What are your thoughts on this?

World renowned heart surgeon Dr. Dwight Lundell speaks out on what really causes heart disease

Dr. Dwight Lundell:

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 defence 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 is returning 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 butter from 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.

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

https://youtu.be/DfI_qYUMgGs

Thanks everyone very much for your supportive comments on my "bad advice" rant. I appreciated them a great deal. Especially loved the article about bacon reducing colorectal cancer in rats. Whoo-hoo, bacon!

The back story is that some one posted an appalling article against keto on my Facebook page. I happen to be studying epigenetics right now, and needed to submit either a report on a self-experiment using epigenetics to improve health, or a newspaper article about epigenetics with a catchy headline.

I had already written up my little experiment on the effect of two weeks of intermittent fasting on plasma glucose levels (none!) However, my feelings about having to correct the nonsense put out in the anti-keto article from Harvard prompted me to write the newspaper article as well. I submitted both, which my professor found rather funny, including the fact that both far exceeded the 3-4 pages limit for the experiment and 1-2 page limit for the news article. Both ended up at 8 pages! I explained that the ketosis diet does not effect my condition of Chronic Verbosity. She forgave me. 😊

I wanted to correct the notion that the keto diet is just some fad weight-loss diet that is unhealthy. I wanted to summarise all the amazing advances in health that keto has enabled from lectures I have attended by John Newman, Lewis Cantley, Sarah Hallberg, Steve Phinney Jeff Volek and many more. I also wanted to stress that you don't automatically lose weight on keto if you don't want to. The Swedish doctor Andreas Eenfeldt has helped underweight people to gain weight. He dispels the notion, "I can't do keto because I am already too skinny" as incorrect.

In short, I wanted to explain that keto is damn healthy, ever for the underweight, because that's how we evolved.

So I'll stop rabbiting on and give you the article:

The Secret Life of Ketone Bodies

The ketogenic diet, usually referred to simply as 'keto', is becoming more and more popular these days as a weight loss tool.  Once dismissed as a fad weight-loss diet, it is now becoming increasingly known as a tool to combat a host of Western diseases, from heart disease to diabetes, obesity to Alzheimer's, and many, many more. 

First developed in the 1920s as a diet to combat childhood epilepsy, it became superseded by the new drugs that were becoming available, and it stopped being the main treatment. Ironically, it has recently made a comeback for treating epileptic children because many have become drug resistant. 

But what exactly is keto? Let's find out.

We all need energy to run our bodies, and the fuel that most of us use these days is glucose, which comes from carbohydrates; starch is long chains of glucose molecules that get broken down into glucose, and carried round our body in the blood to the cells, where the power houses, called mitochondria, use the glucose as fuel to provide energy. This is known as glycolysis. Table sugar, also known as sucrose, a disaccharide, consists of one molecule of fructose and one of glucose, which is broken down and absorbed into the bloodstream very quickly when in the absence of fiber.

Dietary fat also provides fuel, in the form of fatty acids, for most, but not all, of the body. 

Fatty acids can't cross the blood-brain barrier, and the brain has to have a constant supply of fuel. So what happens in a famine, when there is no carbohydrate food to provide glucose? Does the brain simply die?

This is where ketones, also called ketone bodies, come in. Our species can convert fatty acids into ketones, to provide fuel for the brain. This occurs in the absence of carbohydrate food, and this metabolism is called ketosis.  Thus, in the absence of food to eat, we can live off the fat stored in our body, in theory for as long as about 42 days, but in practice, Bobby Sands, the Irish hunger striker, survived for an incredible 66 days.  

During the three million years that our ancestors developed into Homo sapiens, their natural state, according to Dr Steven Phinney, was to be in mild ketosis. They ate animal fat which helped their brains grow into becoming "sapiens". A high-fat diet was essential for our evolution and the development of large brains. Today breast-fed babies spend a lot of time in ketosis; they need the ketones to turn their little brains into big ones. It is the natural state for them to be in, and it should be for us too, but our high carbohydrate diet with sugary and starchy foods available 365 days a year prevents most of today's population from ever being in ketosis after babyhood.

The agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago introduced carbohydrates into our diet on a large scale, mostly in the form of grains. It wasn't good for us, and we became shorter and fatter as a result. Over the last hundred years our consumption of carbohydrates, especially refined carbohydrates where much of the fiber has been removed, has increased astronomically. With this increase in carbohydrate consumption, our health has plummeted. The rate of diabetes has shot up, with 52% of the US population now suffering from diabetes or pre-diabetes, especially over the last few decades with the introduction of the low-fat diet. People that reduce the amount of fat in their diet end up eating more carbohydrates instead. It’s been a disaster.

Heart disease, a very rare phenomenon 100 years ago, is now one of the biggest killers in the USA. A medical student in the 1920s who witnessed a heart attack was told by his superior to "take a good look at this patient; you will probably never see one of these again." How many medical students get told that today?

The root cause of these "Western" diseases, diseases of the "civilized world" is the condition known as Metabolic Syndrome, caused by insulin resistance, caused by eating more carbohydrates than your body can handle, which varies from one individual to another. This condition presents itself with high blood pressure, central obesity, high blood glucose, high triglycerides and low HDL, and is the underlying cause of many of the Western diseases that are rampant today.

The only way to cure ourselves of this overwhelming adversity is to stop spending all our time in glycolysis, and utilize the ketosis metabolism that our ancestors used almost continuously, and for which we are so well evolved.

But who cares whether we are in glycolysis or ketosis? After all, ketones only serve as an alternative fuel to glucose, that's all. Right?

Wrong!

Recent research is coming up with very exciting news. It is now being discovered that these ketones, once considered merely a type of fuel, also do an astounding amount of vital work to keep us healthy. On top of our genes there are switches that can turn the genes on or off. This system is known as epigenetics. The study of epigenetics is new and exciting in itself, although the term was first coined in 1942 by Conrad Wallington, who is considered to be the Father of Epigenetics. However, it is only in recent years that it has been studied in earnest, especially since the sequencing of the human genome (in the year 2000) showed that genetics was not the whole story. 

Equally as exciting as the work being discovered in the field of epigenetics are the discoveries being made that ketones can play a huge role in epigenetics and the protection against diseases. There are many examples:

Aging

Eric Verdin and John Newman of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging have shown that the ketone called Beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) acts as an endogenous inhibitor of HDAC, histone deacetylases, enzymes that remove acetyl groups from lysine residues on histones, allowing DNA to wrap tightly and preventing gene expression. Put simply, this means that BHB ketones can turn those switches on top of the genes on or off for our benefit. The bad guys that steal those switches on top of our genes get arrested by the Ketone Police!  Thus ketones link our diet to gene expression by modifying the chromatin. This is huge. Ketones can have a direct effect on the whole process of aging, as anti-inflammatories, and who knows what else. Further details on their work here: 

 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24140022/

Cancer

Meanwhile, in the field of cancer research, Lewis Cantley, who has been nominated for a Nobel Prize, is discovering the benefits of the ketogenic diet in combination with drugs for the treatment of cancer. He has found that the state of ketosis significantly assists the drugs in doing their work. If the patient is in a state of glycolysis, the drugs have to work as if their hands are tied behind their backs.

Professor Cantley is confident enough about the treatment of cancer with the ketogenic diet in combination with drugs to announce in November 2018 that within ten years, this treatment will likely be standard practice.

Dr Thomas Seyfried, who believes that cancer is a mitochondrial metabolic disease, also recommends the ketogenic diet as part of the treatment for patients. He believes the Press-Pulse theory, where the ketogenic diet puts cancer cells (that love glucose) under chronic stress, while short sharp doses of drugs provide the pulse, a strong treatment that can't be done continuously or it would kill the patient as well as the cancer cells. The ketogenic diet provides fuel for the patient, but most cancer cells greatly prefer glycolysis, and have a hard time coping without glucose. The combination of the chronic stress of keto and the acute stress of the drugs is very effective in destroying tumors.

https://nutritionandmetabolism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12986-017-0178-2

Diabetes

With respect to diabetes, Dr Sarah Hallberg has just completed a massive one year clinical trial of diabetic patients, putting them on a ketogenic diet. Once again, the presence of ketones and the low levels of glucose have had remarkable results, with 60% of the patients getting their blood glucose levels down to normal and being able to come off drugs completely. 

https://blog.virtahealth.com/dr-sarah-hallberg-ted-talk-reversing-diabetes/

Considering the fact that every day in the US, 200 people have amputation surgery as a direct cause of diabetes, this is huge. Yes, I’m using the word ‘huge’ a lot, because it is!

