Vitamin
C and Vascular Disease
Introduction
Our Distant Ancestors Lost The Ability to Produce
Vitamin C
Ice Ages, Scurvy and Natural Selection
Risk Factors: Lipoprotein(a), LDL, Lipids and Oxidized
Cholesterol
All The Known Actions of Ascorbate
Lipoprotein(a) Is The Real Risk Factor for Vascular
Disease
You May Have to Educate Your Doctor
The Startling Facts about Lipoprotein(a)
Animals in The Wild Do Not Get Heart Attacks
The Cost in Lives
The Cost in Dollars
Program for The Reversal of Heart Disease
An
individual by the name of Matthias Rath, M.D. has come up with a comprehensive
explanation of the cause, prevention, and treatment of vascular disease which I
find rational and compelling. Dr. Rath has done seminal research at the
University of Hamburg and has published twelve papers in respected research
journals on the subject of vascular disease. He now lives in the U.S. and was a
friend and colleague of the only double Noble prize winner, the late Dr. Linus
Pauling. Dr. Rath has established a company called Health Now to educate the
public about the prevention and treatment of vascular disease. In his public
presentations and in his book Eradicating
Heart Disease, Dr. Rath explains the known facts from his research on
vascular disease and provides proof at each critical turn in his reasoning. I
have reviewed his work and concluded that what he has to say is critically
important. Therefore, I choose to throw what weight I have behind the effort to
bring Dr. Rath's information to your attention.
The best
part of Dr. Rath's discoveries is that they provide effective action anyone can
take to both prevent and treat vascular disease in a powerful way by natural
means without relying on Draconian changes in diet and lifestyle or dangerous
drugs which lower cholesterol but do nothing to decrease overall mortality. Let
us go to the beginning of this story.
It long
has been known that human beings do not produce ascorbic acid (vitamin C).
Because vitamin C — which I shall refer to as "ascorbate" from here
on out — is essential to life and because we cannot produce it, it is known as
a vitamin in human metabolism. We are rare among species, because almost all
mammals can make abundant supplies of ascorbate. There are only four species of
mammals which do not make their own ascorbate. These are (1) humans, (2)
gorillas, (3) guinea pigs and (4) fruit bats.
All
these species, except humans, are vegetarian by nature. Humans probably were
vegetarians with rare exception, until the invention of animal husbandry.
Gorillas are constantly foraging for plant food rich in vitamin C. Guinea pigs
do the same, and fruit bats, well, why do you suppose we them call them fruit
bats? These three animals know, by instinct, they must ingest large quantities
of ascorbate to stay healthy.
In the
body of an ascorbate-making mammal, the ascorbate molecule is made from a few
small modifications of the glucose molecule. Glucose is in abundant supply in
humans and animals at all times. There are four enzymes required to convert
glucose into vitamin C. Humans have the first three enzymes, having lost the
fourth enzyme somewhere in evolution.
In
mammals which retained the ability to make ascorbic acid, it is made in
response to all sorts of stress, especially the stress of infection. The normal
everyday non-stress production of ascorbate, when proportioned up to represent
the amount made on a weight basis corrected to the size of the average man
(seventy kilograms), is from five to ten grams (5,000-10,000 mg.) per day.
Under stress, that amount can be quadrupled.
Compare
this to the official federal government recommendation (RDA or recommended
deficiency allowance) of 60 mg. (six one-hundredths of one gram or 12
one-thousands of five grams). The increased production of ascorbate under
stress in animals goes a long way toward explaining why we do not see anything
like the rate of infection among animals which we see in human beings. When was
the last time you saw an animal with a cold?
Why did
these four mammals — humans, gorillas, guinea pigs and fruit bats — lose the
ability to make ascorbate? Probably, because they could. I suspect that these
four animals had abundant sources of ascorbate in their diets, and loss of
ability to produce their own ascorbate did not put them at excess risk of being
weeded out by natural selection. Only the human being has changed his dietary
preferences since then. Humans are the only species to both eat meat and be
unable to produce ascorbate. There are no other carnivores which cannot make
ascorbate.
This
explanation dovetails nicely with research in genetics which suggests that we
all had a common mother and a common father who lived sometime between 100,000
to 200,000 years ago, all other branches of the human family since having died
out. This would explain why all, and not just some, humans are deficient in
this fourth enzyme. These common ancestors are thought to have lived in
tropical regions of Africa where ascorbate-containing food was abundant.
However, our common ancestors did
not stay in Africa. They migrated to cover the entire earth. Then came the Ices
Ages, one after another, each lasting around 10,000 years. We know from the
archeological evidence that human beings lived through these ice ages in
northern climates. They somehow toughed it out. Ascorbate, because it is made
by plant food, is not easy to come by in an ice age. The old vegetable garden
does not do so well under a thick layer of ice. These ancestors suffered from
ascorbate deficiency, a disease called scurvy, a fact borne out by examination
of their remains.
Scurvy is marked by the breakdown
of collagen tissue throughout the body and frequent infections. Collagen is the
protein with which strong connective tissue is made throughout the body.
Sailors were known to have had scurvy on long voyages, until someone discovered
that a little citrus fruit intake avoided the disease. The way those
"scorbutic" (the term we apply to a person with scurvy) sailors died
was by leakage of blood out of their blood vessels. Their blood vessels
literally cracked open and they bled to death.
The same sort of thing happened to
many of our ancestors who lived through the ice ages. Many of them bled to
death because they had little or no ascorbate, and without ascorbate there is
no collagen production or repair throughout the body. The wall of a blood
vessel is made of collagen. Therefore, when you run out of ascorbate, it is
only a matter of time until that wall of collagen breaks down, is not repaired,
cracks open and you bleed to death.
