When niacin doesn't work

20. September 2007 William Davis (7)

Dan had the usual collection of metabolic syndrome lipoprotein abnormalities:

low HDL of 28 mg/dl, triglycerides 280 mg/dl, 90% of his LDL particles were small.

Along with elimination of wheat and junk foods, exercise, and fish oil, I asked Dan to add niacin. I usually ask people to buy SloNiacin and begin at 500 mg per day with dinner, increased to 1000 mg per day at dinner after 4 weeks.

Dan came back several months later. His lab results:

HDL 40 mg/dl, triglycerides 76 mg/dl.

(We didn't repeat the full lipoprotein analysis, so no small LDL value was available.) Better, though still some room for improvement. I urged Dan to stick to his program, lose some more weight off his 260 lb frame, exercise, be strict about the wheat products.

Dan returned another few months later. Lab results:

HDL 29 mg/dl, triglycerides 130 mg/dl.

Dan had lost another 8 lbs and was reasonably compliant with his diet.

What's going on here? Why would he backtrack on HDL and triglycerides despite sticking to his program?

I asked Dan where he purchased his niacin. "I got it from Sam's Club. The pharmacist said to try this 'no-flush' kind so the hot flush wouldn't bother me."

Aha! It's no wonder. "No-flush" niacin, or inositol hexaniacinate, is an outright scam. It has virtually no effect on lipids or lipoproteins in humans. It's therefore no surprise that, by replacing real niacin with the no-flush variety, Dan's blood patterns began to revert back to their original state.

Let me be straight on this: No-flush niacin is a scam. It does not work: it does not raise HDL, reduce triglycerides, nor reduce small LDL. It's expensive, too, far more expensive than the real thing. It has no business being sold by stores like Sam's Club or your health food store.

SloNiacin (Upsher Smith) has become our preferred preparation. (I obtain no compensation of any sort for saying so.) We buy it at Walgreen's.

Niacin and blood sugar

19. September 2007 William Davis (14)

We've been engaging in a conversation on the Track Your Plaque Forum on whether niacin raises blood sugar.

Yes, it does. In the vast majority of instances, however, the rise is trivial and without consequence. Typically, someone will start with a borderline elevated blood sugar of, say, 108 mg/dl. Niacin, 1000 mg per day, then raises blood sugar to 112 mg/dl. This small increase does not oblige any specific action, nor does it pose any excess risk.

Blood sugars in the normal range of <100 mg/dl tend not to show this effect. Higher blood sugars, e.g., 130 mg/dl, may show a more exagerrated effect but it is also rarely of great consequence. People who take medications for adult type II diabetes, or people with childhood-onset, type I diabetes will also experience rises in blood sugar. This is a somewhat larger issue in these people.

Niacin is best undertaken with a change in diet, specifically a reduction in processed carbohydrate foods, particularly evil and ubiquitous wheat products.This will often compensate for the blood sugar effect.

Niacin also shares many of the benefits of weight loss: rise in HDL, drop in triglycerides and small LDL.

Keep it all in perspective: If HDL is low, e.g., 30 mg/dl, or there is a significant small LDL pattern, or you have Lp(a), using niacin--vitamin B3--is quite safe and the most effective treatment we have. It's also a vitamin. Also recall the famous HATS Trial of simvastatin and niacin: simvastatin (Zocor) reduced heart attack risk 30%; adding niacin reduced heart attack risk an astounding 90%.

Very few strategies can yield the enormous benefits, both as a stand-alone treatment or in combination with others, that niacin can, whether or not blood sugar creeps up a few milligrams.

Statin drugs and Coenzyme Q10

17. September 2007 William Davis (10)

I am continually impressed at how few of my colleagues take advantage of a wonderful nutritional supplement, Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10).

Despite some of the recent backlash against statin agents, I do believe that they serve a role. I take issue with the pharmaceutical industry's endless advertising and force-feeding of drugs to the public and to physicians. Nonetheless, statin agents do serve a purpose.

If you go to your doctor with a fever of 103 degrees, coughing up thick yellow sputum, and you are struggling to breathe, would you refuse an antibiotic for pneumonia? Probably not. But an antibiotic for a sore throat may be a different matter.

So it goes with the statin drugs, too. An otherwise healthy 50-year-old woman with an LDL cholesterol of 140 mg/dl probably does not need a statin drug. A 35-year-old man with heterozygous hypercholesterolemia with an LDL cholesterol of 280 mg/dl, who will develop his first heart attack within the next 2 or 3 years, does need these drugs. The rub, of course, is deciding who in between also needs them.

Let's just accept that some people do indeed need a statin drug for one reason or another. How common are the muscle aches?

In my experience, muscle aches are inevitable. The longer you take a statin drug, the more likely you will develop them. The higher the dose, the more likely.

Thankfully, for most people muscle aches are more of a nuisance than a real danger. Usually, a reduced dose of the drug, periodic breaks from the drug (we often advise one or two weeks off every three months), or a change to another agent helps.

