But I have one question (remember I’ve been teaching fasting as a health tool a lot longer than the current fashion—since 1983 in fact): the question is WHY DON’T THEY FOLLOW UP WITH TRIAL AND ERROR EATING? I mean, Duh!

If giving up food has such a health benefits—for some even their whole problem clears up—why not identify WHICH FOODS ARE THE TROUBLEMAKERS? 

For many decades, in many of my books, and on countless radio and TV interviews, I (often jokingly) say, “One test for food allergy is to give up eating. If your problem goes away, it’s a food allergy.” I mean, how logical is that?

Usually I suggest that fasting is a bit steep for many, so we compromise with an elimination or exclusion diet—giving up the most likely foods and seeing if that works. But then we have to follow up with challenge testing. Eat the banned foods again, one at a time, done carefully (there are rules) and see which one(s) bring back the symptoms. Those are the ones to avoid!

It’s all in my book ONE DIET FOR LIFE.It’s very rare to see this simple, basic routine described on Mercola, Natural Health News (Health Ranger) and GreenMedInfo; in fact I never have. But I’ve cured 10,000s of patients; had them up out of wheelchairs; got an epileptic man his driving license back; solved lifelong migraines; asthma, eczema, colitis, Crohn’s, urticaria, got infertile women pregnant (oh pur-lease, by their husbands!), irritable bowel, arthritis, schizophrenia (yes!), depression, ADHD and hyperactivity, learning disorders, violent attacks, rage, even tinnitus… the list goes on and on.

So maybe you can see why I’m baffled by a bit of daft science that came into my INBOX today. An article announced that “Cambridge scientists may have discovered a new way in which fasting helps reduce inflammation – a potentially damaging side-effect of the body’s immune system that underlies a number of chronic diseases.” 

In research published in Cell Reports, the team describes how fasting raises levels of a chemical in the blood known as arachidonic acid, which inhibits inflammation. The researchers say it may also help explain some of the beneficial effects of drugs such as aspirin.¹

Yes, well I would say that also explains the health benefits of things like omega-3 fatty acids, curcumin, colchicine, epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) and quercetin. And they don’t have anywhere near the same dangerous side-effects as aspirin but they are highly effective anti-inflammatories.

But they are seriously wrong on another account: omega-6 fatty acids, like arachidonic acid, are serious CAUSES of inflammation, not mediators. More exactly the ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s is to blame. It now stands at 20:1! Traditional diets, omega-6s were low (around 2%) and the ratio was nearer 1:1.²

Arachidonic acid leads to pathways prostaglandins, prostanoids and leukotrienes, some of which are also important inflammatory mediators. They are probably of particular importance in leucocyte-mediated aspects of chronic inflammation.³

I just don’t understand this muddled article!

Never mind, to go back to my main thrust, researchers like this never seem interested in seeing what foods? Just what chemical pathways? I’m baffled. I can only surmise that it’s because they think we are all identical (average) and all triggers are the same.

That’s just not true. As I have written thousands of times, nobody is average! There isn’t one single average human being walking on this planet. So rather than fuss about HOW it does it, I care about WHAT does it?

The Inflammasome

I practiced medicine for 40 years without knowing this word. Hah! Well apparently, although inflammation is our body’s natural response to injury or infection, this process can be triggered by other mechanisms, including by the so-called ‘inflammasome’, which acts like an alarm within our body’s cells, triggering inflammation to help protect our body when it senses damage. 

But the inflammasome can trigger inflammation in unintentional ways – one of its functions is to destroy unwanted cells, which can result in the release of the cell’s contents into the body, where they trigger inflammation.

Professor Clare Bryant from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge (UK) said: “We’re very interested in trying to understand the causes of chronic inflammation in the context of many human diseases, and in particular the role of the inflammasome.

“What’s become apparent over recent years is that one inflammasome in particular – the NLRP3 inflammasome – is very important in a number of major diseases such as obesity and atherosclerosis, but also in diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, many of the diseases of older age people, particularly in the Western world.”

Dear Dr. Clare, the inflammasome is a mechanism, not WHAT triggers inflammation. We need to dig deep into causes, not mechanisms. Still you are on the hunt for drugs I suppose, chemicals which will block the inflammasome, even though it’s an absolutely crucial self-defence mechanism?

Back To The Study

A team led by Professor Bryant and colleagues at the University of Cambridge and National Institute for Health in the USA studied blood samples from a group of 21 volunteers, who ate a 500kcal meal then fasted for 24 hours before consuming a second 500kcal meal. 

The team found that restricting calorie intake increased levels of arachidonic acid. As soon as individuals ate a meal again, levels of arachidonic acid dropped. As I said, whatever led to reduced inflammation, it was not arachidonic acid. Even the team were surprised, as arachidonic acid was thought to be linked with increased levels of inflammation, not decreased.

Just to remind you, association is not causation.

Professor Bryant, a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, added: “It’s too early to say whether fasting protects against diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease as the effects of arachidonic acid are only short-lived, but our work adds to a growing amount of scientific literature that points to the health benefits of calorie restriction. It suggests that regular fasting over a long period could help reduce the chronic inflammation we associate with these conditions. It’s certainly an attractive idea.

“There could be a yin and yang effect going on here, whereby too much of the wrong thing is increasing your inflammasome activity and too little is decreasing it.”

I return to what I said, fasting is good. Therefore why not try and establish which foods trigger inflammation AND THEY WILL BE DIFFERENT FOR VIRTUALLY EVERY INDIVIDUAL. Wheat, dairy and coffee are mine, but they drift. I enjoyed coffee for over 35 years. Now it gets to me! Plus I had milk daily in my two coffees. So now I’ve given up coffee, I’ve gone dairy-free!

OMG look at this picture!

To Your Good Health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

The research was funded by Wellcome, the Medical Research Council and the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Division of Intramural Research.

References:

1. Pereira, M & Liang, J et al. Arachidonic acid inhibition of the NLRP3 inflammasome is a mechanism to explain the anti-inflammatory effects of fasting. Cell Reports; 23 Jan 2024; DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.113700
2. https://mindandmatter.substack.com/p/why-are-we-getting-fatter-part-iv
3. Equine Vet J. 1984 May;16(3):163-75.  doi: 10.1111/j.2042-3306.1984.tb01893.x

Now a new large-scale study, called the PURE (Prospective Urban and Rural Epidemiological) Healthy Diet, has rather proven that WHOLE FAT is good for us!¹ Drink full-fat milk! Enough of that “saturated fat will kill you” nonsense from ignorant or self-serving “experts”, who won’t admit they swallowed a porky when taking on the fat and cholesterol myth of crooked Ancel Keys.

In fact the new study rather startlingly recommends full-fat milk and will NOT condemn red meat as a villain! Contentious stuff here!

A prospective study is the most definitive, scientifically. You don’t set out to “prove” something, you just take a bunch of people and follow them through time, to see what happens!

Analysis of the data of 245,000 people in 80 countries over 20 years indicated that eating more fruit, vegetables, nuts, legumes, fish, and whole-fat dairy was associated with lower cardiovascular disease and mortality in all world regions, especially in lower-income countries where consumption of these foods is low,” says first author Andrew Mente of the Population Health Research Institute at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

Andrew Mente

PURE Score

To make their point, the researchers came up with “PURE scores”. Those with higher PURE scores are considered protective of heart disease. 

