrinogen levels. After a month's course of supplementation with green tea extract, the doctors reported that angina attacks were controlled in 71 percent of the patients. In addition, fibrinogen levels were reduced in all but one patient and electrocardiogram results normalized in fifteen of the patients. Angina patients are usually prescribed powerful medication for this condition, and they should continue taking that medication. |
Bill Sardi
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 Health and Age, and J Am Med Assn 282: 19611-63, 1999]
There is current concern that the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs also may increase the risk of heart attacks and may interfere with blood-pressure-lowering drugs. [Amy Er-ickson, Pharmacy Today, "Do COX-2 inhibitors compromise cardiovascular safety?" www.pharmacist.com] Bleeding events have also been reported among users of blood- thinning drugs when combined with the COX-2 inhibitors. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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| They did other things, like exercise and diet, that helped to prevent heart attacks; the HRT was superfluous. Yet from 1995 to 2003 eight years went by with major marketing to women and billions of dollars in sales. The pharmaceutical companies had hit on the mother lode of all markets: not just patients with a disease but all women over age fifty.
The observational study design, however, is inherently flawed; it's easy for a systematic factor to creep in and skew the results. |
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