The heart, as the “blood pump,” is the center of the circulatory system.

Cardiovascular disease is the number-one cause of death in the United States. It vies with cancer for the infamous distinction of being the leading cause of death worldwide. The US has the highest incidence of cardiovascular disease, despite consuming half of the world’s cholesterol-lowering drugs which, we are told, prevent this condition. Compared to 100 years ago, our consumption of fat as a percentage of dietary calories has dropped by one-third, while the number of adults with heart disease has increased 10 to 30-fold in that same time. So we are eating a third less fat, and have perhaps 30 times more heart disease.

And then there are the essential non-physical aspects of the heart. As close as breath, as vital as the life stream of the blood, the heart is the center of our Being. In Chinese medicine, the character for Heart (xin) is the same as that for the mind. It depicts a branch with three birds alighting on it. Alternately, it is a vessel with three drops of blood above and in it. The Heart, in the oldest remaining Chinese medical test, is

“The Chinese character for the Heart is the outline of the actual shape of the heart. You see the Heart as a bowl or container, with blood drops in and around it. The three short lines can also be seen as the Spirits, or Shen, which reside in the Heart like birds resting on a branch.” – The Secret Treatise of the Spiritual Orchid, p. 33

The Heart controls the Blood and Blood Vessels; it moves the Blood through the Vessels. Blood in Oriental medicine is different from blood in Western medicine. The Heart is involved with all of the mental activities such as thought, memory and sleep, etc. We learn by heart, and have heart to heart talks. – Lecture Notes, Dr Robert Sohn

“The Heart holds the office of lord and sovereign. The radiance of the spirits stems from it”. – Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, Neijing Chapter 8

Click here to schedule a live or phone consultation about your health issues and goals! With 22 years of experience, I provide expert individualized diet, lifestyle, and supplement recommendations, as well as mentoring for health professionals.

Click here to book Michael as a speaker for your organization

Video: please visit my YouTube page for these videos on cholesterol and heart disease:

-          Intro to cardiovascular health seminar

-          The Cholesterol Myths

-          Boulder Ignite video

Audio: Please visit my radio show archives (click here) for these great interviews with Duane Graveline, MD, MPH, of www.spacedoc.net on the Statin Scam and the Misguided War on Cholesterol, and Mark Berger, MD on Metabolic Radiology.

A Deeper Dive: for detailed home learning programs on cardiovascular health and other topics on wellness and nutrition, consider these two:

Webinar for Heart Health Month

Wholistic Approach to Improving Cardiovascular Health

Option One: The Traditional Approach
See your physician (MD, DO) and ask for these tests to be ordered as part of your annual checkup.
Advantage: If you have insurance that covers these tests when ordered by a physician, this route will save you money.
Note: Other licensed health professionals, e.g. a chiropractor (DC), naturopath (ND) or acupuncturist (LAc), may be allowed to order blood and urine tests in your state. These clinicians may also be more open to ordering the less-used tests discussed in these articles.
Disadvantages: One challenge some folks have is their physician may not order the test, and so their insurance, if they have it, will not cover it.

Option Two: The Health Freedom Approach
One of the most significant developments in health freedom is online lab testing services. They allow people in most states to order whatever lab tests they wish, without a doctor’s prescription. The person selects and pays for the tests online, selects a local PSC (patient services center or “draw center”) for the blood or urine test, and receives results online in a few days. You usually pay the same or less than an insurance company would pay the lab for the same tests.
Some states have unfortunately banned such services from serving the citizens of those states, thereby restricting freedom of choice: my birthplace of New York (the most medieval of all states when it comes to lab testing), New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maryland. If, like me, you value health freedom and have an inclination towards citizen activism, please get active in obtaining of protecting online lab access in your state. It is one of the most important ways to stay out of our broken disease-management/medical system.

There are two online lab-access services that I use and recommend:
● www.directlabs.com/online, and www.privatemdlabs.com/online:

These services learned that I was offering trainings nationally to thousands of other health professionals, including the seminar entitled “Clinical Application of Laboratory Analysis,” available here as a recorded seminar with notes, and offered to package the exact profiles that I use and teach, at a large discount for the public. You will find the profiles I created for Cardiovascular Health, Blood Sugar, Thyroid and Comprehensive Annual Blood Tests (which includes the first three and more), at a significant savings.
Advantage: You can order any tests you like. Then you bring your tests to a natural healthcare professional to interpret the findings, and create a natural, drug-free, customized approach to address any imbalances you find. We can also do this for you in a live or phone consultation – details below.
Disadvantage: You pay for the tests yourself. If you do not have insurance, or have a high-deductible policy, it makes no difference. My family, like many others who steer clear of the medical system except in emergencies, have a high-deductible, low-cost insurance plan linked to a Health Savings Account (HSA, MSA, FSA) to cover severe injury or other catastrophic events. Ours has a $10,000 deductible, and covers 100% of all costs above that. We contribute about $600/month to our HSA, which we use for everything from chiropractic to dental to physician services. Even better, contributions to an HSA accrue interest, and are usually tax-deductible (see your accountant for specifics).

