Excerpted Quotes from Dr. Esselstyn on Taste Addiction, Added Oil, & Heart Disease

Been pulling together material to cull through for appendices in my "soon to be announced" cookbook.  The following are selected from Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's landmark "Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease."  Most notable are what he says about taste addiction, oil & free radicals, describing how even a little oil is damaging, and Dr. T. Colin Campbell's observation about oil in one's diet.

Enjoy!  Mark    Twitter: @solveggie

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Pg. 114:  "Collectively, the media; the meat, oil, and dairy industries; most prominent chefs and cookbook authors; and our own government are not presenting accurate advice about the healthiest way to eat."

Pg. 114:  "And it's not just a matter of bad information.  The truth is that we are addicted to fat --- literally.  Receptors in our brains account for our addicition to nicotine, heroin, and cocaine, and similar cravings have been identified for fat and sugars as well."

Pg. 114:  "The way to break the fat habit is to abstain entirely from eating it --- just as those who use heroin, cocaine, and nicotine must give them up once and for all.  We have all seen what happens with many people who go on reduced-fat diets in order to lose weight.  A diet that permits even a modest amount of animal, dairy, and oil fat still feeds the habit.  The craving remains.  And the moment diet is completed --- or, more often, fails --- the dieter too frequently returns to his or her old habits of eating and regains the lost weight."

Pg. 04:  "Here are the facts.  Coronary artery disease is the leading killer of men and women in Western civilization.  In the United States alone, more than half a million people die of it every single year.  Three times that number suffer known heart attacks.  And approximately three million more have "silent" heart attacks, experiencing minimal symptoms and having no idea, until well after the damage is done, that they are in mortal danger.  In the course of a lifetime, one out of every two American men and one out of every three American women will have some form of the disease.

Pg. 38:  "Every mouthful of oils and animal products, including dairy foods, initiates an assault on these [cell] membranes and, therefore, on the cells they protect.  These foods produce a cascade of free radicals in our bodies --- especially harmful chemical substances that induce metabolic injuries from which there is only a partial recovery.  Year after year, the effects accumulate.  And eventually, the cumulative cell injury is great enough to become obvious, to express itself as what physicians define as disease.  Plants and grains do not induce the deadly cascade of free radicals.  Even better, in fact, they carry an antidote.  Unlike oils and animal products, they contain antioxidants, which help to neutralize the free radicals and also, recent research suggests, may provide considerable protection against cancers."

Pg. 84:  "...[oils] are not heart healthy.  Between 14 and 17 percent of olive oil is saturated, artery-clogging fat --- every bit as aggressive in promoting heart disease as the saturated fat in roast beef.  And even though a Mediterranean-style diet that allows such oils may slow the rate of progression of coronary heart disease, when compared with diets even higher in saturated fat, it does not arrest the disease and reverse its effects."

Pg, 84 - 85:  "...Colin Campbell, author of the best-selling China Study, was asked his thought on the results of the Lyon Diet Heart Study [Med Diet], and to compare those results with those he found in studying health and nutrition in rural China, where coronary disease is practically nonexistent.  Colin didn't hesitate for a moment.  The Mediterranean and rural Chinese diets are practically the same, he replied.  "I would say the absence of oil in the rural Chinese diet is the reason for their superior success."

Pg. 04:  "The cost of this epidemic is enormous --- greater, by far, than that of any other disease.  The United States spends more than $250 billion a year on heart disease.  That's about the same amount the nation spent on the first two and half years of its military venture in Iraq, and fully twice as much as the federal government allocates for all research and development --- including R&D for defense and national security."

Pg. 04:  "But here is the truly shocking statistic:  nearly all that money is devoted to treating symptoms.  It pays for cardiac drugs, for clot-dissolving medications, and for costly mechanical techniques that bypass clogged arteries or widen them with balloons, tiny rotating knives, lasers, and stents.  All of these approaches carry significant risk of serious complications, including death.

Pg. 04 - 05:  I believe that coronary artery disease is preventable, and that even after it is underway, its progress can be stopped, its insidious effects reversed.  I believe, and my work over the past twenty years has demonstrated, that all this can be accomplished without expensive mechanical intervention and with minimal use of drugs.  The key lies in nutrition --- specifically, in abandoning the toxic American diet and maintaining cholesterol levels well below those historically recommended by health policy experts.

