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The authors of this article state that heart disease is NOT a disease of cholesterol, but instead, is an inflammatory disease.
Over half of the patients who have heart attacks actually have normal cholesterol levels. They go on to state that the underlying cause of
diabetes
, Alzheimer’s dementia, and a host of other diseases is inflammation. Dr. Meigs recently reported in the April 28th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that women who had the highest amount of inflammation in their arteries had 5 times the risk of developing diabetes than those with the least amount of inflammation.
I shared this study with you in last month’s newsletter. Suffice it to say that you are now just beginning to hear about the dangers of too much inflammation in your body. However, you are going to be hearing more and more about this throughout the media and medical community and there is one main reason. The pharmaceutical industry is on verge of releasing several drugs and promoting drugs that have already been released that are aimed at reversing this damaging inflammation. However, very few will ever you tell you how you can prevent this inflammation from starting in the first place. This month’s issue will just give you an overview of the best way you can protect yourself from developing inflammation in the first place.
What Is The Cause of All This Inflammation?
In my book, What Your Doctor Doesn’t Know About Nutritional Medicine May Be Killing You (Thomas Nelson 2002), I explain theunderlying or root cause of over 70 chronic degenerative diseases is oxidative stress. This is the dark side of oxygen.We are actually rusting inside. Oxidative stress is actually the cause of this inflammatory response and the media and medical community are not relating these two phenomenons within the body.
Free radicals must be immediately rendered harmless via antioxidants or they can go on to damage the vessel wall, cell wall, proteins, fats, and even the DNA nucleus of the cell. When the vessel wall, cell wall, or DNA is damaged the immune system is activated in an attempt to repair this damage. However, since the causes of oxidative stress are usually chronic, the immunesystem has difficulty shutting down and a low grade, chronic inflammatory response usually develops. Medicine and medical research is going to focus on trying to reverse this inflammation once it has already done some significant damage. However, nutritional medicine aims at eliminating or preventing the oxidative stress that is causing the damage in the beginning. Not only is your body protected from this damage but it also prevents the inflammation from occurring in the first place.
Heart Disease—an Inflammatory Disease
I would encourage everyone who has a copy of my book, What Your Doctor Doesn’t Know About Nutritional Medicine May Be Killing You (Thomas Nelson 2002) to at least read chapter 5. You willrealize that the medical evidence that heart disease is an inflammatory disease has been present for the past 12 to 14 years in our medical literature. I also wrote about these findings in my book, Bionutrition (Health Concepts 1998) over 6years ago. The cause of heart attacks is not the build up of too much cholesterol found in your blood stream but instead is the result of a low grade, chronic inflammatory process of the thin, one-cell lining of your arteries.
What are the causes of this inflammation?• Oxidized or Modified LDL cholesterol
• Elevated Homocysteine Levels
• Excessive free radicals produced from high blood pressure, diabetes, cigarette smoke, excessive stress, excessiveexercise, pollutants in the air, food, and water, medication, and radiation.
• Elevated blood sugars especially following a high-glycemic meal
• Elevated fat especially following a highfatty Meal
• Elevated insulin levels (Metabolic Syndrome/Syndrome X)
All of these situations actually produce excessive free radicals that actually damage this very fine lining of our arteries called the endothelium. The body’s natural immune system will try to heal this damage by creating an immune response orinflammatory response. If this damage can be healed the inflammatory response settles down and everything is fine. However, what happens in the majority of cases, the insulting factors that created the damage in first place continue to create more and more damage. The result is a chronic, low-grade inflammatory process that literally goes on to do more harm than good. In fact, it is the inflammation that actually does mostof the damage to our arteries than the original insult. When physicians and researchers actually do blood tests to check for this inflammation [the most common test is the high sensitive C-reactive protein] they are better able to predict who isgoing to have a heart attack or not.
Alzheimer’s dementia, diabetes, cancer etc
There now is increasing evidence that oxidative stress actually leads to this inflammation, which is the underlying cause of Alzheimer’s dementia, diabetes mellitus, cancer, arthritis, and a host of other degenerative disease. Obviously, I am not able to fully cover this subject in one newsletter. However, I want you to be aware of the fact that the medical community and pharmaceutical industry are going to become very excited about this new information because it offers them several different strategies to try to decrease the prevalence of these diseases. As I mentioned earlier, their approach will focus on developing newer and more powerful drugs to reverse this inflammation after it has already occurred. This is the way medicine approaches almost all of these problems. They will bombard you with information, education, and commercials telling you why you need to be taking their drugs.
What they will not inform you is how you can modify your lifestyles so that you can eliminate the inflammation from occurring in the first place.
This would be “True” preventive medicine.
Healthy Lifestyles that Decrease or Prevent Inflammation
I believe in a triad of healthy lifestyles that are designed to decrease or eliminate all of these causes of inflammation and is your best protection against developing any of these chronicdegenerative diseases. These healthy lifestyles are detailed on my web page and you merely need to click on to the option that shows you these Healthy Lifestyles. You need to develop ahealthy diet that combines good fats, good proteins, and good carbohydrates that does not spike your blood sugar. You need to develop a consistent, modest exercise program that includesat least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise 5 times per week. You also need to begin taking advanced levels of nutritional supplements that provides cellular nutrition.
When you combine all three of these healthy lifestyles, you either eliminate or significantly decrease all the causes of inflammation.
There is no need to have to take medication because you are preventing the inflammation from even occurring. This is “True” preventive medicine. I will be focusing much of my research and writings on this subject in the future. Once you begin to understand that it is these excessive free radicals that not only leads to oxidative stress and damage to your body but it is also what causes this inflammation in the first place, you begin to understand why nutritional supplementation along with these healthy lifestyles are so important.
More articles on this site by Dr. Strand
Reprinted with permission from Dr. Strand. Please do not reprint without permission from the author.
Ray Strand, M.D.
Quickly becoming one of the world's leading authorities in nutritional medicine, Dr. Ray Strand has been involved in a private family practice for over 30 years. During the past 12 years, he has focused his practice on preventive and nutritional medicine. He has lectured on this subject across the United States, Canada, and Australia. He is the author of Releasing Fat, What Your Doctor Doesn't Know about Nutritional Medicine, and Death by Prescription.
Dr. Ray Strand's Website
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