Option Three: The Hybrid Option for Those with Health Insurance
Get as many of the tests discussed in these articles ordered by your physician and paid for by your insurance plan. Then use one of the online lab services for the rest.
Advantage: Get all the tests you want, at the lowest cost for those with health insurance
Disadvantage: None. You can even save a visit to the draw center/PSC by scheduling the insurance- and self-paid tests at the same visit.

Click here to schedule a live or phone consultation about your health issues and goals. With 23 years of experience, I provide expert individualized diet, lifestyle, and supplement recommendations, as well as mentoring for health professionals.

Click here to book Michael as a speaker for your organization

In normal health, your body converts excess homocysteine into methionine, an essential sulfur-containing amino acid. These two amino acids convert into each other as needed. You convert the potentially-problematic homocysteine into the essential methionine through a process called methylation. Methylation is an important pathway in human physiology for detoxifying or otherwise getting rid of potentially harmful substances, like mercury.

Optimal: below 9

Small problem: 9-14

Big Problem: 15+

Elevated homocysteine is associated with many plaque-related cardiovascular diseases, such as stroke and atherosclerosis (plaque in and hardening of the arteries).

I was sitting in my favorite internet café in Boulder (Amante North) one day. I was working there while my son Joseph was in his Shining Mountain Waldorf Kindergarten class. It a sunny, clear day and a busy time at Amante, with every seat full of folks with laptops and lattes. The frustrated gent sharing a table with me asked if he could borrow my laptop to access patient information, as his was on the fritz. I gladly agreed, and struck up a conversation. He was an internal medicine physician, who had recently completed a fellowship in homocysteine research (no accidents!) and entered private practice.

We recalled the then-recent study-of-studies (systemic review and meta-analysis) published in the prestigious medical journal, the Lancet, which concluded that supplementation with the (synthetic) vitamins B6, B12 and folate were ineffective at lowering homocysteine. He commented, “Those findings surprised us.” My reply was, “I wasn’t surprised, because of the spotty results with synthetic vitamins, and because these chemical isolates are not enough to optimize normal homocysteine metabolism.” He agreed. I continued, “And as you know, betaine is needed for the methylation of homocysteine into methionine.” He stared at me, stunned. “Almost no physician or researcher knows that – how do you know that?” I simply pointed out that I was a nutritionist experienced the use of diet and whole-food supplementation in helping people improve and maintain their health, and that I recommended a beet concentrate to naturally optimize methylation and support homocysteine metabolism. He replied that although he had never studied that approach, that it made sense. It was a wonderful and affirming connection with this expert in homocysteine.

The supplement I was referring to, one of the most significant of all nutritional supplements, is Standard Process’ humble Betafood. Betafood, introduced 70 years ago in 1943, is a concentrate of organic beet greens and beet root. Beets are nature’s best source of naturally-occurring betaine. Betaine is called a tri-methyl donor, because one molecule of it can donate three methyl groups to the methylation process. Methylation (and therefore Betafood) is useful as an early step in detoxifying mercury. Mercury toxicity can be checked with hair mineral analysis from Analytical Research Labs.

What to do if homocysteine is high?

-          Diet: eat beets! Beet greens and beet root are wonderful foods for liver and gallbladder health

-          Supplementation: Betafood, 6 per day until homocysteine levels are below 9. It helps to thin the bile and prevent sluggish/thick bile, which is the main cause of gallbladder problems.

-          Extra health tip: I recommend that everyone take two bottles of Betafood each year to preserve the health of their gallbladder. Its much better to keep your gallbladder than not, because it is so important in three ways:

1. Detoxification: the liver puts harmful chemicals that cannot be eliminated through your kidneys into your bile, to be eliminated through the stool. The gallbladder stores and concentrates bile. Bile is 83% water and so should be thin and easy-flowing. Problems occur (sludge, sand, gravel and eventually stones) when the bile becomes too thick.

2. Fat digestion: bile emulsifies (breaks down) fat into smaller, easier-to-assimilate pieces. If you don’t have a healthy gallbladder to secrete bile into your intestines after you eat, you will not optimally digest fat and absorb fat-soluble vitamins. Since fat-soluble vitamins are by far the most important, this often leads to a progressive decline in overall health and resilience.

3. Acid neutralization: Bile is alkaline, partly in order to neutralize the acidic food (chime) that enters the small intestine from the stomach. Without that nice timed pile of bile in your small intestine (duodenum) after you eat, that acidic chyme can burn and injure the delicate tissues there.

