Fasting and Eating for Health (17 page)

It is interesting to note the diseases that were reported to be quite rare during the period of semistarvation. Among these were coronary artery disease, hypertension, congestive heart failure, gastric and duodenal ulcers, appendicitis, nephritis, cholecystitis, hepatitis, diabetes, hyperthyroidism,

allergic states, upper respiratory infections, and rheumatic fever. Only with improvement of the nutritional state did some of these return to their former prominence as causes for hospitalization.37 Autopsy studies during the years following World War II showed that clinical atherosclerotic disease became extremely rare as well. This demonstrates the cleansing of the lipid component in plaques. The reabsorption of atheromas has also been well studied and documented with wasting diseases such as cancer,38,39 and also with dietary restrictions and fasting in nonhuman primates.40

It is such a simple concept, yet so far away from the consciousness of today's modern physician, to simply allow the body to reabsorb the blood vessel blockages with an aggressive nutritional approach. When we utilize this knowledge and combine an extremely low fat diet with fasting, the potential to clear the blockages within the blood vessels is maximized. Patients can expect better results than when following the strict diet alone.

Chelation Therapy Compared

Chelation involves the intravenous infusion of EDTA (ethylenediaminetetraaceticacid) and is promoted as a nonsurgical alternative to angioplasty or bypass. Its value and positive effects are controversial. EDTA is a powerful drug that is used to treat mineral poisoning because it pulls minerals such as calcium and lead out of the body.

Chelation therapy for atherosclerotic disease is similar to other temporizing measures. It might relieve pain and improve circulation temporarily through vasodilation, but there is no solid evidence that it can remove the atheromas or plaque lining the vessel walls; nor does it decrease one's risk of sudden death.

I have seen many patients who have received hundreds of chelation treatments without improvement and then watched their chest pain quickly resolve with one fast.

A perfect example is George, a 69-year-old man with a history of diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, and angina. He had already experienced one 89

heart attack. When I saw him for the first time he was using four different medications: Tenormin, Lopid, Orinase, and a nitroglycerin patch. After 175

chelation treatments, and while following what he thought was a very low fat diet suggested to him by his prior physicians, he continued to suffer chest pain and chest pressure. These symptoms were felt even while he was resting.

I explained in detail my treatment plan and I immediately stopped the medication he was taking to lower his blood sugar level. Following my advice, he took care to adhere to a "less than-10-percent-of-calories-from-fat, zero-cholesterol" diet. He returned to my office two weeks later.

At this time his blood sugar level was better controlled than it had been at his first visit, when he was still on medication. My next step was to taper the other medications, leaving only the nitroglycerin patch two weeks prior to the start of his fast.

When he arrived for his fast, his weight was down to 175 pounds from 182

pounds. Because he was still experiencing chest pressure without the nitroglycerin patch during the early part of the fast, I maintained the patch for the first week of fasting. By week 2, he was experiencing no further angina and I was able to discontinue the nitroglycerin patch without further problems.

George fasted a total of 19 days. For 4 additional days I gradually introduced a diet of fresh fruit and vegetables before sending him home. His weight was 151 pounds.

A month later he called me excitedly while vacationing in Florida. He was now walking more than two miles a day, off all medication, and angina-free. He was no longer diabetic, either; his blood sugar levels were well within the normal range.

I have now seen enough patients who have undergone chelation with no benefit to conclude that this therapy is just like other drug treatments, only minimally helpful, if at all, and more expensive. These same patients, when introduced to aggressive dietary changes, had dramatic positive responses. The fact that a cardiac patient must continue the chelation treatments indefinitely and receive hundreds of treatments to maintain its supposed effect also indicates it is not removing the disease.

