Healthspanlife - the Official Life! Blog

Nutrition is becoming increasingly costly as world population mushrooms, and worse, as oil-burning industries immorally pay more  (and governments thus get more in taxes) for plant oil as fuel  than farmers can get for producing food. The hungry poor majority is irrelevant, despite the fact that there has been superabundance of natural  and environmetally friendly power available forever,  and harnessable  by relatively simple technology (which Industry and governments have criminally  suppressed) for decades.

Fish oil omega3 - eicosapentanoic acid EPA and docosahexanoic acid DHA - seems to be the most valuable single nutrition supplement we have, apparently almost halving all major diseases  (and mortality) from brain and immune dysfunction in infants and children to  all the major common degenerative diseases of aging, from vascular and arthritic to immune and mental.

Plant oils have indispensable benefits.  But as people have migrated away from the seaside and fishing, and fish has become scarce so that it is no longer a staple for the poor or as chickenfeed, it is reported that EPA/DHA intake has fallen below 100mg/week in USA. And the more omega6 we eat, and the longer we live, the less EPA+DHA  our metabolism  can apparently make.

So as diet has improved among the better-off on the Food-Pyramid-recommended higher cereal and nut intake, and livestock has been shifted from pasture-fed (at least some omega3) to grain-fed (high omega6), it is estimated that the historical 6:1 ratio of dietary omega6:omega3 in western diet has actually risen adversely to 20:1.

By contrast, historically those who lived as fisher people reputedly had/have the least chronic aging diseases, and the lowest diet omega6:omega3 ratio, reputedly 1:1.

Oils- including  GLA gamma-linoleic acid and ALA alphalinoleic and linolenic acid- are enormously beneficial in humans, especially for immune modulation to steer between hyper immunity - allergy and rheumatic disease- and hypo-immunity - infections and cancer.

But if one eats a prudent Mediterranean-type diet and ensures at least 3gm fish oil i.e. close to a gram of EPA+DHA a day, is it wise or unwise to again increase the already high omega6 excess by encouraging omega6 supplements as in patent products e.g. Effamol?

Most of us older generation were brought up on a spoon of cod liver oil - Scotts Emulsion a day. This custom seems to have fallen into abeyance.

Now it is hard to tell whether this fact - fish oil deficiency - or junk food, or global pollution, or hours of television a day, or the abolition of discipline and obligatory physical exercise at most schools, has contributed more to apparent fall in learning and behaviour achievements in children, and increase in depression, diabetes, overweight, osteoporosis, anxiety, vascular, malignant, inflammatory  and dementing diseases.

There is no evidence that patent mixed fish-plus-plant oils do better than fish oil alone in the indisputable improvement in ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity-disorder in children.

and 7 years since they postulated that statin benefit might be negated long-term by adverse  non- CVD mortality at CVD risk below 1.3%pa.

It is almost 40 years since as a junior medical registrar I was first advised to take lipid-lowering drugs (clofibrate- just a few years before the cancer link came out),

and  have since then been advised  to take statins .

I have never done so  (for my familial mild-moderate type 2b  lipidemia),  because the evidence has never justified such experimental and long-term unproven synthetics (as with modern antidiabetic and anti-osteoporotic wannabe money spinners) in search of $billions for the western Drug Corporations and their investors and lobbyists.  

   Lately,  despite the massive statin trials, the last  statin  metanalysis (2003 from University Slovenia) again failed to show any reduction in non-CVD cardiovascular  disease mortality;

and since CVD is the major cause of death and disability  ONLY in those who already have such disease, statins remain indicated only in secondary prevention -as was shown in the last two major trials published, in 2002 ( ALLHAT-LLT  and WESCOPS), now confirmed in the Japanese MEGA study  (2006) of low dose statin, which (in primary prevention in a slim population)  showed similar barely significant 1/3 CVD mortality benefit- significant reduction only in myocardial infarction -  but no significant other  cardiovascular or non-vascular benefit even after a mean of 5.3years, 41 000 patient-years.   

 Last month  Theo Jacobson from Emory University in Atlanta GA  commented that myalgia is the leading reason why patients abandon statins. 

 In 2000 he already questioned the marketing hype for statins  that “the lower the cholesterol level is driven, the better” . 