Given the shocking fact that there are 600,000 gallbladders removed each year in the US alone (almost all of which are preventable), it makes sense to do what you can to keep your gallbladder. And ignore the medical nonsense that you don’t need this important organ. God put it there for a reason. Take care of it.

Please join us at CSTCM in Denver on May 4^th (on the Autoimmune Process) and May 5^th (understanding lab tests, for clinicians and patients), or view the seminar as a live internet stream. For more info, please visit http://gaetacommunications.com/site/.

Click here to schedule a live or phone consultation about your health issues and goals. With 23 years of experience, I provide expert individualized diet, lifestyle, and supplement recommendations, as well as mentoring for health professionals.

Click here to book Michael as a speaker for your organization

Video: please visit my YouTube page for these videos on cholesterol and heart disease:

-          Intro to cardiovascular health seminar

-          The Cholesterol Myths

-          Boulder Ignite video

Audio: Please visit my radio show archives (click here) for these great interviews with Duane Graveline, MD, MPH, of www.spacedoc.net on the Statin Scam and the Misguided War on Cholesterol, and Mark Berger, MD on Metabolic Radiology.

A Deeper Dive: for detailed home learning programs on cardiovascular health and other topics on wellness and nutrition, consider these two:

Webinar for Heart Health Month

Wholistic Approach to Improving Cardiovascular Health

So let’s look at which tests matter most. This is important, because millions of people are living with either a false sense of security (“My cholesterol is low, so I’m fine”), or a false sense of concern (“My cholesterol is high, so I’m going to die of a heart attack”). Let’s avoid both mistakes and do it right. Lots more detail on CVD risk assessment, thyroid and adrenal health, blood sugar, inflammation and more in the very important live 8-hour seminar in Denver on May 5^th, 2013.

As established in earlier articles , the only reason you and I were told that cholesterol is bad, and a meaningful marker for CVD risk, was solely because there are drugs great at lowering it. The truly important tests are ignored by the medical establishment and mainstream media, simply because there are no drugs that affect those markers. The only things that get attention are those things that drugs can affect, regardless of how (in)significant they are. So here are the blood tests that can help:

Cardiovascular Risk Blood Analysis
Here are the tests that evidence and experience supports the use of (unlike cholesterol):
● Cardiac C-Reactive Protein
● Lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (PLAC)
● Homocysteine
● Fibrinogen
● Lipoprotein (a)
● Fasting Insulin
● Triglycerides

Useful Blood Marker #1: High-Sensitivity or Cardiac-Reactive Protein
a.k.a. Cardiac CRP, Cardio CRP, High-Sensitivity C-Reactive Protein, CCRP, HS-CRP
Sample reference ranges:
Optimal: below 1
Small problem: 1-3
Big problem: 4+

I think you and I are clear at this point that cholesterol is good and protective, and not the cause of cardiovascular disease (CVD). CVD is an inflammatory and nutritional deficiency condition. Inflammation in the blood vessels triggers a cascade of events that lead to the formation of artery-clogging plaque, which is made partly of cholesterol and calcium. Since inflammation in your blood vessels is the primary cause, wouldn’t it be great to know how much inflammation you have in your arteries? You can, through two essential blood tests that measure how “hot” it is in there.

The first is a more sensitive version of the standard CRP test. Standard CRP tells you if there is inflammation or infection somewhere in the body, but not where. It measures a protein created by the liver in response to acute or chronic inflammation. It has been shown to be non-predictive of CVD risk. The more sensitive C-CRP is more specific to vascular inflammation, which is the main cause CVD.

Published studies:
“Of the inflammatory markers evaluated by a CDC and American Heart Association (AHA) Panel in 2002, only C-reactive protein (CRP) met the analytical requirements for outpatient clinical use and, therefore, has been studied intensely over the past decade. More than 25 prospective epidemiologic studies have shown that CRP is a strong and independent predictor of future myocardial infarction, ischemic stroke, peripheral arterial disease, and sudden cardiac death in apparently healthy men and women.”
Source: “High-Sensitivity C-Reactive Protein and Cardiac C-Reactive Protein Assays: Is There a Need to Differentiate?” Clinical Chemistry, July 2006 vol. 52 no. 7 1254-1256

The weakness of both tests (CRP and C-CRP) is their susceptibility to false positives. This means that they can be elevated for reasons other than (vascular) inflammation. For example, they can be elevated if, at the time you have your blood drawn, you have an active infection, recent trauma or injury, or recent surgery. Smoking or being overweight may also raise this marker, though obesity and smoking are also two major contributors to CVD. Overweight people often have insulin resistance, a major contributor to inflammation. Smokers are generally also chronically inflamed, from the toxicity, nutritional deficiencies and the direct heat caused by this deadly habit.
Case example: Mary was a 62-year old patient who came in for her first visit with blood work from her physician showing a CCRP of 15. She and her physician were very concerned. I asked her to think back to the day she had her blood drawn, and it turns out that she was in the middle of a bad flu, with a fever of 102, and had also fallen the day before and badly bruised her arm. I recommended she repeat the CCRP when she was uninjured and feeling fine, and the result was a slightly elevated 1.5.

