Example of red blood cell aggregation and rouleaux formation 6 hours after
a high-fat meal.
HOME HYGIENE LIBRARY CATALOG CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE BREAKTHROUGH AND THE
SOLUTION TO HEART DISEASE
"Everything is simple, when you know how."
Regardless of age, it is possible to reverse disease factors even if deterioration is very advanced.
The corrective measures and the preventive measures are the same. It is simple, all you have to do is this:
There have been two breakthroughs in recent years in understanding the causes of the problem. They both disclose we have deviated too far from nature and are paying the penalty.
The first breakthrough was so spectacular in its benefits that many people, including myself, accepted it alone as being the absolute solution. This was the aerobic exercise system which when applied to a sedentary person, achieved such enormous physical and mental improvements and increase in life expectancy that it was easy to accept as a panacea.
Many wonderful recoveries of people with severe heart conditions and other degenerative conditions were described by Dr Kenneth Cooper in his book Aerobics in 1968. Since then such recoveries are considered commonplace and it is no longer news that many heart attack victims regain such physical excellence that they participate in marathon running races.
Aerobic exercise (within safe limits) can achieve an enormous improvement in general metabolism (particularly the metabolism of blood fats), even without changing the diet. Even light exercise provides benefit simply by assisting circulation of lymph and venous blood. The cardiovascular system tends less to atherosclerosis (CVD), the bloodstream is cleaner, and extra "back-up" circulation systems (collateral circulation) develop.
As a result, the entire body--nervous system, digestion, elimination, glands and vital organs--attain best performance, enabling even severely degenerated people to regain good health. People whose lifestyle incorporates sustained vigorous exercise almost invariably continue a healthy active life way beyond 70, regardless of diet.
You'd settle for that?
That's what I did until I discovered the second and even more spectacular breakthrough, the one by Nathan Pritikin.
Pritikin discovered nothing new. In fact the principles he utilized have been used by natural health practitioners for many years. What Pritikin did was to unearth, study, evaluate and collate masses of records of observations and experiments conducted by countless researchers in the past. Separately these were clues in a gigantic puzzle and their full significance became apparent when he got them fitted together. His breakthrough lay in doing this scientifically and so convincingly that, having gained public acceptance and government backing, the barriers of medical prejudice are lowering at last. This was the real start of the "Health Revolution".
Pritikin's crusade started with a battle against heart disease. The clues he had were many but often conflicting and confused.
One clue was that during World War I, deaths from degenerative diseases in food-rationed countries decreased. The decrease in death rates from these diseases was of greatest significance in meat- and dairy-producing countries where land use was changed to produce grain instead, and in Germany where fats were extracted from food sources and anywhere at all for making war materials.
Between the wars, people like Sir Robert McCarrison lectured around the world about the health of the Hunza people. It was apparent that food was the key factor and the sort of food was known, but without "scientific proof" and without support and publicity, such early crusades gained little ground.
The same clues from Word War I Europe were repeated again in World War II, this time with more evidence. In 1956 at the International Congress on Arteriosclerosis, the question arose--was atherosclerosis in humans reversible? A German pathologist who had been assigned to study post-mortem conditions of concentration camp victims made a statement in reply to this effect: in people who had died after several years of imprisonment, even elderly people, there was an astonishing disappearance, through absorption, of atherosclerotic fatty deposits from the arteries of the heart and brain. These effects were attributed to the complete absence of fat in the meager scraps which had been their diet. They had exhausted all fat deposits in their bodies.
A review of 24,546 autopsies performed in Austria showed there were seven times as many heart attacks in 1958 as there were in 1944 when the wartime stress was greatest.*
*The statistics referred to are for heart attacks and are not representative of the actual incidence of heart disease itself. Because it was assumed the wartime diet, in reducing heart attacks, had at the same time reduced the underlying heart disease, cereal-based diets have become popular. However, in the longer term cereals are far from an ideal food, for reasons explained in Chapter 15.
Observations of primitive tribesmen and laboratory experiments with animals were additionally studied by Pritikin, providing him with the knowledge which enabled him to undertake, for him, the most important experiment possible.
His aim was to save his own life threatened with severe coronary disease. That experiment was described in Chapter 3. It worked, and provided the basis for the Pritikin Longevity Diet, which since 1976 has saved the lives of thousands of sick people.