Unlike previous diet scores, the PURE Healthy Diet score does not penalize eating red meat. With a maximum score of 6, the PURE score simply awards one point each for above-median consumption of fruit, vegetables, nuts, legumes, fish, and whole-fat dairy.

For individuals with and without cardiovascular disease (CVD), higher intake of protective foods (i.e., PURE diet score ?5 points out of 6) compared with lower intake (diet score ?1 point) was associated with lower risks of death from all causes.

PURE was found to be slightly more predictive of health problems than the Mediterranean, 2010 and 2015 Healthy Eating Index, and DASH diet scores — and substantially more predictive than the Lancet Planetary diet score, Mente and colleagues noted in the European Heart Journal.

“These findings suggest that an inadequate level of consumption of key healthy foods is a larger problem than over-consumption of some nutrients or foods (such as saturated fats or whole-fat dairy and meats — all of which are consumed in lower amounts with a lower diet score) for mortality and CVD risk around the world,” the authors wrote.

“On this basis, given the low intake of fats and especially saturated fat (i.e., whole-fat dairy) among people with the lowest diet score … current targeted dietary guidance limiting the consumption of saturated fat and dairy in many populations of the world may not be warranted,” they suggested.

Hooray. This is the first time in recent memory a study has said limiting consumption of saturated fats is NOT GOOD. And they have the evidence to prove it. This was a BIG study.

Also, their results are in line with recent evidence showing that dairy may protect against high blood pressure and metabolic syndrome.

And the new PURE score takes out the meat intake component that had been part of a prior dietary quality score from the PURE investigators. In 2018, they had reported that balanced consumption of various food groups, assessed by that older score, was linked to reduced CVD and mortality worldwide.

In their latest report, Mente and colleagues again stressed “variety and moderation” in a healthy diet. I have promoted the “rotatory diversified foods regimen almost my whole working life. Whole grains and unprocessed meats may still be consumed in moderation, or about one serving daily, they recommended.

Well red meats are, of course, healthy but nobody supposes that means eating meat 2 or 3 times daily!

Based on current data, the authors’ findings and conclusions appear sound, providing evidence that unprocessed red meats are not a priority target for health to either avoid (as strongly emphasized by the EAT-Lancet report) or to include (as strongly emphasized by ‘paleo’ and ‘keto’ diets).

“This was by far the most diverse study of nutrition and health outcomes in the world and the only one with sufficient representation from high-, middle- and low-income countries. The connection between the PURE diet and health outcomes was found in generally healthy people, patients with CVD, patients with diabetes, and across economies,” Mente said in a press release.

Acknowledging that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to healthy eating across cultures, Mente’s group asserted that the PURE Healthy Diet generally translates to an eating pattern including:

Fruits and vegetables: 4-5 servings daily

Legumes: 3-4 servings weekly

Nuts: 7 servings weekly

Fish: 2-3 servings weekly

Dairy: 14 servings weekly

There’s your classic 5-a-day then!

A PURE score of 4 is the threshold for healthy eating beyond which there are modest additional gains in heart health and survival, they found. Thus, vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike may reach this score by consuming as many food groups as possible out of the six.

In the PURE cohort of 147,642 people on five continents, the mean PURE Healthy Diet score was 2.95.

Overall the study, according to Salim Yusuf, MBBS, DPhil, also of McMaster University and PURE’s principal investigator, suggests that a large proportion of deaths and CVD in adults around the world may be due to undernutrition, that is, low intakes of energy and protective foods, rather than overnutrition. This challenges current beliefs,” he said in a statement.

The PURE authors acknowledged that their observational study design is not perfect, since it relied on self-reported diet data being accurate, coming from food frequency questionnaires.

“It is time for national nutrition guidelines, private sector innovations, government tax policy and agricultural incentives, food procurement policies, labeling and other regulatory priorities, and food-based healthcare interventions to catch up to the science. Millions of lives depend on it,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH, of Tufts Medical Center in Boston.²

Don’t hold your breath. Corporate interests want PROFIT and don’t care how many people they kill while grabbing it.

Mozaffarian is keen to write out the novel revelations of this study and “protect” the status quo position. That’s not surprising, when you look at his conflicts of interest! (see below)

I love a good steak (actually had one last night, cooked by a kitchen angel!)

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

1. There’s a short (2 min) video about this study here: 

LINK: https://www.phri.ca/research/pure/

Disclosures

The PURE study is an investigator-initiated study that is funded by the Population Health Research Institute, Hamilton Health Sciences Research Institute, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Strategy for Patient Oriented Research through the Ontario SPOR Support Unit, and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, as well as through unrestricted grants from several pharmaceutical companies, with major contributions from AstraZeneca (Canada), Sanofi-Aventis (France and Canada), Boehringer Ingelheim (Germany and Canada), Servier, and GlaxoSmithKline, and additional contributions from Novartis and King Pharma and from various national or local organizations in participating countries.

Mente and colleagues had no relevant conflicts of interests.

Mozaffarian disclosed receiving research funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Vail Innovative Global Research, and the Kaiser Permanente Fund; personal fees from Acasti Pharma and Barilla; participation in scientific advisory boards for Beren Therapeutics, Brightseed, Calibrate, Elysium Health, Filtricine, HumanCo, Instacart Health, January Inc., and Perfect Day; equity in Calibrate and HumanCo; and chapter royalties from UpToDate.

References:

1. Source Reference: Mente A, et al “Diet, cardiovascular disease, and mortality in 80 countries” Eur Heart J 2023; DOI: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehad269/7192512.
2. Mozaffarian D “Identifying nutritional priorities for global health: time for a more PURE focus on protective foods” Eur Heart J 2023; DOI: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehad325/7192538.

To begin with, indigestion is NOT caused by stomach acid. In fact the commonest cause is lack of stomach acid: a pathological condition called achlorhydria (Latin: no hydrochloric acid!) But the well-established market share taken by Proctor and Gamble’s Pepto-Bismol (bismuth subsalicylate) is proof enough that people will believe any old nonsense, including TV advertizing!

Pink derision!

Then there’s the whole rigmarole of histamine 2 (H2) blockers, such as Zantac. We all know how that ended (but not how many people were outright killed by the stuff).

Of course blocking stomach acid doesn’t work, meaning it doesn’t solve anything. We need stomach acid: otherwise why would Mother Nature put it there? If acid is not the cause then an antacid cannot work. But when the symptom returns, silly old patient says to him or herself: “I must have it bad, I need MORE Pepto-Bismol.” Duh!

As for spicy foods, forget it. I can take any person with heartburn, indigestion, acid regurgitation and hiatus hernia, cure the symptoms by doing the right thing and then he or she can tuck into some lovely curries, Tex-Mex or even Thai green chillies. No problem. Spicy foods are not the problem! Achlorhydria is the main problem, as I said.

GERD

But what about gastro-esophageal reflux; the doctor says I have GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease)? Oh yeah? Well do you have symptoms every minute of every day? Of course not. So you have many hours a day, scores of hours a week, when you have stomach reflux but no indigestion! The doctor, presumably, is trying to tell you that you have a mechanical condition but it clears up several times a day and the symptoms magically vanish; then the reflux returns when you next eat something! I mean…

What the doctor doesn’t tell you—because most of them don’t know—is that we all have a degree of gastroesophageal reflux, meaning food travelling in the wrong direction. It’s especially common in people who are overweight and who eat poor food, meaning just about everybody!