The growing scandal is the increasing marketing  pressure  by Big Pharma lobbyists (including  some Regulator  staff) to promote prescription and even over-the-counter use of statins to achieve ever-lower low-density lipoprotein levels even in the absence of any vascular disease or CVD risks- including the farcical inclusion of statin in a PolyPill (led by Ward and Law and the BMJ in  UK). .

 Last year Kilmer McCully himself  (the father of the homocysteine hypothesis in CVD 1969) points out that the dramatic fall in CVD mortality  since  it’s USA peak in 1955 correlates well with voluntary and mandatory fortification with B6, B9 and B12 (let alone niacin) .

We may also note that  falling  premature CVD mortality coincides with

• the increasing use of metformin the past decades  (which lowers all-cause morbidity and mortality, and new diabetes, by 1/3,  and overweight by about 8%); for both treatment and prevention of type 2 diabetes, overweight, lipidemia and polycystic ovary syndrome.;
• and with increasing use of appropriate sex hormone replacement for aging men and women (which lowers all-cause morbidity and mortality by 1/3); .
•  and with targeting of lower blood pressure levels even in the elderly hypertensives since the SHEP trial (1985).   
•  and with growing intake of supplementary fish oil ((which lowers all-cause morbidity and mortality by  almost 1/2);  
•   and  of other insulin sensitizer- Nitrric oxide - antioxidant -metabolic promoters  (like vitamins A,  B1, B3,B7, C, D, E, K, calmag, zinc, chromium and other trace elements), and the dozens of our other  crucial  biologicals that decline with aging and illness, (like coQ10, n-acetyl cysteine, arginine, carnitine, carnosine, ribose, chondroglucosamine, lipoic acid, taurine, bioflavinoid, thyroid, melatonin  etc).

And while statins have legion adverse effect from insidious fatigue to myositis and hepatorenal impairment; dermatitis, depression; reducing steroid levels and virility; and lately  producing even lung damage, (unlike the natural supplements listed  that are the best drugs),  they have never been shown to have the slightest benefit on non-CVD pathology, from overweight and insulin resistance - diabetes  to arthritis. Manufacturers and lobbyists have studiously avoided head-on trial comparison with  the natural CVD preventatives  listed above which simutaneously address both the underlying metabolic cause of hypercholesterolemia (insulin resistance and atheroma) and all the other major common degenerative diseases of aging. So the direct highpressure marketing od statins to the public  - without prescription - for other than severe resistant hypercholesterolemia is thus dangerous massive corporate fraud.

So there is every reason why statin use should be severely limited to only  high-risk CVD cases i.e. those with  dangerous homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia resistant to all other  interventions.

see for references:

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 NUTRICEUTICALS AND THE RATH  COURT JUDGEMENT

The context and background of the South African Cape Supreme Court judgement  of 13 May 2008 against the  Dr Matthias Rath Foundation (see the BBC article) and the South African ANC Government Ministry of Health , to stop illegal trials of vitamins in AIDS patients, is already concisely summed up in the updated Wikipedia Rath report of the same date, and the TAC report, and the self-damaging hard sell by the Rath Foundation itself.

To what extent the Rath group was conducting research trials as opposed to simply collecting feedback in a structured format becomes irrelevant when Rath websites and supporters manifestly urged patients not to take antimicrobials. It is epidemiogical bedrock that the inital study that leads to an hypothesis, and thus application for trials, permission and funding, is always observational - collation  and validation of data in the field. Provided confidentiality is maintained, and no intervention has been designed, no-one needs  ethical permission to collate and report data ethically collected from, for example, consumers or patients.  See this report by the National Ethics Advisory Committee (New Zealand) which proposes that ethical permission  is essential only for research purposes, but  is not necessary for observational study for audit or public health purpose.

What these reports do not clarify is the human background:

I saw just such a patient just before that judgement was given - a gaunt young middle-aged  Bantu factory owner whose wife has just had another baby, although the couple has recently become HIV positive.

Last year (when he was still HIV negative but lymphopaenic), his non-specific Reiter’s-type arthralgia after antibiotics settled on supplements; but since he stopped taking micronutrient supplements a month ago (already knowing he was HIV positive), he has develloped mouth sores, related cervical/ axillary adenopathy and now progressive dry cough and haemoptysis. Clinically he was still well, with chest clear clinically. This in a  family in townships where highly resistant TB has mushroomed. He came back for more supplements. He and his wife were firmly instructed to go for urgent TB screening, CD4 count, viral load and  appropriate antimicrobials, starting in the meantime with some nutritional immune supplement.