However, in my view, coenzyme Q10 provides a virtual antidote to most of the muscle aches and weakness. A recent review was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiologist that concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support the use of CoQ10 for this purpose. Obviously, the authors do not use CoQ10 in everyday practice. If they did, they would have no doubt whatsoever that CoQ10 provides the majority of people with complete relief of the muscle complaints.

Time and time again, I have witnessed complete relief from muscle aches and muscle weakness from statin drugs using CoQ10. However, in our experience, a dose of at least 100 mg per day needs to be maintained. Occasionally, a higher dose will be necessary, e.g., 300 mg per day. The preparation also must--MUST--be an oil-based gelcap to work (just like vitamin D). The capsules that contain powder are so poorly absorbed that they usually fail to yield the needed effects.

Pictured is the Sam's Club (Members' Mark brand) that has served us well, providing reliable effects at a reasonable price. (CoQ10 is expensive, no matter where you buy it. That's the only drawback I'm aware of.) GNC has a great preparation, as does Life Extension. Just be sure it is a gelcap, not a capsule filled with powder.

There's more to CoQ10 than relief of statin muscle aches. More about that in future.

More Andy Kessler

15. September 2007 William Davis (2)

I can't help but quote a few more passages from Andy Kessler's irreverent but nonetheless insightful book, The End of Medicine. I find his quotes irresistible because I believe that he is (unintentionally) describing precisely what we are doing in the Track Your Plaque program:

"Maybe the jig is up on the cholesterol conspiracy. Any real scientist running studies on cholesterol drugs would not just check to see if participants in the study had a heart attack. You would scan, check for plaque, provide drugs, scan again, see if the plaque increased or decreased, repeat. Instead, we have a multibillion-dollar statin business based on vagaries and deception."

Kessler cuts to the chase on that one. Except we do it with a lot of things beyond drugs.

"256-slice scanners, faster than your heartbeat, just might be the magic pill of diagnosis. It's as if doctors will be saying I was blind before i could see. . . Six blind doctors feeling around an elephant and describing a wall, spear, snake, tree, fan and a rope. Looking for clues in all the wrong places. Measuring cholesterol and blood pressure is like reading the outside temperature and humidity from inside your house and guessing if it's raining. Open the window, stick your goddamn hand outside and know for sure.

How much do these scans have to cost to become widespread? $500? $100? $20? It almost doesn't matter. The savings come over time. Spread the R&D over millions and you get scale. It works.

. . . what if the spending was on detection instead of intervention? With some breakthrough, the economic consequences can be staggering. if medicine as we know it is replaced by health monitoring, hmmmm . . ."

Get beyond his humor and you see that Kessler shares our appreciation of the futility of cholesterol testing for predicting your heart's future. He advocates early detection, no surprise.

And lastly:

"I go to conferences about wikis and Wi-Fis, podcasts and blogs, and I always leave with an empty feeling, bored to tears. It's all great stuff, but technology somehow seems gripped with incrementalism. It's all really neat and cool and wow, but somehow predictable. Gee, in five years we'll have cheap terabyte drives so that we can, what, watch Simpsons reruns and shop more efficiently?

Forget that. It's all about taking control. One by one, industries are being democratized. Power is shifting from producers and service providers to users. . . Power to the people--everywhere except medicine . . . With the right tools, we'll all take control."

Amen. He's right. Taking control of health care out of the hands of the doctors and putting it in your own hands. But you are going to need better tools, more information, and guidance.

I couldn't have said it any better.

The End of Medicine

14. September 2007 William Davis (0)

"It's not about staying young--it's about staying healthy. They say 60 is the new 50. If you stay healthy, got a good ticker lay off tobacco, are lucky enough to avoid some weird cancer, you can kick up your heels, keep running your company, or better yet, travel the world, hike a mountain, ski Zermatt--heck, Tony Randall even started a new family.

But that's a big if. We pump ourselves with cholesterol-lowering drugs as if that was the magic elixir. Not so simple.

Instead, our skin is getting peeled back for a quick look inside. This is the end of medicine as we know it. Don't guess that I might have hardening of the arteries. Open me up and take a look. Don't guess that I don't have cancer because I'm not spitting up blood or growing a tumor the size of a grapefruit out my side."

If you can get beyond some of the frat-boy joking in the book, you will see that the author, Andy Kessler, actually acquires some pretty canny insights into the future of medicine in his book, The End of Medicine.

It's a book not about the end of medicine, but about the end of medicine as we know it today: the doctor by the bedside, the treating-when-symptoms-appear approach that characterizes current practice.

Instead, Kessler predicts that new technology will supplant the role of doctor-as-gatekeeper and decision-maker. Early detection is key. He picked up on that right away, as his quote above shows.

Despite the sophomoric humor, I was impressed that much of the Track Your Plaque approach--online, self-empowered, based on the concept of early detection followed by practical and effective tools for correction, involving your doctor only peripherally--is what Kessler is trying to articulate.

In actuality, I would not necessarily recommend his book, unless you need a light moment and some fodder for thinking about our health future. But he does have some startling insights for a guy who just invests money and has no real health background.