But it is not bound to cause indigestion. Also it means that sitting up straight is a better solution than popping medicines. We all know how doctors and Big Pharma like to move drugs as a “solution” to any problem. Usually the “solution” doesn’t work and the patient—instead of being clever and saying it’s no good—takes more and more, because that’s what the doctor says to do!

Bacterial Ulcers

Ah, what about Helicobacter pylori? I hear you say. Remember the old days when people were told, in no uncertain terms, they had “an ulcer” (or ulcers). It was caused by excess acidity, they said. You must take lots of antacids and avoid acid or spicy foods. Stress is the major cause of ulcers… That was the canon. People even had to have an operation to cut out “the ulcer” and maybe a good bit of the stomach at the same time.

Some died as a result. Too bad. You always get some collateral losses.

In fact, it all turned out to be hooey (as indeed is a lot of medical “science”). The medical elite thought they knew what caused ulcers and stomach cancer. But they were wrong — and didn’t want to hear otherwise.

They were shown up and shamed by an Australian doctor called Barry Marshall. He did many biopsies and believed that the true cause was the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. But nobody would listen. In 1984 Marshall did the ultimate scientific test by infecting himself with the bacteria, developing the symptoms of the disease and then successfully treating himself with antibiotics.

Maverick doctor Barry Marshall

It was a miracle and Marshall, along with colleague Robin Warren, the pathologist at the Royal Perth Hospital who first identified the existence of the causative bacteria, rightly received the Nobel Prize for their discovery (2005).

So YES, H. pylori is a player in the story. But anyone who doesn’t know that and fix it FIRST does not deserve to be a doctor or healer; it’s so easy.

By the way, you may have noticed, doctors have stopped diagnosing “stomach ulcers”! That’s yet another example of how doctors got the condition horribly wrong and went on for decades screwing up patients, using false science!

But it’s interesting to reflect that in this day and age, with “doctor” Mark Zuckerberg running Facebook, Marshall’s discovery would have been suppressed as fake news and heavily censored, since it was contrary to the mainstream narrative, thus leaving people to suffer (including dying of unnecessary surgeries) to create more profits for the medical industry.

What Should You Do?

So, I have hinted there is a right way to deal with this problem. The clue is the on-off nature of indigestion. As with any health condition, I tell patients that if you can have one good day, you can cure it! If you have symptom-free days it means there is no damage, no body parts missing, no tumor, no degenerative loss. The good days PROVE you are OK, really!

So that’s step 1: observe yourself for a week. How much time are you symptom-free? The more the better, for the outcome.

Step 2 is start noticing what you are eating. Keep a food diary. There is ALWAYS one or more foods that trigger indigestion; maybe not every single time you eat it but often enough for it to be a suspect. I have a tendency to get indigestion after certain red wines, for example (but not Shiraz or Rioja). On the other hand, I LOVE curries and they never trigger unpleasant symptoms, no matter how “hot”!

Step 3. If no pattern shows up, try an exclusion diet. You can’t avoid just one food at a time, you have to give up a whole bunch. At the very least you must avoid ALL manufactured foods, because they are all adulterated in some way or another. But also you need to give up tea, coffee and alcohol.

If there seems to be an improvement, after 5 days, try reintroducing the foods one at a time. You could be very surprised! The commonest triggers are chocolate, dairy (especially cream), red wine and certain cheeses. That’s not “alcohol” but one specific version of it. White wine and champagne are generally very well tolerated but not red wine, because it contains up to 100 times the amount of histamine and you will perhaps know that histamine H2 receptors are very suspect with indigestion. That’s what cimetidine (Tagamet), ranitidine (Zantac), famotidine and nizatidine were for—to block histamine receptors!

Food allergies (in fact all allergies) tend to promote histamine, so it all makes sense.

Finally, if you get stuck, consider the entire trial and error, exclusion and challenge dieting routine, described in my book One Diet for Life.

Don’t be intimidated by indigestion. Be wise instead.

To your good health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

You can enjoy an extra twelve to fourteen years of good life! No really! That’s a promise.

It’s not a pill or potion! You just have to take care of yourself properly. Deep down, we all know that if you follow healthy lifestyle options, you will live longer. Not just that but you will enjoy better health in your life.

Now we can boil it down to just 5 essential factors. In a large study, which followed over 78,000 women and over 44,000 men, researchers have shown that if you follow a healthy diet, exercise regularly, don’t smoke, drink moderate amounts of alcohol and maintain a healthy weight you could live more than a decade longer than those who don’t do any of these things.

To be more specific, they defined the five good health habits as never smoking; body mass index (BMI) of 18.5 to 24.9 kg/m2; 30 minutes or more of moderate to vigorous physical activity each day; a high-quality diet (top 40%); and moderate alcohol intake (up to one glass of wine daily for women and two glasses of wine daily for men). Personally, I would say that BMI is not such a good measure as percentage body fat, but that discussion can take place elsewhere.

The good news is that researchers found each factor added around 2 to 3 years of extra life. Cumulatively, that means that life expectancy at age 50 years was 14 years longer for women and 12.2 years extra for men (for women, that’s 93 years average, up from 79, and for men, 87.6 years, up from 74).

Put another way, compared with men and women who lacked any of the five healthy-lifestyle habits, those who had all five enjoyed an 82% lower risk for dying from cardiovascular disease, a 65% lower chance of dying from cancer, and a 74% lower risk of dying from all causes during follow-up. That’s awesome!

And, you know, so much better than popping pills, NONE of which add to your health span!

What you can potentially achieve is exciting. But almost as exciting is that, even by following some of these recommendation, you get measureable benefit, even if just a few extra years! In other words, just do as much as you can. Every step in the right direction will lengthen your life a little.

“Each single lifestyle change you make will help you live longer and better,” commented Jean-Pierre Després, PhD, cardiology research director at the Quebec Heart and Lung Institute at Laval University, Quebec, Canada, and chair of the American Heart Association (AHA) Council on Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health.

If your life is really good—and it should be—then you will want to maximize your stay here on earth. In which case, commit to all five.

It’s Not Just About Lifespan (Longevity)

Lifespan is how long you can expect to live, on average. But there’s a better concept: “health span”. Lifespan is simply how many years you live and breathe. But for over a decade, the Longevity Institute of the University of Southern California (USC) a leading biomedical research center for aging and longevity, has been researching how to improve a person’s health span – the happy part of life prior to the onset of some calamity such as diabetes, heart attack, stroke, cancer, Alzheimer’s and auto-immune diseases.

It’s not the same as Lifespan, obviously. But hopefully nearly the same length of time. Our health span is critical and we want it as long as possible, staying healthy until the very end of life. This is a newer version of the old saying, that anti-aging is not so much about putting years into your life, as putting life into your years!

Many years ago (1997) I wrote a piece entitled “Do You Want To Be An Old Crock Or A Classic Car?” It may help to picture this in terms of the aging of a motor car. Typically, a well-used car will last 10- 20 years and then fall apart, unsafe to be repaired. The better the maintenance, the longer it takes to crumble, naturally; if you omit routine oil changes and other vital tasks, the car will soon fail mechanically. But then some cars, so-called Classic Cars, are in sweet running order and perform reliably when they are 80, 90 or even more than 100 years old. Why is that?

