I'm going to break with standard practice and go ahead and quote the whole thing, here, because there's no single part of that can be excerpted and it's just too important. Here's some resources to check out:
- My original post: Don't Listen To Me!
- Dr. Dwight Lundell's part 1 article: Heart Surgeon Admits Huge Mistake
- Dr. Lundell's book websites: The Great Cholesterol Lie; The Cure for Heart Disease
- Dr. Lundell's interview with Dr. William Davis of the Track Your Plaque program
And now, here's part 2 of Dr. Lundell's heroic article.
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 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 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.
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Low weight, high reps, and a lot of work my friend.
I think the "grandmother" advice, while simple and easy to remember, needs a bit of refining. Depending on one's age, and one's grandmother's age, it's probably necessary to go back at least one or two generations earlier for a guidepost. I'm 47 yo, my remaining living grandmother was born in 1919 (many grandmothers are far younger). My grandmother grew up poor but ate well from the food they grew and raised on their farm. But she left that hard life and never looked back, adopting modern foods at every stage, including vegetable oil and margerine, and boxed foods. Her first husband died of CVD at age 50. Because of that she, and several of her children and even grandchildren, totally swallowed the low fat/saturated fat propaganda. She seems to thrive in spite of a very low fat diet, so I know it's hard to argue against a woman her age who is is great shape, walks regularly for exercise, and still drives on the local roads in daylight, but she probably had great nutritional benefits from the poor but wholesome food on the farm, that her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren did not have with their processed, abundant, and convenient supermarket food. Plus she lives a life of extreme moderation in general (some might say boring and predictable) so that might temper any damage done by the lack of good saturated fats.
And while I know now my great-grandmother had years of making sauerkraut, sausage, and canning the fruit and vegetable harvests from her modest farm, my memories are mostly of her fantastic yeast cinnamon buns and big peanut butter cookies, and also the sugary cereals we weren't allowed at home. I'm sure she used Crisco and margerine by then, too, if for no other reason than it was cheaper than butter.
My paternal grandmother was a few years older than my maternal grandmother and probably also ate very well in her youth. She was a butcher's daughter, so she knew all about meat, but my dad (her eldest child of 9, born in 1935) says they ate a lot of canned fruit in syrup, canned veggies, canned fruit juice, and of course, potatoes every day, and white bread and jam as snacks in between meals. I'm sure the labor savings for such large family made convenience foods very tempting. I always remember lots of candy and soda stocked in the pantry for the grandchildren, and frequently cake, baked from a mix. In fact, both grandmothers' homes were places we were sure to eat much the things our own mother wouldn't often buy or make for us (sugary cereals, potato chips, cookies and donuts, hard candy, soda, etc.).
"Western" diets have changed a lot since the beginning of the Industrial Age, so one needs to perhaps use diets as early as the end of the 19th century or even the American Civil War or before as a better guideline, rather than early to mid-20th century diets, because depending on the region and socioeconomic status, some significant changes began that far back, like industrial refinement of carbohydrates, new food preservation and food chemistry technology, increased sugar consumption, increased grain yields (and lower prices), substituting vegetable oils for animal fats, etc. Plus, unscrupulous food factories sold adulterated and substandard foods to poor, urban people, often vulnerable immigrants, such as filthy TB-infected distillery milk whitened and thickened with chalk, etc.
DH's grandmother rendered lard, pickled pigs feet, made head cheese, kept a chicken pen the size of 3 city blocks, kept a large garden and an orchard and made her own lye.
I remember seeing my grandmother wring a chicken's neck to start supper but then she moved to town when I was still little and started buying more stuff from the store.
Good info, Anna.
I have much the same experience. My maternal grandparents had lots of junk around the house, however, they ate lots and lots of real food, gardened, hunted game (venison, birds) and my grandfather was a lifelong master fisherman (I once saw him catch and release 112 trout from a river in a single late afternoon). We always ate a lot of variety in terms of meat, fish, veggies. They both smoked and drank, and both lived into their 80s.
My paternal grandparents were German immigrants after WWII. I don't think I recall ever seeing much of any junk laying around. My grandmother always cooked from scratch and used plenty of fat, near as I could tell. My grandfather smoked like a chimney all his life, both also lived into their 80s.
So, while one set ate a fair amount of junk and the others didn't, both ate lots of really good food, and they did so daily. You can't beat great nutrition and I'm of the belief that it'll mitigate a fair number of sins.
I think that's really what's at the bottom of the obesity / diabetes epidemic. People have been eating crap for a long time, a point you've made well. However, they also weren't afraid of animal fats pre-1970 or so, and they consequently ate lots of good food. When you eat lots of good food, you eat far less junk, so the balance is to the good. But nowadays, people eat crap on crap, and are actually afraid of eating good food and have been duped into thinking that the increasin size of their asses and bellies is fine, cause it's "low fat."
Modern ignorance.
This coming from a man who had his medical license revoked for unprofessional conduct.
Hmm.
Well I did find this.
azcentral.com/community/gilbert/articles/2008/10/16/20081016gr-baddoctor1017.html
Note the the revocation came four years after the guy retired, having performed 5,000 heart surgeries. Plus, everyone knows that surgeons are pretty much just fancy mechanics.
At any rate, the same thing is coming from a lot of people. Don’t like that heart surgeon? How about Steven Gundry?
freetheanimal.com/2009/02/enlightened-heart-surgeons-and-cardiologists.html
See if you can smear him (which of course is out-of-context anyway, since you’re apparently incapable of actually making an argument).
I happen to be a Dwight Lundell survivor. I have spent the last 9 years in pain resulting from an operation he performed on me. When I went back to see him to express that I was still in pain, he brought my x-rays to the waiting room, did not even bother to bring me into the back office and proceeded to tell me that it was normal. I might add that his post op story had changed from when he operated on me initially to when I went to him to seek treatment. I’m not here to argue. I got lost on this site when I was trying to find him to locate my medical records. His old office couldn’t give me anything more than the fact that his son was in charge of his medical records. However, while the revocation may have been after he retired(according to your math) the other 4 board actions against him were while he was still practicing. Furthermore, he is still being referred to as Dr Dwight Lundell, chief medical officer of Asantae. Personally and professionally I find this more than a little fraudulent as he does not have a license to practice medicine.
Broken:
Sorry for your pain & experience, however, I canot count much against a guy who did 5,000 heart operations based upon one anecdote, even granting that there are probably others.
Not every surgery always goes well. I think everyone understands that, as unfortunate as it may be.
BTW, did you notice the title of the piece?
“Heart Surgeon Admits Huge Mistake”
To end, I appologize for the misunderstanding. I didn’t come here to smear doctors. If anyone knows where Lundell has his medical records stored, I really need mine.