It could Happen to Anyone .... Heart Association president has heart attack

The president of the American Heart Association, Dr. John Warner, had a minor heart attack Monday during the organization's scientific conference taking place in Anaheim, California, according to a press release.


Warner, CEO of UT Southwestern University Hospitals in Dallas, was taken to a local hospital where doctors inserted a stent to open a clogged artery. Warner is recovering and doing well, according to the Heart Association.


Prior to the attack, the 52-year-old practicing cardiologist delivered a Sunday speech where he talked about the effects of heart disease on his family. Both his father and his father's father had heart bypass surgery while in their 60s, he told the audience. He also lost his maternal grandfather and a great grandfather to heart disease.

"After my son was born and we were introducing him to his extended family, I realized something very disturbing: There were no old men on either side of my family. None," he told his audience. "All the branches of our family tree cut short by cardiovascular disease."
[h=3]Warnings and risks[/h]Warning signs of a heart attack include chest discomfort, upper body pain, shortness of breath and, more rarely, cold sweat, nausea or lightheadedness, according to the American Heart Association.


Most people experience an unusual feeling that begins at the center of the chest and radiates out. The discomfort, which can feel like uncomfortable pressure, squeezing, fullness or pain, can last for more than a few minutes or go away and come back. Sometimes people have discomfort or pain in one or both arms, the back, neck, jaw or stomach.


Women, just like men, commonly experience chest pain or discomfort when a heart attack strikes. However, they are more likely than men to suffer other symptoms, such as shortness of breath, nausea/vomiting, and back or jaw pain.
While most heart attacks begin slowly and gradually intensify, some strike fast with no warning signs to herald their approach. Patients require immediate medical attention in either case. Do not hesitate to call 911.


When oxygen-enriched blood flowing to the heart muscle is cut off completely or severely reduced, a heart attack occurs. The reason this can happen is coronary arteries, which supply blood to the heart muscle, can slowly become narrow from a buildup of fat, cholesterol and other substances. This slow process of "plaque" build-up is called atherosclerosis or hardening of the arteries.


Those most at risk for a heart attack are people older than 65, men and people with a family history of heart disease. While these factors cannot be changed, there are additional strong predictors of heart attack that can be modified by lifestyle: smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, physical inactivity, obesity/overweight and diabetes.

That's heartbreaking.

the silent killer, sometimes there's no indication you have a blockage no matter what standard testing you undergo

trust me, I know

I had a burning sensation in my upper "right" arm that wouldn't go away, and no other symptom.

No chest pain, no shortness of breath, no other symptoms at all for two hours, then I had intermittent jaw pain

When I google jaw pain, it said "symptom of a heart attack". I went to the ER, and they told me all my vitals are fine and they don't think I had a heart attack, but we're having you see a cardiologist.

Based on the enzyme the body releases, the cardiologist told me I had a heart attack and I must have a blockage somewhere. All vitals remained normal, a ultra sound of my heart revealed a perfectly functioning heart

They go in anticipating I need a stent someplace, they were shocked to find 5 arteries including 2 major arteries 90% blocked. They scheduled me for open heart surgery the very next morning

I'm told I'm better now than I've been in decades since the blocked arteries have been bypassed, I'm one of the extremely lucky ones

It truly is a silent killer

Willie99 said:

I had a burning sensation in my upper "right" arm that wouldn't go away, and no other symptom.

No chest pain, no shortness of breath, no other symptoms at all for two hours, then I had intermittent jaw pain

When I google jaw pain, it said "symptom of a heart attack". I went to the ER, and they told me all my vitals are fine and they don't think I had a heart attack, but we're having you see a cardiologist.

Based on the enzyme the body releases, the cardiologist told me I had a heart attack and I must have a blockage somewhere. All vitals remained normal, a ultra sound of my heart revealed a perfectly functioning heart

They go in anticipating I need a stent someplace, they were shocked to find 5 arteries including 2 major arteries 90% blocked. They scheduled me for open heart surgery the very next morning

I'm told I'm better now than I've been in decades since the blocked arteries have been bypassed, I'm one of the extremely lucky ones

It truly is a silent killer

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That's crazy .. guess you can't go by the norm. Always thought it was the 'Left" Arm or Shoulder
and never knew about the Jaw

Glad everything worked out for you

Betallsports said:

That's crazy .. guess you can't go by the norm. Always thought it was the 'Left" Arm or Shoulder
and never knew about the Jaw

Glad everything worked out for you

Click to expand...

when I tell this story to medical professionals, they all say the same thing, they're surprised it was my right arm

one nurse even said she wouldn't think twice about a heart attack with pain in the right arm, she'd assume it was not a heart attack

Willie99 said:

when I tell this story to medical professionals, they all say the same thing, they're surprised it was my right arm

one nurse even said she wouldn't think twice about a heart attack with pain in the right arm, she'd assume it was not a heart attack

Click to expand...