Sample schedule:
Adjust your schedule depending on your results (more often if high), and if you have a family history of CVD.
Age 18-40: every 3-5 years
Age 41-60: every 2 years
Age 61+: every year

What to do if CCRP is high? This calls for the anti-inflammatory lifestyle, which includes:
-          Regular exercise (one to four hours per week)
-          Optimize your weight (especially eliminating belly fat)
-          Avoid pro-inflammatory and otherwise detrimental foods, such as sugar, non-fermented soy, pasteurized milk, trans-fats (hydrogenated oils), artificial sweeteners and chemicals, etc.
-          Assess your heavy metal toxicity with hair mineral analysis through Analytical Research Labs (health professionals can contact us  for more info). Heavy metals, or toxic elements, can be quite inflammatory. Work with a natural health professional trained in heavy metal detoxification protocols if elevated. Repeat hair analysis every three months until clean.
-          Eat protective foods that can help reduce inflammation: a colorful diet of organic berries and vegetables, grass-fed beef, pastured poultry, raw dairy, organic eggs, and healthy fats such as olive and coconut.
-          Work with a health professional to do a guided purification program. The one I use myself and with patients, which I consider the most natural and physiologically balanced, is the Standard Process Purification Program, which could be done once per year for three weeks, or twice per year for 10 days.
-          Supplements:
● I take and recommend Standard Process’ Tuna Omega-3 Oil. This is a clean, sustainably-harvested, minimally-processed tuna oil that has no detectable PCBs, peroxides or mercury. I have had better results with this formula than others which provide larger doses of omega-3.
● Standard Process’ Cyruta-Plus is a wonderful whole-food concentrate of organically-grown buckwheat leaf and seed. It is rich in bioflavonoids, vitamin C complex, and vitamin P (the “capillary fragility factor”). Buckwheat also improves insulin sensitivity, reduces elevated blood sugar, improves the integrity and elasticity of blood vessels. I often recommend this formula for folks with chronic or acute inflammation, weak blood vessels (varicose and spider veins, hemorrhoids, easy bruising), and elevated blood sugar or fasting insulin.
Source: “Effect of total flavones of buckwheat seed on lowering serum lipid, glucose and anti-lipid peroxidation.” – Chinese Pharmacological Bulletin, June 2001

A physician colleague conducted an informal study in his clinic. He gave 352 patients with elevated C-CRP Cyruta-Plus for six months, then repeated the test. He had 100% success in lowering this important marker with Cyruta-Plus.

Please join us at CSTCM in Denver on May 4^th (on the Autoimmune Process) and May 5^th (understanding lab tests, for clinicians and patients), or view the seminar as a live internet stream (details to follow). For  more info, please visit http://gaetacommunications.com/site/.

Autoimmune Disease and Nutritional Application of Blood, Urine and Hair Testing
Sat. May 4 – Sun. May 5, in Denver. 16 CEU for LAc, DC.
For more information click here.

What is AI? It is a condition in which a part of your immune system, the part that makes antibodies to specific proteins, creates too many antibodies (autoantibodies) that attack a certain type of your own cells. An antibody is like a shark that hunts and eats only one type of fish. In normal health they mostly attack foreign proteins, like pathogenic (disease-causing) bacteria. In AI they attack your own tissues, causing further destruction of that tissue. Some examples of AI include rheumatoid arthritis (1% of the world population), Hashimoto’s hypothyroidism, Graves’ hyperthyroidism, lupus, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes type 1.

What causes the immune system to attack one’s own body? The main pattern underlying AI is a deficiency or weakness in the affected tissue, gland or organ. When that tissue breaks down (necrosis), often from poor nutrition, toxicity, injury, chronic inflammation or infection, it eventually leaks fragments of the dead cells into the bloodstream, triggering an autoantibody response. Those autoantibodies, which are normal and healthy in small amounts, become excessive, seeking and attacking that body tissue.

Another cause of AI is “molecular mimicry,” in which antibodies begin to attack normal cells whose appearance is close enough to the disease-causing cell it is specialized for. It’s as if the shark designed to attack only one type of fish starts to eat a different fish that looks similar. This is why vaccines are a significant cause of autoimmune disease, and partly why the US has more AI per capita than any other country. It is because we are, by far, the most vaccinated population in the world, despite a lack of credible scientific evidence that vaccines prevent infectious disease. And so we suffer the most from what the medical journal Clinical Immunology describes as “vaccine-induced autoimmunity.” ⁵ Besides vaccines, “hidden” infections and a leaky gut can also contribute to molecular mimicry and AI.

