The Health Plus Letter
December 4, 2008 Vol. 6, No. 28
By Larry Trivieri, Jr. – founder & publisher
http://www.1healthyworld.com
Table Of Contents
New This Issue
Quote of the Day
Fast Fact
Niacin: Twice As Effective As Statins & One Hundred Times Safer! by Dr. C. Norman Shealy
A Little Known Secret For Restoring Gut Health
JAMA: Synthetic Low Dose Vitamins—Of Course They Don't Work!
Recommendations
Medical Freedom
Contact Information
New This Issue
Welcome to another issue of The Health Plus Letter. This week I’m featuring an article written by Dr. Norm Shealy on the effectiveness of niacin (vitamin B3) for improving cholesterol scores far more effectively and safely than statin drugs. In addition, you’ll also learn how you can use clay to improve the health of your gastrointestinal system. And I’ve also included an excellent rebuttal of a widely publicized study that claims vitamins C and E have no benefit for protecting against cancer and heart disease.
As always, please spread the word about The Health Plus Letter by passing it along to your friends and inviting them to subscribe.
Quote Of The Day
“Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. Then, for the second time in the history of the world, man shall have discovered fire.”
-- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Fast Fact
Every five minutes someone in the United States dies due to receiving a properly prescribed pharmaceutical drug.
Unabashed Plug
Protect Yourself From Energy Pollution With the BioElectric ShieldTM. Energy pollution is all around us in the fo/rm of harmful electromagnetic frequencies and radiation (EMFs and EMR) emitted by power lines, cells phones, computers, and many other so-called modern conveniences. By wearing the BioElectric Shield pendant, you can protect yourself from the harmful effects of EMFs and EMR. To obtain a BioElectricShield, visit http://www.mcssl.com/app/aftrack.asp?afid=408491. To learn more about how and why the BioElectric Shield works, see my article about it at http://www.1healthyworld.com/ezine/vol4no9.cfm.
Niacin: Twice As Effective As Statins & One Hundred Times Safer! by C. Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D.
Niacin was the first major development in cholesterol therapy. Niacin(vitamin B 3; also called nicotinic acid. No relation to nicotine!) was shown to reduce cholesterol and raise HDL cholesterol as early as the mid 1960's, but it was never widely accepted because it sometimes leads to intense flushing. And of course the PharmacoMafia could not make ridiculous profits with Niacin! Early varieties of timed release niacin were not as efficacious at reducing the flushing. More recently Flush-free or Non-flushing niacin has been available. Niacor ®, a prescription form of extended release niacin, is no better than the OTC Non-flush Niacins and Niacor has been reported to lead to a significant incidence of liver enzyme elevations and other problems. Indeed, even if you tolerate Niacin well, it is wise to have liver enzymes checked at 6 months and yearly thereafter.
The tremendous news is that as little as 1500 mg of Non-Flush or Extended Release Niacin raises HDL 19 to 24%--TWICE AS EFFECTIVE AS STATINS!! Statins raise HDL only 5 to 15%. Niacin also lowers triglycerides 13 to 28%.
Arch Int Med, 162: 158-1586, 2002
In another study, niacin raised HDL cholesterol 26-39% compared with 13 to 15% with fibrates, fibrates being similar to the less effective statins. Cleveland Clinic J of Med, 70: 553-560, 2003
In an unrelated study, the addition of 3 eggs daily to a low carbohydrate diet raised HDL over 15% and decreased triglycerides over 40%! J. Nutr, 138:271-276, 2008. The great news is that a low carbohydrate diet with 3 eggs daily is more effective than statins in raising HDL-infinitely safer, less expensive and tastes great! To date, I have not seen a study using low CHO diets, 3 eggs plus Niacin! But I suspect it would be the best yet! Non-Flush Niacin is available at www.selfhealthsystems.com or 888-242-6105.