Yeah unfortunately for my Brother he had just had Left shoulder surgery 2 months before he had pain. Doctor said it was just the shoulder healing from the surgery
2 days later he died from a Heart attack.

That's why I have been good for almost 2 years with eating right and doing a lot of walking.
Trying to stay as healthy as possible.

next step, No more Cigarettes come Jan 1st. ( I know I said that last year ) But had a rough year.

WILD times in the Cardiology world, to say the least.

first came , well, a flat out concession that we are losing the battle of controlling/mitigating heart disease. Shocking new guidelines, essentially putting 30 MILLION more americans into a diagnosis of hypertension, .....attack it earlier, a plea for lifestyle changes..


and now we have a TWITTER war from cardiologists around the globe on a merits/efficacy of surgical stent therapy. JUST WOW.

enjoy the read........


https://www.medpagetoday.com/cardiology/cardiobrief/69147

CardioBrief: ORBITA Trial Puts Interventional Cardiologists on the Defensive

Time to move beyond complaints about trial design?



Since it's debut a week ago the ORBITA trial has provoked the most furious debate in cardiology since the COURAGE trial a decade earlier.
But the ORBITA debate has proceeded far faster, fuelled by Twitter and its ability to instantaneously deliver point and counterpoint.

Although ORBITA was showered with praise for its innovative design, in particular for its use of sham controls, the trial nonetheless completely divided the cardiology community over its implications for the use of PCI in stable angina patients.
On one side of the debate, a chorus of prominent interventional cardiologists and their supporters are seeking to dampen the impact of the trial, saying that the trial tells us nothing that we don't already know while also saying that the trial is completely incapable of informing any change in clinical practice.
On the other side, the more skeptical part of the cardiology community believes that ORBITA casts serious doubt on the the benefits of PCI in some patients with stable angina, providing a long needed corrective to the hubis of interventional cardiology.

Anupam Kumar Singh, a cardiologist in Delhi, pointed out on Twitter that the attack on ORBITA followed the same pattern as the attack on COURAGE, which George Diamond and Sanjay Kaul wrote about at the height of the COURAGE debate: Schopenhauer said that "truth passes through three stages: 'First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident'." But, they write, the COURAGE critics "reverse this journey," and so, according to Singh, do the ORBITA critics. These critics start off by first stating that the trial results are obvious and conform to current guidelines but then end up dismissing and ridiculing them.
Unfair!
A dominant theme of the opposition is that the trial was somehow "unfair," that it was designed for PCI to fail. Many interventional cardiologists have argued that in their practices ORBITA type patients would not normally get stented without first being given a chance on optimal medical therapy (OMT). But it also seems clear that in the real world many of these patients do get PCI, as soon as a critical stenosis is found on their angiogram.
Suneet Mittal (Valley Health System) said that "in my opinion, when a patient reports chest pain and a decision is made to proceed with an angiogram, discovery of a high grade stenosis typically leads to PCI. Maybe there are doctors who take patients off the table and start up titrating medications, but I do not see that in my routine clinical practice. I would even go so far as to say that most patients would expect and want (until now) that such a lesion be revascularized."
Now it is undoubtedly true that there are many principled interventional cardiologists who would hold off before proceeding to PCI. Ajay Kirtane reported on Twitter that, in the wake of COURAGE, many interventionalists "titrate anti-anginals prior to catheterization so that if they have improved with OMT there is no reason to obtain the angiogram that provokes the oculo-stenotic reflex." But Kirtane's remarks contain a tacit acknowledgement that this is not always the case, and that there are in fact ORBITA-type patients who do undergo PCI without first being offered OMT.

COURAGE investigator William Boden said that "the real sad news here is the degree to which the lay public is uninformed" about PCI for stable angina, an issue which is "very complex and nuanced. On the one hand, we see ads, billboards, and other advertising that supports PCI as being lifesaving for heart attack, while on the other hand, many otherwise naïve or uninformed individuals don't really understand the distinction between STEMI/ACS and SIHD -- especially when words like coronary 'blockages' are used to describe this condition... Is it any wonder that the lay public struggles to understand this? And, the interventional community really does little to clarify these blurry margins (e.g., 'I can open up and fix that artery'), while what the patient takes away is the cardiologist can cure that'."

Here's another way to look at this issue: if the critics are correct that because of its relatively healthy patient population ORBITA was incapable of showing any benefit of PCI it is then also true that this means that ORBITA-like PCI patients can not benefit from PCI. You can't have it both ways

What About the Patients?
Where is the outrage and concern in the interventional community about the millions of stable PCI patients over the decades who it now appears may have received no benefit from PCI beyond a placebo effect. Why, it is fair to ask, do the ORBITA critics fail to also focus their attention on the interventional cardiologists who rush their patients into PCI? As Boden mentioned, there is little effort made to educate patients and the public about the true benefits of PCI. I've personally never met anyone with a stent who didn't think that their life had been saved by the procedure. What have the interventional cardiology leaders done to help prevent the widespread misconception among patients that PCI is nearly always life saving?

