We can’t live without our heart, yet we systematically abuse it. Heart disease is the number one cause of death in most western nations. It doesn’t have to be that way.
I am a great fan of Carl Gustav Jung and synchronicity seems to have guided every step of my life. I thoroughly enjoyed your essay and, as an old man long diagnosed with high LDL and recently told that I am in the 82nd percentile of people expected to die of a heart attack, I read it closely. I've never heard of Esselstyn or Saladino. All I can say for sure is that many years ago I bought a book on a "heart healthy" diet and the meals were all so bland and tasteless that it soon went to the dump.
My doctors have experimented on me with various statin drugs. Three of them made my joints and muscles ache. Crestor nearly killed my liver.
Mrs. C and myself eat mostly vegetables, these days. She can't stand red meat and I am currently anxiously awaiting her traveling to Berea, KY for three days (I have three small steaks thawed out & plan on living on them - along with asparagus and sauerkraut - for those three days).
I am considering buying a bottle of Rye for my evening snack (but that is another story).
I am writing to you, my friend, because I have two questions.
(1) You said you won't eat anything with a "mother". Is that referring to meat of any kind or, surprisingly, to apple cider vinegar?
(2) In that same vein, I have been considering the Paleo diet. It strikes me as a high-protein alternative to the healthy Mediterranian diet. What do you think?
A dear friend of mine, a retired Nurse Practitioner that's skinny as a Praying Mantis and looks ready for the grave, recommends a raw food diet. While I enjoy roasted veggies and the colors and tastes of various vegetarian combinations, I can't convince myself that living on bales of hay and bushels of carrots would be better than dying.
My experience was that vegan worked for me. Very well. I enjoyed it, with a main course of sweet potatoes and brown rice, with sides of beans and vegetables. But we need fuel from either fats or carbs, with conversion of protein to glucose available in the liver, if needed. With very low fat and moderate protein, I was existing mostly on carbs. So my blood glucose and A1C and insulin remained high, borderline diabetic. Saladino explains it fairly well. I would have stuck with it if my Kardia ECG hadn't started reporting problems. A couple of clinic ECGs led my docs to discount it, but I had experience with overlooked signals and decided to not ignore this one. My docs seem like nice people but I sometimes wonder if they subconsciously cultivate future business.
The problem with mediterranean is it has fats and carbs, which causes the pathologies we all get eventually. Med people don't really live any longer than anyone else, just die of different things.
The problem with paleo is we have no idea what our ancient ancestors ate, and its likely that whatever it was is no longer available. Our chemistry requires fuel from carbs or fats or protein, and nutrient molecules, all available from many sources, many of which have additional components that disagree with us. Animals avoid being eaten by running away and hiding, and plants avoid being eaten by evolving a variety of toxins.
Raw versus cooked changes the absorption of nutrients. Oxalates are a problem for me, not genetically as far as I know, but they bind magnesium and were likely a contributor to my arrhythmia and arthritis and urinary problems, all of which improved when I cut spinach (raw), sweet potatoes and brown rice, all high oxalate foods. Raw spinach has higher oxalate than cooked. Cooking is necessary to make many foods edible. Raw seems fine for hungry cave men without fire, but cooking improves things a lot, nutritionally as well as taste.
The mother prohibition isn't mine, but Esselstyn. His cutesy way of saying no animal products. Or fish. Dairy. He doesn't seem interested animal mistreatment or leather garments as the vegan fans prefer, he's just interested in the nutrition.
My docs will probably drag me in eventually for diagnostics to be sure my high LDL and cholesterol aren't creating problems. I'm feeling really good. No pains or palpitations, improving blood tests, plenty of energy, so I expect they'll be disappointed. LDL and cholesterol are articles of faith for the medics, Saladino has a strong case why they're wrong. My first year of experience is confirming his analysis. If I'm wrong, I should be too sick to write in a couple of years. I'll send a farewell note in that case.
Thanks for the feedback, David. Sorry to hear about spinach, sweet potatoes, and brown rice (which have traditionally been considered healthy). Another friend who has had several mini-strokes told me there's something unhealthy about greens! In my mind, there is something very wrong with a world where cheese is evil.
I'm going out in the woods T-Rex hunting, right now. Wish me luck.
We evolved in an environment where sometimes hunts were successful, sometimes not, and sometimes trees had fruit, sometimes not. We're metabolically flexible, able to thrive on fats or carbs. The problem is supermarkets on every corner providing abundance year round. We weren't designed for abundance. Some combinations of healthy foods can become unhealthy. We need to go without sometimes to reset our systems. One of the topics I'm drafting is fasting. It provides a lot of benefits.
I look forward to reading your understanding and conclusions regarding fasting. When I was younger and more motivated, I went on a juice fast once a week. When I was into martial arts, I followed some Texan's "Feel Chi-rific" fast.... which involved drinking nothing but diluted orange juice with a bit of lime juice put into it. I don't know if it was the acidic nature of the drink or the sugar in the OJ that killed the hunger pains, but it was easy to follow for 24 hours. I found that if I could go 30 hours without eating anything solid, the hunger pangs disappeared and it sometimes seemed I could go forever. These days, I get headaches when I become hypoglycemic, though, and I have so little interest in good health that I tend to gorge myself at the end of a fast and I don't lose weight. I agree that, just as it seems to magically help electronic gizmos to unplug and reboot them, the digestive system needs to be given a break on occasion.