Another excerpt:

CT Anxiety

I always feel a certain anxiety when I walk into the Hyatt Regency at the bottom of California Avenue in San Francisco. The cutsie Trolley car outside, the Embarcadero tile pattern on the sidewalk — they are all part of the package. But as I've done every time I've been there, I head straight into the lobby, tilt my head back and scan the Escher-like floors, starting at the top and then down and outwards to the bottom until I start feeling dizzy. I thank Mel Brooks for this.

This guy was zooming through someone's brain like it was a Sunday drive. More like a Sunday afternoon video game.

With my head spinning from this "High Anxiety" flashback, I stroll into the conference, half expecting to be given a barium enema by a cross between Nurse Diesel from Mel Brooks' flick and Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. I really gotta switch to decaf on days like this.

The 7th International Multi-Detector Row Computed Tomography Symposium sounded innocuous enough. I assumed it would be a bunch of technical papers on the future of scanning, where I would read the paper in the darkened hall until lunchtime and then head off for some hot Hunan and home.

Instead, the place was like a carnival for cardiologists.

Kessler has, in Silicon Valley style, left a wide wake of electronic content to get a better view of his ideas. There is a podcast located on the InstaPundit site that you can listen to at: http://podcasts.instapundit.com/AndyKessler.mp3, that provides some more of this irreverent but out-of-the-box thinker's thoughts.

Life Extension article on vitamin D

14. September 2007 William Davis (5)

For anyone looking for a discussion about the emerging role of vitamin D as a cause for coronary disease, see my recent article, Vitamin D’s Crucial Role in Cardiovascular Protection, in Life Extension Magazine, now posted online at:

http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2007/sep2007_report_vitamind_01.htm.

Vitamin D has assumed an absolutely critical role in the Track Your Plaque program for coronary plaque reversal and dropping CT heart scan scores. Since adding vitamin D and aiming for blood levels of 50-60 ng/ml, our success rate has skyrocketed. In fact, I wonder just how well our two most recent record holders--51% and 63% drops in heart scan scores--would have fared without it. (They probably would have dropped, but no where near as much.)

Also, a full-length booklet that contains just about everything you want to know about vitamin D (or at least a right-this-moment summary of what is known about it) will be available to Track Your Plaque Members for free before the end of the year.

If you haven't done so already, DO THE D!!

Why healthy can make us fat

13. September 2007 William Davis (0)

Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating: Why we eat more than we think (see yesterday's Heart Scan Blog post), also has a Blog. Despite the bland advice offered on much of the Prevention Magazine and website, Wansink's Food Think Blog is a winner.

In a recent post, Wansink quotes a report from Science Daily that described a study he recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research. Wansink's study describes how just applying the label "healthy" to fast food choices increased consumers' calorie intake:

"When we see a fast-food restaurant like Subway advertising its low-calorie sandwiches, we think, 'It's OK: I can eat a sandwich there and then have a high-calorie dessert,' when, in fact, some Subway sandwiches contain more calories than a Big Mac."

In one study, Chandon and Wansink had consumers guess how many calories are in sandwiches from two restaurants. They estimated that sandwiches contain 35% fewer calories when they come from restaurants claiming to be healthy than when they are from restaurants not making this claim.

The result of this calorie underestimation? Consumers then chose beverages, side dishes, and desserts containing up to 131% more calories when the main course was positioned as "healthy" compared to when it was not--even though, in the study, the "healthy" main course already contained 50% more calories than the "unhealthy" one.

"These studies help explain why the success of fast-food restaurants serving lower-calorie foods has not led to the expected reduction in total calorie intake and in obesity rates," the authors write.

Interesting. In fact, I've had many patients say that they eat at Subway or similar chains and choose the "healthy" options. "That's got to be better than a cheeseburger and fries!" Perhaps not. (Of course, you can't leave Subway or other fast food operation feasting on wheat products.)

Wansink can be counted on for some truly fascinating observations into many behaviors that are subconscious but explain at least part of the reason why we're so fat. Though his Blog has a relatively short history of posts, there's lots of great commentary.

Pierre Chandon and Brian Wansink. "The Biasing Health Halos of Fast Food Restaurant Health Claims: Lower Calorie Estimates and Higher Side-Dish Consumption Intentions" Journal of Consumer Research, October 2007.

Outsmarting the enemy

12. September 2007 William Davis (2)

"Everyone--every single one of us--eats how much we eat largely because of what's around us. We overeat not because of hunger but because of family and friends, packages and plates, names and numbers, labels and lights, colors and candles, shapes and smells, distractions and distances, cupboards and containers. This list is almost as endless as it's invisible.

Invisible?

Most of us are blissfully unaware of what influences how much we eat . . . We all think we're too smart to be tricked by packages, lighting, or plates. We might acknowledge that others could be tricked, but not us. That is what makes mindless eating so dangerous. We are almost never aware that it is happening to us."

So opens Brian Wansink's book, Mindless Eating: Why we eat more than we think.

Wansink studies consumer behavior at Cornell University. He's the guy who scrutinizes in excruciating detail why we eat what we do, what factors determine what we eat like food color and smell, the company we keep, product packaging. He works without food industry funding, though there are plenty of researchers who do this sort of research funded by the likes of Kraft, Nabisco, and Kellogg's.