Mohamed Elshazly (Cleveland Clinic) similarly pointed out that ORBITA represents "a huge call to review fundamental procedural practices." Haider Warraich (Duke University) made a similar point: "People can nitpick the study as much as they want, but burden of proof should be on the procedure to show an advantage."
It's also fair to wonder why the interventional cardiology community has gone into overdrive criticizing ORBITA but has been noticeably quiet about other, far more consequential developments. Compare the reception of ORBITA, which sparked immediate furor, with the response to the Absorb stent, which represents a massive and significant failure of the entire system to develop and approve cardiac devices. I have not seen a whole lot of deep reflection and anguish in the interventional cardiology community about Absorb. Why has there been so much scathing criticism on ORBITA but so little about the long Absorb train wreck? Despite the highly questionable data, at the time of its approval the main disagreement among the leaders of interventional cardiology was how high would be the percentage of patients who would receive the new stent.
Perhaps, instead of serving as cheerleaders for new devices, the interventional cardiology community should take a lesson from the ORBITA investigators and insist that new devices and procedures undergo truly rigorous testing. Anything else is a sham.

Hope he will be ok. Whats the chances? Kinda like Tommy John needing Tommy John surgery. Or even worse, Lou Gehrig dying from Lou Gehrigs' disease. Life is ....

Willie99 said:

when I tell this story to medical professionals, they all say the same thing, they're surprised it was my right arm

one nurse even said she wouldn't think twice about a heart attack with pain in the right arm, she'd assume it was not a heart attack

Click to expand...

Glad you made it through ok Willie!

CookieNBabe said:

Glad you made it through ok Willie!

Click to expand...

thank you

heart attack April 1, 2015
Surgery April 3, 2015

Returned to work April 14, 2015 (Ok, it was only two hours before I needed a nap, but I tried)

unfortunately, there are people walking around believing chronic disease is predominantly determined by genetics . The explosion of chronic disease CANNOT be explained by genetics alone. Epidemiological studies tell us genetics is only one part of the game

this is fresh off the presses.......like fresh air.....................dagone...............


there is some truth in the saying, 'money is the root of all evil'

New report alleges big sugar tried to hide possible link to cancer 50 years ago



According to a new analysis, when a study in rats suggested sucrose might be associated with heart disease and bladder cancer, the industry terminated the project


According to the authors of a new paper, the sugar industry abruptly terminated funding for a study that suggested a possible link between sugar and bladder cancer nearly 50 years ago.
The rat study — known as “Project 259” — was finding that the urine of rodents fed a high-sucrose (versus high-starch) diet contained higher levels of an enzyme that had been previously associated with bladder cancer in rats, according to the authors of the latest analysis of “the sugar papers” — a cache of internal memos, letters and company reports unearthed by University of California at San Francisco researchers.
Project 259 also suggested a possible mechanism for how sugar acts on gut bacteria to drive up triglycerides, a type of fat circulating in the blood that increases the risk of heart disease, the researchers report.
But the results of Project 259 were never published. After dismissing its value as “nil,” a sugar industry trade organization halted its funding, according to the new analysis, published this week in the journal PLOS Biology.
“Let’s say this study had been going the other way and you could have fed these animals massive amounts of sugar and it didn’t do anything,” co-author and cardiologist Stanton Glantz said in an interview. “I’m sure (the sugar industry) would not have cut off the funding. They would be out there thumping the tub — ‘look, we fed these rats, like, five gazillion pounds of sugar and it didn’t matter.’”


In a statement, The Sugar Association called the new paper “a collection of speculations and assumptions about events that happened nearly five decades ago.” It said the study was ended not because of “potential research findings,” but because it was behind schedule and over budget. @)
“There were plans to continue the study with funding from the British Nutrition foundation, but, for reasons unbeknown to us, this did not occur.”


Association president and CEO Courtney Gaine said she could find nothing in a search of the archived project reports about a possible link with bladder cancer. Last year, The Sugar Association issued a press release downplaying results of a University of Texas mouse study linking sugar to cancer, saying, “no credible link between ingested sugars and cancer has been established.”
“Cancer is serious and consumers care about what they eat,” she said. “What is the point in scaring the public into thinking sugar causes cancer?”

The new analysis, however, suggests the industry cut off funding because the animal study was teasing out a possible link.
“The kind of manipulation of research is similar (to) what the tobacco industry does,” Glantz alleged in a statement released with the study. (In 1994, Glantz took delivery of thousands of pages of leaked internal documents from Big Tobacco that were sent to his office by a secret source named “Mr. Butts.” Glantz turned the documents into the book The Cigarette Papers.)

“The sugar industry has stayed on top of, and in many cases ahead of, the scientific community and worked very hard to shape the discussion in ways that would protect their economic interests,” he said.
In an earlier analysis of the sugar papers published last year, the UCSF team reported that the industry bankrolled a review article published in 1967 by Harvard scientists that downplayed sugar’s role in heart disease — in part by pointing the finger squarely at saturated fat.