Pritikin Longevity Diet--basic composition
The main benefits from this diet for people, sick or well, come from the severe restriction of fat to less than one quarter of the amount contained in the average ordinary diet, although important benefits are gained by the elimination of refined carbohydrate and the reduction of protein. The total fat means any kind of fat--saturated, unsaturated or polyunsaturated, in any form at all, except that which occurs naturally in unrefined vegetable foods, and includes all oils whether visible or hidden in prepared food.
The protein excludes meats, fish, poultry, eggs and dairy products in order to minimize cholesterol as well as fat intake.
Strictly followed, this program works.
I thought it astounding that a man could be trained to be able to run a 26-mite marathon one year after a heart attack. I have met such people in Honolulu, patients of Dr Scaff.
But that was nothing compared with the fantastic results from the corrected diet.* It works so effectively that people literally dying of heart failure respond within three days, get up and rapidly improve.
*Any diet drastically reduced in fat content, such as the Gerson diet described in Chapter 14, achieves the same result. So too does fasting, which in some cases is very beneficial.
How it works
When people are gravely ill in hospital with coronary insufficiency or heart attack they are administered pure oxygen to breathe, sometimes in an oxygen tent, or an oxygen-pressurized capsule. The extra oxygen filling the lungs can mean the difference between life and death but it still requires the red blood cells and the "oxygen transport" system to deliver it.
The "regression" diet is so utterly simple in the way it works and so infinitely more effective than any other treatment, that it resembles magic.
There is a book recently published called The Body is the Hero by Dr Ronald Glasser. It illustrates that recovery from disease is achieved by the wonderfully intricate defense systems of the body itself. As clever physicians know, providing a patient is given a little rest and some medicine to placate anxiety, the body will rectify most ailments by calling on its own defenses. Now if you give the body, for the first time, a really unhandicapped chance to show what it can do, then you see what looks like magic.
First have a look at the photograph taken through a microscope of the red corpuscles in the blood (Fig. 14.1). It shows what happens to the red corpuscles after a high-fat meal. Stuck together like that they cannot carry much oxygen. With the blood thick and sticky as well, what chance do you have with arteries that are clogged, and blocked with atherosclerosis? Not much.
Fig 14.1 Red corpuscles after a high-fat meal
The photo was taken six hours after the meal. Some people's blood is like that all the time! And smoking, coffee, alcohol, or stress make it worse. Can you visualize the patient right now, frightened and pale-bluish, pulse erratic etc.?
So straight away onto the "regression" diet. Within a few hours the patient feels better. In a couple of days, feels good and wants to walk about. What has happened' Have a look at Figure 14.2.
Fig 14.2 Red corpuscles after a low-fat mealDark field high power view of normal non-aggregation red blood cells six hour's after a lowfat meal.
You can see clearly what has happened. The oxygen transport system is working again!
If the patient has had congestive heart failure, this clears in three or four days, because with improved circulation, fluid no longer builds up in the lungs. This explains why people who have suffered badly and have eaten nothing for a few days, suddenly recover. They feel so good sometimes that they "could eat an ox".
Sometimes they try, and die the same night. Most hospitals serve catastrophic food.
The "regression" diet must be adhered to rigidly at home or anywhere else. It is stricter than the regular (maintenance) diet in that it permits no cholesterol-containing foods at all, as well as drastically reducing all fats and eliminating sugar, so as to allow the body to gradually rid itself of the fat and cholesterol which were strangling it.
The patient feels like more activity and this is exactly what is required. Get out and walk. Don't rush it, take it easy but walk, and together with the diet and exercise, which of course should be supervized in precarious cases, the arteries gradually clear.
When cholesterol is reduced below 150 (3.85), it is estimated the arteries may completely clear in two years. Dr Wissler of the University of Chicago Medical School showed that artery disease in monkeys reversed much faster when they were given oxygen. Dr Finney of Baylor University in Dallas showed that infusing oxygen directly into the bloodstream of monkeys reversed and "melted" plaques in eight weeks. This study was over 10 years ago, but further research along these lines is being undertaken. Other animal experiments in 1978 by Dr M. R. Malinow of the Oregon Regional Primate Center showed that diet enriched with alfalfa not only reduced the assimilation of dietary cholesterol by the body but assisted in the process of artery plaque reversal. The active substances in the alfalfa are chemicals called saponins which are contained also in other green vegetables.
Summarizing, the Pritikin Program works because it vastly improves the body chemistry to a condition which most people have never experienced.