The answer is so obvious, it screams at you: they have been properly looked after.

It’s exactly the same with the human body. You have to ask yourself, do you want to be a classic car or an old “banger”, rusting and clanking away? I doubt anyone in their right mind would choose to be a banger. Yet that is the outlook mentality of anyone who doesn’t begin to take effective care of their health NOW.

Turning Back The Clock

We have one proven advantage over mechanical objects: our bodies can regenerate to a considerable degree. It has been a medical hoax of long standing, to tell people they have to put up with miserable health conditions, just because the doctors don’t know how to cure it. The fact is that if you turn to nature, instead of the drug industry, to look for answers, there are many exciting ways to gain back your health, even after many years of believing you were stuck with it. You probably already know of people curing themselves of arthritis, cancer, heart disease and so on, without resorting to any further drastic medical intervention. These results show the way for us all: you can recover your health! 

Add to this the many wonderful breakthroughs in the science of anti-aging, and there is really no good reason, other than self-neglect, to accept the breakdown of old age. People routinely feel a sense of complete life renewal, increased vigor, mental clarity and sexual pleasure. You can—literally—turn back the clock!

In the words of Dr Walter Pierpaoli and Dr William Regeleson: “Ours is the first generation that need not experience senescence, the dismal physical decline now associated with old age. We are the first generation that need not resign ourselves to accepting the fate that our later years will be filled with debility and disease. Ours is the first generation that has the capacity, by resetting our aging clocks, to actually prolong youthful health and vitality into our eighties, nineties, and possibly even our hundreds”.

The appalling toll of unnecessary deaths is simply a measure of the incompetence of a medical profession, which is obsessed with drugs and treating only symptoms, instead of taking effective and proven action directed towards the known causes of these conditions.

It really comes down to what does Nature want for us? As far as she’s concerned, we are supposed to be wandering around in the forest, or on the African veldt, where it all started. We are hunter-gatherers and should eat meat, fish, plants, nuts and seeds.

Sitting still all day long is very bad. So are burgers, pizza and donuts. Boozing isn’t natural, although even wild animals have access to alcoholic fermented fruits at least part of the year (for some fun, search on YouTube for “drunken elephants marula fruit”).

Drunken elephants smashed on fermented marula fruits

As for smoking, Nature doesn’t understand that at all. And being fat just doesn’t happen in the wild.

Sugar is the kiss of death—truly. But so are grains, which turn quickly to soft carbohydrates like glucose. Milk is good for infants; but after a few months it’s nothing more than a sugar food. Skim milk is even worse, by the way: take away the fats and milk is basically just sugar water.

Thing is, these are all what I call “farmer foods”; they have only been in our diet for a few thousand years. In evolutionary terms that’s no more than a blink of an eye.

Forget vegetarianism and veganism; those are cults, not science. We are built as hunter-gatherers and that’s the way to live. I dismiss arguments about teeth and intestinal patterns. The truth comes from archeology, not speculation. Looking at ancient middens we know exactly what paleolithic man ate. From skeletal remains we also know that true paleolithic man was superb physically: tall, muscular, healthy and without a trace of bony malformations, which all appeared when we started to eat more vegetables!

In the last 2 millennia humans had shrunk to a crippled and deformed dwarf status and only regained their average paleolithic height in the late 20^th century.

Take these science-based tips to heart and get to work building a vigorous future!

To your good health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

Source reference:

Circulation. 2018;CIRCULATIONAHA.117.032047. Originally published April 30, 2018

However, there’s plenty of interest to read in the rest of this newsletter. The fact is that I have renamed my Diet Wise as One Diet for Life

Why?

Because I believe in the book so much and the good that it has already done, the lives it has changed (and, indeed, the lives it has saved!) It really is the foundation of a whole movement for good living.

Over the years we’ve been told and signaled may times that what you eat is vital for health. That’s true, in its way. But it saddens me when ignorant wannabes start talking about “superfoods” and the “ideal diet”, etc. These uneducated people fall into the usual trap of: “It worked for me, therefore it works for everybody!”

Sadly, that is the whole of what is wrong with orthodox medicine (allopathic, sometimes called). They treat the “average” person. There are NO average individuals; we are all uniquely different. The nonsensical idea that you can treat any adult individual, from age 18 to 110 or beyond with exactly the same dose for everybody is not just silly. It KILLS people.

Our responses to food are also uniquely different; foods are just a complex bunch of chemicals, after all. Over the space of 40 years, I saw someone, somewhere, be made violently ill by every food you can name. OK, not many of us eat persimmons or ostrich on a regular basis. But common foods, including but not limited to: lettuce, potato, egg, corn, wheat, beef, pork, lamb, fish, apples, tomatoes, bananas, onions (my own dear Mum’s bête noir), almonds (would you believe), cherries… 

I could go on and on (and on!) but it’s pointless. Would you even believe people can be allergic to spring water: Perrier, Evian, San Pellegrino, Fiji? See, natural spring water (not the artificial, filtered tap water Dasani by Coca Cola) contains a great deal of organic matter from the ground; dead plants, bacteria and other microbes… it’s a unique fingerprint and a person can become allergic or intolerant of the waters from one spring, but not others.

When I tell people this they either go “Ooooh” with mystical intensity (or just snigger behind my back)! But it’s true.

You never know what you might react to. Because of the sneaky “hidden allergy” effect, you could be eating something every day that is compromising your health. I like to tell the story of a woman who had severe headaches every day except Sundays and Mondays. It turned out she was reacting to corn starch: the gum used on office envelopes at that time. Whenever she licked the office mails and sealed them, it gave her a headache next day.

This phenomenon cuts across set beliefs that few people ever question. Stephen Pratt, thanks to dear old Oprah Winfrey, made $millions on his book “Superfoods”.

But two of his “superfoods” were toxic to many people: tomatoes (in the nightshade family) and oats (a mild gluten food). Pratt had got his “expertise” from Googling about lycopene and cholesterol. He knew NOTHING about the fact that all of his superfoods could make a person ill. He was dangerously ignorant of the clinical issues.

Anti-Inflammatory Foods

This has got out of hand and people are now writing up “anti-inflammatory foods”—every one of which is highly inflammatory to some individuals; or that old chestnut “alkaline foods” (most of which are acid in part and any one of which will TURN your body acid, if you happen to be intolerant of it)

In fact I’ve always supposed the acid-alkali story got started because of me and a handful of colleagues back in the 1980s. We soon realized that when a person has an allergic reaction to a food, he or she quickly turns metabolically acid. One way to speed up recovery from symptoms was to administer a dose of “alkali salts”: a mixture of sodium and potassium bicarbonate (2 to 1). It worked a treat (we also gave Epsom salts, a mild laxative, to clear the offending food from the bowel as quickly as possible).

But we NEVER suggested that continuous taking of alkali salts or fluids was a good idea. It’s not! It just taxes your kidneys, which have to keep your pH balance exactly around 7.3. Moreover, it stupidly ignores the fact that all food passes through the stomach, which is very acid indeed (it will burn a whole in the carpet if you dropped stomach juices on it).

So What’s In The Book?

Stories, lots of stories, that will show you the incredibly diversity of baffling clinical conditions that can be caused by food allergy or intolerance. There’s an inventory of scores and scores of symptoms which, taken together, will tell you how likely it is you are reacting to foods.

