FlowerPower wrote:Yes, I understand his frustration with scientists and reductionist science, but my question (from this article) still remains--if saturated fat is not a major contributor to heart disease, then why limit the consumption of whole foods such as avocados, nuts, olives, and coconut for heart patients? What, if not the fat, is the problem with these foods? It's not animal protein.
Oils seem to be attacked for not being whole foods and having no nutritive value, but I had gotten the impression from Esselstyn's writing that they also had harmful effects beyond their empty calories. Again, no animal protein.
Dr. Campbell just mentioning Dr. Esselstyn, is giving the reader enough information for them to do their own research. The learning curve of this WFPB life style is very deep. That is why Jeff Novick's dvds are so important as he clarifies fat and oil in whole intact plants aren't limited to nuts, seeds and avocados. We get enough fat and oil from Whole Intact plants while excluding them. In "Whole" Dr. Campbell shares about paradigms shifts. To make a collective paradigm shift it is like a school of fish have to be in the right place for them to make a 180 degree turn. We are in that school. When it comes to other choices besides animal fat/oil and concocted fat/oils it is a individual choice. While at the same time know the body shows the past, the mind (non-empircal) shows the future. Today quantum physics comes first and reductionist science 2nd.
Dr. Campbell "Whole":
In its broadest sense, a paradigm is a mental filter that restricts what you are able to see at any one time. Mental filters are essential; without your brain’s reticular activating system, you would be overwhelmed by stimuli and therefore unable to respond to the important ones. Without the ability to focus on one thing and shut out distractions, you wouldn’t be able to get much done. And in science, without the literal filters of microscopes and telescopes, we would know precious little about inner and outer space.
Filters—mental and literal—become problematic only when we forget about them and think that what we’re seeing is the whole of reality, instead of a very narrow slice of it. Paradigms become prisons only when we stop recognizing them as paradigms—when we think that water is all there is, so we don’t even have a name for it anymore. In a world shaped by the paradigm of water, anyone who suggests the existence of “not water” is automatically a heretic, a lunatic, or a clown.
Dr. Esselstyn "Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease":
Most of America’s health dollars are spent on the late stages of heart disease, strokes, hypertension, diabetes, and the common Western cancers of the breast, the prostate, and the colon. Like heart disease itself, these others are part of the bitter harvest of the toxic American diet. And like traditional treatments for heart disease, their treatment is not preventive. Having your breast cancer amputated, your malignant prostate gland radically removed, or your cancerous colon resected is painful, disfiguring, and costly—and too often does not resolve the underlying problem.
My own research has concentrated on coronary artery disease, and how plant-based nutrition can prevent and also arrest and reverse it. But with every year that passes, there is more proof that a plant-based diet has similar salutary effects on other chronic diseases, as well.
Take stroke, for example—the third leading cause of death in the United States. The evidence is overwhelming that if you eat to save yourself from heart disease, you eat to save yourself from stroke.
There are two types of stroke. In hemorrhagic stroke, the less common of the two, a blood vessel in the brain ruptures because of high blood pressure or a genetic weakness of the vessel wall known as an aneurysm. A plant-based diet cannot do anything to cure a genetic aneurysm. But it will definitely help reduce blood pressure, an important step in the right direction.
On the more common variety of stroke—ischemic or embolic stroke—there is even better news. These have the same origin as coronary artery disease. An ischemic stroke occurs when fat and cholesterol block blood vessels that carry oxygen and nutrients to the brain, just as they may block the coronary arteries that nourish the heart. An embolic stroke also deprives the brain of nutrients and oxygen, but in a slightly different way. When an artery sheds part of its diseased inner lining, that debris—called an embolus—is carried through the bloodstream until it gets wedged into a blood vessel that is too small for it to traverse. Now it blocks the flow of blood through that vessel. This may happen almost anywhere in the body, blocking blood flow to a kidney, an intestine, a leg, or some other organ. When it occurs in vessels that nourish the brain, it is a stroke.
In the 1990s, Pierre Aramenco, a physician from Paris, studied this process in Frenchmen who were at risk for vascular disease.2 Using ultrasound probes inserted through the esophagus, Dr. Aramenco measured the thickness of atherosclerotic debris growing on the inside of each patient’s ascending aorta, the giant artery that climbs directly from the heart and sends branches to the brain. He divided the men into three groups. One group showed 1 millimeter of debris on the lining of the aortic wall. The second had debris measuring between 1 and 3.9 millimeters thick. The third had more than 3.9
millimeters of debris. Dr. Aramenco followed the patients for three years. Not surprisingly, the group with the greatest amount of plaque growth shed the greatest number of emboli, and had the most strokes (see Figure 17 in insert).
The buildup of fatty plaques in blood vessels can cause damage in many different ways. For example, when an aorta that contains plaque is clamped during coronary bypass surgery, plaque debris is loosened and enters the bloodstream as an embolus. Using ultrasound to monitor the middle cerebral artery in the brain, technicians can distinctly hear the embolizing plaque as it enters the brain. If the patient dies during surgery, the plaque debris may be found in the brain at autopsy.
This tragic sequence helps explain the fearful loss of cognition in coronary artery bypass patients.3 But neuroradiologists also report that using magnetic resonance imaging, they can detect little white spots in the brains of Americans starting at about age fifty. These spots represent small, asymptomatic strokes (see Figures 8 and 19 in insert). The brain has so much reserve capacity that at first these tiny strokes cause no trouble. But, if they continue, they begin to cause memory loss and, ultimately, crippling dementia. In fact, one recently reported study found that the presence of these “silent brain infarcts” more than doubles the risk of dementia.4
We now believe, in fact, that at least half of all senile mental impairment is caused by vascular injury to the brain. Not long ago, a Swedish study of five hundred eighty-five-year-olds found that fully one-third of them showed some form of dementia. A careful analysis revealed that in half of those with dementia, their mental impairment was due to a diseased arterial blood supply to the brain.5 Similarly, a study in the Netherlands focused on five thousand people between the ages of fifty-five and ninety-four.6 The researchers studied the circulation in the brains of all their subjects, then asked them to perform various written tests of mental acuity. The results were quite clear: those suffering from artery disease and thus impaired circulation in the brain performed less well on the tests than did those whose arteries were clean. Age made no difference. Arterial health was the variable that counted.
This should come as no surprise. Clogged arteries serving the brain and clogged arteries serving the heart are part and parcel of the same disease. The cause is the same: a buildup of fat and cholesterol and lethal had just one stroke. Emil Huffgard had three. As a result, both had suffered impairment of their walking. More than twenty years later, both of these men are alive and well. Neither has had any further strokes. The same plant-based nutrition that saved their hearts also saved their brains.
Aloha, patty