Researchers report that the next year, the Sugar Research Foundation launched Project 259 in rats. This time, they chose Walter Pover, a biochemist at the University of Birmingham who was paid roughly US$188,000 in today’s dollars to lead the study between 1968 and 1970.
Pover set out to test the effects of sugars on triglycerides. He fed two groups of rats — one germ-free, the other normal rats with gut bacteria — either a high-sugar or high-starch diet


The results suggested that triglycerides form when bacteria in the gut ferment sucrose, said first author Cristin Kearns, a finding Pover reported to his funders, the International Sugar Research Foundation as “highly significant.”
Rats fed sucrose also showed higher levels of beta-glucuronidase, an enzyme Kearns says had previously been associated with bladder cancer in humans. But she and her co-authors cite only two studies, from 1955 and 1968, suggesting an association between elevated levels of the enzymes in urine and bladder cancer.


The sugar industry “has consistently denied that sucrose has any metabolic effects related to chronic disease beyond its caloric effects,” the authors write in PLOS Biology.
So how bad is sugar? It’s still hard to say.
In August, in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, U.S. researchers said added sugars have produced “drug-like” effects in animals, including binging, cravings, tolerance and withdrawal. “Sugar produces effects similar to that of cocaine,” they wrote, a charge critics called “absurd.”


In The Case Against Sugar, author Gary Taubes (who, for the new paper, provided funding for Kearns to travel to the Harvard Medical Library) prosecutes sugar as the root cause of the things statistically most likely to kill us, “or at least accelerate our demise, in the twenty-first century.”
Yet he also acknowledges that the science, as it stands now, hasn’t unequivocally proven sugar to be “uniquely harmful — a toxin that does its damage over the decades. The evidence is not as clear with sugar as it is with tobacco.”


Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, has instructed his health minister, among other mandated top priorities, to improve food labels to include more information on added sugars.
New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle said that large amounts of sugar are strongly associated with obesity, Type 2 diabetes and metabolic abnormalities “leading to fatty liver and the like.” However, she’s not aware of evidence for an association with bladder cancer.


“The point is that the research generated a disturbing hypotheses that deserved further investigation, but did not get it at the time,” she said.
Three years ago, the Heart and Stroke Foundation issued a new position statement recommending Canadian adults and children limit their consumption of added or “free” sugars to no more than 10 per cent of their total daily caloric intake and, ideally, less than five per cent — recommendations that align with the World Health Organization’s sugar targets.

................

anything in excess has the potential to act as a poison. The WHO guidelines on recommended ADDED sugar are very telling.

Had to delete that last post as it was blocking the view of the thread

thanks, guilty as charged

btw, condolences on your brother. Here's hoping you kick the habit in 2018. Would be a heck of an accomplishment. Accomplishment empowers. I'm sure you have a plan. Consider chemotherapeutics as an aid to combat the chemical addiction (ex., champix)...........just sayin'
............


[FONT=&quot]to add to my last post on sugar. Again, controlling environmental factors has a SIGNIFICANT effect on chronic disease expression. Diet is a risk factor............ It's not fun when lobbyist/special interest fuck people over. This is from the Journal of The American Medical Association, Nov 2016 (not some kook site................);

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2548255

[/FONT]
[h=1]Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease ResearchA Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents[/h][FONT=&quot]
[FONT=&quot]Early warning signals of the coronary heart disease (CHD) risk of sugar (sucrose) emerged in the 1950s. We examined Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) internal documents, historical reports, and statements relevant to early debates about the dietary causes of CHD and assembled findings chronologically into a narrative case study. The SRF sponsored its first CHD research project in 1965, a literature review published in the [/FONT]New England Journal of Medicine, which singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of CHD and downplayed evidence that sucrose consumption was also a risk factor. The SRF set the review’s objective, contributed articles for inclusion, and received drafts. The SRF’s funding and role was not disclosed. Together with other recent analyses of sugar industry documents, our findings suggest the industry sponsored a research program in the 1960s and 1970s that successfully cast doubt about the hazards of sucrose while promoting fat as the dietary culprit in CHD. Policymaking committees should consider giving less weight to food industry–funded studies and include mechanistic and animal studies as well as studies appraising the effect of added sugars on multiple CHD biomarkers and disease development.[/FONT]

....

You know guys, when you consider all og the other horrible disease ppl go thru & suffer with, a heart attack might be one of the best ways to go.

Of course in many cases you can prevent one from happening too soon...

Hache Man said:

You know guys, when you consider all og the other horrible disease ppl go thru & suffer with, a heart attack might be one of the best ways to go.

Of course in many cases you can prevent one from happening too soon...

Click to expand...

Well if you're going to have one, I think having in your Sleep is the best way....
That's how my Dad went.

Betallsports said:

Well if you're going to have one, I think having in your Sleep is the best way....
That's how my Dad went.

Click to expand...

Most definitely agree.

