Heart Cipher

Say you’ve got a son or daughter who just got married and the happy couple comes over to tell you the great news about their new house search. They explain that they have a great real estate broker who has recommended a particular loan broker to help with some great financing. They met with the loan broker who then gave them some great news.

The loan broker could get them ARM financing (an ACTUAL Rate Mortgage) for 2 points under the current standard rate and that rate would be the Actual Rate rate for the life of the Mortgage. It’s ARM financing. Your kids are really excited about this. After all, if they don’t get the ARM mortgage, they’ll have to get a FIXED Rate Mortgage and face changing and rising interest rates all the time because the interest rate on this sort of loan would change by a FIXED amount higher than the current standard interest rate.

What would you tell them?

(image courtest of TonyWatson.net)

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In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Low Carbohydrate and Mediterranean Diets were found to be more helpful for controlling obesity and the blood lipids related to Coronary Artery Disease than a Low Fat Diet.

One of the most devastating ways that Medical Professionals have contributed to the increase in obesity and heart disease has been their insistence on a “one size fits all” approach to nutrition for these problems. One only needs to stroll down grocery store aisles to understand that the dominance of the “Low Fat Diets are best” ideology is coincidently timed with great increases in obesity.

Thankfully, more scientific studies are showing these recommendations to be flawed at best.

HeartWire at TheHeart.org has a great rundown on this new study.

At a minimum, what this study does is confirm that my personal experience is not an anomaly.

Here’s the link to the journal article and the abstract appears after the jump.

(image courtesy of the New England Journal of Medicine)

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Once in a while, you hear or read some cardiologist make a set of statements that are so astonishing that they merit special comment and to be called out.

And there’s even more of a need to highlight the statement when that cardiologist’s professional colleagues fail to do so.

Such is the case in a recently begun thread at the “ClubwebMD” forum at TheHeart.org.

A cardiologist in that thread (who I won’t name but can be found by the diligent using Google) uttered something that boils down to the title of this post.

“My patients are too poor or too stupid to get the best cardiac care.”

At the outset, let’s grant that this cardiologist deserves at least some credit for being honest. Or maybe you think I’m exaggerating. No doctor, not even a FACCer, would make this point so baldly, right? (I use the designation “FACCer” as shorthand for describing a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology with whom I am particularly taken.)

Well, how about we do this? I’ll provide the verifiable online quotations and commentary and then you decide whether my interpretation of his remarks in this post’s title is a fair one.

Deal? Ok then, follow me after the jump for more…

(image courtesy of thechaly.wordpress.com)

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On Friday July 4th, 2008, an Illinois man died of a heart attack following his scaling of Mt. McKinley (aka Denali). The tour guides he was scaled the mountain with attempted to revive him for 45 minutes before finally giving up the attempt.

He was buried on Sunday at the summit of the mountain at 20,320 feet above sea level because of the difficulty and danger involved in bringing his body back down the mountain.

According to the Chicago Tribune…

James Nasti was an avid runner, cyclist and mountaineer who had been on an 11-year quest to climb the highest points in all 50 states.

But upon reaching his 49th high point on the 4th of July, the Naperville father of three collapsed and died on the summit of Mt. McKinley in Alaska, apparently of a heart attack…

James Nasti belonged to the Highpointers Club, whose members try to visit the highest points in 50 states. He had only White Butte, N.D., left to scale, his son said.

Nasti was a runner and cyclist who had trained for the climb up Mt. McKinley and had no known history of heart trouble, his family said.

“He had done a stress test two years ago and there was no indication of heart trouble, no family history of the disease,” his son said.

Nasti did not appear to be sick or in distress and was climbing strongly before the collapse, McLaughlin said.

“It sounds like from the guides that this was a particularly strong team as a whole and he was a strong climber. It was unexpected,” she said.

Meanwhile, in the first of a series of reports on Cardiovascular Disease Risk Assessment, (the MESA study), a measure of coronary calcium was shown to be better than carotid IMT for predicting CVD risk.