Considering the current knowledge, I have to put Non-flush or Flush-free Niacin at the top of my supplement recommendations for lowering cholesterol. A healthy diet, minimizing sugar, pop and junk fast foods, high in fruits, vegetables, nuts and salmon and other health habits are always superior. Physical exercise and deep relaxation to reduce stress are ahead of any supplement. I always recommend nutrition, exercise and stress reduction above anything else. But if they do not lower your cholesterol below 200, add Flush-Free Niacin. And if Niacin does not lower your cholesterol below 200 and raise your HDL to near 50, consider policosanol, beta sitosterol, saw palmetto, lecithin granules, and arginine, any one of which can do the job without the inherent risks of statins. Check my Optimal Recommendations for more details.
Copyright © 2008 by C. Norman Shealy. All Rights Reserved.
[Note: You can learn more about Dr. Shealy’s Optimal Recommendations by visiting http://www.selfhealthsystems.com. And to obtain a wealth of other powerful tips for improving and maintaining cardiovascular function, be sure to read the following Unabashed Plug. – LT]
Unabashed Plug
Learn the Truth about Heart Disease, Stroke and Hypertension. Most of what conventional medicine has to offer for treating these conditions is based on faulty and potentially dangerous assumptions. Discover the real causes behind these diseases and learn what you can do today to prevent and reverse them using safe and natural alternatives that have been scientifically proven to be effective. Read the critically-acclaimed eBook Burton Goldberg’s Definitive Guide to Heart Disease, featuring the contributions of Dr. Garry Gordon, Dr. Stephen Sinatra, and many other leading heart specialists. To order or to find out more about this potentially lifesaving guide, visit http://www.1healthyworld.com/ebooks/Heart-Book-Info.cfm.
A Little Known Secret For Restoring Gut Health
Last issue, I shared with you effective solutions for maintaining healthy gut function. Now I’m going to share another powerful yet little known way that you can improve the health of your gut: consuming clay
That’s right—clay!
Bear with me and you’ll see why I’m making such a seemingly outlandish suggestion.
An Ancient Healing Remedy
Although the idea of eating clay may not strike you as appealing, certain types of clay have been used for centuries because of the health benefits they provide. One type of clay in particular, known as smectite, is prized by over 200 cultures around the world because of its healing properties. In addition, many native (indigenous) healing traditions recommend eating a small amount of clay (approximately one teaspoon) once a day to help maintain good health. The practice of eating clay even has a medical name—geophagy. The practice of eating clay can also be observed among animals, many of which can be found rolling licking clay and around in clay beds when they are sick.
Perhaps the earliest recorded mention of clay as a healing remedy can be found in the ancient texts of Ayurvedic medicine, the healing tradition of India that originated approximately 5,000 years ago. In ancient Egypt, healers recommended that clay be consumed for purification. Clay was also used in the process of mummification in the belief that it would enable deceased pharaohs to enter into the next world in a state of health and purity.
Here in the West, the use of clay as a medicinal agent was recorded by Pliny the Elder nearly 2,000 years ago. Pliny the Elder was acclaimed as the greatest healer in the Roman Empire, and he included an entire chapter on the healing properties of clay in his famous book Natural History. A few decades later, the famed Roman physician Dioscorides also wrote about clay’s health benefits in his five-volume text De Materia Medica, the first complete pharmacopoeia ever written in the Western world. More than a century later, clay was also acclaimed as a healing agent by the famous Greek physician Galen. In subsequent centuries, many noted healers continued to recommend clay for its health benefits, including Avicenna, who lived one thousand years ago and is considered the greatest physician of his healer.
In the 17th century, clay again came to be widely used among German healers, thanks in large part to the research and medical practice of the Bavarian priest Sebastian Kniepp, one of the founding fathers of naturopathic medicine. Because of Kniepp’s writings about clay German physicians used it in the early 20th century to successfully treat Asiatic cholera, an infectious disease of the small intestine. During World War One, French, German, and Russian soldiers were give clay as part of their food ration kits to help prevent and treat various conditions such as diarrhea, dysentery, food poisoning, and wound infections, all of which were rampant during the war.
