Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (29 page)

Homocysteine. Homocysteine is an amino acid that is a waste product of the processing of proteins that is toxic when not effectively cleared by the liver. High levels in the blood plasma predispose people to coronary artery disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and, in younger women, premature birth and other problems of the reproductive system. High levels usually respond to detoxification programs and supplementation with vitamin B complex.

Thyroid Function. Most doctors order tests for the thyroid hormones TSH (thyroid-stimulating hormone) and T4 (thyroxine), but Free T3 is the active thyroid hormone that needs to be checked. When T4 is converted to T3 and then to Free T3 and thus activated, our body needs certain vitamins and minerals to do it. Supplementing with these boosts thyroid activity and therefore metabolism and is often enough to correct mild clinical presentations of low thyroid activity.

Thyroglobulin Antibodies. Autoimmunity generated by gluten can have subtle expressions, such as the creation of antibodies against proteins of your thyroid system, called thyroglobulins. Catching high levels of these early can prevent future bigger problems.

The disruption of the intestinal lining exposes the GALT to antigens that should have been filtered out; many allergic reactions are generated this way. Gluten, a protein that appears in wheat and other grains, can generate an immune response, known as celiac disease. When severe, it can be fatal.

Iodine Levels. Iodine is what the thyroid gland uses to manufacture its products, thyroid hormones. Our food supply is lacking in adequate iodine. When lack of iodine is severe, we develop goiter, but there is growing evidence that milder iodine deficiencies are associated with heart disease, among other things. If you have thyroid abnormalities or symptoms you suspect have to do with your thyroid, ask your doctor to order an iodine absorption test (Doctor’s Data is a laboratory that can provide you with the kit; contact them via their Web site www.doctorsdata.com).

Mercury and Other Heavy Metals. Mercury toxicity is called “the great mimicker” because it can show up as many different diseases, from psychiatric problems and cancers to autoimmune diseases. When your symptoms are not that clear, or do not seem to get better despite great efforts, or when you suspect exposure to heavy metals (you have consumed a lot of tuna or other mercury-laden fish or you have silver amalgam dental fillings), have your doctor test you for it. Blood mercury and hair analysis have their uses, but are not the way to determine if you are mercury toxic. The only reliable test is a twenty-four-hour Urine Challenge Test using a chelating agent such as DMSA. Metametrix or Doctors Data are the labs I use.

Organic Acid Test. Available from Metametrix. Allows you to tailor a supplement regimen specific to you, as oppossed to taking whatever supplement is making the news (which may or may not be good for you.)

A Personalized Supplement Regime

Design a supplement regimen tailored specifically for your needs, instead of blindly taking every vitamin or other supplement that happens to be making the news. The Organic Acid test by Metametrix in combination with simple blood levels of magnesium, zinc, selenium, Vitamin D and the B vitamins will give lots of information in order to do this.

Your Clean Wellness Plan at a Glance

Your list of goals for the next year may include some or all of the following. Add your own goals to the list.

Find an openminded doctor.

Eat Clean: eat organic food, nothing processed, 51 percent raw, avoid chemicals, buy food at your local farmers’ market.

Install water filters and air filters at home.

Do the Clean program periodically. Fast every night for twelve hours. Juice for one day a week, for five days with every change of season; and for one week to ten days a year. Or do some research and find the plan that resonates with you. More and more plans for detox are being talked about everywhere. Explore them.

Keep blood and inner environment alkaline. Periodically measure acidity by using pH strips on saliva.

Exercise.

Meditate.

Get body work (massage, chiropractic, reflexology, osteopathy, cranio-sacral therapy).

Do stretching, yoga, or Pilates.

Express creativity.

Rest and sleep.

Spend time with loved ones.

Establish a custom-tailored supplement regimen.

Get blood tests and other tests once a year.

Read and learn about health and wellness.

Find a wellness coordinator.

As a cardiologist I was trained to treat heart attacks and their complications. Those critical moments that require fast thinking, smart decisions, and a little luck were what attracted me to becoming a cardiologist in the first place. The result of saving a life is evident immediately, and the feeling of doing it is right up there with the other greatest feelings in life. Western medicine has amazing technology to open the arteries and restore blood flow to the heart muscle. Angiograms, angioplasties, and stents have proved invaluable in those life and death situations.