As the “baby boomer” generation ages and the cardiology and medical communities continue to ignore the results of dozens, if not hundreds, of studies of the predictive power of Coronary Artery Calcium scanning, we will continue to read stories about people taken down by heart attack at the pinnacle of their life and achievements.

The last 3 months have been eventful in a negative way both for my family and I’ve also had greatly increased professional stress. My posts here have suffered greatly…

But I’m well and I’m back and more determined than ever to address my coronary artery disease in as serious a way as the science will allow and I am capable.

A special thanks to my local Jedi Master and especially to Dr. Davis of Track Your Plaque for their descriptions and explanations of that path and for their encouragement.

In the near future, I’ll post about what I’ve been up to related to my heart disease for the last few months.

But for now, and to celebrate my return in this brief post, I quote a Life Extension Foundation news release on a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology just today.

The text of the LEF news release entitled Large study links obesity and inflammation to heart failure follows after the jump.

(image courtesy of  http://krystalmae.blogspot.com)

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Haven’t written here in a while. Life has been hectic and stressful for a good two weeks now. Some interesting potential new insights gained. Will write about that in a bit.

For now, I wanted to point you to an online webinar that Dr. Davis will be conducting on Vitamin D3 this week.

Here’s the link to register for the webinar…

See ya’ there.

And just for fun, how about that “Vitamin D3 Song” by John Denver?

Seth has done a great interview with Gary Taubes at his blog. A transcript of the 14 part interview with Taubes has been posted as a google document.

The thing I like about this interview is that Taubes talks about the process of scientific discovery. A great read.

In the intereview, Taubes explains how he came to write the book Good Calories, Bad Calories. Excerpt below to entice you to read the whole interview.

TAUBES Well, I’ve spent over 20 years now writing about controversial science. In the mid-1980s, I lived at CERN for ten months, the big physics lab outside Geneva, watching physicists discover non-existent elementary particles. Then I wrote a somewhat infamous story about prions, the supposed causative agents of Mad Cow Disease. I wrote a book about cold fusion: I got obsessed with this question of how it happened, because it was so obviously wrong. After all that, I developed what I believe is a very good feel for who’s a good scientist, and who’s a bad scientist, just by talking to them. There are certain ways that good scientists describe their data, describe the caveats, and describe the conditions by which they may or may not be right. I had also, obviously, with cold fusion, interviewed some of the worst scientists in the world. I used to joke with my friends in the physics community that if you want to cleanse your discipline of the worst scientists in it, every three or four years, you should have someone publish a bogus paper claiming to make some remarkable new discovery — infinite free energy or ESP, or something suitably cosmic like that. Then you have it published in a legitimate journal ; it shows up on the front page of the New York Times, and within two months, every bad scientist in the field will be working on it. Then you just take the ones who publish papers claiming to replicate the effect, and you throw them out of the field. A way of cleaning out the bottom of the barrel.

INTERVIEWER I thought your NY Times article, “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie,” sort of did that. The people who came out against it, they were all the bad journalists. Just throw them out!

TAUBES Well, how I got onto that: I was doing this story for Science on salt and blood pressure, looking into the controversy about whether salt consumption plays any role at all in raising blood pressure and causing hypertension. One of the prime players in this salt/blood pressure controversy was obviously one of the worst scientists I’d ever met — one of the five worst…you can’t say, in that five, who is the very worst, but they’re all pretty bad. This is a group that includes guys like Stan Pons and Martin Fleischman who claimed to have discovered cold fusion. While I’m on the phone with this guy, interviewing him, he takes credit for getting Americans to eat less fat and fewer eggs. I literally finished the interview, called my editor at Science, and I said “You know, one of the worst scientists I’ve ever interviewed just took credit for getting Americans to eat less fat and fewer eggs, and I don’t know what the story is, but when I’m done with this salt story, I’m going to look into fat, cholesterol, and saturated fat.” I had a great relationship with Science. My editors had faith in me. If I said there was a story there, they’d give me the support I needed to pursue it. A year later, I ended up with that first story in Science, saying that there’s no evidence that reducing the total fat in the diet makes a damned bit of difference in our health. The evidence that saturated fat and monounsaturated fats are players is, at best, marginal. And that led to the N.Y. Times article.

