Lynn Capehart Wellness Project

PREVENT AND ELIMINATE ANY TYPE CAUSED BY A BLOCKAGE

CATEGORY: 3: Blockage

https://lynncapehartwellness.com/2013/09/01/blog-30-essay-2-the-seven-categories-of-illness/

RECOMMENDED SUPPLEMENT: LECITHIN

I watched Barbara Walters’ TV special on heart disease recently. She and her guests—former President Bill Clinton, David Letterman, Robin Williams, Regis Philbin, and Charlie Rose—all had open heart surgery to perform bypasses to blocked coronary arteries. She also spoke to Luke Russert, journalist Tim Russert’s son, about his father’s sudden death from heart disease at 58.

Walters and her guests are comfortable in front of a camera. They all put on their bravest professional faces, and didn’t share what the surgery is really like. Who wants to relive such a horrific experience? My heart went out to every one of them.

Walters wanted her Special to be upbeat, about surviving, about beating the odds, about new beginnings. Not the stalking death that brushed so very close as it passed them by this time. Not the gut-wrenching physical abuse the surgery entails. Not the all consuming stress. And she succeeded. The Special brought uplift and imparted information. Good job.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENS IN OPEN HEART SURGERY

But let’s take a brief look anyway, at a little of what they actually went through, maybe as an incentive to try harder to avoid this hideous, medieval procedure, called open heart surgery. Because I promise you, guarantee to you, that there is an easier way. If the people on Walters’ Special had used Lecithin regularly, the blockages would never have been able to form, and they never would have needed the surgery. I am going to tell you how to avoid what they went through, how to avoid the following:

A VERY CONDENSED OVERVIEW OF OPEN HEART MISERY

1.         First there’s the emotional agony of dragging around the soul-chewing, spirit-killing information of what you’re about to go through. Having your dreams haunted by it.

2.         Then being rolled into the cold, sterile, white room on a gurney, fingers secretly crossed under the blanket, because you Googled this procedure and you know that while the survival rates are good, they aren’t 100 percent. You know the masks are important, but still wish you could see people’s faces. The room smells too clean.

3.         They move you from the gurney to the operating table and commence putting tubes in your arms and other places. In a few minutes you are gratefully unconscious, lying there vulnerable in every sense, your life in another person’s hands.

4.         After slicing open your chest, your sternum (breastbone) is cracked in half, sawed through and separated, so the surgeons can get their skilled hands on your heart. Their hands and those lovely steel instruments. And if you are bothered by the sound of your dentist’s drill, just be glad you’re out cold while this is happening.

5.         Next, your doctor decides from where to get the grafts to make the bypasses. Perhaps he’ll cut up your thoracic chest artery, which is more easily isolated than others in the area, or maybe sacrifice one of the veins in your legs. There is a higher purpose here, can’t worry about collateral damage.

6.         At some point your heart may be stopped, stopped!, and you are connected to a heart-lung machine that will provide circulation for your body. You are now technically dead. The pump is keeping you “alive.”

If you are not put on-pump and your heart is not stopped, your doctors will stabilize your heart with other medical “devices.”

7.         Then they go to work cutting open and replacing sections of three, four, or even an amazing five of your blocked coronary arteries, with the grafting material they harvested from other parts of you.

8.         Finally, 6 or 10 or even 20 hours later your surgery is complete. You are then stitched up like an old suit. If you were “on-pump” your heart is restarted, hopefully. Your sternum is creaked back into place like pieces of broken china and fastened with stainless steel wires, which will stay in your chest permanently. Your chest cavity skin is sewed up with more sutures. Tubes are left in your chest for a while to drain the cavity of normal post-operative bleeding.

9.         You spend 1 to 2 days in Critical Care, maybe on a respirator for part of the time, 2-3 more in the hospital before discharge. The cracked sternum takes up to a year or more to heal completely. You hear that a small percentage of people report cracking in their chests when bending or stretching, even years later.

Charlie Rose described it as, “hell.”

I do not want to make light of the efforts of the doctors and support staff who do their best in these surgeries, who save lives every day. Superior medical teams saved Walters and her guests, who might not be alive otherwise.