Dr Richard Mackarness gave five key symptoms that point the way to allergic illness and that have special importance. He believed that without one of the following symptoms, diagnosis is unlikely:

1. Over- or under-weight or fluctuating weight
2. Persistent fatigue that isn’t helped by rest.
3. Occasional swellings around the eyes, hands, abdomen, ankles, etc.
4. Palpitations or speeded heart rate, particularly after meals
5. Excessive sweating, not related to exercise

It needs mentioning that there should be no other obvious explanation for these symptoms.

But I eventually discovered probably the number one important question to allergies and health:

#1. Do you ever have good days (no symptoms)?

If you do, it means there’s nothing missing or busted. All present and correct. The fact that symptoms come and go frequently is a dead giveaway. Cancer doesn’t come and go! Neither do degenerative diseases of decay and aging! Even infections don’t clear up and then keep coming back…

No, if you are good Monday, Tuesday you are ill, but better again Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday Thursday good, then on Friday, after lunch starts again THAT’S AN ALLERGY! I promise you. That coming and going is absolutely characteristic.

And there is something else important which follows, as night follows day: 

#2 If you can be well one day, you can be well every single day!

Think about that; it’s totally logical. You just have to find the trigger and knock it off!

Having established the likelihood, the book then walks you, step by step, to uncover the hidden food allergies which may be spoiling your life. The “hidden enemy” as one dear friend put it long ago (Amelia Nathan-Hill).

If you haven’t read Diet Wise but are intrigued by this new title, go get yourself a copy. We have print, digital (read-online, on your phone or on a tablet) and BOTH. It’s one of the most helpful health books every written (I know that, from all the praise it brings).

That’s all for this week. Let’s start a movement!

To Your Good Health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby

The Official Alternative Doctor

However, don’t get carried away with excitement—some “experts” are calling for healthy skepticism when interpreting the findings.

Investigators at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, Illinois, found that for those who reported diets highest in these flavonols, the rate of incident AD was 48% lower than that of their counterparts who consumed the lowest levels of these dietary compounds.

They went a little deeper into the story and came up with 3 particular flavonols: kaempferol, isorhamnetin, and myricetin. Apart from myrecetin, I’ve never heard of these. Kale, beans, spinach, apples, olive oil, and tomato sauce are among the sources richest of these flavonols. Red wine and tea are good sources too.

But isn’t this a bit of throwback mentality? Kale, beans, spinach and olive oil, etc. can’t possibly do any good, can they? So what was the “real” reason, what is the actual chemical that did it? (keep going, I’m being ironic!) This is why they hunt for the so-called “active ingredient”. There is NO active ingredient in healthy fruits, oils, and veg. The whole plant does the job.

Eat your fruits and vegetables, particularly dark leafy greens, and drink some tea every now and again. A healthy diet that contains various fruits and vegetables is critical for continued health, especially brain health, is the main message being drawn from this useful study, which was published online January 29, 2020, in the journal Neurology.

At least the dodos have woken up, even if they are deluded that they just discovered the benefits of flavonols. The rest of us have known for several decades!

Ha ha!

We have also known that polyphenols, and particularly flavonoids (sometimes called vitamin P), are good for brain health. That’s why non-dutched organic chocolate is so good for us. For example, the famous longitudinal Nurses’ Health Study* investigators reported higher global cognitive scores among women with higher flavonoid consumption in comparison with others after 6 years of follow-up.

In addition, work in animals has linked higher flavonol intake to a lower risk of developing dementia.

However, to date, no researchers have explored the potential cognitive benefits of the flavonol subclass in humans.

To fill this research gap, investigators studied 921 participants living in the Chicago area, with a mean age was 81 years, and they were all free from dementia at baseline. The majority (75%) were women. 

After adjusting for age, sex, education, APOE-?4 positivity (that’s a gene that disposes to AD), late-life cognitive activity, and physical activity, the results showed that those in the highest quintile of total flavonol intake had a 48% lower risk for incident AD vs individuals in the lowest quintile.

A “quintile” means a fifth part, in other words about 20% of the whole. It does not mean the top group consumed 5 times as much flavonols as the lowest group.

This is a pretty staggering connection. You don’t have to be a vegetarian; just replace some of the meat, fowl and fish with brightly colored fruits and vegetables!

Skeptics

Of course the skeptics are all over this. They consider it their duty to pick holes in EVERYTHING.

They point out (quite correctly) that an association does not mean a causative role. But c’mon you idiots. Does that mean we have to trash the whole idea?
Of course not. It means we have to proceed with the wisdom we have, while looking for more conclusive proofs. But since Big Pharma can’t make $billions on selling fruit and veg, a properly designed prospective or “longitudinal study” as it’s called (going forwards, to see what happens, not backwards into what has happened) is never likely to be done.

Commenting on the study, Gunter Kuhnle, professor of nutrition and food science, University of Reading, United Kingdom, in a release stated, “The mode of action of flavonols is not known and it is likely that the observed associations are simply due to a dietary pattern rich in specific foods and vegetables.”

In truth, the investigators ran a series of adjustments to rule out other potential contributors to their findings. For example, they found that intake of vitamin E, saturated fat, folate, leutin, and omega-3 fatty acids did not materially change AD risk estimates.

“A risk reduction of almost 50% is of course impressive,” Kuhnle added. “But there are currently no data that suggest that flavonols as a compound could have such an effect.” Remember the old science maxim: It can’t be true, therefore it isn’t!

David Curtis, honorary professor of genetics, evolution, and environment at University College London, United Kingdom, said in a release. “…On the basis of this study I would not be urging people to drink more tea or eat more kale.” 

Sounds like he already has dementia then…

Only One Piece of the Puzzle

The researchers found that assessing the role of diabetes, hypertension, myocardial infarction, and stroke did not markedly change the results. Similarly, the analysis showed that higher body mass index and depression did not worsen AD risk.

The only statistically significant modification of effect was by sex. Total flavonol intake was stronger in men.

“In this community-based prospective study of older persons, we found evidence that higher flavonol intake through food sources, and kaempferol and isorhamnetin in particular, may be protective against the development of Alzheimer dementia. The associations were independent of many diet and lifestyle factors and cardiovascular-related conditions,” the investigators write.

Lead study investigator Thomas M. Holland, MD, of the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging, said the association of flavonols with decreased AD risk did not surprise him. “However, I was pleasantly surprised by the percent rate reduction being as strong as it was,” he said.

“It is generally known that the vitamins and minerals found in these food items are important. But we are now understanding that it’s the entire composition of the food, inclusive of bioactives, like flavonols, that render these foods as beneficial,” Holland added.

So has understood the truth: the WHOLE food is what does the job. Nutritional accountancy, as I call it, is worthless.

Assessing Foods That Are Just Right For YOU…

Get yourself a copy of my book Diet Wise.

May you never get dementia!

To Your Good Health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby

The Official Alternative Doctor

1. Dietary flavonols and risk of Alzheimer dementia. Thomas M. Holland, Puja Agarwal, Yamin Wang, Sue E. Leurgans, David A. Bennett, Sarah L. Booth, Martha Clare Morris. Neurology Jan 2020,

She accidentally spilled 2 drops of dimethyl mercury on her gloved hand… and subsequently died in agony.