What more can one do in a ”democratic”  society where TB obviously cannot be notified without good evidence, and HIV-AIDS  is apparently still not a compulsorily notifiable disease ante mortem?

The diet of the poor or the ignorant - sugar, low nutritional value food,  and often smoking,  excess alcohol and stress, poor living/work  conditions, and lack of exercise -  often with little or no restful  sleep, fresh air, fresh produce or fish - promotes both infections and chronic degenerative disease, such as cancer,  diabetic- vascular, mental, arthritis and osteoporosis, because  such  lifestyle and  stressed aging creatures  are  deficient, imbalanced  in essential protective antioxidant  immunomodulating  anabolic  vitamins minerals and biologicals  eg  marine fatty acids, co-Q10, acetylcysteine, carnitine, hormones  and scores others.

It is common cause that the exhausted depleted body is far less able to prevent and  fight disease than the healthy are, whether against common colds or tuberculosis and cancer. One has only to think of  fever blisters, shingles, tuberculosis,  hypertension  or heart attack that are more prevalent in the stressed and nutritionally imbalanced;  and the fact that  the seriously ill are admitted to hospitals or sanatoria  - or given both food packages and drugs- for both balanced diet and modern therapy.

It is common cause - amongst sensible natural healers (sangomas), homeopaths and naturopaths as well as the medically qualified -  that it is folly to ignore antibiotics or modern therapies/ surgery with serious diseases where these are known to be responsive to antimicrobials, chemo-and radiotherapy. While designer modern synthetic antimicrobial, anticancer and anticardiovascular disease therapy may have major adverse effects, there is no contesting that they have major benefits in acute illness, especially when combined with appropriate macro- and micro-nutrition.

Drastic  modern high-tech  therapies are also   futile, unlikely to prolong life long  if underlying major malnutrition- obesity  with micronutrient imbalance, or starvation- are not simultaneously addressed. And designer drug companies are well aware that prescription drugs need to be supplemented where appropriate eg Viagra with testosterone, statins with CoQ10, anti-diabetics with alpha-lpoic acid , antibiotics with vitamins and pre/probiotics, NSAIDs with gastroprotectives  etc.

For cancer the evidence is comprehensively summed up at: Dietary Supplements in Patients With Cancer: Risks and Key Concepts, Part 2 Laura Boehnke Michaud, Julie Phillips Karpinski, Kellie L. Jones and Janet Espirito: Am J Health-Syst Pharm.  2007;64:467-480. 

So the outcry against those who publically oppose all patented antimicrobial drugs  for eg HIV   is valid.  But as the Academy of Science has pronounced, this is not to  condemn prescription and provision of  good nutrition and proven appropriate natural  therapeutic supplements - which are  the original and often still the best medicines.

       The Cape Court judgement so far published carefully does not venture into this well-proven scientific area - nor pronounce judgement against the current Government  under  the ANC’s Presidents Mbeki and Zuma for it’s progressive impoverishment  and (by default of adequate funding and control of the police) permitted terrorization of the masses the past decade in favour of useless weapons, institutionalized  corruption and violence, and massive enrichment of the favoured bureaucrats and cadres as in Zimbabwe.. (lest it be forgotten, Mr Zuma was deputy president of South Africa from 1998 to 2004 ie from  when the  infinitely corrupt and avoidable Armsgate,  Eskom  and South African Airways insolvency disasters were forced  by the ANC Govt  on South Africa against massive public protests, that have ruined South  and thus southern Africa.).

“The Cape court did not find that Rath’s distribution of his products was unlawful merely because they are distributed. What was deemed to be unlawful were the claims  made in advertisements associated with Rath’s product distribution, i.e. the claims that rendered VitaCell a medicine. The court therefore interdicted the Rath respondents from making claims that VitaCell reverses the course of AIDS. http://www.tac.org.za/community/node/2348

     In reaching a decision on the second question, whether Rath and his accomplices were found to have conducted unauthorised clinical trials, the Court ventured into new legal terrain because “the term ‘clinical trial’ has never been judicially considered in South Africa” (para 72). In the absence of relevant South African case law, the Court considered a 2002 decision of the Zimbabwean Supreme Court where “clinical trial” was defined as:  “a systematic study in human beings or animals to establish the efficacy of, or to discover or verify the effects or adverse reactions of drugs”     

ndb.