How Clay Can Help Keep Your Gastrointestinal Tract Healthy
Smectite and other healing clays can help to improve and maintain the health of your gastrointestinal tract due to two equally important properties that such forms of clay possess. These properties are adsorption and absorption.
Adsorption refers to the process by which clay attracts other substances and causes them to stick to its surface. This is an especially useful property as far as your gastrointestinal (GI) tract is concerned because of the many toxins that circulate within it. After healing clay is ingested and enters into the GI tract, it rapidly attracts such toxins because clay particles carry a negative electrical charge, while the toxins carry a positive charge. The end result is similar to what happens when a magnet is passed over metal filings, with the toxins sticking to the surface of the clay particles. Once there, they pass out of the body with the clay as it is eliminated from the body. (This happens because clay cannot be digested by the body. After it is ingested, your body will eliminate it, but not before it uses its abilities of adsorption to attract the toxins.)
Clay’s property of adsorption is well known to winemakers and brewers of beer and cider, who add small amounts of clay to the beverages they produce in order to attract and remove positively charged impurities before they ship their brews to market.
The other important property of healing clay is absorption. Just as a paper towel absorbs water, clay, once it enters into the GI tract, is able to absorb additional toxins that are not attracted to its surface through adsorption. Though the absorption process is much slower than that of adsorption, it enables clay to eliminate whatever toxins are not neutralized by adsorption.
As clay absorbs such toxins, they are pulled inside the clay’s surface, causing the clay to expand. Because of the expansion, clay particles are able to absorb toxins that are much greater in size then the clay particles themselves.
The adsorbent and adsorbent properties of healing clay make it an excellent natural agent for safely and effectively purifying your gastrointestinal tract. In fact, research has found that healing clay has other benefits besides neutralizing and eliminating toxins in the GI tract, including heavy metals and environmental chemicals such as herbicides and pesticides that are often found in commercially grown foods. Researchers have discovered that clay also is capable of absorbing and neutralizes various types of viruses and parasites that are often found in the GI tract. As a result, by eating small amounts of clay on a regular basis, you can also boosts your body’s immune functions.
Other Health Benefits of Healing Clay
In addition to its abilities to purify the GI tract, healing clay offers other health benefits. In the many cultures around the world in which clay is used, both internally and externally, it has been shown to protect against and improve a wide range of health conditions. Besides gastrointestinal conditions such as constipation, diarrhea, diverticulitis, food poisoning, and hemorrhoids, other conditions that clay offers benefits for include allergies, anemia, arthritis, bad breath, chronic fatigue, gum disease, hay fever, headache, liver disease, menstrual problems, nausea, prostate problems, skin conditions, and ulcers. In many indigenous cultures, eating clay is also recommend for expectant mothers to ensure a healthy pregnancy.
One other important health benefit that clay has is as a protector of the cardiovascular system. That’s because healing clay contains a rich supply of enzymes known as diastases, which act to enrich the oxygen supply of blood while at the same time ridding the bloodstream of impurities. In addition, because of clay’s negative charge, clay particles are able to neutralize dangerous free radicals that could otherwise cause damage to heart cells.
The ability of clay to help protect healthy heart function has also been recognized for many centuries, dating back to ancient Persia and Arabia. In both of those ancient cultures, healers instructed people to eat small amounts of clay each day in order to keep their hearts strong and healthy.
How To Easily Get the Benefits That Healing Clay Provides
In ancient times, people around the world obtained the health benefits of clay by eating it from the ground. This is a practice that continues to this day among various indigenous peoples. Fortunately, you do not have to search the ground for clay in order to obtain its benefits. All you have to do is head to your local health food store. There you will find a clay product known as bentonite, an ideal form of healing clay that you can safely use on a daily basis. Bentonite is a member of the smectite class of healing clays, and the bentonite formulas available at your local health food store come in a thick liquid form, making them easy to ingest. To benefit from bentonite, all you have to do is use it according to the directions you will find on the product label.
