Joel Fuhrman - Eat To Live

Eat to Live 153

Heart attacks still occur in the minimally narrowed segments, areas

that may appear normal on catherization and stress testing.

Most of an Iceberg Is Hidden Under Water

Your stress test results or cardiac catherization results being normal

does not mean you do not have atherosclerosis. You can have a heart

attack the day after you are told your vessels are clear. These tests

show only advanced disease.

Massive atheromas (fatty deposits) lurking within the vascular

wall — outside the view of angiography (cardiac catherization) —

account for two-thirds of myocardial infarctions.^24 Most heart at-

tacks occur at sites invisible to the tests done by cardiologists.^25 This

is why invasive cardiac procedures relieve pain but do not have an

impressive record of reducing the risk of future heart attacks.

Only strong risk-factor control, with aggressive nutritional inter-

vention, can reverse diffuse disease, avoiding the high probability of

that heart attack occurring down the road. Your survival depends on

risk-factor management — quitting smoking and lowering your

weight, blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol, and insulin levels as a

result of careful nutrition — not the procedures done by the inter-

ventional cardiologist or cardiac surgeon. Only then will beneficial

changes occur in the plaque composition, promoting healing of the

blood vessel's lining that will stabilize the vessel wall and substan-

tially reduce the risk of a heart attack.

You are deluding yourself if you think chelation or drugs alone

will reverse your condition while you remain overweight and nutri-

tionally malnourished. Chelation will not dissolve your atherosclero-

sis, as claimed. The studies done on this therapy are not impressive.^26

In spite of chelation, patients generally continued to deteriorate un-

less they changed their diet, lost weight, and lowered their choles-

terol. In other words, changes not related to chelation.

The areas of vulnerable plaque that cause heart attacks have a

large fatty core of cholesterol. Removing the lipid from the plaque

can make it smaller and more resistant to rupture. Use common

sense; chelation could no more suck fatty substance out of a coro-

nary artery than it could suck the fat off your left hip. There is no

way chelating agents can selectively remove the lipids in atheromas.

These atheromas that form on the inside of our blood vessels are

fatty tumors with a fibrous cap. They shrink and become more resistant