$1 million just so she can have her cake? And they say it's the cheap foods that kill us.

Very informative case. Thanks! What happened to Janet's triglyserides and LDL size (and other risk markers) as she adopted your regimen? What is exactly the evidence on the role of thyreoid dysfunction in coronary artery disease?
RL -dietitian from Finland

I can't get over how powerful your approach is, and how much better it comports with the "first do no harm" idea which would ideally be the bedrock of medicine.  Thank you for sharing these stories with us, I get fantastic leverage for a non-medical approach to health by referencing what you write.

Wait, how many caths? How many stents? And how much does each one cost...?

She must have good insurance!?

Thirteen  times in the cath lab???  I cannot imagine anyone not wising up after the first time through the cath lab... and I'm speaking from experience.

Two visits, three visits, four... a patient might get a little curious about what was causing all this, and why they 'needed' all these procedures. The emotional toll of all those procedures alone would motivate me to a). Find another approach and b). Her doc didn't have a clue?  Find someone who does!

Dr. Davis, your approach is so powerful, does no harm... and it surely doesn't cost $1M.

Best wishes to you,

madcook
Paso Robles, CA

The preference for grains in American society has deep religious, cultural, and political roots that can't be uprooted by anything as insignificant as science or medicine. Those opposing it will be voices crying in the wilderness for the forseeable future.

My brother got me a package of the fine-ground oatmeal and I went through most of it. I was feeling woozy the other day after eating it and checked my blood sugar- 194. No more of that!

Oh my! Those are some pretty scary numbers. HDL/Trig ratio of 1:10 and 85% small, dense LDL!

I too would be curious how your recommendations affected her lipid numbers. I know this... she's far better off under your guidance than the docs that counseled her right into that mess.

Thanks Dr Davis.
Jack Kronk

dr davis how did you fix the thyroid dysfunction? im really interested and what alerts you to the thyroid issue?

anything that increases the cardiac CRP can alter the throid axis.  So a patient with an increased Cardiac CRP due to heart disease fits that bill.  It could be either a conversion problem or frank throid recpetor resistance.  T4 is the inactive form of thyroid hormone. It must be converted to T3 before the body can use it. More than 90% of thyroid hormone produced is T4.  This common pattern is caused by inflammation and elevated cortisol levels. T4 to T3 conversion happens in cell membranes. Inflammatory cytokines damage cell membranes and impair the body’s ability to convert T4 to T3. High cortisol also suppresses the conversion of T4 to T3.

That is how it happens.  

Dr. K

There is also a well known connection between lipids and thyroid fxn that most docs seem to have forgotten. Last January in 2010, as part of Thyroid Awareness Month, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) has released the results of a new survey on the thyroid-cholesterol connection, looking at the connection between undiagnosed hypothyroidism and high cholesterol.



Materials released by the AACE in support of this information campaign include:

•Americans Urged to "Take Cholesterol by the Neck"

•Understanding the Thyroid-Cholesterol Connection

•Facts about Thyroid Disease

•Take the Thyroid Neck Check -- The Neck Check Card

The survey had several important findings:

•Fewer than half of the adults who had been diagnosed with high cholesterol know if they had ever been tested for thyroid disease, despite the well-documented connection between the two conditions.





•Ninety percent of those surveyed were unaware of the thyroid gland's impact on cholesterol regulation.

According to AACE President Richard A. Dickey, M.D., "Patients who have been diagnosed with high cholesterol should ask their physician about having their thyroid checked. If they have an underlying thyroid condition in addition to their high cholesterol, the cholesterol problem will be difficult to control until normal levels of thyroid hormone are restored."

The patient shown by Dr Davis clearly has a lipid issue as seen in the example. Her SDLDL is off the charts and her other docs had no idea that her lipid profile will cause her hypothyroidism.  Hence the teaching point and it shows that the study was right about that 90% number.  Most PCPs have not a clue about this and they treat these people all the time!

Dr. K

I cannot believe she had undergone the 10th catheterization in two years. She must be a strong woman to undergo such procedures.
Isn't it a protocol to do a heart scan before doing a catheterization? I am deeply saddened with her case. It is good to hear that she is in good hands now with an expert cardiologist.
Nutrition is indeed a great factor that affects our health. We must be very cautious to what we eat before experiencing the symptoms of heart diseases.