That's how we all wanna go.

a rather morbid discussion, 'what's the best way to go'? .............imo, longevity shouldn't be the goal, rather the quality of health which affects quality of life (to say nothing of the financial burden of having a chronic disease), be it mental or physical health. Does anyone want to be 55 yrs old and can't do a 20 km walk/bike ride without significant hardship?.....up a flight of stairs and experience shortness of breath? The worst is when acute manifestation of chronic disease occurs and then the individual has regret- 'i should have....'. Geez, fuck that. Regret has no use. If you are choosing a path do it with a clear conscience. We can't control genetic factors, we CAN control environmental factors that carry significant weight, expression and lack thereof of said genetic factors (epigenetics)


unfortunately, we have largely a society of lazy fucks. People want a pill to cure a problem-and they actually believe the pill will cure the problem. Big Pharma absolutely is the big winner...they won again with the recent hypertension guideline changes.



great read. The author is NOT a kook. An American born licensed MD, specialist in endocrinology



In medical training, I was taught that a low-fat diet high in complex carbohydrates prevented weight gain and disease. I believed what my professors said. Early on, I advocated low-fat diets. But this soon changed. I now teach my patients to balance their meals. Let me tell you how this all came about.

In July 1990, I had just finished nine years of medical training at the University of Southern California. My training was in endocrinology and metabolism, and I was ready to go out and help the world. I accepted a position at a prestigious medical clinic in Santa Barbara, California. The clinic was famous for having been the premier diabetes center in the United States during the 1920s.

I was excited about starting my new position, but I was not thrilled that all my new patients would be Type II diabetics.1 My area of expertise was "esoteric" endocrine diseases-hypothyroidism, adrenal and pituitary problems-conditions where the patient's symptoms could be reversed.

Type II diabetics did not get better. I had seen too many diabetics have legs amputated, too many who required kidney dialysis or who had scars down the middle of their chests from coronary bypass grafting. Working with diabetics meant that I would have to watch people inevitably get sicker and die. But having accepted the challenge, I committed myself to giving patients my best care.

Because the patients were all new to me, I spent a full hour with each one, obtaining a detailed history. I will never forget the anxiety I felt when they would begin by saying, "I hope you won't tell me the same thing all the other doctors have said. It just doesn't work for me." They complained of higher blood-sugar levels and high blood pressure, despite medication, and of chronic fatigue, weight gain and abnormal cholesterol profiles.

I heard many stories of patients going for yearly physical exams and being diagnosed with diabetes incidentally. Chemistry panels had come back with a red flag of high blood sugar-diabetes. These newly diagnosed diabetics were put on the American Diabetes Association (ADA) diet-a low-calorie, high-carbohydrate, low-fat, low-protein program. The diet stressed fruit, milk, bread and very little fat. It was very complicated. They had to measure everything they ate-proteins and fats, as well as carbohydrates. These patients had stuck to this diet, only to see their conditions worsen.

Diabetes was considered genetic. The fact that these patients had gotten worse was considered part of the progressive genetic nature of the disease. It was thought that once a person developed diabetes, it could not be reversed. Part of the "standard of care" was to keep diabetics' blood sugar under control to enable them to live relatively normal lives.

Physicians manipulated insulin doses to bring patients' blood sugars down. But my patients complained, "When my other doctors gave me insulin, I gained weight." That made sense because insulin is a fat-storing hormone. The patients' weight gain along with high insulin levels had caused increased blood pressure. Many had been prescribed drugs to lower blood pressure, which in some cases made their blood sugars worse. It was a vicious cycle. They injected insulin, but their blood-sugar levels did not improve. They gained weight and required more insulin. And their cholesterol levels were getting worse. Here were patients who had been accidentally diagnosed with diabetes when they felt relatively well, and now, after following the "standard of diabetes care," they felt terrible. After listening to their stories I thought, My God, we are making diabetics worse!

I remember the sinking feeling as I told them, "I understand why you're upset about what has happened to you. But I would have asked you to follow the exact same regimen the other doctors have been prescribing. At this moment, I don't know what else to tell you, but I'm going to help you get better any way I can."

I decided for the time being to get a baseline. "You're going to monitor your blood sugar seven times a day at home with a blood-sugar monitoring device," I instructed. "Before you eat, an hour after you eat and at bedtime. Write everything down. Everything you're feeling, everything you eat, activities, blood-sugar levels and any other observations. I'll see you again in a week."

When they returned after monitoring their habits, my patients all told me, "It's the food I'm eating!"

It was clear. These patients were monitoring their blood sugar. When they did a "finger blood-sugar stick" in the morning, their blood sugar was normal. Then they ate a perfect ADA breakfast-a bowl of shredded wheat with non-fat milk, a banana and a glass of orange juice-and watched their blood sugar rise one hundred to two hundred points. (A normal blood-sugar response to any meal is no more than ten to twenty points.)

