Vitamin K2 Reduces Heart Disease by 57 Percent

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Interesting links, some new some old. Enjoy!

From Natural Health Digest and News

Quote:

Researchers concluded that vitamin K1 had little effect on cardiovacular health, but vitamin K2 dramatically reduced it.
How do you get vitamin K2 into your diet? Vitamin K2 is found largely in meats and eggs.

Also cheese, organ meat, natto. See also my old posts on vitamin K2 related topics

Other interesting links gathered from a vegan forum (thank you Dr. Mc Dougall):


Sci Am: "Carbs against Cardio..." (refresher of an older post)

"Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Do Not Cause Coronary Heart Disease" by Dr. Paul J. Rosch

Quote:

4. No association between cholesterol levels and the severity or extent of atherosclerosis has ever been found in postmortem studies of the general population. No clinical or imaging study has found any relation between the degree of cholesterol lowering and improvement.

In one angiography study, in which blood cholesterol had been reduced by more than 25% in 24 patients, atherosclerosis was increased in 18 and unchanged in eight. Cholesterol rose in 12 other patients but only 4 showed an increase in atherosclerosis. A Mayo Clinic study similarly found that in all patients whose cholesterols had decreased by more than 60, there was a significant increase in coronary atherosclerosis.
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6. The huge and lengthy MRFIT study (Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial) was designed to prove the links between diet, cholesterol, and other Framingham risk factors with heart disease. Cholesterol consumption was cut by 42 percent, and saturated fat consumption by 28 percent and on long-term follow-up, those adhering to this dietary fat restriction had slightly lower coronary heart disease death rates.

However, this benefit was far outweighed by significantly increased total mortality rates, especially from hemorrhagic stroke, cancer, suicide, accidents and violence. The risk of dying from a cerebral hemorrhage was 500% greater in those with low cholesterol compared to those with high levels. In most other studies, the incidence of stroke was higher in those who ate less saturated fat.

Fuhrman's diet - repeat of the Natural Hygienist's dead end

I thought of rehashing this issue on behalf of my friends and fans (just kidding) from the WebMD forum, especially one person who seems to be doing much better on Dr. Fuhrman's diet and his IMT scan as a measure of arteriosclerotic progression started even reversing as opposed to his previous 30 years on a Pritikin vegan/vegetarian diet. Even though the following text is addressed to EngineerGuy of the webmd forum, I hope that more people will benefit reading it. I am encouraging everyone to read and add comments.

All Dr. Fuhrman did was reintroducing blended salads and added a little bit of meat or fish plus liberal amounts of nuts which are still in severe anathema pronounced by other vegan propagators. One can consider Fuhrman's diet to have 90% in common with the purist vegans like Drs McDougall or Ornish but that 10% difference has made ALL THE DIFFERENCE! What is happening here is that it seems that the 90% compliant vegans seem to be doing better than the 100% compliant vegans!

I think that this little addition of animal produce and nuts has made a huge difference by addressing some of the vitamin deficiencies inherent in the plant-only diets.

That deficiency is not only in B12. I was surprised to find out that some vegans suffer from obvious and easily measurable vitamin deficiencies, even vitamin A in spite of consuming massive amounts of beta carotene! Many seem to suffer from tooth decay, low bone density and/or osteoporosis which would point towards deficiencies of D3,K2 or some other factor. Neurological problems (mood disorders, depression, panic attacks) seem to be associated with the deficiencies of DHA and EPA (fatty acids) in my opinion (this is only my speculative guess, I have no proof).

There is also a possibility that the malnutrition symptoms among some vegans may be caused not only by their deficient diet (note: vitamin D2 and K1 can be obtained from plants, but their proper human forms D3 and K2 cannot!) but also by some intestinal digestive disruption. That possibility was first discovered and proposed as a possible explanation by Natural Hygienists. See Dr. Stanley Bass and read "With Three Generations of Vegetarian Hygienists" by Dr. Gian-Cursio. After suffering many health setbacks on their pure raw food vegan diets, including death of Dr. Cursio's son, they treated them with fasts every few months, followed by some special recovery diet that involved unpasteurized goat's cheese and eggs yolks. Dr. Cursio also introduced (and perhaps invented) the blended salads. (Note: Dr. Bass no longer recommends vegetarian diets, for which he was kicked out of the Natural Hygiene movement, after his life long participation). I am inclined to believe that their recovery approach and explanation may be correct, given the intestinal-disruptive properties of many plants. I think that the absorption problems are related to some plant phyto-toxins from wheat family (I suspect gluten and agluttins like WGA) and the cabbage family of plants (digestive enzyme inhibitors and thyroid hormone disruptors). Fasting would allow the intestinal lining tissue to regenerate itself and recover after excessive raw consumption of those plants.

I am bringing the Natural Hygienist's article to illustrate that Dr. Fuhrman is following in the footsteps of the people who tried that all before him and eventually had to abandon that approach, after many years of trials tribulations and errors. I recommend to learn from their mistakes. Dr. Bass wasted probably ~60 years of his life along this path and is kind enough to inform us of his experience. I am grateful to him since I don't have to go though all this!

Neither should you, after already wasting 30 years of your life on some vegetarianism, you don't need to waste another 30 years on some slightly less harmful variation of the same thing.

P.S. (2/07)

Dr. Bass describes how his fruitarian dietary experiment destroyed his teeth. It turns out that the damage might not be limited to fruitarian diets:

Vegetarian diet 'weakens bones'

Vitamin A,D3,K2 - toxicity levels

This is a short comment to summarize the situation, based on information gathered from the most recent nutrition studies as well as some of the most useful nutrition blogs (Stephan's, Peter's and Chris Masterjohn's - see the links on the left margin).

The issue of supposed toxicity level of D3 is being slowly unraveled in recent research. It turns out that A,D3 and (probably) K2 must come together in balanced proportions, thus some studies that were increasing D3 alone without A reported toxicity of D3 at a lower level than other studies where D3 may have come from natural produce (like fish oil) thus came together with vitamin A! A and D3 always seem to come together in animal food (any exceptions?). The same story repeats with studies analyzing toxicity of vitamin A. Again, the toxic A levels come out lower when only A is being increased on it's own, versus if it comes with natural fats like fish oil, butter, liver, yolks etc. Also, it appears that the body's synthesis of A out of carrotenoids from vegetables (or absorption) is impaired without sufficient level of fat in food. Subsequently, the sunlight-induced synthesis of D3 out of cholesterol, or the utilization of D3 seem to be deficient when not enough vitamin A is present in the system.

All of the above is absolutely consistent and may explain why do low fat vegetarians, even in sunny places like Arizona or Florida may and often do get deficient in both A and D3.