His book is packed full of the conclusions he and his team have come to over the years studying our buying and eating habits. While this information could (and is) be easily used by the food industry to coerce us to eat more and more, understanding many of the concepts Wansink talks about can also open your eyes to their clever tactics.

He especially details how our internal satiety signals fail us when external cues are present that easily trip us up. He talks about one experiment he ran in which soup bowls were rigged with concealed rubber tubes in the bottom that continually replenished the soup as the person consumed it. Thus, with the bowl continually refilled, the eater had no idea how much he or she had consumed. When the quantity of soup eaten from the endless bowl was compared to people eating from standard bowls, there was as much as a three-fold increase in the quantity and calories eaten.

Just be aware that, while Wansink is an expert in consumer eating behavior, he is not necessarily an expert in nutrition. Just as a card shark can show you lots of clever tricks to hoodwink your opponent, he might not be the best person to teach you how to play bridge.

For a great hint at some of the interesting and all-too-human observations Wansink makes, the online Prevention Magazine posted a brief video:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1155399889/bclid1171884988/bctid1113465050

We might not be able to stop Big Food from selling garbage foods, but we can at least be armed with insight into how we are subconsciously coerced into eating more.

Test Of Scanner Saves A Doctor's Life

11. September 2007 William Davis (5)

Read the story online at http://www.courant.com/news/health/hc-luckydoc.artsep10,0,7572510.story?coll=hc_features_promo

I personally hate these stories, the ones that turn heart scans into drama by describing how someone had a heart scan, then turned out to have so much coronary plaque that they had to have bypass surgery.

But I point this one out because the story is related in an interesting way. It highlights the utter ignorance that operates in heart disease detection.

The story highlights how a 50-year-old, 5 ft 8, 150 lb slender, exercising neurologist underwent a CT coronary angiogram in a newly installed device in a Hartford, Connecticut hospital (not a heart scan) that detected entirely unsuspected severe and diffuse coronary disease. You know the rest: abnormal stress test, heart catheterization, bypass surgery of the hapless doctor-now-patient, followed by grateful patient saying things like "This machine saved my life."

It probably is true. You've seen these stories before. I've witnessed these sorts of headline-makers for the past decade. I remain surprised that it still happens.

The doctor is not some ignorant, uninformed man who can't even fill out his income tax forms. Yet how does a man like this walk around with life-threatening disease and not know it? Why does it still make headlines?

Anyway, despite all my jawing about heart scans and early heart disease detection, many physicians and the public remain in the stone age of heart disease. Even though this neurologist's story made headlines, the many other people who 1) identified their heart disease earlier with a simple heart scan, then 2) took action to put a stop to it, do not make headlines. But that's the way to go.

Why isn't the rest of the story being told? Why was this man's heart disease uncovered only in its late phases? Hartford, Connecticut is not some backwater. I've been there. It's a major city with large hospitals and a University Medical Center. But a professional with presumed knowledge of health and his doctor(s) allowed this to happen?

In other words, this is not a story of success, but of failure--failure to identify coronary disease years earlier when preventive action would have prevented bypass. But that's not such a compelling headline, is it?

As an aside, I'll bet you that this man has lipoprotein(a), a severe small LDL pattern, and severe deficiency of vitamin D. Correct these and it's unlikely he'll need bypass again. But that's kind of boring, isn't it?

The great food industry deception

8. September 2007 William Davis (1)

I'd forgotten what a powerful report Peter Jennings and ABC News produced about the enormous deception perpetrated by the food industry and its effects on health until Dr. Joe Mercola posted the YouTube clips from the report on Mercola.com.

(This is not meant to be an endorsement of everything Dr. Mercola has to say. He says lots of things; I agree with only a fraction of it. But this is a gem.)

Although made in 2004, the report remains every bit as relevant today as it was then. It concerns me deeply that, despite reports like this being broadcast to Americans, the obesity epidemic continues unabated. In fact, it's worse just in the short three years since then.

Be aware of what the food industry is up to. They intensively market high profit margin foods to us--and especially our children--to increase sales. As Jennings points out, the U.S. government (USDA) is, for a variety of reasons both good and bad, complicit with this massive deception. While many media reports continue to focus on lack of exercise as the root cause for the obesity epidemic, it is really the active and purposeful selling of processed junk foods to Americans that is principally to blame.

By the way, how many of these foods proudly boast the American Heart Association Check Mark of approval?

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

200 point drop in heart scan score

11. August 2007 William Davis (0)

Some of the math-savvy will have noticed that we often report drops in CT heart scan scores on a percentage basis. Unfortunately, it this were a competition (which, of course, it is not), this would be unfair.

A score of 50, for instance, that drops "only" 25 points would represent a 50% drop in score.

But someone with a score of 1050 who drops his or her score the same quantity, or 25, will have dropped their score less than 5%.

In other words, the magnitude of your starting score determines how large a percentage drop you achieve, even when the absolute, or real, quantity of plaque reversal is the same as someone who begins with a lower score.

I qualify this discussion in this vein because of Grady's story. Grady, a soon-to-retire attorney, started with a heart scan score of 1151. On the Track Your Plaque program, he saw his score drop nearly 200 points--200 points!