Now it’s important you take note this is dimethyl mercury, which is NOTORIOUSLY dangerous. Methyl mercury, which caused the outbreak of Minamata Disease in Japan in the 1960s and 70s was METHYL mercury, not DIMETHYL mercury. We all saw the horrible picture of young kids from the city if Minamata, twitching and jerking in wheelchairs, as they slowly died.

Well, dimethyl mercury is ten times as deadly.* It’s horrible!

KW turned up in ER five months after her accidental exposure. She was sure that she had not touched the chemical. She apparently followed the full detox procedure at the time (she was a professional, after all). But…

This is what happened to her: she noticed progressive deterioration in balance, gait, and speech; she has lost 15 pounds in the 2 months leading up to her admission, and experienced several brief episodes of nausea and abdominal discomfort.

She started walking into walls and assumed she had not been paying proper attention. Then, one day, she almost got into a car accident. She started asking her husband to drive her to university. Maybe she hadn’t slept well, she thought.

When examined, she had a condition called “dysmetria” (“dys-” meaning wrong, and “-metria” meaning length). She was mis-estimating distances and how close or far away things were, which made her extremely clumsy.

Similarly, she had ataxic gait, meaning her walk was awkward, imbalanced, and disorderly. Both of these were combined with lousy handwriting and slurred speech, all of which amounted to severe neurodegeneration, with mercury as the likely culprit.

She was a skilled professional and she knew what all this meant. She was right to be concerned about her condition.

As the days continued, KW reports that she has a tingling in her fingers that’s getting stronger. She sees brief flashes of light in both eyes. She introduces the concept of white background noise that begins to wash away her normal hearing in both ears. Her gait becomes even more ataxic. Her speech becomes more slurred; her field of vision, more narrow.

A blood test revealed that her blood mercury levels were over 4,000 mcg/L. Thats 4,000 times greater than the upper limit of normal. Obviously, mercury poisoning was THE cause of her condition.

But the sad part of the story is that she did not show any signs of recovery, many weeks after leaving the lab. Where was the mercury hiding? It was clearly not being excreted. 95% of her “dose” was unaccounted for.

In fact it ended up in the nervous system. Remember, she was not poisoned by mercury metal but the dimethyl form, which has a strong affinity for fatty tissue. What’s the fattiest organ in the body?

The brain! it’s over . 60% fat.

So a near-lethal dose of organic mercury is transferred to her brain and nervous tissues. She was in big trouble.

The problem with dimethlymercury is that, in the liver, it’s broken down to methylmecury, which still dissolved strongly in fatty tissue (hence Minamata Disease). Even worse, it’s known to bing to tissue and cause free radical damage and oxidative stress, and form complexes that accelerate cell death.

The best solution here is to trap the mercury inside a molecule that’s water-soluble on the outside, so that it will grab the mercury but still dissolve in water and be excreted by the kidneys. We call this “chelation”, from the Latin word for a crab’s claw!

But it was too late. A week later a neuropsychiatric consultant found severe cognitive deficits. She’s losing touch. Her husband tries to speak to her, but she would stare blankly into a void.

At 3 weeks’ time after initially presenting to the emergency room, KW becomes unresponsive to verbal, visual, and touch stimuli. From the depths of her coma, she is sometimes found yawning spontaneously with brief episodes of agitation, screaming, crying, and unpromted sudden, jerky limb movements. There’s someone inside, but that person is trapped in a prison of her own comatose body.

There continued to be some debate whether her condition was caused by steady accumulation of mercury from her work. But a hair analysis showed that was not the case.

The amount of free mercury found in her body halved every 75 days, with a maximum excretion recorded roughly 150 days before presenting to the emergency room: the time she was subject to the spill in the lab.

Working, backwards, it became obvious that she had absorbed a MASSIVE quantity of demethylmercury, four times the lethal dose. She was as good as dead from the moment of the spill. In fact at one point her blood mercury levels were likely to be 16,000 times the upper limit of normal, it was calculated.

It was discovered later the dimethylmercury does, in fact, diffuse through the type of disposable latex gloves KW wore that day, and it does so within seconds. The small exposure, equivalent to a few drops absorbed into her skin, embedded into her body and caused delayed onset of cerebral disease.

In view of the dismal prognosis and after more than three months of trying everything they could do to saver her, the patient’s advance directives were followed, and she was left to die peacefully on June 8, 1997, 298 days after exposure.

Before she lapsed into a vegetative state, the patient requested that her case be presented to the general medical community, to scientists working with mercury, and to toxicologists, in the hope of improving the recognition, treatment, and prevention of future cases of mercury poisoning.

Only three other cases of dimethylmercury poisoning have been documented in history. In 1865, two lab assistants who were synthesizing it for the first time passed away several weeks after doing so. In the 1960s, another lab worker was exposed to it and he too suffered a delayed neurologic decline in the same fashion as KW.

In general, it’s a good rule to not touch things if you don’t know what they are. Be cognizant of what comes in contact with your skin. Unless you’re a chemist, you probably won’t come into direct contact with dimethylmercury the way that KW did. And don’t worry, you would have to eat 65,000kg of fresh Atlantic salmon in one sitting to get you to where she was.

It is important to understand that methyl and dimethylmercury are ORGANIC forms of mercury, not the same as thiomersol at all (mis-spelled by Americans as thimersal).

I don’t think it is appropriate to illustrate this story with an image of the patient. But if you want to watch a YouTube video about this famous case, go here:

A gloomy story, And of course it poses the obvious question: why would they want to put ANY form of mercury into babies? Teething powders resulted in deadly “pink disease”, back in the 1940s and 50s. Then it was used in vaccines. Duh! now we have to worry about polluted fish (from coal burning and other industrial waste). As a general rule, smaller fish, like squid, scallops, sardines, contain less mercury than larger varieties such as tune and swordfish, which are higher up the food chain.

Also- a good idea: get yourself a copy of the Monterey Aquarium phone app. Check the quality of fish you are eating!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby 

The Official Alternative Doctor

• A figure of speech only.

Sources:

1. Medpage Today

2. June 4, 1998. N Engl J Med 1998; 338:1672-1676 doi: 10.1056/NEJM199806043382305

So I thought I might as well share the whole story with you (this is supposed to be a newsletter, after all!)

Some years ago, I found a formulator with a good idea. It’s a very different version of vitamin C that has amazing, powerful properties (it is vitamin C!) but in a very well-tolerated form. In fact it tastes rather nice, instead of that ghastly sour ascorbic acid form.

Sodium ascorbate tastes a little better but is still not well tolerated in large doses. It causes diarrhea and stomach pains.

But the main value of vitamin C in fighting health conditions is to be able to take substantial doses. The piffling quantities they called the “recommended dietary allowance” (100 mg or less) was drawn up by fools, who cannot understand the different between the minimum amount to stop you getting scurvy and the OPTIMUM amount, to keep you in good health!

Consider: most animals don’t get colds and flu, or cancer (unless they eat the junk fed them by humans). Why so? All animals, with very few exceptions, make their own vitamin C on board. Goats, for example, create themselves about 12 – 15 grams of vitamin C a day. That’s more than 1,000 times the RDA.

You know I’ve always gone with nature, not scientists. She knows what she’s doing. We humans are a bit bigger than goats, so we probably need 15 – 20 grams a day. But we can’t make vitamin C anymore. We could once, but we lost the gene!

So I took on this new form and called it my “Super C”. All went well for years; it’s been one of my most successful products. Lots of people rave over it and say they can tolerate it like never before.