Something they were eating was causing the problem. It could not be the protein. Protein will eventually turn into sugar, but not that quickly. It could not be the fat-they were eating hardly any fat-and fats do not turn into sugar that quickly either. Carbohydrates are the only nutrient group that can be converted into sugar so fast. All carbohydrates are recognized as sugar by the body, whether they are in the form of grains, starches, dairy, fruits or sweets. I suddenly recognized that by recommending a high-carbohydrate diet, we were giving sugar to diabetics.

In order to understand why sugar is so destructive to diabetics you need to appreciate the central role of insulin in human physiology. Insulin is the hormone responsible for tightly regulating the amount of sugar going to the brain after you eat. Insulin accomplishes this in two ways: First, the presence of insulin alerts the liver to incoming high amounts of sugar so that the liver does not let this high sugar pass through to the brain. Second, insulin stows away sugar into cells, thereby decreasing blood-sugar levels. Also, when sugar is stowed, insulin levels normalize. This system keeps blood sugars and insulin levels balanced.

But Type II diabetics are "insulin resistant," which means that the cells will not allow insulin to unload sugar from the bloodstream. Because the cells do not respond to insulin, the pancreas reacts by secreting even more insulin in an attempt to open up the closed cells. This results in Type II diabetics having both high insulin levels and high blood-sugar levels. If you then ask diabetics to eat more carbohydrates (as in the ADA diet), it further increases both their blood-sugar levels and insulin levels.

Requiring diabetics with high blood-sugar levels to follow a high-sugar diet did not make sense. But how could I challenge the ADA? I reasoned that the ADA diet must have been thoroughly researched- they could not be recommending diets that were making people sicker! But all of my Type II diabetic patients returned with the same observations: The ADA diet was causing their blood sugars to rise to dangerous levels.

I decided to see what would happen to my patients' blood-sugar levels if I put them on a "zero"-carbohydrate diet. I asked them to eliminate all obvious carbohydrate foods, such as potatoes, rice, legumes, cereals, breads, fruit, low-fat yogurt, milk and, of course, refined sugar.

Since foods are often a combination of fats, proteins and carbohydrates, if a food caused a rise in their blood sugars we classified it in the carbohydrate category. For example, most people think that milk is all protein, when in fact the amount of carbohydrates in four ounces of milk drives a diabetic's blood sugar up approximately one hundred points. With this method, the main ingredient of a food and whether it raised blood-sugar levels dictated whether it should be considered a protein, a fat, a nonstarchy vegetable or a carbohydrate.

Because I did not want my patients to go hungry, I added some protein and fats back to their diet. At the time, I still thought that a low-fat diet was healthier, so I asked them to use low-fat dairy products, and to eat egg substitutes, mostly fish and chicken and small amounts of red meat. I also educated my patients about insulin levels. Eliminating obvious carbohydrates for one week would rapidly lower their insulin levels, and they would have to reduce their diabetes medicines accordingly to avoid low blood-sugar reactions.

One week later, the first group of patients returned for an evaluation. I looked at the blood sugar numbers they had recorded. Their progress was astounding. I said, "This is unbelievable!" Some confessed, "Dr. Schwarzbein, I've been cheating. I love red meat and when you said I could have some, I ate it every night for a week."

The "cheaters" were eating real mayonnaise, real cheese, real eggs and steak every day-foods that had been forbidden for so long they could not resist them. Their blood-sugar numbers had fallen dramatically. In fact, the biggest improvements were seen in the patients who "cheated" the most.

By cutting carbohydrates from their diets and adding proteins and fats, most patients (after an initial body-water loss) started losing one to two pounds of body fat per week. They ate fats and lost body fat. All came back to me and said, "I don't understand. I got fatter when I didn't eat fat. Now I'm eating fat and I'm losing weight."

Prior to this, these patients had high blood sugars, abnormal cholesterol panels, high blood pressure, weight gain, fatigue and constant hunger. As they followed the new dietary program their blood sugars normalized, so they were able to get off insulin and/or oral hypoglycemic agents (which treat high blood sugar). Their cholesterol levels improved, so I stopped their cholesterol-lowering medication. Their blood pressures came down, so I stopped their blood pressure medication. I was able to eliminate most of their drugs. They lost body fat and gained muscle mass. Their energy improved. They were not going hungry anymore. They felt great.

My diabetic patients were so happy with the improvements in their health that they began to refer family members to me. Although these referred patients were not diabetic, they suffered from fatigue, excessive body fat with decreased muscle mass, cholesterol problems, high blood pressure and even heart disease. I treated them with the same program. Body fat decreased and muscle mass increased, cholesterol levels normalized and blood pressures came down. They, too, felt great.

Word of my successful "diet" spread. I started treating patients who had the same symptoms as the first two groups but no family history of diabetes. These patients all related histories of poor diets and chronic dieting, including low-fat dieting. The program worked for them as well.

I began to see people with isolated conditions: bad cholesterol profiles, high blood-pressure problems or excessive body fat. I put them on the program, altered by then to include more oils, real eggs, real butter. I was amazed that the same program I used for my diabetics worked for all these people. Regardless of the patient's problem or illness, a balanced diet produced the same results-better health and decreased body fat.

