Niacin: A Safer Way To Lower Bad Cholesterol?

Half of all Americans are on drugs!: prescription drugs that is.

It's true, says the Associated Press (14 May 2008): "Half of all insured Americans are taking prescription medicines regularly for chronic health problems." That is nothing to be proud of.

Among the very most prescribed of all drugs are those used to lower "bad" LDL cholesterol. Patients taking pharmaceuticals trying to do that are being mistreated. Why? Because niacin (vitamin B-3) in high doses is just as effective, much cheaper, and most importantly, far safer. Niacin raises beneficial HDL levels better than any drug. (1) It also dramatically lowers triglycerides.

The New York Times agrees, saying: "An effective HDL booster already exists. It is niacin, the ordinary B vitamin. Niacin can increase HDL as much as 35 percent when taken in high doses, usually about 2,000 milligrams per day . . . and it has been shown to reduce serum levels of artery-clogging triglycerides as much as 50 percent." The president of the American College of Cardiology, Dr. Steven E. Nissen, said, "Niacin is really it. Nothing else available is that effective." (2)

Indeed, niacin is it. Niacin is cheaper, safer and more effective. (3) So why are cholesterol-lowering drugs pushed anywhere and everywhere? Professor of medicine Dr. B. Greg Brown offered an answer: "If you're a drug company, I guess you can't make money on a vitamin."

One reason why doctors and patients select drugs over vitamins is, said AP, "the pharmaceutical industry's relentless advertising." Indeed, "Americans buy much more medicine per person than any other country . . . The biggest jump in use of chronic medications was in the 20- to 44-year-old age group - adults in the prime of life - where it rose 20 percent over the (last) six years." That is a huge increase.

Even worse than that, now one out of every four children and teenagers is taking a chronic disease drug, usually for depression, asthma, or ADHD. Pushing drug therapy for these conditions is largely based on profit, not health. The value of vitamin therapy for each of these conditions is already well established. (4)

It is time for patients to assert that they are simply not going to accept more and more drugs, at higher and higher prices, with more and more dangerous side effects. It is time to demand the proven but too-long-overlooked alternative: safe and effective nutritional treatment.


References:

(1) Alderman JD, Pasternak RC, Sacks FM, Smith HS, Monrad ES,
Grossman W. Effect of a modified, well-tolerated niacin regimen on
serum total cholesterol, high density lipoprotein cholesterol and
the cholesterol to high density lipoprotein ratio. Am J Cardiol.
1989 Oct 1;64(12):725-9.

(2) Mason M. NY Times, January 23, 2007. An old cholesterol remedy
is new again.

(3) http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v01n10.shtml Also
vitamin E: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v01n01.shtml

(4) Depression: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v01n11.shtml
Asthma: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v01n08.shtml
Behavioral disorders: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v03n07.shtml
Research summaries at http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/index.shtml

Source : http://www.orthomolecular.org/

The Truth Behind Farmed Salmon...

It turns out that farm-raised salmon, touted as inexpensive fare for heart-healthy diets, may not be such a good mealtime addition after all. The journal Science published an article detailing an exhaustive analysis of some 700 farm-raised salmon. Most had levels of dioxin-cancer-causing chemicals that are the by-product of various industrial processes-as much as 11 times higher than those found in wild salmon. The best explanation for the big dose of dioxin is that farm-raised fish are eating badly themselves-food pellets mostly derived from ground-up fish. A less-diverse diet than wild salmon eat, it allows concentrations of chemicals to pass easily to farmed salmon.

IT'S THE SALMON FARMS, NOT THE RISKS OF DIOXIN IN FARMED SALMON, THAT WE OUGHT TO BE WORRIED ABOUT.

Farm-raised salmon were largely unheard of 20 years ago. But after getting their start in northern Europe and then spreading to places such as Chile and British Columbia, Canada, "salmon farms" grew rapidly. Today they account for some 60 percent of salmon worldwide-1.4 million metric tons in 2002, which is a lot of salmon steaks. The abundance of farmed salmon has helped make a fish that once was largely a luxury item (or an expensive canned fish) into a commonplace meal in homes and restaurants.

Farmed salmon bring their own set of troubles in their wake. For starters, aquaculture is a dirty industry. As many as 600,000 salmon may be raised in a single net-enclosed pen-itself usually installed in a protected fjord or inlet. Although progressive farmers rotate "crops" of fish between pens, the sea floor under the enclosed salmon becomes covered with fish excrement and uneaten food, creating a dead zone where nothing can live or grow. By some estimates, the salmon farms in British Columbia pump out as much fish faeces as the human equivalent from a city of 500,000.

by Douglas Gantenbein
Source : www.slate.com

The Solution: Ask for wild caught Salmon or Alaskan King Salmon next time you go shopping.

Vitamin C - An Alternative to Chemotherapy?

By Jerome Burne
Medical Health Journalist
As featured in Food Matters

A Check-up six months ago revealed Denis Vaughan's prostate cancer was becoming more active. Vaughan, an orchestral conductor and one of the driving forces behind the creation of the National Lottery, has had prostate cancer for 12 years. Because the tumour wasn't considered aggressive enough for surgery or radiotherapy, his consultant at University College Hospital had agreed on a policy of watchful waiting, while Denis kept it at bay with diet and exercise.

Then, his prostate specific antigen (PSA) score, which measures how active the tumour is, went from 13 to 18.5 'and the watching became a bit anxious'. His oncologist wanted him to take drugs or begin radiotherapy, but Vaughan, who is a strong believer in a natural approach to health, preferred to try a treatment offered by his London GP that involved infusing vitamin C into the bloodstream.

He underwent weekly treatment - with up to 75 grams of vitamin C at a time (the recommended daily amount is 60mg). The treatment, which cost £100 a time, appears to have worked - after seven weeks, his PSA dropped back down to 13, a level described as moderately elevated, and he's back on watchful waiting. His oncologist has said he now doesn't need to see Vaughan for another year.

It's an unorthodox approach, but one that seems to be backed up by research published earlier this month, which found that injecting large amounts of vitamin C into laboratory mice with aggressive and hard-to-treat tumours, caused the cancers to shrink by between 41 and 53 per cent.

Hundreds of patients in the UK have already received IVC as a treatment for cancer - without apparent side-effects. Dr Julian Kenyon, a private GP in Harley Street, says: 'What the American study shows is that when you infuse amounts as high as 4 grams per kilo - the equivalent of around 75 grams for an average adult - vitamin C causes a build up of a chemical called hydrogen peroxide, which destroys the tumour.'

The chief researcher of the American trial, Dr Mark Levine of the American National Institutes of Health, has been investigating vitamin C's cancer killing abilities for several years. He's already shown that it's effective in a test tube and two years ago, he published a report on three patients who were treated for serious and advanced cancers and survived far longer that would normally be expected.

'We now know that the vitamin C gets into tumours in large amounts and that it kills them by causing a build up of hydrogen peroxide. In fact, vitamin C is hardly a new anti-cancer treatment. It was famously used by double Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling more than 30 years ago, who found that terminal cancer patients treated with vitamin C lived much longer. However, when his trials were repeated at the prestigious Mayo clinic in America, the researchers found no benefit. Proponents of vitamin C point out the clinic only used oral vitamin C which can work differently.
'This is just the sort of thing that public money should be spent on,' says Dr George Lewith, of the University of Southampton, who assesses complementary and alternative medicines for the National Cancer Research Institute. 'I would be strongly in favour of running a proper clinical trial of IVC as soon as possible.'