But, if we gauged Grady's success just on a percentage basis, he dropped his score only a measly 17% or so. (Imagine the headlines if this program were sponsored by a drug manufacturer. The Track Your Plaque program proudly has nothing to do with the drug industry.)

Of course, the Track Your Plaque program is not a competition. It is an effort to help everyone possible, the more the better. Even if Grady failed to set a new Track Your Plaque record gauged on a percentage basis, he will have achieved an extraordinary advantage in health: the virtual elimination of the dangers of heart disease.

With this drop in score, Grady's risk for heart attack plummets from a spine-chilling 25% per year to nearly zero. (I know of NO other program that can claim such a track record.)

Grady's full story will be reported in the August, 2007 Track Your Plaque newsletter. To subscribe or to just view when it is posted, go to www.cureality.com website, click on the upper right hand corner What Does My Heart Scan Show? graphic, which then takes you to the page to view the newsletter. Or, Track Your Plaque Members can just go to the Library and click on newsletter archives.

How tough is the Track Your Plaque 60-60-60 target?

9. August 2007 William Davis (3)

One of the basic requirements that stack the odds in your favor of stopping or dropping your CT heart scan score is to achieve basic lipid targets of 60-60-60.

In other words, we generally see best results when LDL is reduced to 60 mg/dl, HDL raised to 60 mg/dl, triglycerides reduced to 60 mg/dl. Now, these are not absolute requirements. Someone can have a spectacular drop in heart scan score even with an HDL of 56, LDL of 71. But the "Rule of 60" provides a useful target that is easy to remember, packs real power, and is clearly beyond that achieved with conventional approaches.

People often ask, "Just how tough is it to get to these targets?"

It's really not that tough. Interestingly, whenever I tell my cardiologist or primary care colleagues that I advocate these 60-60-60 targets, they declare that it's tough, perhaps impossible, except for the most highly motivated.

I agree that it requires motivation. A cigarette-smoking, TV-addicted, 70-lb overweight, chip- and pretzel-eating couch potato is not going to achieve them.

On the other hand, you don't have to be a marathon running vegetarian to do it, either.

Most people, in fact, engaged in the Track Your Plaque program achieve the 60-60-60 targets---or exceed them. It's not uncommon, for instance, for HDL to skyrocket to 80 or 90 mg/dl with many of our strategies. (Of course, if your starting HDL is 20 or 25 mg/dl, 80 or 90 is not possible with current technology.)

But it certainly does require more than the "Take Lipitor and stick to your low-fat diet" approach that is the mantra repeated in the vast majority of medical offices across the U.S. For instance, reducing LDL to 60 mg/dl when starting at 170 mg/dl will require addition of oat bran and other soluble or viscous fibers; raw almonds and walnuts; perhaps the use of Benecol butter substitute; reduction or elimination of wheat products if small LDL comprises a substantial proportion of LDL particles. Reducing triglycerides requires the generous use of omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil. Attention to vitamin D must be a part of the effort.

So, yes, it is not as simple as the conventional approach. But the results are far superior in reducing or eliminating heart attack and in dropping your heart scan score.

But it can be done. We do it every day.

Vitamin D2 belongs in the garbage

8. August 2007 William Davis (15)

It happened yet again.

Mel came to the office. CT heart scan score: 799--quite high, enough to pose a real threat very soon. Thus, no time to lose in instituting an effective prevention program.

We do the usual--identify the six causes of coronary plaque; begin fish oil, show him how to correct his plaque causes. You've heard it before.

Vitamin D blood level in March: 17 ng/ml--severe deficiency.

Vitamin D replacement needs to be a part of his coronary plaque control program. So I suggested 6000 units per day of an oil-based preparation of vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol). Conveniently, there is a Vitamin Shoppe outlet across the street from my office. I just point and tell people to go across the street.

Mel did just that. However, he also informed his primary care physician about his vitamin D deficiency. His primary physician promptly told him he needed to take a prescription form of vitamin D and not to bother with just a supplement.

So Mel stopped his vitamin D capsules and started taking vitamin D prescription "medication." Mel figured, naturally, that if it requires a prescription, it must be better. Unfortunately, Mel and his doctor failed to pass the change in strategy onto us.

So, four months later, Mel got repeat vitamin D blood level: 19 ng/ml.

I've seen this too many times. The prescription form of vitamin D is nonsense. There's hardly any effect on blood levels of vitamin D3 at all. The body's conversion of this non-human form of D is extremely inefficient and therefore virtually useless. While it raises the blood level of vitamin D2 (ergocalciferol) and thereby total D (D3 + D2), there is negligible effect on the real human and active form, D3.

How and why this preparation got through the FDA process to obtain approval as a drug is beyond me, though I am not a defender of FDA practices and politics.

This notion that "if it's a prescription, it must be better" is a fiction perpetuated by the drug industry. The same principle gets tossed around with fish oil, hormones like estrogens and testosterone, and others. Often, the principal difference between prescription and non-prescription is patent protection. Patent protection provides profit protection. Selling a product without patent protection can be risky business. It's certainly less profitable.