Risk Factors: Lipoprotein(a), LDL,
Lipids, and Oxidized Cholesterol
However, not all our Ice Ages
ancestors died of cracked open blood vessels. Many did, but some had the
ability to repair leaky blood vessel walls without the assistance of ascorbate.
These people, as a group, lived long enough to have children, and we are the
descendants of those children. Therefore, we have inherited this ability to
repair our blood vessel walls without much ascorbate.
When a crack develops in a blood
vessel wall due to a shortage of ascorbate, certain fat packages in the blood
have the ability to plug the leak by forming a kind of plaster cast. These
packages of fat are known as cholesterol, lipids, low density lipoproteins
(LDL), and one especially effective leak plugger, lipoprotein(a), a special
type of LDL.
LDL is a bag of several thousand
cholesterol and other fat molecules with the bag itself made of protein. In
itself, despite all the hype in the media, ordinary LDL is no problem. However,
there is one type of LDL, namely lipoprotein(a) which has an extra protein
cover on the outside of the usual protein cover. Lipoprotein(a) is a double bag
of fat. This outer bag is called apoprotein(a) or apo(a). The "a"
could well stand for adhesive, because it is a very sticky substance.
When a crack develops in the wall of a blood vessel, this sticky double-bagged
fat sack finds its way through the crack. Once there, the apo(a) adhesive outer
bag glues it down and begins the process of plugging the leak. This both avoids
death by scurvy and sets the stage for blood vessel disease.
Once having plugged the leak the
apo(a) outer bag sticks to whatever other bags of cholesterol (i.e. LDL) float
by and glues them down as well. The process looks like the following:
The tumor, i.e., the proliferation
of excess smooth muscle cells is not cancerous. Nevertheless, it can cause
death by pushing this mass of plaque into the lumen (passage way) of the blood
vessel in which this process is happening. This narrows the passage way through
which blood passes and can eventually lead to heart attack, stroke and other
problems, depending on where in the body it develops.
The
bottom line is that lipoprotein(a) is the real risk factor in cardiovascular
disease and that ascorbate and niacin are the only major lines of defense
against high levels of lipoprotein(a). Cholesterol, even LDL cholesterol, can
serve as a statistical risk factor only to the degree that it is correlated
with the level of the real problem: the special type of LDL called
lipoprotein(a).
The best
test, by far, for risk of cardiovascular disease is the direct measurement of
this special type of LDL, namely a lipoprotein(a) level. A lipoprotein(a) level
is ten times more accurate and specific for prediction of vascular disease.
By the
way, this is new information, right out of the research journals. It will be
many years before the average doctor knows about it and many more years before
it is generally accepted and then a few more years before this test is
routinely ordered in the evaluation for vascular disease. Medicine is dominated
by a conservative inertia in which, for what they conceive of as medical-legal
safety, 95% of the entire pack moves forward slowly, and together, to
incorporate advances in science.
If you
want this test now, you will probably have to educate your doctor about it and
then insist on it. Also, you can be sure the anti-cholesterol industry is not
going give up their position easily and adopt lipoprotein(a) as the new
standard, regardless of the scientific truth behind the matter. If they do,
they lose big money!
The
presently accepted levels of lipoprotein(a) are the following.
|
0 |
- |
20 mg./dl |
low risk |
|
20 |
- |
40
mg./dl. |
moderate risk |
|
>40 mg./dl. |
high risk |
||
Animals In The Wild Do Not Get Heart Attacks
The
process of atherosclerosis is limited to humans. Animals in the wild do not
develop atherosclerosis, therefore no heart attacks and no strokes occur among
these citizens of nature. To induce an animal to have atherosclerosis you have
to put it in captivity and feed it the kind of diet which humans use to cause
the problem. The guinea pig and fruit bat make good models, if this is what you
want to do. The gorilla would make a good model, but who wants fifty gorillas
lined up in a laboratory?
Animals
in the wild do not get heart attacks because they make their own ascorbate, and
therefore the process of atherosclerosis does not begin. We humans could take
the hint, load up on vitamin C and a few other vitamins twice each day for life
and eradicate heart disease. This is already happening in the U.S. where
ascorbate consumption has skyrocketed over the past 25 years, and heart disease
has dropped by one third. The war against smoking may also have something to do
with this, yet in countries where smoking has declined in the absence of
increased ascorbate consumption, there has been no equivalent change in heart
disease rates.
Nevertheless,
there is still a long way to go. In the U.S., every other person will die of
vascular heart disease. Many more will die of stroke, another complication of
vascular disease. Every year 1.5 million Americans die of heart attack, one
fifth of them suddenly, before reaching the hospital or medical attention.
Death is the first symptom of heart disease for forty percent of those who
learn they have it. More than seven million Americans are living with vascular
heart disease right now, and 2.5 million have cerebrovascular disease. Eight
million Americans have arrhythmia: irregular heartbeat related to vascular
disease.
One
hundred billion dollars are spent on vascular heart disease every year,
$200,000 every minute of every day. Coronary bypass, an extremely inappropriate
procedure for the great majority of heart patients — considering the
alternatives — sucks ten billion dollars out of American pockets every year.
The only
people gaining from this situation are the drug companies, the hospital
industry, vascular surgeons and cardiologists. Do you think any of these folks
are going to tell you what I am telling you about ascorbate and heart disease?
Would you cut off your income, given the opportunity. No you would not. If you
were even sufficiently up-to-date with the current scientific literature to
know these things, you would develop doubts and rationalizations about the
research demonstrating the relationship between heart disease and anything
which the public could control on its own. You would then believe your own
doubts and rationalizations. In your own private life, you would load up on
ascorbate everyday, just in case.
If you have vascular disease, and
if you want not to have it, there is a plan for you.
(All the following dosages may be adjusted by your
doctor, based on his or her experience and medical opinion.)