Yet all the training cardiologists get and all the advances in technology are not enough. Heart disease is still the number one killer in the United States. We have not been able to significantly reduce its impact.

What are we missing?

America has been looking for the culprit forever. As it turns out, we found many culprits. We call them “risk factors.” The more of these you have, the more likely you are to develop blockages in your coronary arteries and suffer a possible subsequent heart attack.

The classic risk factors are diabetes, smoking, high blood pressure, family history of heart attacks or genetic predisposition, and high cholesterol.

Then there are other risk factors that are not so well known:

High uric acid level. Uric acid is a waste product that irritates the arteries and promotes heart disease. Acidity in general exacerbates heart disease.

High lipoprotein (a) level. Lipoprotein (a) is another kind of fat in blood; it is associated in a stronger way with the likelihood of blocked arteries than LDL, the classic “bad cholesterol” fat most people are familiar with.

High homocysteine level. Homocysteine is a waste product of the processing of certain proteins; when not cleared fully by the liver, it accumulates and irritates the arteries.

Fairly recently the medical community came to the realization that inflammation is an underlying cause of or contributor to most chronic diseases, especially coronary artery disease. Years ago, isolated articles in medical journals were the first clues to this. One showed a connection between gum disease and dental decay with heart attacks. Another showed a correlation of heart attacks with the presence of Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that takes shelter in the stomach wall, causing chronic inflammation and sometimes ulcers. Next, diabetes was finally understood as an inflammatory disease, as was smoking. Both were linked to heart attacks. Slowly the dots were connected: inflammation was the link between all the heart-attack risk factors.

Still, doctors thought of inflammation as isolated local phenomena—thus gingivitis, arthritis, and prostatitis are inflammations of the gum, joint, or prostate, respectively—and happened as a response to some insult (trauma, infection, radiation). Today we have a better understanding: the inflammatory system may get turned on in a systemic way, in all your tissues, in your blood, and corrode all your organs. If this happens, whatever system is the weakest point for you will break down first. In the case of heart disease, this is very relevant information. LDL, the so-called “bad cholesterol,” could be thought of as the plaster the body uses to repair cracks on the walls of your arteries. When the arteries are cracked, LDL is deposited. This is the beginning of coronary artery disease that may end up in a heart attack or bypass surgery.

Nature has a way of balancing itself out. The way our inflammatory system works is by means of the presence in our blood of both proinflammatory factors and anti-inflammatory ones, coexisting in a delicate balance. Inflammation is very necessary when needed so it has to be ready to be sparked into action at the right time. When it is turned on permanently, it is corrosive, so it needs to be turned off immediately when its job is done. The way it is supposed to be balanced is by the foods we eat. Those foods must contain the right balance of pro-and anti-inflammatory nutrients.

Unnatural ways of raising food we consume are only part of the problem. The other part is all the chemicals we add to our foods and our “foodlike” products before they reach the shelves of your local supermarket. When you start considering all the other chemicals that make modern life so apparently “convenient,” you start getting the picture and a clue as to why our health is on the decline despite the fact that we have broken the genetic code and invented machines that can show us every millimeter of our anatomy or fix the mechanics of our body when parts collapse. The understanding of toxicity is of paramount importance to the new approach to cardiovascular disease, and it is an issue that will require global change.

Inflammation is the underlying cause that seems to cause cholesterol to be deposited in the arteries and subsequently to break up into clots, followed by heart attacks. Since the Clean program addresses inflammation at its root, cardiovascular disease is the most important beneficiary to this approach of eating less artery-toxic foods, enhanced clearing of homocysteine and uric acid, and correcting the lack of magnesium. Lack of this mineral not only leads to elevated blood pressure, which leads to heart disease, but also makes the nervous system more unstable. Anxiety and stress happen at a lower threshold. This in turn facilitates inflammation, which causes plaque to be deposited in the arteries.