I felt I needed to gain a better understanding of these relationships. As I examined eating habits more closely I realized that, to reduce fat consumption as much as possible, many people cut down on proteins and ate more carbohydrates. Furthermore, since people had heard that complex carbohydrates are healthy and should form the bulk of their diets, they consumed even more carbohydrates.

Both medicine and the media had promoted the belief that eating a low-fat diet while increasing complex carbohydrates caused people to lose body fat and stay healthy. But I had yet to meet anyone who was healthy or thriving on a low-fat diet. Were the people who did well on low-fat diets so healthy that they had no need for doctors?

I searched the medical literature, looking for studies showing that low-fat diets are healthy. I was surprised to learn that there are no long-term studies showing such results. But numerous studies concluded that fat is necessary to maintain good health. And there are studies spanning three decades relating high insulin levels and heart disease, high insulin levels and hypertension, high insulin levels and excessive body-fat gain and other problems.

The light bulb turned on.

I was taught that diabetic patients have a very high rate of heart disease. Correspondingly, I had observed that diabetic patients frequently had a large scar down the middle of their chests. Frequently I found that these patients had heart bypass surgery before they were diagnosed with diabetes. The implications suddenly occurred to me! After a heart attack, people are told to go on a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet-which increases both their blood-sugar and insulin levels. The increases in blood sugar and insulin were turning heart patients into diabetics. The newly created diabetics are then told to continue eating a diet high in carbohydrates, which further elevates their blood-sugar and insulin levels.

Next, we say to those diabetics, "Your blood sugar is too high, so you need to take insulin to bring that blood-sugar level down." But insulin injections produce even higher insulin levels-as well as increases in weight, blood pressure and the need for more insulin.

Furthermore, the studies I read substantiated a connection between prolonged high insulin levels and the degenerative diseases of aging, such as osteoarthritis, different types of cancer, cholesterol abnormalities, coronary artery disease, less lean body mass with excess body fat, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, stroke and Type II diabetes.

For example, it is known that insulin directs all the biochemical processes that lead to plaque formation in arteries; therefore, I recognized that prolonged high insulin levels lead to heart disease. It is also well known that prolonged high insulin levels could lead to insulin resistance; therefore, I also recognized that prolonged high insulin levels could also lead to Type II diabetes. These studies corroborated my clinical experience showing that elevated insulin is linked to disease. Unfortunately, medical studies had not pinpointed the causes of prolonged high insulin levels that led to insulin resistance. The connection between elevated insulin levels, heart disease and diabetes was assumed to be genetic. But I looked at it from a different angle. Since insulin resistance is connected to degenerative diseases, and since insulin resistance occurs naturally in the aging process, degenerative diseases of aging have to be linked to the aging process.

Because the degenerative diseases of aging were occurring in younger and younger individuals, I began to consider the possibility that degenerative diseases of aging were not genetic but acquired. By "acquired" I mean that people were accelerating their aging process through poor eating and lifestyle habits that raised insulin levels.

Furthermore, medical science had gotten stuck on the assumption that only some people have the high-insulin gene. Again we differed. My clinical experience demonstrated that people acquired (not inherited) insulin resistance-and that too many people were suffering from this condition. I became convinced that the degenerative diseases of aging (which are the end result of insulin resistance) are accelerated by poor eating and lifestyle habits. In other words, a genetic predisposition to disease is not a "guarantee" that you will develop that disease. Instead, what you do and how you live your life determines your risk for developing insulin resistance and the degenerative diseases of aging.

Of course there are genetic variables. For example, everyone (except Type I diabetics) secretes a different amount of insulin in response to various factors. However, this is clinically significant only when eating and lifestyle habits consistently cause insulin levels to rise. In other words, in a perfect world where everyone ate a balanced diet of real foods and avoided stimulants and stress, there would be no appreciable difference between those people who secreted more insulin and those who did not.

But this is not a perfect world. Poor eating and lifestyle habits have led to an imbalance of insulin levels; because the systems of the human body are interconnected, one imbalance creates another imbalance. This is beautifully illustrated by the current low-fat movement. Low-fat dieting upsets the balance within the human body by initially increasing insulin levels, in turn causing a cascade of hormone imbalances. The low-fat, high-carbohydrate movement promised long, healthy lives and trim, athletic bodies. But instead it caused prolonged high insulin levels, which in turn increased the number of people with heart disease, Type II diabetes, excessive weight gain and many more chronic conditions and diseases.

Here are the facts:
Claim: Eating fat makes you fat. If you do not eat fat, you cannot gain fat.
Fact: A low-fat diet makes you fat. Eating fat causes you to lose body fat and reach your ideal body composition. Furthermore, eating dietary fat is essential for life. Eating fat is essential for reproduction, for the regeneration of healthy tissues and for maintaining ideal body composition.