Then one day, a few months ago, Vivien met with this individual who supplied us. She was collecting a batch for distribution. But she noticed the expiry date was all wrong: it was about 7 days from the time of purchase. By the time anyone got their shipment, it would be out of date.

Viv pointed out the inconsistency but this gentleman bullied and harassed her and insisted the products were good for a least a year (probably true, but I can’t sell goods that are past their sell-by date, obviously!) Viv got back with the consignment, very upset and I DESPISE men who push my wife around. I stopped the payment check and told him to come get his out-of-date goods. In the end I had to take them back to him in person.

As people do, when you catch them out in crime or deceit, he became very obnoxious and seems to behave as if we were the party in the wrong. I hope never to speak to him again, though he still hangs around at trade shows etc.

Anyway, because of this wrong-doing, we suddenly found ourselves with no Dr. Keith’s Own® Super C! In a rush we found a new formulator who agreed they could do the job for us. They understood my modifications and improvements and set to work.

But they were starting from scratch; we had to do testing and tastings; then create new labels. It all took an uncomfortable length of time. But I’m writing this with excitement, delighted to tell you that DR. KEITH’S OWN SUPER C is back in stock! Yay!

Go here to order some.

Stock up NOW, just in case there’s a problem. I don’t think so. The manufacturers are the same and we have Victor, a nice young Korean chap, working as our intermediary. He’s very confident things are now ALL GOOD!

There are some tweaks to the formula. As well as EDTA, for chelation purposes, there is MSM (methylsulfonylmethane).

Methylsulfonylmethane (MSM) has become a popular dietary supplement used for a variety of purposes, including its most common use as an anti-inflammatory agent. According to a 2017 article on PubMed, it has been well-investigated in animal models, as well as in human clinical trials and experiments. A variety of health-specific outcome measures are improved with MSM supplementation, including inflammation, joint/muscle pain, oxidative stress, and antioxidant capacity.¹

I also added glycine. Glycine is a most important and simple, nonessential amino acid in humans, animals, and many mammals.

Glycine acts as precursor for several key metabolites of low molecular weight such as creatine, glutathione, haem, purines, and porphyrins. Glycine is very effective in improving the health and supports the growth and well-being of humans and animals. There are overwhelming reports supporting the role of supplementary glycine in prevention of many diseases and disorders including cancer (I don’t think I’m allowed to say that).

Dietary supplementation using proper doses of glycine is effectual in treating metabolic disorders in patients with cardiovascular diseases, several inflammatory diseases, obesity, cancers, and diabetes. Glycine also has the property to enhance the quality of sleep and neurological functions. ²

So, you’ll not be disappointed! In fact you should notice clarity and energy you have never been aware of before. I think it’s a better formula and I am delighted to take it myself.

Incidentally, it was reported that glycine is very effective in optimizing the activities of g- glutamyltranspeptidase, alkaline phosphatases, asparatate transaminases, tissue fatty acid composition, and alanine transaminase, [these are all liver function enzymes] so oral supplementation of glycine can be very effective in protecting the liver.

And for those of you who like a drink: glycine is an excellent preventive to reduce the alcohol levels in blood.³

A ton of good references in that last article, by the way.

Finally, there is that wonderful heart-healthy sugar: D-ribose.

So, take care of yourself. GET MY NEW SUPER C HERE.

Go here to order some and you can use the coupon code: SUPERC to get a 10% discount.

As I said, stock up NOW, just in case there’s a problem. This is the most wonderful vitamin substance of all time!

To your good health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby

The Official Alternative Doctor

References:

1. Nutrients. 2017 Mar; 9(3): 290. Published online 2017 Mar 16.

2. Oxid Med Cell Longev. 2017; 2017: 1716701. Published online 2017 Mar 1.

3. Oxid Med Cell Longev. 2017; 2017: 1716701. Published online 2017 Mar 1.

There are numerous dangers, which are always ignored or lied about. It’s almost impossible to get real data because Big Pharma hides the evidence. The FDA is complicit in this.

But the fundamental folly is that—if statins do anything at all—they only lower cholesterol. There’s shaky and unimpressive proof of that. A number of articles show it. But probably as many articles show it’s not even very good at that.

What’s lacking is any proof that lowering cholesterol is valuable. We need cholesterol; PLENTY of it. Those in the highest 25% of cholesterol levels live longer!

The stupid thing is that you can change ALL measurable bloods for the better, by a significant change of diet and lifestyle.

Doctors are totally ignorant of such matters and even have the idiocy to say it doesn’t matter. Then there are the official government food “guidelines”, which will literally KILL you, so it would be foolish to follow them. The official government guidelines have led to a massive explosion in obesity, diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

I recommend you give up 97% of your carbs (bread, wheat, pastry, pasta, pizza, muffins, cookies etc.), no manufactured foods (NONE) because they sneak in corn, wheat, sugar and MSG. Eat more plant food and eat like a caveman or hunter-gatherer. That’s it, you’re done! Such a simple step has 10 times the beneficial effect that taking statins does.

Give up most carbs. It’ll do more good than a ton of statins

Eat all the eggs you like but make sure they have the yolks intact; that’s where all the nutrition and goodness is, which will help preserve your eyes (age-related macular degeneration is another condition of epidemic proportions, as a result of government guidelines!)

Great for making you feel horny, by the way!

New Controversy

OK, I said all that, because there is new controversy around the use of statins for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease is once again in the news, with a new analysis suggesting that statin use in low-risk patients, which researchers say may be an example of low value care (having little benefit and potential to cause harm) in these patients and, in some cases, represent a waste of healthcare resources.

I need hardly add these are NOT American researchers, who are paid lackeys of the pharmaceutical industry. This information is from a cheery bunch at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and The analysis was published online in the British Medical Journal on October 16, 2019.

They point to the concern as to whether the “benefits” of statins outweigh the harms for primary prevention and whether widespread statin use can be justified from a societal perspective.

Nevertheless, clinical guidelines have expanded the eligibility criteria over time, and in many countries the majority of people taking statins do so for primary prevention.

For their analysis, the researchers examined the effects of changes to European guidelines on cardiovascular disease prevention from 1987 to 2016 using data from a national cohort of older people in Ireland.

Applying guideline recommendations from various times over the past 30 years to the Irish cohort, the researchers found that according to the 1987 guidelines 8% of their population would have been eligible for statins, but by 2016 the guidelines were recommending much greater use of statins so that 61% of the cohort were eligible for the drugs.

That’s a HUGE increase and a clear pointer to the way Pharma finagles and weaves it’s tricks, till it takes over all reason.

We don’t need this poison. It’ll potentially damage your heart, liver and kidneys and result in rhabdomyolysis and diabetes. And yet they claim it will benefit you by lowering your cholesterol.

Oh Yeah!

The Hoax

The hoax is that statins, or even low-fat diet changes, do any good at all.

In 1957 the Anti-Coronary Club was formed and in 1966 the results of its investigations were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). They had compared two groups of New York businessmen, aged 40 to 59 years. One group followed the so-called “Prudent Diet” consisting of corn oil and margarine instead of butter, cold breakfast cereals instead of eggs and chicken and fish instead of beef (in other words official government B*S* advice); a control group ate eggs for breakfast and meat three times per day.

