The Substance of the Piece …
È
Western foods bring heart disease, high blood pressure and
diabetes wherever they are adopted, but we don’t
really know why. Conventional wisdom is
of little help, for the low-fat diet has failed and
neither lowering cholesterol
nor antioxidant
supplementation alleviates heart disease.
However, Dr Lawrence
Resnick’s ideas provide the missing piece of the puzzle and reveal the
nature of health-sustaining diets, and may allow us to have our cake and eat it
too, so to speak.
Too much sodium (from salt) and too little potassium (from
vegetables and fruit) overwhelm our cells’ ability to maintain the high
potassium, low sodium milieu within themselves they need to function at their
best. Higher sodium within the cells
means higher calcium and lower magnesium (especially when magnesium is low in
the diet) which has profound adverse effects on cell function, causing
different malfunctions in different organ systems. Muscle cells of the arterial wall can no
longer relax completely so the blood pressure goes up. Insulin resistance increases when there’s
less magnesium to communicate its message within the cell so insulin levels
rise to compensate, which tells the fat cells to store more fat and the liver
to produce more triglycerides and LDL-cholesterol. This is the “deadly quartet”
of Dr Gerald Reaven’s syndrome X with its
attendant very high risk of heart disease: obesity, high blood pressure,
insulin resistance and dyslipidemia, and, if the
pancreas cannot keep up with the demand for insulin, Type II diabetes. The
delicate cells lining the arteries are irritated by high insulin levels, and
are further irritated by the homocysteine and inflammation caused by the dearth
of dietary antioxidants, vitamins and anti-inflammatory ω3 essential fatty
acids. Such irritation is widely
accepted as the cause of the first lesion of atherosclerosis, the beginning of
plaque formation which will result in heart disease; and homocysteine is
intimately associated with Alzheimer’s disease and the other dementias. High sodium and low potassium also cause the
acidity within the cells to rise to levels associated with cell reproduction
(levels which are appropriate only in the young of the species). In other words, these ionic imbalances
predispose to cancer.
Reversing these dietary faults, then, should reverse high
blood pressure, insulin resistance and obesity and cause the regression of
atherosclerosis. In the case of high
blood pressure, this is well-accepted: a large trial has shown that a low-salt
diet lowers blood
pressure, and a low-salt, high-potassium
diet lowers it even more. Dietary
remedies for insulin resistance have been little investigated, although Dr Reaven advocates less carbohydrate for syndrome X sufferers
and points out that carbohydrates worsen the condition. However, insulin
resistance is lessened in diabetics by magnesium
supplements, and by low-salt, high
potassium diets in everybody. Dr Walter Kempner’s Rice Diet,
Dr Max Gerson’s cancer
therapy regime and Nathan Pritikin’s
diet and exercise program all limit sodium and supply plentiful potassium and
magnesium, along with the full complement of nutrients naturally present in
unrefined foods. Paradoxically, these high-carbohydrate diets improve the failing carbohydrate metabolism:
clearly, it’s the character of the
carbohydrates that governs. At least
three studies have shown that the Pritikin program reverses insulin
resistance;
and Nathan Pritikin’s arteries were found to be as clean as a teenager’s at
autopsy, although he began his dietary program with severe atherosclerosis.
"In a man 69 years old," wrote pathologist Dr Jeffrey
Hubbard, "the near absence of atherosclerosis and the complete absence
of its effects are remarkable." Similar
unrefined diets today support
populations entirely free of both heart disease and the dementias, such as the Kitava
islanders of the
We see that Dr Resnick’s ideas are validated, and that they
point out dietary strategies which both protect against and cure the diseases
which destroy so many of our lives. So what have we really got here? Nothing less than the solution to
degenerative disease! Apparently, a
healthy diet is not necessarily one low in saturated fat or cholesterol, nor is
it composed of some elusive healthful proportion of fat, protein and
carbohydrate: Dr Robert Atkins, Nathan Pritikin and so many others among us
have been as the blind men
who described the Elephant! Rather, avoiding the heavily-salted and
refined foods of the Western diet in favor of unrefined foods supports health.