But my point is that this surgery is barbaric given the available alternative, which is to take a handful of Lecithin softgels twice daily. It’s cheap, it’s effective, it’s easy on the stomach, there are no side effects, and it works fast. I’ve seen people scheduled for heart surgery avoid it with Lecithin therapy. Compare the options. Do you choose supplements or surgery? Because it’s one of the biggest decisions of your life.

Clinton spoke frankly about his 90 percent blockage and quadruple bypass. His cardiology appointment was on a Friday. His doctors wouldn’t let him leave the hospital for the weekend, fearing he wouldn’t be alive Monday morning for the surgery. But the most helpful comments came from Letterman and Russert.

Letterman, along with Walters, had five coronary arteries blocked, necessitating a remarkable, “quintuple” bypass! (Remember when a “double bypass” sounded like a big deal? Do you suppose there are sextuple, or septuple, or even octuple bypasses in our future?)

Maybe it was easier for Letterman to be real with us. He’s used to bearing his soul five nights a week. We’re more than an audience, we’re his therapy couch. We’ve been through the triumphs and travails with him and still love him. Maybe that’s why Dave said real things like, “I would find myself busting into tears and sobbing uncontrollably . . . [the surgery] assaults every part of your system . . . [the experience] is horrendous mentally, emotionally, and physically.”

Letterman’s best insight was in the statement, “I wouldn’t be surprised to have to have the surgery again.” In fact, unless he adds Lecithin, an emulsifier, to his diet, he can pretty well count on it. Even now, blockages are forming slowly in his arteries again. According to cardiologists, it’s not unusual to have two or three follow up surgeries in connection with the original one, sometimes to add stents to the new bypasses that have collapsed, not to mention needing the procedure all over again for new blockages that form.

Walters asked Luke Russert how his father could pass a stress test in April and die of a heart attack in June, despite being on medication for asymptomatic (no symptoms) coronary artery disease. His doctors reported that built up deposits of cholesterol plaque in an artery had ruptured, causing sudden coronary thrombosis—death, where all blood to the heart is stopped suddenly by a complete blockage.

The only answer to Walters’ question is that you can have an arterial blockage large enough to kill you and still pass a stress test on a given day. But Luke’s answer was broader and more to the point. He said, “There is not enough known about heart disease, especially prevention.”

And that’s the real problem here, that our attempts to prevent heart disease are so feeble and archaic.

YOU CAN HAVE A HEART ATTACK EVEN IF YOU ARE FIT

Just as a stress test is not a good predictor of coronary blockages, being a trim fit athlete doesn’t mean you’re safe from heart attack, either: Remember Jim Fixx, the champion long distance runner credited with helping start America’s fitness revolution? Author of The Complete Book of Running? He started running at the age of 35, quit smoking, lost 60 pounds. He was found dead at 52 by the side of Vermont Route 15, from a massive heart attack while running. His father, a former editor at TIME, had died of a heart attack at 43, but Fixx was a big red-meat eater anyway. An autopsy revealed blockages of 95 percent, 85 percent, and 70 percent in three of his main coronary arteries.

And blockages are not just an older person’s disorder: The US Army did a two year study of new recruits, ages 18 to 21, and discovered that over half of them already had 35 percent arterial obstruction.

Take a look at what you and your family eat. Chances are if it’s high fat, starch or cholesterol, it’s going to spend a long time in your bodies. Remember that last fatty meal smothered in butter sauce that you so enjoyed? Well, if you don’t use Lecithin regularly, parts of that meal are still hanging around inside your body, clinging to the walls of your arteries, setting up future blockage disorders like heart disease. Even if you ate it five years ago.

You don’t have to forego your favorite comfort foods, just cut back a bit, and take precautions like adding Lecithin to your diet. I love butter, I love mayonnaise, I don’t like substitutes. If I’m eating it, I want the real thing. But I take Lecithin every single day, more when I pig out during the holidays.

I’m particularly saddened by Clinton’s surgery: After the press started mocking “Bubba’s” eating habits, I sent him a gift copy of Vitamin Remedies That Really Work, with a bookmark at chapter 9, Lecithin. I told him he could eat burgers and cheese fries once in a while, but he needed to take an emulsifier. Otherwise, he would face heart disease later in life. I never heard back except a thank you note. Obviously, he didn’t take my advice. But if Clinton starts taking Lecithin, he will live to see not only Chelsea’s children, but her children’s children. If not, it won’t be a “blockage” disorder like heart disease that does him in.

