real life plan
the doctor
Dwight Lundell
In 1970 as a young medical student I saw many patients who had suffered heart attacks. They spent almost 2 weeks in the intensive care unit on near total bed rest. When they were ready to go home there was relatively little that we could do to modify the course of their disease. We prescribed nitroglycerin to relieve chest pains, and digitalis to encourage the heart to beat stronger. We knew their heart disease would progress and we were basically helpless to do anything about it. You can imagine my excitement upon learning about a new operation called a coronary bypass. This operation would restore blood to the heart muscle and allow it to function normally. I had the good fortune to have as a heart surgery professor one of the pioneers in this field. The challenge of doing a technically difficult operation with no margin for error, at the same time completely controlling the circulation with the heart-lung machine appealed to me both on an intellectual and technical basis. The chance to restore people to full activity with their family and work was compelling. After finishing a residency in general surgery at the University of Arizona Medical Center, I was privileged to complete cardiac surgery training at Yale University.
I returned to Arizona in 1979 and began a 25 year career as a cardiovascular surgeon. I performed over 5000 coronary bypass operations and countless other vascular and thoracic surgeries. I was at the forefront of a new field. I was involved in advancing the safety and success of coronary bypass surgery. I was one of the founding partners of the Lutheran Heart Hospital, which at the time was the second largest heart hospital in the United States. I served as Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at that hospital.
I was winning battles against heart disease on a daily basis, but over time I realized that we were losing the war, more and more folks had heart disease, and it had become the leading cause of death in the United States. Attempts to prevent heart disease with low-fat diets and early cholesterol lowering medications were mostly a failure. In spite of this, the idea that heart disease could be prevented by lowering cholesterol stimulated research to develop a medication that would more effectively lower cholesterol levels. This effort culminated in the approval of the first statin drug in 1987. The Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study, sponsored by the drug company Merck was published in 1994. This study was said to demonstrate that by lowering cholesterol levels 35%, the chance of dying from cardiovascular disease could be reduced by 42%.
By 1995 Zocor and Mevacor, two of the approved statin drugs brought in over $1 billion each to Merck’s treasury. Currently annual statin sales are over $30 billion. The entire focus of heart disease treatment was on cholesterol and ways to lower cholesterol levels with medications and diet. It troubled me that a compound made naturally in the body, cholesterol could be “good” or “bad “ and cause disease. It also troubled me that more than 50% of all heart attack victims had normal cholesterol levels. I began to look for other factors that would be present in 100% of the patients, therefore more likely to be the real cause. In the operating room I often looked down at the coronary artery and noticed redness and swelling, two of the Cardinal signs of inflammation. I and many others began to study the relationship between coronary disease and inflammation.
This research was summarized in a brilliant article published in 1999 in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled; Atherosclerosis-an Inflammatory Disease. The cellular and biological pathways whereby inflammation would engender atherosclerosis were clearly elucidated. To my dismay, instead of looking for what was causing inflammation, research was focused on ways to reduce inflammation. The drug companies funded large studies trying to demonstrate that statin drugs would reduce inflammation.
Knowing that inflammation follows injury, I began to look at what might injure the lining of the blood vessels and start the inflammatory cascade, which had been proven to lead to atherosclerosis. Cigarette smoking was quite obvious as an agent that had been proven to injure the blood vessels, but most of my patients were non-smokers. The Heart Association and the other experts had recommended a low cholesterol, low-fat, high carbohydrate diet to prevent heart disease. The adoption of these recommendations by the American public coincided exactly with the increase in the number of people who were overweight, obese, diabetic and had heart disease. Was this the connection? Recalling that correlation is not causation, there needed to be an actual physiologic mechanism to prove that correlation equaled causation. There was clear evidence that most people consuming high carbohydrate diets had repeated spikes in blood sugar. There was clear evidence that spikes in blood sugar cause injury to the lining of the blood vessel (endothelium). The physiologic mechanism whereby elevated blood sugar caused injury to the endothelium was well understood and vividly demonstrated in patients with severe diabetes.
Further careful examination of the officially recommended low-fat, low cholesterol, high carbohydrate diet demonstrated that there was no evidence that dietary cholesterol had a significant effect on serum cholesterol. Further examination showed that the foundation of the low-fat dietary recommendations which were based on Ansel Keys Seven Countries Study were false, namely there was no correlation. Keys cherry picked seven countries out of the twenty two countries from which he had data that met his preconceived notion about the correlation between fat consumption, cholesterol and heart disease. Over and above that there is no metabolic pathway for saturated fat to be converted to cholesterol. This was rather upsetting, the dietary recommendations were based on false data, and there was no scientific evidence to support the avoidance of saturated fat. The evidence really showed that sugar and agents that injured the endothelium, not cholesterol was the real cause of heart disease.
As a leader of the medical staff at the Heart Hospital I began to push for us to modify our approach to heart disease, namely making lifestyle changes to prevent it, instead of continuing to recommend dangerous cholesterol lowering drugs and a diet that actually promoted rather than prevented heart disease. The more I pushed the more they pushed back, so I came to the realization that to make a real change I had to go outside the hospital and clinically prove that there was a better way.
I closed my successful surgical practice and opened a clinic to treat patients who had as a primary goal losing weight, I reasoned that by following an anti-inflammatory, low carbohydrate diet we could both induce weight loss and also reduce the risk factors for heart disease. The results were more than dramatic; significant weight loss, reduction or elimination of type II diabetes, elimination of hypertension, improved lipid profiles and general improvement in feelings of wellbeing. This was as exciting as heart surgery! It was a possible permanent solution as opposed to the temporary solution of coronary bypass.
The success was so dramatic; it had to be shared way beyond what could be done in one clinic. The solutions were simple and effective. The solutions went directly to the real problem. They are based solid evidence in real human physiology. This experience ultimately led to the founding of Asantae and the formulation of the products that are powerful tools to help people achieve the health and the body weight that they desire and to be free of chronic diseases.
Every powerful tool needs an instruction manual, the Asantae real life plan is here to guide you on how to use the tools to enhance your health. Step by step this plan will show you how to use the tools to maximize the changes in the diet that will natural follow the use of the tools: RealW8, iS2 and akea.