Some other  references: (more…)

It’s tragicomedy that the BBC – the quintessential British spokespersona – laments NHS woes: * UK c.diff deaths ‘rising sharply’ * “The equivalent of one person an hour dies in hospital from clostridium difficile, figures suggest.”

And yet Authorities there and mostwhere are still in denial about enforcing simple safe low-cost multi-system prevention – in this instance to keep people out of bed and hospital, off antibiotics.
Authorities- regulators, politicians, the Tax Man – benefit as hugely from disease as do their fairy godmother the Disease Industry- the Drug conglomerates and their researchers and lobbyists, private hospitals, medical schemes - that pay them handsomely and creates myriad factories and jobs.

So because it is not profitable, Prevention Does Not Pay, no matter that it adds decades to health:

*There is no move to ban smoking, to make it (and sale, and allowance thereof) a criminal offence.

*No move to immediately jail drunken drivers for a long time, and on second offence permanently confiscate their driving licence and ban them permanently from current and future public office and public vehicle driving, be they judges or janitors, cabinet ministers or cabbies.

*The banning of deadly polluting coal-and oil-powered vehicles and major electricity sources has been blocked for decades by the endlessly greedy and ruthless oil-based industry magnates, despite the fact that these finite energy sources are desperately needed for other purposes. Now the world faces immediate famine because the oil-based transport-and energy behemoths (who have blocked investment in natural – solar - energy for decades) are paying bigger dollars for crop and marine resources as energy supplies than most consumers can afford to pay for these finite resources as food.

*No official move to acknowledge that the best drugs for both prevention and chronic treatment are the long-proven natural low-cost vigorous safe daily doses of a few score appropriate micronutrient supplements - vitamins (~15), minerals(~10) and biologicals (human and other species’) that are increasingly inadequate in the food chain in longer-lived increasingly overweight stressed humans facing worsening man-made epidemics and environmental disaster.

*No serious move yet by the US FDA- the chief protector of the new drugs industry of the west -English- Europe- Japan – (against the interests of consumers) to enforce integrity, insist that no chronic designer drugs for the chronic major common degenerative diseases be released for general use until they have been proven both at least as safe and effective as those already existing and effective, in major randomised controlled trials of a mean of at least 8years, head to head against both older designer drugs, and long-proven natural drugs, for similar purpose, in those diseases.

*The past decade alone has seen condemnation of myriad unproven unnecessary and risky released drugs –
on Wikipedia alone at least a dozen - eg Propulsid; cerivastatin; Vioxx; pemoline; benzbromarone; torcetrapib; and the discrediting of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs as no better - and potentially more hazardous than- appropriate cortisone and micronutrient use, and
newer designer antidepressants and anticlotting agents as less safe and effective than appropriately used older ones;

*the unnecessary anti-osteoporosis bisphosphonates that are increasingly associated with the very long-bone fractures they are supposed to prevent;

*and most especially the wannabe oral anti-diabetic anti-atheroma and anti-obesity drugs – statins, rimonabant, glitazones, meglitanides and sulphonylureas - as inferior to and less safe than metformin, the 85year old plant extract which is the only designer drug ever proven as invaluable panacea in a 20year RCT, tested against sulphonylureas, but not against all other modern designer drugs which (as in more recent studies) have never been shown to meaningfully reduce all-cause morbidity and mortality as does metformin.

The until-recent FDA haste to licence new drugs after scanty trials was reminiscent of the criminal conspiracy between the FDA and industry that licenced the already contested diethylstilbestrol Chicago trial of 1950- and kept that drug on the market another 25years after it was discredited. And it was in stark contrast to the FDA (to protect USA drug companies) blocking drugs already in highly effective use elsewhere for decades, like lithium carbonate, metformin and betablockers.