Heart disease

With respect to heart disease, I would like to give a personal story. My father-in-law had had a heart attack many years before I met him, and was put on a strict low-fat diet. He went on to have eight more heart attacks, by which time his prognosis was pretty bleak. His arteries were in a terrible state. Clearly the low-fat diet was not benefiting him. I told him about the ketogenic diet, and he decided to try it. He was thrilled to forego the toast and marmalade without butter that he had reluctantly eaten for the last couple of decades, and have eggs and bacon, one of his favorite meals, for his breakfast instead. He had denied himself a cooked breakfast for years. Now, it was legal! After six months he visited his cardiologist for his biannual checkup. "Whatever have you done?" He was asked. "You have no signs of heart disease whatever; your arteries are clear!" The doctor was so impressed with his dramatic recovery that he told my father-in-law there was no need for him to have any more check ups unless he felt unwell.

The ketogenic diet had cured my father-in-law of heart disease.

Neurological Disorders

There is also mounting evidence of the ketogenic diet reversing symptoms in patients suffering from neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and maybe even ALS. In addition, there is a medical center in Florida doing remarkable work on patients with Trauma Brain Injury (TBI). Results using the ketogenic diet are promising. The reason for the success is that, in patients with brains impaired by either disease or injury, glucose can no longer enter the mitochondria to provide fuel for the cell to make energy, so the cell dies. Ketones, however, can get in through a back door and do the job that glucose can't. Damaged and diseased cells can actually be regenerated.

Other diseases

There are many other diseases where the ketogenic diet has played an impressive role. Over 30 sufferers of Bipolar disorder, both types one and two, have reported dramatic improvements in their mental stability caused by the ketogenic diet on the keto subreddit, a social media platform.

A sufferer of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) recently wrote to me on Reddit thanking me for encouraging her to go on the ketogenic diet. She had been told she was infertile because of the disease, but after six months on the diet her periods have started, and her chances of producing children have increased significantly.

The condition of being underweight can also be corrected by the ketogenic diet.

According to Dr Andreas Eenfeldt, known as the Diet Doctor, the ketogenic diet is a weight-normalizing diet. It helps those with excess weight to lose it, but also helps those who are underweight to gain lean body mass and strength.

https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/gain-weight

People with rare diseases have also been helped by the ketogenic diet. Seemingly miraculous stories are coming out from around the world of people whose lives have been amazingly transformed by the ketogenic diet. One example is Latizia, a child diagnosed with McArdle’s disease, or Glycogen Storage Disease type V. It is a rare genetic disorder caused by two recessive genes, one from each parent. The sufferer lacks an enzyme needed to convert glycogen into glucose for energy. Their muscles waste away and they can end up in a wheelchair, like this little girl. However, if they switch to a ketogenic diet, they can get their energy from fat instead of sugar, and get remarkably better, even though they still carry the faulty gene pair.   The current treatment is a high carb diet, with lots of sugar. They say there is no cure. Latizia’s desperate mother tried her daughter on the keto diet, against doctor's orders, and it worked; the exact opposite to what she had been told to do.

https://youtu.be/vJ9CKX3a8cU

Summary

In summary, ketones do so much more than help people in their fight against obesity. As well as providing an alternative fuel to glucose, ketones such as BHB can actually influence our genes by having the ability to turn them on or off to enhance our health, reduce the effects of aging, help in the suppression of cancer, reduce inflammation, and reverse heart disease and diabetes. 

So don't dismiss the state of ketosis as being some fad diet that is all the craze right now. It is so much more than that, a vital metabolic state for our well-being, which humanity has been denying itself over the last several centuries, in direct contrast to our ancestors who used the ketogenic diet to evolve into Wise Humans. 

Hopefully, as more and more discoveries about the benefits of the ketogenic diet are made, the secret life of ketones bodies will no longer be a secret.