Click here to schedule a live or phone consultation about your health issues and goals! With 22 years of experience, I provide expert individualized diet, lifestyle, and supplement recommendations, as well as mentoring for health professionals.

Click here to book Michael as a speaker for your organization

The second greatest hoax in modern medicine, after vaccines, is the cholesterol myth.  Here’s the truth: Blood cholesterol levels, the amount of cholesterol in the blood, are not predictive of cardiovascular disease. You can’t figure your chance of having a heart attack, heart disease, or a stroke from looking at your blood cholesterol levels. In other words, what you suck out of the vein in a blood test is the blood cholesterol, which does not tell you what’s happening in the lining of your blood vessels. It doesn’t tell you the plaque status of that blood vessel. It just shows you what’s floating around in the blood.

Half of the people who have heart attacks have “normal” cholesterol. Half of the people who have strokes have “normal” cholesterol. So you could flip a coin about all those millions of heart attacks that happen annually as to what those people’s cholesterol levels are. And many countries, like Sweden, where the people have higher cholesterol, have much less heart disease.

There is no relationship between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease, because cholesterol in the blood or diet has nothing to do with it (other than helping protect you from the real problem, which is inflammation). Cholesterol is good because cholesterol is protective. Blaming heart disease on cholesterol is blaming the firefighter for the fire. The dangerous situation is when cholesterol is too low – below 150. Then your risk of depression, suicide, violent behavior, cancer and infections goes up.

Reducing blood cholesterol does not reduce cardiovascular disease risk. This is one of the greatest lies foisted upon the planet by the drug industry, that lowering cholesterol will keep you safe. If you just get that number down, everything will be fine. That’s a lie. The average person’s cholesterol level in the US, without medication, is about 220. That’s why Big Pharma created, out of thin air, an upper limit of 200, so everyone would be scared/scammed into taking the drugs. Because the only reliable way to get most people’s cholesterol down below 200 is with drugs. This happened after the upper limit of cholesterol was 330, for decades, until the first statin drug, Mevacor, came out in 1987.

Cholesterol drugs do not reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease or heart attack in people who do not have heart disease. Yet this is how they are being used. They are being used preventatively in people who have no heart disease, when in fact they are completely ineffective in primary prevention – preventing that first heart attack or heart disease development.

Plus, statin drugs are known to increase your risk of cancer, memory loss, depression, diabetes, loss of sexual desire and performance, heart failure, muscle and nerve damage, and more. Not to worry, though. There are other drugs for all that.

I had a patient come in some time ago. She said, “My doctor said I have high cholesterol and I should take a drug.” I said, “Well, how high was your cholesterol before he prescribed the drug?”  She said, “183.” The lab reference range on the blood test showed an upper limit of 169! Based, of course, on no credible science or evidence (sounds like vaccines!). In almost every case, these drugs are being prescribed for people who do not have heart disease and have not had a heart attack. They are most often used preventatively, when there is no credible evidence to support this. It’s amazing how many smart, well-intentioned people (most physicians) do not question the unproven cholesterol hypothesis. The few who do are shocked—first at how little credible evidence exists, and second at how much pressure there is for doctors to stay in the box and stick to this fact-free “standard of care.”

Join me as I interview one who has – Uffe Ravsnkov, MD, PhD, a courageous physician (that’s rare these days, because doctors who don’t tow the party line are threatened and persecuted professionally), who challenged the cholesterol assumptions and found them to be baseless and untrue. His book, and our topic, will be The Cholesterol Myths. My live radio interview with him will be on March 21 at 11am PST on Contact Talk Radio (click here).

Address the real issues of cardiovascular health – not this ridiculous red herring of cholesterol – by eating a whole foods diet, getting enough physical activity, and taking whole-food and plant-based supplements (not synthetics). If you’d like help creating your personal heart health program, just click here for a live or phone appointment. And remember, go for drug-free!

My main recommendations for you would be to eat a diet high in healthy fats—olive oil, pasture-fed meats (e.g. grassfed beef, pastured chicken and eggs), coconut oil, etc, and very low in bad fats—hydrogenated, corn, canola, soy, polyunsaturated flower oils, etc. For more, see these excellent books at Selene River Press:Cholesterol Facts and Fantasies; Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill; and Know Your Fats.