So many of the health problems that eat up money, time, and resources are related to diseases that could be greatly alleviated by looking through detox glasses. My specialty, heart disease, is prime among them: detox programs can help dramatically create the conditions where patients can pave their own paths away from “inevitable” prescription drugs to manage their symptoms.

Of course, there are many scenarios where disease or degeneration has manifested and must be treated with immediate intervention. If the house is burning down, you don’t want to waste time collecting papers. You want to put the fire out immediately. It is basic common sense. If you are having a heart attack, you don’t want to go to the yoga studio or drink some antioxidant tea. You want to get to a hospital immediately and have an angioplasty performed.

Exceptions to the Rule

It is crucially important to treat heart patients with thoughtful care. Many of them are not candidates for a detox (see the contraindications section in “Before You Start Clean” in chapter 7). But sometimes they take matters into their own hands. Who is to say that their instincts are not smarter than my diagnosis? In this spirit I share the “anecdotal” evidence of a patient who used a detox to jumpstart his way out of serious cardiovascular disease. Please do not read this as a prediction of any kind of outcome for yourself. It is one man’s unique story. But as I always say, anecdotes are worth sharing when it comes to health. They can be windows into the miraculous.

When I was living in Venice, California, I once saw a patient who refused to submit to any tests or take any medications with such conviction that it was impossible for me to persuade him to take anything. And if someone needed Western medicine the day I saw him, it was him. He came to me with classic symptoms of unstable angina. This means, chest pain on and off, very likely caused by an unstable plaque in the coronary artery tree. An unstable plaque is one that ruptures so that blood clots are forming and dissolving, threatening to cause a heart attack. If the clots do not dissolve (our blood is constantly dissolving clots) a heart attack is inevitable. My first recommendation was that he chew and swallow an aspirin to prevent a blood clot from forming and that as he did that, I would call for an ambulance that would take him to the nearest hospital. There, an angiogram and an angioplasty (and most likely a stent) could save his life and bridge things until slower solutions, like right nutrition and exercise, could take effect.

STATINS FOR EVERYBODY?

It is shocking to read new reports regarding statins. Going one step further than the madness of automatically dispensing statins to everyone with elevated cholesterol without first lowering the levels naturally, now they want to give statins even to people with low cholesterol as a preventive measure, because statins will somehow reduce inflammation. Since one of the main reasons for inflammation is the accumulation of toxins, if the liver is not clearing up toxins at an optimal rate, isn’t it much more natural to improve its function than to block it further with statins? One of the side effects of statins is actually to inhibit an important reaction in the liver, making the whole problem worse. Furthermore, statins may just destroy liver cells completely; that’s why we need to get blood tests to monitor liver enzymes when taking them.

There is a place for statins in our toolbox. Sometimes the whole thing is so messed up that we need to block a survival mechanism (cholesterol making) that may end up killing us. Yes statins do stabilize arterial plaque and prevent heart attacks, and I use them in these cases. But I try to use them as a bridge, while I guide my patients to make the changes (dietary and exercise) that will later allow them to discontinue the statins. Certainly there are cases in which genetic defects or simply the inability to make those changes warrant the use of statins as a long-term plan, and thank God for them. But in today’s world, in the vast majority of cases in which we use statins so freely the patient would be much better served by basic measures, including detoxification and liver function enhancement. For this reason, cleansing and detoxification are very useful tools in my toolbox for my daily cardiology practice.

He so adamantly refused even an aspirin that I decided to help him in other ways. I gave him grape-seed extract to thin his blood, fish oils to counteract inflammation and also prevent clotting, and magnesium to stabilize the nerve and electric cells in the heart, which are the cells that form the heart’s electrical system, needed to coordinate contraction. I told him to rest and started him on a strict green juice fast. I called him literally every thirty minutes for the first two days and made him promise me that if the chest pain became permanent or worse, and if he had any other symptom, he would allow me to call an ambulance. It was not necessary. After a day his chest pain went away. After a week he felt so good he started exercising, against my advice. He juiced for three weeks and then went to raw foods. Four years later he is still on a health kick, has never had chest pain again, and has lost thirty pounds. I will never know exactly what happened but I bet my medical title he reversed his own heart disease.