Claim: Eating fat and cholesterol adversely affects your cholesterol profile and puts you at risk for heart attacks.
Fact: Eating a low-fat diet causes heart attacks. High insulin levels produced by a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet result in plaqueing of the arteries, because insulin directs all the biochemical processes that lead to plaque formation in arteries. Eating fat and cholesterol can prevent heart attacks by lowering insulin levels and switching off the internal production of cholesterol.

Claim: Eating fat causes cancer. Low-fat diets prevent cancer.
Fact: Low-fat diets (high in carbohydrates) cause insulin levels to rise too high-a growth factor and a major player in cancer-cell replication. Dietary fat lowers insulin levels. Dietary fat is also essential for hormone production, which in turn is essential for a healthy immune system. In other words, dietary fat provides the immune system with key components that fight the growth of cancer cells.

Claim: Eating fat increases your risk of high blood pressure (hypertension).
Fact: Cutting fat from your diet increases the risk of high blood pressure because, without fat, insulin levels rise higher in response to food. Insulin stimulates various biochemical processes that can lead to increased blood pressure.

Claim: A low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, which is the current "standard of care" treatment for diabetes, makes patients healthier.
Fact: Long-term low-fat, high-carbohydrate dieting leads to insulin resistance and, if continued, results in Type II diabetes. This same diet makes diabetics sicker.

It is important to note that these claims are not backed up by long-term scientific studies. But the facts are supported by physiology and biochemistry (true science). By focusing on physiology and biochemistry, and the evidence of my own clinical experience, I learned how prolonged high insulin levels set off a multitude of chain reactions that disrupt all other hormones and biochemical reactions at the cellular level. I termed this chronic disruption "accelerated metabolic aging," and recognized that it led to body-fat gain, chronic conditions and degenerative diseases.

Throughout the six-year period I have referred to above, I learned that there are other factors that raise insulin levels, both directly and indirectly, and that prolonged high insulin levels are caused not only by eating a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet but also by stress, dieting, caffeine, alcohol, aspartame (an artificial sweetener), tobacco, steroids, stimulant and other recreational drugs, lack of exercise, excessive and/or unnecessary thyroid replacement therapy, and all over-the-counter and prescription drugs. These factors have become central in the eating and lifestyle habits that have prevailed over the last twenty years and that parallel the rise in the incidence of disease during this same period of time.

My program gradually expanded to include balanced nutrition, stress management, exercise, the elimination of stimulants and other drugs, and hormone replacement therapy-a complete program designed to balance insulin and all other hormone levels.

The Schwarzbein Principle was written to share this program with you-to tell the truth about losing weight, being healthy and feeling younger, by first focusing on this principle: Degenerative diseases are not genetic but acquired. Because the systems of the human body are interconnected and because one imbalance creates another imbalance, poor eating and lifestyle habits, not genetics, are the cause of degenerative disease.

I have seen what high-insulin eating and lifestyle habits do to people. People are getting fatter, sicker and more depressed. Indeed, it has not taken long-only two decades-to realize the repercussions of eliminating fat, one of the most important nutrient groups, from our diet and replacing real food with invented substances, processed foods and stimulants.

Moreover, American society's preoccupation with numbers-whether referring to chronological age, total cholesterol numbers or the number on the bathroom scale-has wrought devastating results. Many popular books offer programs that require time-consuming computations and obsessive measuring and focus on food. But my experience with patients demonstrates that, ironically, the more a person obsesses about numbers the more likely he or she is to engage in harmful behaviors that generate chronic health problems and disease. One of my goals as a physician is to change our culture's fixation on meaningless numbers to an emphasis on quality of life.

When people are told that poor health is genetic, they are more likely to tolerate illness and decreased quality of life as their lot. Along with this resignation comes increased body fat, depression and lethargy. Teaching people that health and vitality are within their grasp, and showing them how to achieve optimum health, is the key to the success of my program. When people understand that they have control over their health, they are motivated to make significant changes in habits.

As a physician, I hope to influence the medical profession so that more emphasis is placed on preventive medicine. Giving people the power to attain balance, to heal themselves and to avoid illness instills motivation, in addition to dramatically improving doctor-patient relationships and potentially revolutionizing the "standard of care."

This book could have been written around the many important studies that are cited in the References section. But the problem is that there is never going to be a perfect study. Questions always remain unanswered, no matter how many references you cite. And there are so many opposing theories that it would be virtually impossible to counter every one of them. I realize that I would have never come to my own conclusions about accelerated metabolic aging if I had focused on studies rather than true science. So I chose to write a book explaining how the body works at the cellular level, not a book based on other researchers' conclusions.

The truth is, anyone can prevent accelerated aging and disease, achieve ideal body composition and extend longevity. As you learn more about physiology and read the case histories that demonstrate my clinical experience (which shows that aging and disease are one and the same) you will understand how you can gain control over your health. My hope is that the information in this book will lead you to balanced nutrition and to a lifestyle that will regenerate and heal your body so as to prevent accelerquality of your life.

well that didn't work, lol


http://www.schwarzbeinprinciple.com/pgs/dr_schw/sp_I_intro.html