Our father died at age 57 of a variety of stress-related diseases. I'm 53. With that and my older brothers' recent experiences in mind I decided to see if there is much that I can do now to avoid a similar fate. Of course I'm not a health care professional and can't diagnose or recommend treatment for anyone, but I can share what I've learned thus far:
Why Arteries Clog
The way I understand it, the process starts with damage to the lining of the arteries, which is super slick so that things don't stick to it. I haven't come across any known reason for the lining breaking down, though there are various hints about possible causes, which I'll cover later. After this damage occurs your body deposits fat at the damage site. Once the fat is deposited chloresterol gets stuck to the site and a plaque begins forming. Now I may not have this 100% right, as I am a layperson. The important thing to remember here is that chloresterol is the THIRD symptom of heart disease. There are two other things that need to be addressed before worrying about chloresterol.
Cholesterol
If you watch TV nowadays, you'd think that lowering your chloresterol is absolutely imperative if you have clogged arteries. It seems that the argument is that chloresterol is part of the plaque building process that leads to the narrowing of arteries. The thing that the drug companies don't tell you is that chloresterol lowering drugs on their own do absolutely nothing to improve your chances of survival after a heart attack or stroke. They're simply instilling fear to generate profits - nothing new there...
Thyroid Gland
I recently read Solved: The Riddle of Illness by Langer and Scheer. If I remember correctly Langer is an MD that practiced for decades and had studied with a prominent endocrinologist. An interesting story is told about a medical fad decades ago where people's thyroids would be removed thinking it would solve various problems. There may have been some short term success, but by and large, within a few years these folks would die of clogged arteries, even though many showed no evidence of such a problem prior to the surgery. Eventually they learned to avoid this by giving folks dessicated thyroid extract (I think from pigs?). But the important message is that the thyroid seems to have an important role in maintaining the lining of arteries. Unfortunately, the endocrine glands are not well understood. We do know that the thyroid needs iodine and that a short latency deficiency will result in a neck goiter. There are some thoughts that bromide (or bromine?) in the environment may be playing havoc with our thyroids by clogging up the iodine receptors in the thyroid. Whether this contributes to clogged arteries is an interesting question.
Low Fat, Low Protein Diets
Their are a lot of physicians making a lot of money selling books about low fat heart healthy diets. I beleieve the phenomenon started with Dean Ornish, who documented that his diet resulted in a reversal of arterial clogging. A lot of these diets are vegetarian, and if you know that your arteries are already clogged, please don't ignore their advice.
However, they cite studies indicating health problems related to consuming milk protein, which they then extrapolate to infer that very probably all animal protein could be bad for you. I have difficulty with this on many, many levels. First, we are probably talking about pasteurized and homogenized dairy products. It has been shown that these processes alter the proteins. I suspect that the problem is more likely to be caused by the processing of the milk and not the milk itself, at least not for folks that are genetically endowed not to be lactose intolerant.
Dr. Gabe Mirkin posted an article on avoiding mammal protein that is probably a better recommendation than simply avoiding all animal protein. After all, we are omnivore's, so have evolved to eat some meat. And all those great essential fatty acids found in seafood are pretty difficult to adequately replace with a vegetarian diet.
Vitamin C
A number of years ago nobel laureate Linus Pauling proposed a theory that the damage to arterial linings was caused by a long latency Vitamin C deficiency - basically a chronic low level Scurvy. While this appears to have been extensively researched and dicredited, I have to tip my hat to him for his thinking. I suspect that very likely there are two things likely to work together to create heart disease - too much of something that is bad for you (i.e. too much mammal protein) and too little of things that are good for you (i.e. some sort of long latency nutritional deficency).
Vitamin D
Hopefully you've heard a lot about Vitamin D lately, though not nearly as much as you should be hearing. There are a number of folks that are suggesting that the President needs to declare a Vitamin D health emergency to get the word out about the implications of long latency Vitamin D deficiency for people's health (rickets and osteomalacia are well known short latency deficiencies of this vitamin).
First off, Vitamin D is not a true vitamin, but a hormone precursor. And there are about 2,000 Vitamin D receptors throughout our bodies, thus it is very important to our health. It actually turns 2,000 genes on or off based upon its presence or absence.
Second, Vitamin D is made by your skin, or at least is was before we all started working indoors and the suntan lotion business convinced us to fear the sun. These are both reasons why current Vitamin D levels are lower than those that we have evolved to need for optimal health.
There was a recent article posted at the New York Times about low Vitamin D levels and increased likelihood of death, stroke or heart attack for those that had recently had a cardiac event. Ironically, they show a picture of a milk carton as being representative of where to get your Vitamin D.
Inflammation
There has been a lot of buzz in the past decade about inflammation. Research is indicating that it is a root of most, if not all, chronic diseases. So what in our diet leads to inflammation? The Big Two are sugar and refined flour. And it seems that perhaps you can add mammal meat and make it the Big Three. Greatly reducing these in your diet will greatly lower most people's inflammation levels.
What in our diet decreases inflammation? Think fruits and vegetables and Omega 3 fatty acids. Which just happen to be Dr. Mirkin's basic nutritional recommendations.
Summary
It is likely to be years before anyone truly knows the solution to many chronic diseases, but there seems to be some commonality among many divergent views out there:
- Avoid sugar and refined flour.
- Limit meat consumption; avoid mammal meat and limit other meat portions to a serving roughly the size of your palm.
- Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, but go easy on those that are high in starch (bananas, peas, corn, etc) - chose a wide variety, not just a few of the usual suspects.
- Take at least 4,000 IUs of Vitamin D per day, especially if you have a desk job or live very far from the southern U.S. Avoid sunscreen except when you'll have prolonged exposure to sun and an increased risk of sunburn.
- Limit your intake of dairy products (don't worry, there's plenty of high quality calcium in most fruits and vegetables).
- Don't overdo caffeine or alcohol.
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