Cool Dr. K
Thanks for the inputs. Going to an anti inflammotory lifestyle would cure the thyroid dysfunction as well i would suppose? whatelse can be done to keep the thyroid healthy.

Anonymous said: "The patient shown by Dr Davis clearly has a lipid issue as seen in the example. Her SDLDL is off the charts and her other docs had no idea that her lipid profile will cause her hypothyroidism."

Don't you mean that her hypothyroidism will cause her lipid profile? That's what the AACE literature says.

Stand in bare feet on a wet ground every day for at least 30 - 40 minutes and/or sleep 'grounded'.
Results :
- thyroid stabilisation
- less inflammation
- blood thins
- less cortisol spikes
Sounds goofy ? Yep !
Try it.  I did, it works.

http://www.earthinginstitute.net

Correcting Janet's thyroid dysfunction, i.e., hypothyroidism, was simple: Just iodine and Armour thyroid.

Because the iodine yielded minimal improvement in thyroid function, she required the extra "boost" of exogenous thyroid hormones, T3 and T4. This has also contributed to substantial weight loss.

I was in the cath lab 6 times. Three stents and 2 balloons and then off to bypass. My cholesterol numbers were never horrible(I don't have those records) but my hs-CRP was 13.8 indicating inflammation.

Three years after bypass(2003) I was close to going back to the cath lab as I was having pitting edema and SOB. Before I went, I stopped eating gluten and other grains and these symptoms, along with many more, disappeared. My hs-CRP is now 2.2(not perfect but better)

I too can only imagine what life would have been like if I had understood the power of food earlier. I am also thankful that I found this out when I did.

What puzzles me is why the Japanese who eat their high glycemic diet (rice and more rice) have such low rates of heart disease and diabetes and live a lot longer than we do.

Dr. Davis,

Be wary of the Glycemic Index. It has been promoted very heavily by the grain companies as a way of confusing the public that their products are healthy.

The Glycemic Index values are established by testing foods in completely normal people. Anyone who has abnormal glucose tolerance (i.e. prediabetes) is likely to have a very different reaction to a supposedly low GI food than a normal person.

Oatmeal, for example, can give devastatingly high readings to someone with pre-diabetes, though it is supposedly low GI. Whole wheat bread was proven to raise blood sugars just as high as white bread in people with diabetes in a recent study.

People will have much better results if they ignore the Glycemic Index and pay attention to the total carbohydrate count of a serving of the food they eat.

Every gram of that carbohydrate will require the same amount of insulin to be processed. If it is done slowly, you might not see a high blood sugar, but you will have elevated insulin, which will worsen weight gain and other symptoms of metabolic syndrome.

You might find it interesting to research the extent to which the grain industry has been promoting the GI concept. I get quite a lot of fancy spam from PR firms working for organizations with names like "the Whole Grain Council" telling me how healthy low GI foods--like their grains--are for people with diabetes.

They aren't.

Don't forget that sucrose is the one-two punch of damaging foods.  Half of it is glucose, a.k.a. blood sugar and the cause of the glycemic index/glycemic load values.  The other half is fructose, which causes your liver to immediately stop whatever it is doing and create triglycerides that directly raise your serum triglyceride number.  As in, one of the two numbers in the typical cholesterol test that actually means something (and means high risk).

Sucrose creates the fats (triglycerides) in your blood and then guarantees that they make you fat through insulin's action that pushes triglycerides across liposome (fat cell) cell walls.

It's especially important not to be fooled into thinking that GI and GL are the whole story of why sugar is bad for you.  Otherwise, you end up believing silly assertions like, "White grape juice is better for you than HFCS because white grape juice has a lower GI."  White grape juice is 80% fructose, so of course it has a lower GI than HFCS which is 55% fructose.  Doesn't make it any better for you.  It's just bad for you in a different way.

This quote is right on the money, except for one detail. The author assumed corporations are against regulation, when in fact they love it and depend on it.