WOMEN ARE AT SPECIAL RISK

Despite all her guests being men, Walters informed us that more women die of heart disease now than do men. Heart disease is the number one killer of women. According to the American Heart Association, more than one in five females has some form of cardiovascular disease, which takes the lives of more than a half million women every year. That’s more than the next five causes of death for women . . . combined.

Worse news is that the kind of heart disease women get, and the way it behaves, is often different than in men. For instance, we’re all familiar with pains in the arm or chest that signal an imminent attack, but did you know that women present with entirely different symptoms, and that they may appear up to a month before the attack?

The National Institute of Health reports that the most commonly reported symptoms of heart attack in women are unusual fatigue (71%), sleep disturbance (48%), and shortness of breath (42%). Fewer than a third of women reported having chest pains. Almost half reported having no chest pain at any time. Some women reported a feeling of unusual “weakness” in one or both arms.

HEART DISEASE BEGINS WITH DIET

Heart disease is directly attributable to what you eat. It starts with fats, starches, and high-cholesterol foods, ones that cause “blockages.” Our bodies are not equipped to properly process such a diet without additional help from an emulsifier.

HOW DO BLOCKAGES FORM IN THE CORONARY ARTERIES?

When you eat something your body has trouble processing, like a sirloin steak with butter sauce and a fried egg, baked potato with bacon bits and sour cream, green salad with blue cheese dressing, and crème brulee, without also providing it with an emulsifier, it stores the left over gunk in all sorts of inner nooks and crannies. Just like you do in real life. But instead of a drawer, closet or garage, the body stores it in your arteries, your heart, your lungs, sinus, joints, liver, kidney, gallbladder, penis, spinal cord, colon, eyes, any old place it finds room. In the process it causes you to get sick with a blockage disorder, like heart disease.

Blockages are a whole subset of diseases unto themselves in my paradigm of wellness. From the outside it may look like a multitude of different disorders, like heart disease, or Alzheimer’s, or a blocked sinus, or erectile dysfunction, or lung congestion, or peripheral artery disease, or glaucoma, or a blood clot, but it’s actually a blockage masquerading as a plethora of different problems. A diet that causes blockages puts you at risk for many disorders besides heart disease. But all of the blockage disorders can be treated successfully with Lecithin, an emulsifier.

Your major organs depend on a constant flow of blood for oxygen and nourishment. Your heart muscle is no different. But if the arteries—the pathways that carry blood and oxygen—become blocked with plaque and solidified organic debris, less and less blood, and therefore nourishment, gets through. Without proper nourishment and enough oxygen from this steady blood supply, your heart will fail.

Think of an army using a road to get supplies to the troops. Think of your heart as those troops waiting for the supplies. If the road becomes blocked with disabled vehicles, it will be impossible for supply trucks to get through. That makes it necessary to send in additional troops for the sole purpose of removing the blockage on the road. Once the blockage is gone, the trucks can roll. Think of Lecithin as those additional troops sent in to remove the blockage so the supply lines to your heart can be kept open.

USING THE EMULSIFYING POWERS OF LECITHIN TO KEEP YOUR ARTERIES OPEN WITHOUT SURGERY, STENT, OR ANGIOPLASTY

[Definitions: SURGERY: open heart or valve replacement; STENT: a flexible tube made of plastic or wire mesh to support and prop open weakened arteries in collapse; ANGIOPLASTY: a balloon used instead of or along with a stent to support and prop open weakened arteries in collapse.]

Lecithin is an emulsifier and therefore has great abilities to keep organic particles in suspension, as a mixture. It is a natural substance extracted from soybean oil. It is known to be safe, and has been used in our food supply since the early 1900’s. Take a look in your cabinets. Lecithin is used as an ingredient in countless foods and cosmetics, because of its ability to emulsify, stabilize, thicken, and moisturize.