The final report noted that the Prudent Dieters had average serum cholesterol of 220 mg/l, compared to 250 mg/l in the eggs-and-meat group. That’s insignificant—not worth the trouble dieting!

But guess what? There were eight deaths from heart disease among Prudent Dieter group, and none among those who ate meat three times a day (JAMA 1966 Nov 7;198(6):597-604; Bulletin NY Academy of Medicine 1968).

Now consider this: researchers at the Tulane University School of Medicine used electron beam tomography (EBT) to measure the progression of plaque buildup in heart-attack patients taking statin drugs. EBT is a very accurate way to measure occlusion from calcium in the arteries. Contrary to expectations, the researchers discovered that the increase in coronary artery calcium (one of the main markers for a heart attack) was significantly greater in patients receiving statins compared with event-free subjects despite similar levels of LDL-lowering.

[Arterioscler Thromb Vasc Biol, April 1, 2004]

Calcified coronary arteries: severe danger! Statins make it WORSE!

Look At It Another Way

The researchers looked at what we call NNT – the number needed to treat, to prevent one episode. In this case, how many patients would you have to keep permanently on stains (at VAST expense) to prevent one single heart attack (cardiovascular event, not necessarily death).

The researchers calculated that back in 1994, using the guidelines of the time for use of statins, the number needed to treat (NNT) to prevent one cardiovascular event in the primary prevention population was 40. That’s not bad/not particularly impressive. (changing diet would be about 1 or 2).

But when applying the 2016 guidelines to the data, they found an NNT of 400. “So we are getting far less bang for our buck with the 2016 guidelines,” the researchers noted.

The researchers give examples of two patients who would have very different absolute benefits of taking statins. One is a 65-year-old man who smokes, does not have heart disease, but has high total cholesterol levels, raised blood pressure, and an estimated 38% absolute risk of having a major coronary event in the next 10 years.

Such a man could expect an absolute risk reduction of about 9% (NNT = 11) from taking a statin.

The second example is a 45-year-old woman who does not smoke and has raised total cholesterol levels and slightly raised blood pressure. She has a 10-year risk of 1.4%, but her absolute risk reduction by taking a statin would be just 0.6% (NNT = 166).

In other words, a waste of time.

Amusingly WebMD has the following to say about statin use: Maintaining a healthy lifestyle while taking a statin can “improve the effectiveness of the drug”…

• Eat a balanced, heart-healthy diet
• Get regular physical activity
• Limit alcohol intake
• Avoid smoking

Isn’t that saying that these four interventions do all the work? What do they mean by “improves the effectiveness of the drug”? NO IT DOESN’T. It means the drugs are so INEFFECTIVE that these four simple changes produce a vastly better effect! Duh!

It’s time to bury these pernicious and costly drugs, before they bury you.

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby

The Official Alternative Doctor

You see plates of starches and sugar, sauces, dairy shlock and mayo or ketchup, all piled high, as if there was a famine on the way. Big portions are the modern American specialty, where just one single dish can be over 2,000 calories!

The days of nouvelle cuisine (tiny portions) are long gone. It only turns up occasionally these days, chiefly one suspects, in pretentious establishments that want to make more profit: sell less food for more money but with a French accent!

Olive Garden’s spicy Alfredo Chicken is 2,800 calories a portion!

3 Diets Tested

An interesting study from Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland, published online March 6th, 2019, looked at three different scientifically-recognized diets and evaluated which were best for middle age health and for maintaining cognitive function (thinking and memory skills).

These were:

The Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes whole grains, fruits, vegetables, healthy fats, nuts, legumes and fish and limits red meat, poultry and full-fat dairy. It also includes moderate alcohol, usually omitted by propagandists, but essential if you live in Spain, Italy or the south of France!

The DASH diet (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension), which emphasizes grains, vegetables, fruits, low-fat dairy, legumes and nuts and limits meat, fish, poultry, total fat, saturated fat, sweets and sodium. No alcohol.

The CARDIA APDQS diet (a priori Diet Quality Score) emphasizes fruits, vegetables, legumes, low-fat dairy, fish, and moderate alcohol, and limits fried foods, salty snacks, sweets, high-fat dairy and sugar-sweetened soft drinks. A priori just means dietary factors chosen in advance of the study. CARDIA stands for Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults.

So What Were The Results?

Eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, moderate in nuts, fish and alcohol and low in meat and full-fat dairy seems to be associated with better cognitive performance in middle age. Cognitive abilities include thinking and memory skills as the years go by.

“Our findings indicate that maintaining good dietary practices throughout adulthood can help to preserve brain health at midlife” said study author Claire T. McEvoy, PhD, of Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland.

The study involved 2,621 young people (average age of 25), who were then followed for 30 years. The participants’ cognitive function were tested twice, when they were about 50 and 55 years old.

We call this a longitudinal study and these are much more reliable than demographic surveys. It means researchers are much more likely getting a result that relates to a known cause.

The participants’ dietary patterns were evaluated to see how closely they adhered to three heart-healthy diets. Study participants were then divided into one of three groups – low, medium or high adherence score – based on how closely they followed the diet.

The researchers found that people who closely followed the Mediterranean diet and the APDQS diet had significantly less 5-year decline in their cognitive function at middle-age. But not so with the DASH diet,

In fact people with high adherence to the APDQS diet were 52 percent less likely to have poor thinking skills than people with low adherence to the diet.

People with high adherence to the Mediterranean diet were 46 percent less likely to have poor thinking skills than people with low adherence to the diet. Of the 868 people in the high group, 9 percent had poor thinking skills, compared to 29 percent of the 798 people in the low group.

Put another way, if you adhere reasonably well to either the Mediterranean diet or the CARDIA APDQS, you are 2 – 5 times more likely to avoid dementia and senility.

So forget the Alfredo sauce and the ketchup! A couple of glasses of wine will be far healthier. Go for a side-salad with light vinaigrette dressing! And have a bowl of fruit, instead of that tempting sugar dessert. It’s good for your heart and good for your brain!

The Failed DASH Diet

Doctors like to push the DASH diet and consider it “proven”. But it didn’t work nearly as well as the other two diets!

The DASH diet is a politically-correct diet. It’s supposed to work. They just ignore evidence that it is worthless (or even harmful). It’s a “committee” diet, rather than a real researchers plan.

Plus, it doesn’t include any alcohol and I am tired of repeating myself: that moderate wine intake is POSITIVE, health-wise. Not just “OK”, it adds subtle health factors.

Moreover, I don’t think it’s got anything to do with resveratrol or antioxidants or any other chemical factor. I think it’s the camaraderie, the joy-of-living factor that it brings to the table. It lowers stress and teaches us that life is good! Bonhomie is hard nutrient to score but a definite nutrient, nevertheless.

My friend Dr. Stephen Sinatra shares this view.

“One possibility is that DASH does not consider moderate alcohol intake as part of the dietary pattern, whereas the other two diets do,” Dr. McEvoy said. “It’s possible that moderate alcohol consumption as part of a healthy diet could be important for brain health in middle age…”

I say yes to that! Cheers!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby

The Official Alternative Doctor

SOURCE:

“Dietary patterns during adulthood and cognitive performance in midlife” Claire T. McEvoy, Tina Hoang, Stephen Sidney, Lyn M. Steffen, David R. Jacobs, James M.]Shikany, John T. Wilkins, Kristine Yaffe Neurology Mar 2019, 10.1212/WNL.0000000000007243