As always, getting at the truth is sometimes the most difficult job of all. Prescription vitamin D belongs in the garbage. Vitamin D capsules (gelcaps) do the job and do it well, over and over, with reliable, consistent and substantial rises in blood levels of 25-OH-vitamin D3. I take 6000 units per day (3 2000 unit capsules) that cost me $5.99 for a bottle of 120 capsules, or about $4.50 a month.

And nobody--nobody--pays me to say this. I say it because I believe it's true.

Angioplasty vs. Track Your Plaque

5. August 2007 William Davis (10)

What does angioplasty have over the Track Your Plaque program?

Well, first of all, the Track Your Plaque program has a lot to boast about. What other approach can claim to have reduced heart disease 30, 40, 51, and now 63%? That's as close to a cure that's ever--EVER--been achieved. Statin drug manufacturers can talk about an occasional 1, 2, or 5% reversal. We're talking 10 times more.

The Track Your Plaque program also uses as little prescription medication as necessary. Fish oil, vitamin D, coenzyme Q10, niacin--some of the frequent tools used for plaque reversal in our program. Yes, we do use prescription medications, but only when there is truly a benefit and nutritional strategies have failed to achieve the goals we're seeking. We do not endorse shotgun prescription approaches conceived of by some marketing department at a pharmaceutical company.

So what possible advantage can coronary angioplasty have? Why don't more people embrace a program like Track Your Plaque that has already proven itself enormously effective?

Because angioplasty is easy. There's little worrying ahead of time. Just wait for the symptoms or other problem to appear, go to the hospital and get your procedure. You can live the free and easy life beforehand--no exercise, no diet efforts, no nutritional supplements. Just be sure to go to the hospital when suspicious symptoms strike. (Of course, you gamble that you survive the appearance of symptoms, a process 30-50% of people fail to survive.)

That means you can eat all you want, drink all you want, save the money you otherwise might have thrown away on supplements, pocket the monthly costs of an exercise club membership, etc. Go to the hospital when you experience the sensation of an anvil on your chest or of suffocation, let the emergency room do their thing, meet your cardiologist, go to the catheterization laboratory, get two or three stents, go home the next day!

Why bother with a prevention program, especially one that requires involvement, learning, and effort like Track Your Plaque?

Because it's your way to stack the odds enormously in your favor of 1) surviving the appearance of symptoms, 2) avoiding the prospect of heart procedures, which are not as clean and easy as they often seem, 3) have a longer lasting durability than a stent which could buy you a couple of years before your next procedure or heart catastrophe, and 4) it's the right thing to do for the sake of the huge societal cost of heart disease.

Many of you have the equivalent of a cure for heart disease at your fingertips. Unless you have a soft spot in your heart for hospitals, cardiologists, or the pharmaceutical or medical device industry, there isn't a choice.

Plaque is like money

3. August 2007 William Davis (0)

In case anyone missed this in the June, 2007 Track Your Plaque Newsletter, I'm again posting how we calculate the annual rate of score increase, should it occur.

For instance, say your score in January, 2005, is 100. In November, 2006, you undergo another scan and the score is 140. Obviously, your score has increased an undesirable 40%. But what is the annual rate of score increase, the amount of increase per year?

In this example, the annual rate of score increase is 19%--not anywhere near as bad as the 40% that can scare the heck out of you.

Obviously, the best rate of heart scan score increase is a negative number, i.e., a drop in score from, say 100, to 60. You might even eliminate the need for this calculation altogether if you drop your score.

Nonetheless, whenever there is a score increase over an uneven period of time, a fraction of year(s), this is the method we use to annualize the calculation. The equation we use is a modified form of the annual compound interest equation using continuous compounding, since that’s how coronary atherosclerotic plaque grows--just like money. The difference is, of course, is that while you might want more money, you certainly don't want more plaque.

You will need a calculator for this calculation, one with an exponential “y to the power x” function. For ease, calculate "1/t first, then use it as the “x” exponent on your y^x function and "(score 2 / score 1)" as the "y".

Annual rate of plaque growth (APG) = ( score 2 / score 1 ) ^1/t - 1

Multiply the result by 100 to yield a percent.

“Score 1” is your 1st heart scan score, “score 2” is your 2nd (or any subsequent heart scan score); “t” is the amount of time between the two scans expressed in years in decimal form. Time between scans should be expressed in years or fractions of years. To obtain the time interval in fractions of years, simply divide the number of months between scans by 12 (e.g., 18 months / 12 = 1.5 years ; 22 months / 12 = 1.83 years).

It’s not as tricky as it looks. For example, if your first heart scan score is 300 and your next scan 16 months later (or 16/12 = 1.33 years) is 372, then:

Annual rate of plaque growth (APG) = ( 372 / 300 ) ^1/1.33 - 1 = 0.175

Multiply 0.175 x 100 = 17.5% annual rate of plaque growth

Some scan centers will do the calculation for you as part of a repeat scan. However, the equation can be used if you're left on your own, or if you go to a different scan center. If this is too much effort, perhaps it's just another reason to add to the list of reasons to drop your heart scan score!

Triglycerides: What is normal?

