Heart Surgeon - Admits Huge Mistake!
By Dwight Lundell, MD

Without inflammation, cholesterol would not accumulate
in wall of blood vessel and cause heart disease.

Part 1 of a 2-part article (see part 2 below)
 
We physicians with all our training, knowledge and
authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it
difficult to admit we are wrong. So here it is.  I freely admit to being wrong...As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having
performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries, today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.

I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labeled
“opinion makers”.  Bombarded with scientific literature, continually
attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease
resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.

The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower
cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The
latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart
disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.
 
It Is Not Working!

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally
defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the
artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a
paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be
treated. The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire
economic consequences.

Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin
medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of
our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than
ever before. Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are
affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year

Simply stated, without inflammation being present in
the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the
wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes.  Without
inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as
nature intended.

It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.
Inflammation is not complicated -- it is quite simply your body's
natural defense to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or
virus.  The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your
body from these bacterial and viral invaders. However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process, a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.

What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to
foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body?
Well, smokers perhaps but at least they made that choice willfully.
The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream diet
that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates,
not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels.
 

This repeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart
disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity.  Let me repeat that. The injury
and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet
that has been recommended for years by mainstream medicine.

What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply,
they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates
(sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess
consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower
that are found in many processed foods.

 

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

 

Part 2
by Dwight Lundell MD 02/06/2009

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft
skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. Let’s say 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 arrive 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 labeled
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.
 
[Ed. Note: 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 the author of The Cure for Heart Disease and The Great
Cholesterol Lie