The few well-designed double-blinded studies that have addressed the efficacy of chelation for atherosclerotic disease have not found evidence that chelation offers benefit over dietary intervention.41,42 Since both the EDTA-treated and the placebo-treated groups fared the same, the authors concluded that the beneficial effects were closely correlated with motivational encouragement from the physicians, improved diet, and more exercise, rather than from the therapy itself. Other carefully done, randomized, double-blind trials also concluded that no therapeutic effect of chelation could be demonstrated.43,44

Certainly, further studies will be done to evaluate chelation. Attractive as it 90

may be for those people looking for an effortless cure, chelation still does not remove the cause of disease—high saturated fat and cholesterol-containing foods. The primary treatment must be dietary, with a zero-cholesterol diet.

Then, as an adjunctive measure, fasting is the quickest and most effective complement to diet to accelerate recovery.

Fasting Quickly Lowers Blood Pressure As It Extends Life
For a person with advanced cardiovascular disease, fasting can not only begin to reverse the damage caused by years of improper eating, but also rapidly decrease the risk of sudden death from a heart attack or stroke.

First of all, fasting rapidly and effectively lowers blood pressure without medication. In most cases this effect is permanent if the person maintains the correct eating pattern after the fast. A period of therapeutic fasting will lower blood pressure even in severe hypertension. Many of my patients who have had difficulty controlling hypertension utilizing combinations of three or four different drugs have had their blood pressure decrease into the normal range through fasting. Moreover, blood pressure generally remains low upon the reintroduction of food if they continue to follow the recommended diet.

Greg came to me after suffering from repeated transient ischemic attacks.

These "mini-strokes" can be a warning sign that a serious and life-threatening stroke is likely to occur. His blood pressure was difficult to control with diet alone, so the dose of his blood pressure medication was increased and another medication was added. Though taking the highest suggested dose of two bloodpressure-lowering agents, he continued to have elevated blood pressure and still suffered from headaches and visual disturbances. Fearful he would experience a stroke, I advised him to undergo a fast as soon as possible. At the start of his fast and while medicated, his blood pressure was 150/90, and he weighed in at 236 pounds.

Greg fasted for 12 days. I tapered his medication until he was receiving no medications by day 4. At that time his blood pressure dropped to 132/90. At the end of the fast his blood pressure was 110/78 and his weight had dropped to 216 pounds.

At the time of his followup visit to my office a few weeks later, his pressure was 108/76. It has continued to remain in the low, normal range with no medication, as he continues to adhere to a proper diet.

The medical literature confirms these findings. In a study of 683 obese patients of whom 48 percent had high blood pressure, it was noted that rarely did these patients continue to have high blood pressure after two to four days of fasting.45 This phenomenon has been consistently noted with both obese and nonobese patients.46,47

In Dr. Alan Goldhamer's ongoing study of fasting and hypertension, so far 51

people with high blood pressure have been fasted an average of 11.2 days. The average blood pressure when these individuals began fasting was 151.8/91.1; 91

by the end of the fast the average was 117.8/75.1. At a followup check 27

weeks after the fast the average blood pressure was 123/77.48

I have yet to see a case of hypertension resistant to the powerful bloodpressure-lowering effects of the fast. Even more fascinating is the observation that blood pressure does not rise back to its abnormally high level when eating is resumed. In fact, fasting, if followed by a health-supporting diet, can be a permanent cure for hypertension. Of course, if the same diet that caused the development of the high blood pressure is resumed after the fast, the problem will once again be created.

Since the bloodpressure-lowering effect of a prolonged fast continues after the fast is ended, it is not the result of the fasting-induced fluid loss, nor merely due to weight loss. Weight loss alone cannot account for the lowered blood pressure, as the results seen from fasting are significantly greater than what is generally observed from
losing
the same amount of weight through dieting. The lowered peripheral resistance from plaque reduction and especially the normalization of blood flow in the kidney achieved from fasting are important factors leading to the normalization of blood pressure. Fasting also results in a decrease in the size of enlarged hearts, slowing of the resting heart rate, and decreased cardiac output, all of which contribute to the permanent benefits achieved through fasting.49,50

Weight loss, vegetarian diets,51 and raw foods52 have all been shown to be effective at reducing blood pressure. Indeed, solely with such nutritional interventions, most of my patients are able to stop taking high-blood-pressure medications. Only occasionally are individuals resistant to further weight loss on an optimal diet. Sometimes the person's blood pressure does not respond to diet alone. When this is the case, I have found a therapeutic fast to be universally effective at reducing the pressure and keeping it in the desired range.

