Best Heart Herbs

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By Michael Wooldridge, MAWooldridge@lbl.gov

One of the great scientific mavericks of this century spoke at LBL August 10, 1993 at a special seminar hosted by the Life Sciences Division’s Lipoprotein and Atherosclerosis Group. Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel laureate and the world’s foremost vitamin C proponent, entertained an overflow crowd in the Bldg. 66 auditorium with a talk on Vitamin C and Heart Disease.

The lively 92-year-old first gave a candid history of how he came to take up the vitamin C cause. He was introduced to the subject by biochemist Irwin Stone in 1966. Five years later, he would pen “Vitamin C and the Common Cold,” and then boldly go on to champion vitamin C as a fighter of more serious diseases such as cancer.

According to Pauling, the vitamin’s versatility in illness prevention arises from its role in the manufacture of collagen, the protein that gives shape to connective tissues and strength to skin and blood vessels.

One of the great misfortunes of human evolution, Pauling explained, was when our human ancestors lost their ability to manufacture vitamin C. Pauling thinks the trait was probably discarded at a time when our ancestors had a diet of vitamin-rich plants and didn’t need to produce the vitamin themselves. This left today’s primates (including humans) as one of the few groups of animals that must get the vitamin through the diet.

Ever since proto-humans moved out of fruit-and-vegetable-rich habitats, Pauling said, they have suffered great deficiencies of vitamin C. Pauling has forthrightly recommended that people make up for this deficiency with daily doses of vitamin C much greater than the 60 mg generally recommended.

He said our vitamin C consumption should be on par with what other animals produce by themselves, typically 10-12 grams a day. Pauling practices what he preaches, having gradually upped his daily doses of vitamin C from 3 grams in the 1960s to a hefty 18 grams today.

Pauling went on to discuss vitamin C’s connection with lipoprotein-a, a substance whose levels in the blood have been linked to cardiovascular disease. Lipoprotein-a is also a major component of the plaques found in the blood vessels of atherosclerosis patients.

Pauling has published studies asserting that lipoprotein-a is a surrogate for vitamin C, serving to strengthen blood vessel walls in the absence of adequate amounts of the vitamin in the diet. In the lecture, Pauling noted that animals which, unlike humans, manufacture their vitamin C and have much higher levels of the vitamin in their bodies, have very little lipoprotein-a in their blood.

Pauling is convinced that doses of vitamin C can help prevent the onset of cardiovascular disease, inhibiting the formation of disease-promoting lesions on blood vessel walls and perhaps decreasing the production of lipoprotein-a in the blood. Vitamin C’s link to healthy blood vessels, Pauling said, is further supported by studies of scurvy, the disease caused by vitamin C deficiency. Fifty percent of patients who die of scurvy, he said, do so because of ruptured blood vessels.

Pauling won his first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 for using quantum mechanics to elucidate the nature of chemical bonds. He garnered a Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for his efforts to stem nuclear weapons proliferation.

The scientist founded the Linus Pauling Institute in Palo Alto, where research on vitamin C and other nutrients continues today.

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/pauling-and-vitamin-c.html

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Natural Medicine Leads to Real Cures
In contrast, the philosophy of natural medicine holds that a weakened immune system (and/or along with other weakened bodily systems) is the reason foreign invaders can thrive, producing symptoms and diseases.

Most of us are taught that we need to go to medical doctors when we get sick. What we aren’t taught is that the real doctor is already within us as the innate wisdom of the body. This is the difference between conventional allopathic systems and natural holistic medicine systems. The philosophy of natural medicine is that, given the right conditions, the body will heal itself. Whereas the allopathic model tries to control defective body systems through drug intervention, or kill foreign invaders with antibiotics, natural medicine rarely includes toxic agents. Instead, herbs, homeopathic remedies and other non-invasive therapies are used. These techniques harmoniously help facilitate the repair and strengthening of bodily systems (especially the immune system, which can then properly fight foreign invaders), or help to destroy offending pathogens without toxic side effects. The goal of natural medicine is to figure out why systems have weakened and then repair them, which results in healing.

Allopathic Medicine—Symptom/Disease Management
The allopathic medical philosophy taught at most medical schools, and practiced by the majority of medical doctors, relies on the concept of identifying diseases or symptoms, and then prescribing drugs to manage or combat those conditions. It is a system that considers the disease or symptom to be the actual problem, as opposed to addressing the underlying causes that produced the disease or symptom in the first place. A wide variety of tests, procedures and equipment specially designed to identify diseases and symptoms have been developed, which on one level is great, because these tests could be used to help figure out underlying causes. Yet, on another level they are very limiting, since they are rarely used for such purposes. Typically, once a diagnosis is determined, the tests are plunked into the patient’s file as conclusive evidence of his or her condition.

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