Unabashed Plug
Discover and Gain Control of Your Human Energy Field. Read Dr. Valerie Hunt’s Mind Mastery Meditations: A Workbook for the “Infinite Mind,” the empowering guide created by one of the world's foremost researchers into the human energy field, energy medicine, and the relationship between consciousness and health. Each of the meditations this eBook contains is designed to give you mastery of your mind and to empower you to discover the answers to why you are the way you are, your soul's needs, your unique talents and capacities, and your self-designed destiny. By practicing and mastering these meditations, you will become able to live your life with greater ease and success, speed your self-healing, and dramatically increase your ability to manifest your deepest goals. To order this life-changing guide, visit
http://www.1healthyworld.com/ebooks/Mind-Mastery-Book-Info.cfm.
JAMA: Synthetic Low Dose Vitamins—Of Course They Don't Work!
Joint Press Release by the Alliance for Natural Health and the American Association for Health Freedom
November 18, 2008
Around 40% of people in western countries, and a growing proportion in developing countries, consume vitamin and mineral supplements. Those who know most about how nutrients work in the body—integrative medicine/functional medicine/nutritional medicine practitioners—know that you aren't going to be able show that cheap, supermarket-style, synthetic vitamins are going to reduce the risk of heart disease.
Well, that's exactly what Dr Howard Sesso and colleagues at the Brigham & Women's Hospital at Harvard did. And they seemed surprised that after 10 years of studying nearly 15,000 people, these supplements didn't work?
Here's an extract from Sesso's paper in the pro-pharmaceutical Journal of the American Medical Association telling us which vitamins and dosages were used in the trial:
METHODS Study Design
“The PHS II was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, 2x2x2x2 factorial trial evaluating the balance of risks and benefits of vitamin E (400 IU of synthetic dl-tocopherol or its placebo every other day; BASF Corporation, Florham Park, New Jersey), vitamin C (500 mg synthetic ascorbic acid or its placebo; BASF Corporation), and a multivitamin (Centrum Silver or its placebo daily; Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Madison, New Jersey) in the prevention of cancer and cardiovascular disease among 14641 male physicians aged 50 or older…”
Are you surprised the study yielded no clear beneficial results in the prevention of heart disease?
We weren't. Find out more in our release below.
FAULTY STUDY TARGETS VITAMINS C AND E
Finding of No Cardiovascular Protection Was Predictable
Today, the American Association for Health Freedom (AAHF) and its international affiliate, the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH), have together sharply criticized defective and misleading research published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The research triggered headlines around the world suggesting that neither vitamin E nor vitamin C supplements protect against cardiovascular disease in older men.
The study by Howard Sesso and colleagues from Harvard, entitled the “Physicians’ Health Study II”, included over 14,600 male physicians over a ten year period, used the least potent form of vitamin E and incorrect dosages of both vitamins C and E, according to an analysis conducted by ANH experts, Dr Steve Hickey, Dr. Damien Downing, and Dr. Robert Verkerk.
The ANH analysis, “Designed To Fail: A Trial Without Meaning”, criticized the Sesso et al. study for using synthetic dl-alpha-tocopherol, which is less effective than the natural and more complete forms of vitamin E and is thus more likely not to reveal any benefit. Additionally, the vitamin E dose in the study (400 IU every other day) is far below the dose taken by many who supplement, making the findings irrelevant to older supplement consumers, who are aware of extensive research and clinical evidence on higher dose vitamin therapy.
The JAMA paper included a 500 mg daily dosage of vitamin C, which is only half of a typical one-gram tablet of the type popular with supplement users. Evidence suggests that dynamic flow levels of vitamin C, which may prevent heart disease, begin at daily intakes above about 3g per day, best delivered in divided doses.
Additional complaints about the JAMA study include the use of an unidentified placebo, which may have included beneficial nutrients such as magnesium, failure to control diet for synergistic nutrient interactions that may have skewed test results, and the relevance, or otherwise, of applying these findings among physicians (the study group) to all men across the population.