I am a great fan of Carl Gustav Jung and synchronicity seems to have guided every step of my life. I thoroughly enjoyed your essay and, as an old man long diagnosed with high LDL and recently told that I am in the 82nd percentile of people expected to die of a heart attack, I read it closely. I've never heard of Esselstyn or Saladino. All I can say for sure is that many years ago I bought a book on a "heart healthy" diet and the meals were all so bland and tasteless that it soon went to the dump.
My doctors have experimented on me with various statin drugs. Three of them made my joints and muscles ache. Crestor nearly killed my liver.
Mrs. C and myself eat mostly vegetables, these days. She can't stand red meat and I am currently anxiously awaiting her traveling to Berea, KY for three days (I have three small steaks thawed out & plan on living on them - along with asparagus and sauerkraut - for those three days).
I am considering buying a bottle of Rye for my evening snack (but that is another story).
I am writing to you, my friend, because I have two questions.
(1) You said you won't eat anything with a "mother". Is that referring to meat of any kind or, surprisingly, to apple cider vinegar?
(2) In that same vein, I have been considering the Paleo diet. It strikes me as a high-protein alternative to the healthy Mediterranian diet. What do you think?
A dear friend of mine, a retired Nurse Practitioner that's skinny as a Praying Mantis and looks ready for the grave, recommends a raw food diet. While I enjoy roasted veggies and the colors and tastes of various vegetarian combinations, I can't convince myself that living on bales of hay and bushels of carrots would be better than dying.
My experience was that vegan worked for me. Very well. I enjoyed it, with a main course of sweet potatoes and brown rice, with sides of beans and vegetables. But we need fuel from either fats or carbs, with conversion of protein to glucose available in the liver, if needed. With very low fat and moderate protein, I was existing mostly on carbs. So my blood glucose and A1C and insulin remained high, borderline diabetic. Saladino explains it fairly well. I would have stuck with it if my Kardia ECG hadn't started reporting problems. A couple of clinic ECGs led my docs to discount it, but I had experience with overlooked signals and decided to not ignore this one. My docs seem like nice people but I sometimes wonder if they subconsciously cultivate future business.
The problem with mediterranean is it has fats and carbs, which causes the pathologies we all get eventually. Med people don't really live any longer than anyone else, just die of different things.
The problem with paleo is we have no idea what our ancient ancestors ate, and its likely that whatever it was is no longer available. Our chemistry requires fuel from carbs or fats or protein, and nutrient molecules, all available from many sources, many of which have additional components that disagree with us. Animals avoid being eaten by running away and hiding, and plants avoid being eaten by evolving a variety of toxins.
Raw versus cooked changes the absorption of nutrients. Oxalates are a problem for me, not genetically as far as I know, but they bind magnesium and were likely a contributor to my arrhythmia and arthritis and urinary problems, all of which improved when I cut spinach (raw), sweet potatoes and brown rice, all high oxalate foods. Raw spinach has higher oxalate than cooked. Cooking is necessary to make many foods edible. Raw seems fine for hungry cave men without fire, but cooking improves things a lot, nutritionally as well as taste.
The mother prohibition isn't mine, but Esselstyn. His cutesy way of saying no animal products. Or fish. Dairy. He doesn't seem interested animal mistreatment or leather garments as the vegan fans prefer, he's just interested in the nutrition.
My docs will probably drag me in eventually for diagnostics to be sure my high LDL and cholesterol aren't creating problems. I'm feeling really good. No pains or palpitations, improving blood tests, plenty of energy, so I expect they'll be disappointed. LDL and cholesterol are articles of faith for the medics, Saladino has a strong case why they're wrong. My first year of experience is confirming his analysis. If I'm wrong, I should be too sick to write in a couple of years. I'll send a farewell note in that case.
Thanks for the feedback, David. Sorry to hear about spinach, sweet potatoes, and brown rice (which have traditionally been considered healthy). Another friend who has had several mini-strokes told me there's something unhealthy about greens! In my mind, there is something very wrong with a world where cheese is evil.
I'm going out in the woods T-Rex hunting, right now. Wish me luck.
We evolved in an environment where sometimes hunts were successful, sometimes not, and sometimes trees had fruit, sometimes not. We're metabolically flexible, able to thrive on fats or carbs. The problem is supermarkets on every corner providing abundance year round. We weren't designed for abundance. Some combinations of healthy foods can become unhealthy. We need to go without sometimes to reset our systems. One of the topics I'm drafting is fasting. It provides a lot of benefits.
I look forward to reading your understanding and conclusions regarding fasting. When I was younger and more motivated, I went on a juice fast once a week. When I was into martial arts, I followed some Texan's "Feel Chi-rific" fast.... which involved drinking nothing but diluted orange juice with a bit of lime juice put into it. I don't know if it was the acidic nature of the drink or the sugar in the OJ that killed the hunger pains, but it was easy to follow for 24 hours. I found that if I could go 30 hours without eating anything solid, the hunger pangs disappeared and it sometimes seemed I could go forever. These days, I get headaches when I become hypoglycemic, though, and I have so little interest in good health that I tend to gorge myself at the end of a fast and I don't lose weight. I agree that, just as it seems to magically help electronic gizmos to unplug and reboot them, the digestive system needs to be given a break on occasion.
https://www.wellandgood.com/dry-fasting-cleanse-from-gil-jacobs/