Since no drug corporations promote the out-of-patent old and proven agents, authorities cannot afford to promote truth - that the only remedies for chronic prevention that lower all-cause disease and mortality by between a third and a half - overweight, obesity, diabetes, cancer, hypertension, arthritis, osteoporosis fractures, vascular disease, acute infections, depression, dementia - are:

-fish oil a few grams a day- which also drastically lowers behavioural and learning disorders;
-a lowcost simple blend of a few score other proven natural micronutrients - the fifteen vitamins, ten minerals and the human / other species’ biologicals including herbs;
-metformin titrated to tolerance about 2.5gms a day, for both prevention and treatment of overweight, diabetes type 2 and most major chronic degenerative diseases; &
-appropriate conservative balanced sex hormone replacement in most older men and women, as proven in the landmark Womens’ Health Initiative and Finnish Oulu randomised controlled trials, and numerous other studies in major centres in North America, UK, Europe, Australia and South Africa, since 1953.

It is a tenet of endocrinology for the past 60 years that all major hormone deficiencies should be replaced permanently and physiologically with the same human hormones, yet there are still those, even medical specialists, who would deny this to those most in need – from middle age onwards, especially women. At least some of these specialists have the honesty to disclose that they are well paid by drug compnies to be advocates and trialists for the wannabe designer drugs to supplant the old.

Recognition of appropriate measured low cost HRT and the other proven listed supplements for all aging people would of course rob the drug industry of perhaps 90% of it’s market for it’s wannabe designer substitutes that the FDA allows to be marketed prematurely until enough people die of their complications or shortcomings.

In fact, while no study shows that any modern drug for common chronic degenerative disease prevention does any overall - mutidisease- good, reduces all-cause mortality, those who promote and practice such published truth – that the old is better - are threatened with prosecution.

this 5year Canadian followup (http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/100/4/252) study of women after breast cancer confirms the recent (200 follow-up from Italy about the low mortality from breast cancer detected and treated early (Elderly breast cancer patients treated by conservative surgery alone plus adjuvant tamoxifen: Fifteen-year results of a prospective study. Martelli G, et al National Cancer Institute, Milan, Italy.Cancer. 2008; 112; 3: 481-488).

In UK the annual deathrate for women from breast cancer was only 0.28% http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/breast/mortality/
- but in the UK screening program, of 1.7million women screened, 4.8% were recalled for further screening - of whom only 80% had unnecessary screening- a giant burden to both patients and the NHS. Almost 80% fewer mammography procedures and facilities were actually required.

Contrary to the mythology and hype that breast cancer is a major killer of women, these three studies affirm that even in those who get breast cancer, it still kills only 0.5% a year of sufferers at any age, (as opposed to 1% of those over the age of 70yrs in the Italian study)
Thus >80% of truly asymptomatic women without good family history of breast cancer have the lucrative (to Industry) unnecessary regular screening mammography
- and there is no good evidence that in such women, (or men) regular repeat cancer screening makes any difference to survival..

The evidence from numerous sources is very strong, that appropriate supplements ie parenteral HRT (estrogen +testost- +prog-esterone -especially when combined with other natural biologicals eg - fish oil, coQ10, acetylcysteine, MSM, carnitine, arginine, ribose, herbs ; and minerals and vitamins) more than halve all major chronic degenerative diseases and premature deaths.

People who fear cancer and all disease , early disability - especially those with a significant family history- just have to use common sense:
- follow sensible diet and lifestyle including avoiding overweight, have bloodpressure and eye checks regularly,
- take a sensible combination of the >50 natural supplements (if only as a few oil capsules and a glass of powder blend twice a day, and either daily hormone cream (or a tiny
hormone subcut (self) injection every few weeks, or implant, or lowdose HT orally) ; and
- most important of all, report promptly to a doctor if they develop symptoms that do not settle in a few days eg unexplained pain bleeding, lumps or tenderness, swelling, breathlessness, cough, or change in vision, hearing or bowel or bladder habit etc; or persistent weight gain or loss.

If early and permanent supplements; and symptoms, are addressed early, the common major diseases rarely become major killers - we die active of healthy old age!. Without appropriate supplements including appropriate HRT even after breast cancer, all-cause disease and mortality is more than doubled. Waiting for sudden death, diabetes, obesity, blindness, hip fracture, cancer or dementia before starting safe lowcost permanent multi-prevention is truly crippling if not fatal.