1. August 2007 William Davis (2)

In The Track Your Plaque program, we advocate decreasing triglycerides to 60 mg/dl or less.

That's the level of triglycerides that minimize the presence of triglyceride-containing undesirable lipoproteins causing plaque, such as small LDL, VLDL, and the after-eating persistence of IDL (intermediate-density lipoprotein, a bad player). (The enzyme, cholesteryl-ester transfer protein, or CETP, is responsible for exchanging one triglyceride molecule for one cholesterol molecule between HDL and other lipoprotein particles. Thus, an excess of triglyceride availability permits CETP to operate unrestrained, creating more undesirable lipoproteins. This was the basis for Pfizer's now defunct CETP inhibitor, torcetrapib.)

Of course, this triglyceride target is far below that of the conventional guidelines. The Adult Treatment Panel-III of the National Cholesterol Education Panel suggests a triglyceride level of 150 mg/dl is okay.

In my view, a level of 150 mg/dl is highly abnormal, permitting the persistence of multiple lipoprotein particles and virtually guarantees plaque growth. In short, triglycerides of 150 are awful.

Curious thing: Successful participants in our program, i.e., people who achieve desirable weight, reduce processed carbohydrate junk foods and saturated fat sources, and aim for the 60-60-60 targets for conventional lipids, commonly end up with triglyceride levels of 25-50 mg/dl.

We have seen many people drop their heart scan scores just by achieving a triglyceride level of 60 mg/dl or less. So achieving a lower level below 60 is not necessarily a requirement for coronary plaque regression.

But it makes me wonder if a triglycere level of 30s or 40s is the level for perfect health. These are levels ordinarily regarded as impossibly low. When colleagues see the numbers we readily and routinely achieve, they declare that the numbers are spurious, temporary, or just flukes. "No way you can do that all the time!"

This level also seems to, in virtually all cases, eliminate the triglyceride-containing undesirable lipoproteins small LDL, IDL, etc., and allow full conversion of HDL into the healthy, large fraction.

Should we move the Track Your Plaque triglyceride target to below 45 mg/dl or even lower? I don't think so, but it makes me wonder.

The processed food battlefield

31. July 2007 William Davis (4)

If you have any remaining doubts that the processed food industry is a cutthroat, go-for-the-jugular, organized effort to extract every possible penny from your pocket, even at the expense of health, take a gander at a quote from Marion Nestle's wonderful book, Food Politics.

In Nestle's description on how food conglomerate, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), conspired to fix prices on some basic agricultural compounds, she quotes an ADM executive captured on videotape and presented in court:

"We have a saying at this company . . . our competitors are our friends and our customers are our enemies."

In other words, ADM's competitors help establish what prices should be charged for basic foodstuffs, while its customers are the ones to do battle with.

Food is a necessary commodity. You and I only need so much of it. So how does a 40 billion dollar food manufacturer extract greater and greater profits and grow their market? Motivate people to eat more. It's that simple.

Eat less? Are you kidding? Eat spinach, green peppers, beets, and other low-margin products? Get real.

Why not take 8 cents worth of wheat flour, add some sugar, food coloring, and some other enticing flavorings like high fructose corn syrup? Put it all in a cleverly illustrated package, maybe even develop an entire story line about the product, complete with clever slogans and songs and . . . ouila! You now have a food that sells for many, many times its intrinsic value.

How to make the health nuts happy? Easy: Add some fiber. Now it's healthy! And it's now part of a "balanced diet".

What if it's full of corn starch, wheat flour, and sugar of the sort that make HDL cholesterols plummet, fan the flames of small LDL, increase inflammatory measures like C-reactive protein, push people closer and closer to diabetes, and make them fat? Then be sure it's low in saturated fat! It might even qualify as "Heart Healthy" by the American Heart Association!

Processed foods have no role in the Track Your Plaque program. If you want to see your CT heart scan score skyrocket, go to your grocery store and stray into the aisles outside of the produce aisle.

But stick to the produce aisle and watch your wallet grow, your health improve, your appetite shrink, all while food processor profits plummet.

Heart Scan debate

29. July 2007 William Davis (4)

A few years back when the book form of Track Your Plaque was first released, I did a bunch of radio and interviews to raise awareness of the book and of CT heart scanning in general.

I'd forgotten about this interview I did for National Public Radio (NPR), in which I debate Dr. Graboys from Harvard. Though I've had this debate countless other times, usually on a less formal basis, I didn't know what to expect at the start of the interview. After all, I knew of Dr. Graboys' reputation as a respected Harvard cardiologist. So I was expecting that at least he would argue that, being relatively new at the time, CT heart scanning was largely unproven in large clinical trials. (This was not entirely true then, however, as at least 1000 trials had already been performed, many of them involving thousands of participants. However, despite that much validation, the concept of CT heart scanning had still not entered the consciousness of most practicing physicians. After all, heart scanning is not part of the "crash and repair" equation that most have invested their career in.)

Heart Hawk re-discovered the debate, still on the NPR website. So here it is. When I re-listened to the debate, I was surprised at how little Dr. Graboys had to offer. He argues that examining left ventricular function should suffice as an important measure of mortality. In other words, if you have experienced a drop in the strength of heart muscle, that can be used to stratify your risk of death.

