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 labeled “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 that has been 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.

In Part 2 of this two-part article, I’ll discuss which foods cause inflammation, how those foods trigger the inflammatory process, and the foods to eat that will cure inflammation.

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I went to a fantastic seminar recently called “Change Your Habits, Change Your Life”.  One of the speakers was Cyndi O’Meara who is a passionate and knowledgeable expert on health issues and self motivation. She has written a few books, the first one called “Changing Habits, Changing Lives”.

An interesting statistic Cyndi shared with us is that only 1 in 10 people will make permanent changes in  their lives regarding their health.  Cyndi spoke about finding a New Truth and attaching emotion to it to change our behavior – 1 step at a time. This is what I took away from the evening.

Nowadays, we are getting mixed messages all the time about what is good and what isn’t.  But the statistics  speak for themselves: we have a nation of sick people.

41% of children have a life long illness, 1 in 5 have depression, 1 in 3 have asthma and there is an escalation in autism, ADHD and allergies.  Also there has been a 300% increase in diabetes, heart disease, cancer and obesity.

Why is this, and what can we do to change it?

There are 4 parts to health:

Chemical: Food we eat and what we put on our skin
Emotional: If we change the chemical the emotional will take care of itself
Physical: Exercise
Spiritual: Our purpose in life

The message repeated over and over at the seminar was  simple, change what we are eating.

Dr Kerin O’Dea did a study with Australian Aborigines suffering diabetes, they went back to the bush.  For 7 weeks they lived off the land and in that short time all risk factors for heart disease and all metabolic abnormalities of diabetes plummeted. They also had a sense of control over their lives and felt healthier.

Most supermarket foods are now so highly processed they barely even qualify as foods.  We must go back to eating foods in their natural state.  They are called whole foods and they a full of all the nutrients, vitamins and minerals our bodies need for optimal health.

Things to eat are fresh organic fruit and vegetables, real butter (not margarine which is chemically produced) whole grains, pulses, nuts and organic free range eggs.

Sweet tooth? A small amount of real sugar like rapadura, organic raw sugar, honey or 100% pure maple syrup is ok, but avoid artificial sweeteners!

Why? Aspartame creates cravings 90 minutes after eating it, so you eat more of it, and you get cravings, and you eat more. The cycle goes on until you are overweight.  It is a chemical so avoid it!

Read the labels on your food, but don’t just look at how much saturated fat, sugar and calories it contains.  Instead look at the ingredients, the saturated fat may be from nuts and seeds, which is good for us, and the sugar may be organic raw sugar which is not bad in small amounts.  If it is low in fat, low in sugar and calories it might be low in nutrition, so it makes no sense to eat it.

To summarise:

The food nature gave us is the best.
Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize (which is most of the food in the supermarket aisles).
IF YOU CAN’T MAKE IT IN YOUR KITCHEN, don’t eat it.
Quality of food is much more important than quantity, so stop trying to lose weight and start gaining health.

Get the most out of a healthy diet by exercising regularly to get the oxygen into your cells and by hydrating your body with lots of purified water.