“Considering that the methodologies were significantly biased against finding a positive result from vitamins C and E as determined from both available research and clinical evidence, one has to ask who stands to benefit from these findings? How, for example, would the pharmaceutical industry be impacted from diminished sales of their vitamins if people, under the belief that vitamins provided no benefit in the treatment and prevention of cardiovascular disease, instead chose pricey prescription drugs,” asked Gretchen DuBeau, AAHF Executive Director.
Dr Damien Downing, ANH Medical Director, President of the British Society of Ecological Medicine and Editor-in-Chief of the peer reviewed journal, the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine, on reading the Sesso et al. paper independently responded, saying it was “an intervention designed to fail”!
ANH Scientific & Executive Director, Dr Robert Verkerk added, “With three of the world’s largest drug companies, namely BASF, Wyeth and DSM—formerly Roche—supplying the low dose synthetic vitamins for the study, it’s perhaps not surprising that the outcome is made to look bad for vitamins. A trial like this costs a huge amount of money and is a waste of much needed research funds. Why don’t they ask the people who work with nutrients on a daily basis—integrative medicine doctors—what nutrient forms, combinations and dosages are most likely to work?”
The ANH analysis, “Designed to Fail: A Trial Without Meaning”, is available at: http://www.anhcampaign.org/files/081117_Sesso_PHSII_ANHrebuttal.pdf
[Note: The flawed clinical trial referred to above is only one of a growing number of studies that have appeared in the media in recent month, purporting to show that supplements don’t work and may even be dangerous. I fully expect that we will continue to see more of these stories. I also am convinced that Big Pharma is intent on keeping such stories before the public so that a number of things can be accomplished, including public belief that vitamins are bad or worthless, more draconian oversight of the supplement industry by Big Pharma’s lapdog, the FDA, and ultimate control of said industry by Big Pharma itself. All of these trends are already underway. Don’t be misled by the machinations behind them. – LT]
Recommendations
Books
Elsewhere By Gabrielle Zevin. This is a novel about a young teenaged girl who wakes up in a boat to Elsewhere after being struck dead by a taxi cab driver. It’s very well-written and also very moving and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Moriarity by John Gardner. Sherlock Holmes’ archenemy is brilliantly reimagined in this very entertaining novel. If you like Holmes, you like this.
Seven Minutes To Natural Pain relief by Danile J. Benor, MD. This book is not only an excellent instructional manual for learning how to use WHEE, a method of energy healing, but also a very informative treatise on the link between emotions, beliefs, trauma, health and disease.
Medical Freedom
Please contact and support the following organizations dedicated to protecting our health freedoms.
Citizens for Health - http://www.citizens.org
Alliance for Natural Health – http://www.alliance-natural-health.org (The leading organization fighting to preserve health f/r/e/edom in England and the EU.)
Institute for Health Freedom – http://www.ForHealthF/r/e/edom.org
International Advocates for Health Freedom (IAHF) – http://www.iahf.com
And to learn how corrupt and extensive Big Pharma’s monopoly is, visit http://www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr/online/research/index.html the website for the Campaign Against Fraudulent Medical Research. In particular, read their in-depth report The Pharmaceutical Drug Racket that you will find there.
That’s all for this week.
Health and Blessings!
Larry Trivieri, Jr.
Contact Information: Due to the inordinate amount of spam my email account receives, I no longer use it to receive emails. To contact me, please visit www.1healthyworld.com/contactus
Disclaimer: The Health Plus Letter is a weekly eZine published by Larry Trivieri, Jr. and Library of Health, LLC (dba www.1healthyworld.com) 3 Greenwood Court, Utica, NY 13501. It is made available without charge for information purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for medical care. If you are experiencing a health problem, seek prompt medical attention.
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Legal Notice: The information in this eZine may be freely and widely disseminated so long as full attribution is made as follows: The Health Plus Letter, December 4, 2008, Vol. 6, No. 28. Copyright © 2008 by Larry Trivieri, Jr. All rights reserved.
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