I tried to convey to the audience (NOT convince Dr. Graboys to believe, as most of my colleagues are stubbornly adherent to their way of thinking until someone tosses a big carrot in front of them) that CT heart scanning provides a means to detect coronary atherosclerosis years, even decades, before questions of mortality (death) became necessary. Heart scanning identifies disease in its early stages so that a program of prevention can be followed and tracked.

Dr. Graboys expressed concern that heart scanning devices could be mis-used to increase hospital procedures. He's absolutely right here. By that same line of thinking, say your crooked auto mechanic on the corner scams most of his customers by doing unnecessary car repairs. Does this mean that we should ban all auto mechanics from repairing cars? I hope not. I believe it does mean that we should all be educated on distinguishing scams from an honest businessman.

Same with heart scans. The key is not to ban heart scanning. We should try to educate the public and physicians to prevent these sorts of scams and decisions based on ignorance from occurring.

Nonetheless, make your own judgments.

CLICK HERE to listen (this is a .ram file so you will need the free RealPlayer to play)

Break the addiction

28. July 2007 William Davis (8)

"But, doc, I can't lose my cereal! Pretzels--you've got to be kidding me! I eat 'em every night! I can't do it. I'll be hungry all the time!"

This is a discussion I have every day. The usual suspect: A 50-some year old with HDL in the 30s or 40s, small LDL, borderline high blood sugar approaching the pre-diabetic cut-off, highish blood pressure, excess tummy. They usually struggle with energy, feelings of sleepiness, use lots of caffeine to stay alert even in the middle of the day after a sufficient night's sleep.

Not as obvious as the tremulous, pinopint-pupil drug addict, but I recognize it nonetheless: The processed food addict.

Breaking this addiction can be as difficult for some people as breaking a smoking addiction. Instead of nicotine cravings, they get insatiable hunger. Just 3 or 4 hours without their processed food "fix," and they are ravenous to satiate their impulse. Most give in and go right back to the vicious cycle.

But break the cycle--eliminate processed foods like breakfast cereals, whole wheat crackers, pretzels, cookies, granola bars, fruit drinks, low-fat salad dressings, bran muffins . . .70+% of the foods in your supermarket---and you will make an interesting discovery:

You no longer crave these foods.

Just think about it: The addictive properties of processed foods are a food manufacturer's dream. What other product besides cigarettes has an addictive quality that ensures you come back for more... and more and more.

It it just too creepy that much of the processed food industry is, in reality, owned by the tobacco industry (Altria, previously known as Phillip Morris) and RJ Reynolds. Perhaps that is the modus operandi of these corporations: Identify products that have an edge, foods or other products that possess an addictive quality. This is not true of cucumbers, for instance. What a lousy investment a cucumber grower would make!

Be smarter than Phillip Morris. Outsmart the people looking to empty your pocket and corrupt your health. Break the addiction.

Hang around the produce aisle of your grocery and use the farmer's market or your local equivalent. Look for locally grown foods. Try to keep your food as unprocessed as possible.

You will be impressed with the results.

Are we done here?

27. July 2007 William Davis (4)

Les' doctor consulted me because his CT heart scan score had increased 40% from 893 to 1259 over 18 months.

Judging by his appearance, Les was a 59-year old guy trapped somewhere in the 1980s. The only reason he'd undergone two heart scans was from the prompting of his wife, who was quite savvy.

Among the steps we took was to have Les undergo a stress test. I explained to Les and his wife that stress tests are effective tests of coronary blood flow, but not of plaque. Therefore, there was somewhere around a 25-35% likelihood of an abnormality that suggested poor flow in one or more portions of the heart.

Les passed his stress test easily. A bricklayer, Les was accustomed to heavy physical effort. "Are we done here, doc?" Les asked. Les' wife raised her eyebrows but, to her credit, kept quiet. She'd obviously been here before.

I explained to Les that having normal coronary blood flow was just one aspect of the issue.

"But I don't need a stent, right? I don't need a bypass. I already take Vytorin. So I need a cheeseburger once in a while. So what! Who doesn't? What else is there?"

I continued. "Les, with a normal stress test, there's no denying you still have lots of plaque in your heart's arteries. The risk to you is that one of these plaques will 'rupture,' sort of like a little volcano erupting. Of course, it's not lava that flies out, but the internal contents of plaque. When that happens and the contents of plaque get exposed to blood flowing by, a blood clot forms. That's a heart attack.

"With a 40% increase in your score over 18 months, you are, in fact, at substantial risk for such a plaque rupture. Unless you're fond of hospitals and the thought of heart procedures, then we need to address that part of the issue."

So it went. Step by step, with the quiet, strong support of Les' wife, we uncovered 7 additional causes of his heart disease. It wasn't the easiest process for us, but we did manage to educate Les on the simple steps he needed to take to 1) correct the causes of his coronary plaque, 2) how to use foods and stop fanning the flames of his plaque, and 3) how to live with this nasty specter hanging over him.

Now, if we could only transform Les into an optimist . . .