C.D., the guy I buy cars from, looked like he had aged 10 years…
The last time I saw him he was happy, energetic, talking a hundred miles an hour and doing a deal a minute…
But when I saw him last week he was different: He talked as if he were depressed. His thinking was muddled. He admitted to feeling “exhausted.” He looked like his body was shutting down.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“Lousy,” he said. “And I don’t understand it. I got a scan of my heart. Two of my coronary arteries were blocked. They told me I was going to have a heart attack soon. They convinced me to get stents on the spot. So I did.”
It was a story I’d heard before. Many times.
“I expected to be feeling good by now. But I’m having trouble doing normal things. I can’t think. I’m weak… my limbs hurt.”
I asked him what sort of drugs he was taking.
C.D. said he was taking six but he couldn’t recollect the names of four of them. He did remember he was taking Lipitor, the cholesterol-lowering drug and Plavix, a blood thinner.
If that wasn’t bad enough, he said he didn’t understand why his heart was blocked in the first place because he runs 20 miles a week and eats “healthy.”
Healthy turns out to be a breakfast of orange juice and a bowl of cereal. For lunch he eats sandwiches – made from “whole wheat bread,” he said.
“How could whole wheat give me a heart attack?”
I find myself in these situations all the time. He is not my patient. He isn’t paying me to help him get healthy. But I can’t say nothing. I can’t let him continue to make such unhealthy choices – especially when he believes he is doing the right thing.
How do I tell him that everything he thinks he knows about managing his heart is like throwing gasoline on a wildfire?
His exercise routine – running 20 miles a week — is no good. His nutrition is worse. And the drugs he is taking to stay healthy? They are the culprits behind his pain, mental fog and lack of energy.
Statin drugs stop production of the enzyme we use to make energy, CoQ10. Statin drugs plus zero CoQ10 means painful muscles and no energy.
But I’m not his doctor so I can’t countermand his doctors’ orders. So I gave him my card and suggested that he go to my website and read about heart health there. I also promised to send him my book, The Doctor’s Heart Cure.
My approach to heart health is radically different from what cardiologists have been telling people for decades. It also contradicts 80% of what the American Heart Association recommends in their publications.
It is difficult for some people to accept that. It is scary to think that all those brilliant doctors and scientists from Harvard and Stanford are wrong.
But the experience convinced me to put into effect a plan I’ve been thinking about for some time. I’ve decided to do is develop a heart health kit.
It’s going to be a collection of proof and advice on things like how to keep your homocysteine down, why cholesterol is your friend not the enemy, how to cure the inflammation problem, the real dietary changes to make for heart health, and the real exercise you need to strengthen your heart.
Let me give you an example. It’s a simple heart cure that most people don’t know… because regular doctors don’t want me to tell you about it.
You see, collagen is the most abundant protein in your body. It’s how your body makes blood vessels, and the tissue of your heart.
Collagen is stronger than steel wire, and as part of a network of an elastic-like substance called elastin, it makes up the connective tissue that holds you together.
That means that without collagen, you would literally fall apart. Your joints would disintegrate, your blood vessels would break open, and your heart would fail.
And do you know how you make collagen?
From vitamin C.
That means your heart would fail without vitamin C.
Cardiologists hate when I talk about this. They would rather you take drugs for your heart.
Yet in one clinical trial after another, researchers find links between low levels of vitamin C and risk of stroke.1 And people who get the most vitamin C show a dramatic decline in death from heart disease.2 Vitamin C even helps prevent plaque from being deposited in your arteries.
And here’s a shocking study you’ll never read in the mainstream media. Researchers looked at group of mice that, like people, couldn’t make their own vitamin C.
As these mice without vitamin C grew, they were exposed to normal stress for only an hour a day. Their heart cells died, and the mice were dead within two weeks.
But researchers also took a group of these mice and gave them vitamin C as they grew. The researchers wrote, “All of the findings in vitamin C-[deficient] mice were completely prevented by the supplementation of a sufficient amount of vitamin C.” 3
Medical professionals continue to claim that it’s bad to supplement with nutrients, especially vitamin C. And the RDA for adults is only 90 mg for men and 75 mg for women.
But here’s the thing… animals that make their own vitamin C produce between 3,000 mg and 10,000 mg a day. That’s over 100 times more than the RDA!
Unfortunately, we only get a small amount of vitamin C from our food. The foods with the most vitamin C include dark green, leafy vegetables, and “superfruits” like the acerola cherry.
Peppers, parsley and watercress are all little-known but rich sources of vitamin C… but you’d have to eat a lot of them to get enough for heart protection.
That’s why I recommend you supplement with 1,500 mg twice a day if you’re healthy. If you’re under a lot of stress, or if you are sick, you can take as much as 20,000 mg per day. Your heart will thank you for it.
This is just one simple recommendation for heart health that goes against everything you hear from standard medicine. There are many more, and I’m going to put them all together in my Doctor’s Heart Health Kit. When it’s ready, you’ll be the first to know all about it.
A big component of my heart kit is my advice on the right supplements to take for your heart. The most important are CoQ10 along with the remarkable nutrient called PQQ. I’ll be telling you much more about this in the next few days, so be sure not to miss my upcoming letters.
1. Kurl S, Tuomainen T, Laukkanen J, Nyyssönen K, Lakka T, Sivenius J, Salonen J. “Plasma vitamin C modifies the association between hypertension and risk of stroke.” Stroke. 2002;33(6):1568-73.
2. Wannamethee S, Bruckdorfer K, Shaper A, Papacosta O, Lennon L, Whincup P. “Plasma vitamin C, but not vitamin e, is associated with reduced risk of heart failure in older men.” Circ Heart Fail. 2013;6(4):647-54.
3. Kim H, et. al. “Vitamin C prevents stress-induced damage on the heart caused by the death of cardiomyocytes … in Gulo(-/-)Vit C-Insufficient mice.” Free Radic Biol Med. 2013. pii: S0891-5849(13)00367-5.