The Ultimate Next Step: Join us live for a whole day on how to understand your lab tests, and what to do about it (for health professionals and the health-conscious public), on Sunday, May 5^th, 2013 in beautiful Denver, CO. We’ll do a whole updated section on cardiovascular risk markers. The day before (May 4^th) we are spending the whole day on the causes, prevention and reversal of autoimmune disease, which not affects at least 1 in 12 Americans. By the way, we are the global epicenter of autoimmune disease partly because we are the most vaccinated nation on earth. Register by March 4^th and receive a coupon for learning programs atwww.gaetacommunciations.com for your entire registration fee, making the seminar(s) free! This will be the only event of its kind that I am offering in 2013. CEUs for acupuncturists. Click here to register.

Video: please visit my YouTube page for these videos on cholesterol and heart disease:

-          Intro to cardiovascular health seminar

-          The Cholesterol Myths

-          Boulder Ignite video

Audio: Please visit my radio show archives (click here) for these great interviews with Duane Graveline, MD, MPH, of www.spacedoc.net on the Statin Scam and the Misguided War on Cholesterol, and Mark Berger, MD on Metabolic Radiology.

A Deeper Dive: for detailed home learning programs on cardiovascular health and other topics on wellness and nutrition, consider these two:

Webinar for Heart Health Month

Wholistic Approach to Improving Cardiovascular Health

Above all, remember that cholesterol is protective, and good! See you in Denver in May!

Peace,

Michael

Thankfully, no. Cholesterol, a type of fat created in the liver, intestines, brain and adrenal glands, is essential to life. We obtain only 20-25% of our total body cholesterol from food. The less we eat the more we make, because without enough of it we die. It is an essential part of the cell membrane of the human body’s 60-100 trillion cells, and that of all mammals. The liver uses cholesterol to create fat-digesting and toxin-clearing bile. We make the highly protective Vitamin D from cholesterol. And our adrenal and reproductive glands make their hormones from cholesterol. Let’s look a bit more closely at how you and I need this critical nutrient to regulate most of the functions in the body.

The endocrine, or hormonal system, is the most important control system in the body. Dr Royal Lee created the first and still finest whole-food multi-nutrient supplement, Catalyn, in 1929. He wrote that one of the main functions of this nutritive whole-body formula was to support the proper functioning of the all-important endocrine system. Our hormones are chemical messengers created by seven levels of glands to regulate all physical, mental and emotional activity.

Our body creates two critical groups of hormones, reproductive hormones and those made in the adrenal cortex, from cholesterol. The adrenal cortex is the outer shell of the adrenal glands which wrap around the core, or medulla. It is both the spark plug and the armor that motivates action and allows us to handle stress and change well.

Cholesterol is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented parts of our bodies and health. Simply put, cholesterol is an essential nutrient for life and resilience. It has been given a bad reputation in order to sell toxic and dangerous drugs, especially “statins,” which have no benefit in women, and very little benefit in men.

Our bodies turn cholesterol into reproductive and adrenal hormones, making it critical to health. You may have heard that female endurance athletes who eat a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet may stop menstruating, which is true. Such women (and men) usually have many, less obvious, adverse effects from such a deficient, depleting diet.

In reality, low cholesterol (below 150) is far more dangerous than high (supposedly above 200). The average blood cholesterol (unmedicated) in the US is a nice, healthy 220. Low cholesterol is associated with an increased risk of depression, suicide, violent behavior, cancer and infections. This is why the less cholesterol we eat, the more we make. And since more women have heart disease than men, you should know that there is no relationship between saturated fat and cholesterol in the diet and heart disease, and no correlation between blood cholesterol levels below 330 and heart disease. Tragically, the standard of care in conventional medicine is to keep the blood cholesterol levels of diabetics below 100.

My main recommendations for you would be to eat a diet high in healthy fats—olive oil, pasture-fed meats (e.g. grassfed beef, pastured chicken and eggs), coconut oil, etc, and very low in bad fats—hydrogenated, corn, canola, soy, polyunsaturated flower oils, etc. For more, see these excellent books at Selene River Press: Cholesterol Facts and Fantasies; Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill; and Know Your Fats.

The Ultimate Next Step: Join us live for a whole day on how to understand your lab tests, and what to do about it (for health professionals and the health-conscious public), on Sunday, May 5^th, 2013 in beautiful Denver, CO. We’ll do a whole updated section on cardiovascular risk markers. The day before (May 4^th) we are spending the whole day on the causes, prevention and reversal of autoimmune disease, which not affects at least 1 in 12 Americans. By the way, we are the global epicenter of autoimmune disease partly because we are the most vaccinated nation on earth. Register by March 4^th and receive a coupon for learning programs at www.gaetacommunciations.com for your entire registration fee, making the seminar(s) free! This will be the only event of its kind that I am offering in 2013. CEUs for acupuncturists. Click here to register.