Ok. So you googled heart disease or some other phrase for whatever reason for yourself or for someone you care about and the Track Your Plaque (TYP) program website came up in the search.

If you’re like I was (in late August of 2007) you’ve already spent time on some other sites dealing with coronary artery disease (CAD) and you weren’t that impressed. Sure, there are some sites that talk about the fact that you should improve your diet, the list of supplements you take, and/or your exercise program.

But then you came across the TYP website or maybe Dr. Davis’ HeartScanBlog and they just “feel” different to you. There are some audacious claims being made at both sites about dramatic positive changes in actual risk and risk factors related to CAD. But this Dr. Davis character sometimes goes on rants about how bad things are vis-a-vis CAD and you’re thinking to yourself “it can’t be this bad can it?” And some of his suggestions sure seem extreme.

“Give up wheat? Is he kidding?” Well, no, he’s not.

If you’ve gone through something like these stages and still, ready or not, you’re thinking now that you’d like to move forward as quickly as possible to follow the TYP program, I’ve written this post for you.

Below the fold, I sketch the steps related to lipoprotein blood testing that will jumpstart your Track Your Plaque program.

(image courtesy of nsc.org)

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A reader, Jim, was kind enough to provide a comment on my last post that I hope will be as useful to you to hear as it was to me to hear.

I had written that a strategy of presenting numbers demonstrating improvement in blood lipids went a long way in my getting taken more seriously within my HMO when asking for assistance in implementing the Track Your Plaque program.

Jim’s comment gives me even more hope that there are some shared lessons that we might learn together in our fight against Coronary Artery Disease and, well, you know, our doctors.

I’m going to quote from Jim’s comment in full because I think his story is a great one that shows how it’s done.

Enjoy.

And thanks Jim!

(image courtesy of tuxpaint.com)

Your experience dovetails with mine. My primary care Doc, whom I’d been fighting with for years about my cholesterol, is now very much onboard and helpful once he saw the results from my blood work and serial heartscans. He is now willing to authorize NMR, Vit D, Lp(a) tests now that my numbers have shown such a tremendous response with minimal drugs (10 mg simvastatin, 2 g niacin). Originally, he didn’t even want to do Lp(a) because he said it was so hard to change. After dropping it to 1/4 of what it was before, he is getting very supportive. He is a great source of information about the drugs and a good sounding board for what I want to do. In contrast, my wife’s primary doc simply won’t get on board, Her LDL is way down so he has no interests in looking at Lp(a), Vit D or anything else. Says its not necessary. We’ll soon be looking for another primary care Dr.

I have consulted a couple of local cardiologists and looked at the profiles of others at my HMO. The one I talked to just said that one just had to learn to live with heart disease. I went to one outside who was known for being different, but though she has a non-surgical orientation she isn’t at all aggressive about dealing with things and knew less than I did about the lipid class issues. So I passed on her as well.

I have recently become convinced that finding a “cardiologist” isn’t necessarily the key to success for integrating Track Your Plaque program (TYP) practice with your HMO or other types of medical care.

I lucked out and am now well on my way to 100% integration. I’m not exaggerating: If I continue to prove myself worthy, I can easily see continuous and permanent 100% integration.

I can’t go into detail at this time. At some point, I believe I’ll be able to describe the incredible support for TYP and my more general health that I worked to establish and that I’ve found within my HMO.

In short, I have found a local TYP program Jedi Master to assist me under the tutelage of Dr. William “Yoda” Davis.

For now, what I can say is that I believe getting help from ANY medical professional who is already familiar with TYP or is open to new ideas is more important than that they be a cardiologist or even a doctor. I DID luck out. I lucked out incredibly. But I also followed a particular path, without understanding the full implications of what I was doing, that made the odds of things going well much higher. Let me explain…

(image courtesy of msn.com)

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