What keeps drug companies in business? FDA approval requirements. What did food companies push for in Canada? Total ban on "low-carb" labelling.

So the response to greed and corporatism is not regulation but a free marketplace where everyone is allowed to compete, big or small.

Keep up the good work.

Perhaps governments should do better regulating food publicity and food labeling. For example, in the US they're trying to implement a system called "NuVal(tm) Nutritional Scoring System". Anyone here knows how it works? The official website is http://www.onqi.org and there are 2 articles about this at http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2750793620071128 and http://www.nutraceuticalsworld.com/articles/2008/07/online-exclusive-nuval-nutritional-scoring-system On the other hand, if this ONQI numerical algorithm incorporates the recommendations of the "famous" USDA Food Pyramid, and ignores evolutionary nutrition (paleodiet, which was low-carb, low insulin, no grains or dairy, etc.), it will certainly be of little use.

Regarding the glycemic index and sugar control, I wonder how useful would it be to get hA1c tested in most people with heart disease?

Wouldn't it be a good gauge of glycemic control? I wonder if l it could play a role in Dr. Davis' program... Besides checking just lipid parameters, perhaps those with lower hA1c would also have less plaque?
And it should be useful to the patient too, so they can see how well they have been eating over the past several months.

The GL (Glycemic Load) is a much better everyday tool to use than GI (Glycemc Index) and here's why: The GI number doesn't account for portion size.  So a drop of glucose and a cup of glucose both have a GI of 100 (it is the reference sugar, so it has the highest rating).  Obviously the former isn't going to do much to your insulin response, and the latter is going to be devastating.  Glycemic Load takes into account portion size.  It is a real-world application of the Glycemic Index.

Once you know this, you realize that the published Glycemic Load number of any food can be miraculously halved...by eating half of it.  (Of course, you can also double it by eating a double portion!)  It puts the whole concept into practice in a tangible, useable way.

Nutritiondata.com uses the GL exclusively and I highly recommend their site.

I used to think the government should do a lot of regulating, because the corporate interests don't do a good job of self regulation.  Not so sure about government regulation now.  They gotten so much wrong, it's frightening.  

With so much of our increasingly complicated lives involving things of which we have little common knowledge anymore (how our food is produced, what to do to optimize health and avoid illness, what chemicals are hazardous long-term, how to do even simple maintenance on our belongings, etc.), it is hard to be personably knowledgeable enough about everything, so it is easier to pass most of it on to the regulators and hope for the best.  But wow, that's a massive gamble that we don't seem to be winning very often.

Japanese who lives as long as 90++ years eats their rice at the end of their meals...

The example of Kitavans and also having seen our Kerala people, it makes sense to totally disregard the GI or GL indexes. What is probably more important is the harmful lectin content of grains/legumes.

If we could simply stop eating all grains/legumes and add nourishment that is missing because of our lack of sunlight (Vitamin D3) and lack of good quality meat (Vitamin K2 and Omega3), and possibly other lacking nutrients in our diet, we could also be healthy.

I believe that a high GI carb is actually equivalent to saturated fat, because it will become one after the action of Insulin. Of-course this does not apply to diabetic and may not apply to people with low D3/K2.

The low GI is probably not as good because it will give glucose for a long time and will make the glucose level high for a long time.

For people like me who have already got leptin resistance cannot possibly avoid the glucose overload if they have to keep their fat mass below the level were our brain feels the leptin. The brain thinks that there is no fat at all to convert to glucose and the low blood sugar makes us feel dizzy.

I think that obesity is caused by WGA and similar lectins that cause leptin resistance, compounded by the fact that we don't have D3/K2 which could fight against these ailments.

I think White Rice is the only grain that has very little lectin and can be consumed easily. The south Indians mix it with sprouted legumes and grind it then ferment it before cooking it. This whole process effectively destroys the lectins almost completely. This is probably the only safe way to consume our legumes. Wheat etc the high lectin grains are poison for our health.

-anand

All of the above foods with GI's and GL's that match or exceed that of table sugar are made of wheat and cornstarch. Some, like Shredded Wheat cereal and rice cakes, don't even have any added sugar