To evaluate your risk of cardiovascular disease, for advice on useful tests to do (which don’t include cholesterol, I promise!), and suggestions on lifestyle, diet and food- and plant-based supplementation, schedule a live (in New York or Colorado) or phone consultation here.

Video: please visit my YouTube page for these videos on cholesterol and heart disease:

-          Intro to cardiovascular health seminar

-          The Cholesterol Myths

-          Boulder Ignite video

Audio: Please visit my radio show archives (click here) for these great interviews with Duane Graveline, MD, MPH, of www.spacedoc.net on the Statin Scam and the Misguided War on Cholesterol, and Mark Berger, MD on Metabolic Radiology.

A Deeper Dive: for detailed home learning programs on cardiovascular health and other topics on wellness and nutrition, consider these two:

Webinar for Heart Health Month

Wholistic Approach to Improving Cardiovascular Health

Above all, remember that cholesterol is protective, and good! See you in Denver in May!

Cardiovascular disease is not a disease of cholesterol, but inflammation. Cholesterol is actually protective. It contributes to long life, and resistance to infections and cancer. Blaming cholesterol for heart disease is like blaming the firefighter for the fire. You need cholesterol for your brain and nerves to function, and to make adrenal and sex hormones, and vitamin D. If it was so harmful, why would your liver make 85% of the total amount in your body? Did you know that the less you eat, the more you make, and the more you eat, the less you make?

In 20 years as a clinical nutritionist, herbalist and acupuncturist, I have seen that confused look in hundreds of patients when I unplug them from The Matrix and let them know that cholesterol is good, and essential to vitality and resilience.

Here’s how it goes. You go in for your annual physical. Your doctor tells you your cholesterol is high, and you need a statin to lower it, so you won’t die of a heart attack. But what’s high? What was maximum normal cholesterol in 1984? 330. That’s right, 330, because cholesterol levels naturally rise with age. Three years later, in 1987, the first statin drug came out, and it wasn’t selling well. So the medical propaganda machine made up a new lie that cholesterol was evil, and scared people into taking a drug to get their cholesterol down to the new upper limit of 200. 200 is not based on science or evidence, but brilliant marketing. Cholesterol is one of the greatest scams in history. In fact, about half of all heart attacks and strokes happen in people with normal cholesterol.

Plus, your doctor didn’t mention that there’s no statin benefit for women, and about 100 men need to take a statin for just one to benefit. By comparison, if just three people take a placebo, one will show benefit.

Just to be clear, there is no credible evidence linking dietary or blood cholesterol to cardiovascular disease, as dad’s cardiologist claimed. And statins are not only ineffective, but dangerous. Did you know that diseases caused by statins include diabetes, cancer, nerve and muscle damage, depression, suicide and, ironically, heart failure? Another common side effect is something we Italians call “stunad,” which means stupid. The medical term is impaired cognition, and includes dementia and memory loss. It’s easy to remember because statin, stunad and stupid all sound alike.

There are excellent lab tests for finding out what your risk of heart disease is. Cholesterol is not one of them. These tests, such as urinary proteins, get ignored because there are no drugs to lower them. The only reason anyone is even discussing cholesterol is because there are drugs that are great at lowering it. Please contact us to schedule [link to fullslate] a live or phone consultation to discuss useful lab tests and create a plan of action to prevent this needless disease.

So what do you do for cardiovascular health? First, ignore blood cholesterol, and be not afraid of foods that contain it. Get informed before doing anything to lower it. Next, eat plenty of healthy fats, like grassfed beef, organic eggs, wild fish and olive oil, and cut down on your sugar and starch intake.

See a natural health professional who understands which tests really matter, and what to do about it.

Exercise 1-3 hours each week, emphasizing high-intensity, short-duration resistive exercise. This is less than the Boulder normal of four hours a day, but it’s all you need.

Take whole-food supplements, including fish oil, and not synthetic vitamins. Let’s meet live or by phone [link to fullslate] to create a diet and supplementation program to address your concerns and meet your goals. As an old saying goes in Chinese medicine, “The inferior physician treats disease; the superior physician prevents disease and nourishes life.”

Love your cholesterol, because it loves you!

One evening many years ago, as I was driving from Kew Gardens to Syosset to teach a class in Chinese medicine theory at my alma mater, the New York College of Health Professions, I was listening to National Public Radio. The interviewer was speaking with the head of the Department of Oncology (cancer) at Stonybrook University Hospital. He asked, “Isn’t cancer genetic? Don’t you get cancer because it’s in your genes to get it? Much to his surprise, the oncologist replied, “5-10% of cancer is genetic. The rest is lifestyle choices.” There was a rare moment of talk radio silence as the stunned interviewer absorbed what he just heard, from a remarkably credible source. He even asked the good doctor to repeat what he had just said, so shocking were its implications.