Most physicians do not offer their patients sufficiently aggressive dietary advice to enable them to improve their condition enough to stop medications.

The patients who come to me have all been looking for. a way to get well and off medications. The fast coupled with a nutritionally correct diet allows them to accomplish their goals.

When I discuss the futility of medical interventions and the superior results obtained with the methods discussed here with my medical colleagues or even with my physician-teachers at the medical school I attended, their typical comment is that very few people will want so restrictive a dietary approach no matter how effective. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant. We must at least offer patients the alternatives open to them and let them make the decision. It is unethical to decide for them paternalistically and withhold evidence of the effectiveness of this natural approach.

I believe many physicians would be surprised at the large percentage of patients who would choose a natural approach to recover their health rather than resort to continuous drugging and medical intervention. When individuals 92

are educated about the side effects and risks of drugs—how they treat only the symptoms of high blood pressure without addressing the underlying cause—

they routinely become very interested in the natural approach.

Patients should thoroughly understand that medications do not have a significant impact on reducing heart attacks, the leading cause of death in people with high blood pressure. In fact, because of their negative effect on lipids and glucose levels, drug treatments such as beta-blockers and diuretics may even
increase
the risk of heart attacks. Even the data from the renowned Framingham study indicate that the likelihood of death from coronary heart disease is higher during treatment with thiazide diuretics than without them.53

The majority of patients with high blood pressure die of heart attacks, not strokes. Medications, therefore, have been shown to have little or no effect in reducing overall cardiovascular mortality in major clinical trials.54 Even when researchers lumped together all nine of the major hypertensive trials to achieve the statistical power of very large numbers, no significant trend was noticed in the ability of hypertensive medication to reduce the mortality or morbidity of coronary heart disease.55

Some of the side effects of high-blood-pressure medication are hard to ignore. They include fatigue, headache, swelling, nausea, dizziness, and many others. For example, I routinely see patients complaining of sexual dysfunction who are anxious to get off their medication.

When patients are given all the facts, including the real benefits of removing the disease rather than merely disguising its existence with drugs, they almost invariably choose the natural way to a healthy heart.

Fasting Quickly Places the High-Risk Patient at Lower Risk
Besides effectively lowering blood pressure, fasting removes and softens the cholesterol plaque that lines the blood vessels. Slowly and steadily the fast allows more blood and oxygen to circulate and thereby rejuvenate all the tissue and organs of the body.

Surgery, arthrectomy, and angioplasty, the invasive approaches to coronary artery disease, will always remain ineffective at significantly extending life. This is because these procedures address only the localized blockage. This small area of diseased blood vessel, though it may be the source of chest pain, will not necessarily be the area that causes death should a person suffer a fatal heart attack. Concentrating on a localized area of coronary artery narrowing in a body full of vessels with diffuse atherosclerotic plaque is like trying to save a patient with advanced metastatic cancer by removing one surgically accessible mass.

Understanding why a life-threatening event like a heart attack or stroke occurs lets us see why high-tech surgical methods will never significantly extend lives. Fatal or life-threatening heart attacks are typically initiated by a rupture or fissure in the atherosclerotic plaque, which leads to clot formation. A 93

thrombus is a clot that forms within the blood vessels. The initial formation of such a clot involves the sticking together of platelets. Injury to the vessel wall releases substances, such as serotonin, that attract platelets and cause constriction or narrowing of the vessel in an attempt to stop bleeding.