Without Lecithin, when you opened a box of biscuit mix, it wouldn’t come out in a nice powdery stream, but would plop into your bowl in funky clumps. Without Lecithin, your facial moisturizer wouldn’t be creamy and smooth when you stick your finger in, but would show the oils coagulated and greasy. Without Lecithin, your mayonnaise would be a congealed mess, unspreadable. Likewise, your peanut butter. Lecithin is what keeps ingredients in suspension, as a mixture, and keeps oils from separating from each other and other ingredients.

It’s Lecithin’s ability to keep organic particles in suspension that makes it such a valuable food supplement. Is it such a huge leap from witnessing Lecithin’s known properties on other organic and biological material outside our bodies to understanding that it can do the same thing inside them? To me it is a straight line of logic.

Lecithin does the same thing in your body as it does in the food and cosmetic container: keeps organic particles suspended, not allowing them to clump together. In your system, each Lecithin molecule binds with an organic waste molecule and prevents it from joining with other similar molecules, by holding it in suspension while it travels through your body and can be safely expelled.

Without enough Lecithin in your diet, oils, fats, and other organic compounds will clump together, accumulate, solidify, clog up vital areas, and cause blockage disorders like heart disease. With enough Lecithin, plaque and other organic debris will be held in suspension and will not settle on the walls of your coronary arteries.

The smartest path is prevention. If you wait for a heart attack before changing your diet, first you may not survive it, and second, even if you do survive you are going to pay dearly for it. And I’m not talking about your bank account.

NOTES

Remember, these are not pills you’re taking, but concentrated food supplements. This isn’t medicine. It’s nutrition.

Lecithin is the best natural emulsifier available, and will safely break up blockages in your coronary arteries or anywhere in your body. Co-Enzyme Q10 strengthens the heart muscle. Beta Carotene will fight inflammation that accompanies plaque buildup. Vitamin D3 will assist Beta Carotene in its functions. (If you cannot find Vitamin D3, you may use Vitamin D.)

I have recommended Puritan’s Pride brand because their Lecithin is from soybeans only, and contains a minimum of 70 mg of phosphatides in each 1200 mg softgel, equivalent to 61 percent phosphatides. The value of a Lecithin product is determined by the percentage of phosphatides it contains, because they activate the fat emulsifying process in your body. You may use another brand but make sure it conforms to these specifications or it will not work as I described.

When you use Lecithin regularly, in the beginning you will notice that you are coughing up and blowing out of your nose, a lot more mucous than usual. This is happening because Lecithin is breaking up blockages and causing mucous and other wastes to be expelled. This is a good sign and will taper off as your body cleans itself.

Lecithin will NOT cause chunks of plaque to rupture, fall off the artery wall and into your bloodstream, threatening a flow stoppage. Lecithin works on a molecular level, mincing away at the blockage, breaking off molecule-sized bits and escorting them through your blood stream (like a cop holding onto a criminal), keeping them in suspension (under arrest), and making sure they don’t team up with other criminals (clump together and cause a blockage), until they can be disposed of safely.

Lecithin Granules are best used in blender drinks and sprinkled on salads, fresh cut fruit, and cereals. Make sure to consume it uncooked, in its natural state. You can use it in cooked recipes for texture and smoothness, but those amounts do not count toward your daily maintenance dose.

One heaping tablespoon of Lecithin Granules is equal to six softgels. You can’t take too much. Feel free to use additional amounts liberally.

If you take more Beta Carotene than your body can process you might get a mild, dull headache. It lasts as long as it takes your body to utilize the extra Beta Carotene, usually a couple hours. Some people get an itchy rash for a couple hours that can be relieved with Benadryl. There are no other side effects because Beta Carotene will not harm you. It will not turn your skin or the whites of your eyes orange, but in larger doses it will turn your feces that color.

If you take Beta Carotene without also taking Vitamin D, you will deplete your stores of Vitamin D and develop a Vitamin D deficiency. It usually manifests as sores on the inside of the mouth. Be sure to take Vitamin D when you take Beta Carotene and there will be no problem.

Do not take mixed carotenoid products. They are a marketing gimmick, do not bestow additional benefits to you, and will not work as I have described. Use only straight up Beta Carotene.

Please be nice to each other, and look for my next blog: Blog 7: Hangovers, where I tell you how to avoid them, and help prevent alcohol from damaging and aging your body.

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