A common fallacy in the area of health is genetic determinism – that there is nothing you can do to change your health outcomes and future, because of your genes. This is the “DNA is destiny” nonsense. For example, cancer is blamed on genes, though even the hyper-conservative National Cancer Institute acknowledges that 2/3 of all cancer is lifestyle. Genetic testing rubs the microscopic crystal ball to prognosticate what illnesses we will manifest someday. Nonsense. Wealthy people spend up to $100,000 to have their own genome sequenced. A misguided waste.

“People will think that because genes play a role in something, they determine everything. We see, again and again, people saying, ‘It’s all genetic. I can’t do anything about it.’ That’s nonsense. To say that something has a genetic component does not make it unchangeable.” – Eric Lander, PhD, one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project.

Patients, having believed the popular misinformation that “There’s nothing you can do. Just hope for the best,” are surprised and relieved to learn that by making conscious lifestyle choices consistently, they can live better, have more vitality and resilience, prevent most disease, and change their future. Each of us has both genetic/innate and acquired factors which influence our well-being, and by far the most important are the acquired influences – what we perceive, pay attention to, eat, breathe, express and do.

Genetic factors are inborn and unchangeable, our fixed ancestral inheritance, the hand we are dealt. In Chinese medicine, they represent our hereditary constitutional potential, or destiny (Ming). Very few of us even approach this level of capacity or function. Each of us has great untapped potential to manifest strength, emotional maturity, creativity, greatness of character and spiritual development. This time in history is perhaps an unprecedented opportunity to manifest our innate greatness.

“Everyone has the power for greatness – not for fame, but greatness, because greatness is determined by service.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Acquired influences are those that occur after birth, and include diet, rest and activity, and other lifestyle choices we make each day. The point is to, as the Serenity prayer states, to accept what cannot change, change what we can, and know the difference. It is to this goal, of making healthier choices in our lives to enhance strength, vitality and peace, which wholistic care is dedicated.

Lifestyle choices and experiences control our epigenetics, which largely determine which genes are expressed and which are not. Epigenetics is how you play the hand you are dealt. It is largely governed by lifestyle choices: nutrition; exercise; thoughts, attitudes and what we express; environmental influences, e.g. toxins, radiation; life experience and how we perceive it.

I have a strong family history of heart disease and heart attacks. That is a tendency or propensity, no more. I eat well, take the best supplements in the world, exercise 3-4 times each week, love those I care about deeply, do meaningful work that serves the whole, cultivate heartful and honest relationships, and (usually) get enough rest – all to enjoy life, and also to prevent the family heart disease pattern from manifesting in myself. What are the choices you are making in these simple areas of food, exercise and attitude? Are you more or less well than five years ago? What’s your well-being trajectory – up or down? What can you do today – eat more nutrient-dense foods, get off your butt and go for a walk, do a set of pushups, tell someone you care about that you love and appreciate them, send thoughts of healing or blessing to someone in need? Small and simple changes often create huge and dramatic results.

If you’d like help identifying your highest-value changes, and making them, through food, exercise, inner work and correct food- and plant-based supplementation, just go to gaetacommunications.com to set up an appointment – live in Boulder or New York, or by phone. To learn on your own about changes that work, just visit our store. Have a new experience, then help others do the same.

It’s also been a year of being broken open and becoming an orphan, with my deeply-loved mother passing away suddenly and tragically two months ago. What challenge, loss or pain have you felt in the past year? Has it made you softer or harder? More open or closed? Just notice.

Finally, it has been a year of deepening—becoming softer and more heartful, yet more resilient and direct. What has deepened in you – become more a part of the evolving fabric of your being?

Proverbs 29:18 famously states, “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” Like many of us at this time of year, and especially with the dawn of a new era from the perspective of the Mayan calendar, I have been “visioning” the coming year and beyond. To, as the late, great Steven Covey taught, “begin with the end in mind.” What is Life seeking to bring through you in the days to come? What of your brilliance, love and courage would serve and be a powerful contribution in these days?

The “law” that Proverbs speaks of is the Law of Life, what we speak of in Chinese medicine as Yang and Yin: radiation and response, cause and effect, giving and receiving freely into life. You and I receive on the basis of what we give. How can you and I refine our thoughts, words and actions, and be more clear, honest and kind, to the greater blessing of those in our life and beyond?

Now, and I say this to both of us, is the time to be big, serve big and have courage. If this is indeed the time of a Great World Transition (see my recent interview with Duane Elgin), then you and I came at this time to help it happen—to boldly participate, to open ourselves and each other to the largeness of who we are and why we are here. Thank you for showing up in these days, to be awake and helping others awaken, to reveal the innate greatness of your Being, to be a Big Blessing.

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