Pg. 05:  "The bottom line of the nutritional program I recommend is that it contains not a single item of any food known to cause or promote the development of vascular disease.  I often ask patients to compare their coronary artery disease to a house fire.  Your house is on fire because eating the wrong foods has given you heart disease.  You are spraying gasoline on the fire by continuing to eat the very same foods that caused the disease in the first place."

Pg. 05:  "I don't want my patients to pour a single thimbleful of gasoline [oil, meat, dairy] on the fire.  Stopping the gasoline puts out [and prevents] the fire.  Reforming the way you eat will end [and prevent] the heart disease."

Pg. 10:  "Cholesterol is a white, waxy substance that is not found in plants --- only in animals.  It is an essential component of the membrane that coats all our cells, and it is the basic ingredient of sex hormones.  Our bodies need cholesterol, and they manufacture it on their own.  We do not need to eat it.  But we do, when we consume meat, poultry, fish, and other animal-based foods, such as dairy products and eggs.  In doing so, we take on excess amounts of the substance.  What's more, eating fat [even as added oil] causes the body itself to manufacture excessive amounts of cholesterol, which explains why vegetetarians who eat oil, butter, cheese, milk, ice cream, glazed doughnuts, and French pastry develop coronary disease despite their avoidance of meat."

Pg. 11:  "The cornonary arteries are the blood vessels that supply oxygen and nutrients to the muscle of the heart.  They get their name from the Latin word for "crown" because they encircle the heart almost like a royal headpiece.  They are relatively small, but exceedingly important: without the nourishment they bring to the incredibly efficient pump they serve, the heart becomes injured, begins to fail, and may die."

Pg. 11:  "The innermost lining of all blood and lymph vessels and the heart is called the endothelium.  Far more thana simple membrane, the endothelium is actually the body's single largest endocrine organ.  If all the endothelial cells in your body were laid out flat, one cell thick, they would cover an area equal to two tennis courts."

Pg. 11:  "Healthy arteries are strong and elastic, their linings smooth and unobstructed, allowing a free flow of blood.  But when the levels of fats in the bloodstream become elevated, everything begins to change.  Gradually, the endothelium, the white blood cells, and the platelets, the blood cells that cause clotting, all become sticky.  Eventually, a white blood cell adheres to and eventually penetrates the endothelium, where it attempts to ingest the rising numbers of LDL cholesterol molecules that are being oxidized from the fatty diet.  The white blood cell sends out a call for help to other white blood cells.  More and more of them converge on the site, becoming engorged with bad cholesterol and eventually forming a bubble of fatty pus--- an atheroma, or "plaque," the chief characterisitic of atherosclerosis."

Pg. 11:  "Old plaques contain scar tissue and calcium.  As they enlarge, they severely narrow and sometimes block the arteries...  A significantly narrowed artery cannot give the heart muscle a normal blood supply, and the heart muscle, thus deprived, causes chest pain, or angina.  In some cases, the coronary arteries actually perform their own bypasses, growing extra branches --- called "collaterals" --- that go around the narrowed vessels."

Pg. 11 - 12:  "However, it is not the old, larger plaques that put you most at risk for heart attacks.  The most recent scientific evidence indicates that most heart attacks occur when younger and smaller fatty plaques rupture their outer lining, or cap, and bleed into the coronary artery."

Pg. 12:  "As the plaque is formed, a fibrous cap develops at its roof, which is covered by a single layer of endothelium about as thick as a cobweb.  For a while, thus protected, plaques lie quiety in place, doing less perceptible harm to the artery's owner.  But an insidious process is nonetheless under way.  The white blood cells that raced to the rescue, now engorged with oxidized LDL cholesterol, are called "foam cells," and begin to manufacture chemical substances that erode the cap of the plaque.  The cap weakens to thethickness of a cobweb.  And eventually, the shearing force of blood flowing over the weakened cap may cause it to rupture."

Pg. 12:  "This is catastrophic.  Plaque content or pus now oozes into the flowing bloodstream, and that constitutes a thrombogenic event: nature wants to heal the rupture, and so platelets are activated.  They try mightily to stop the invading garbage by clotting the rupture. Thus begins a lethal cascade.  The clot is self-propagating, and within minutes, theentire artery may become blocked."

Pg. 37:  "We  should be aiming much higher: at arresting coronary artery disease altogether, even reversing its course.  And the key to doing this, as my research demonstrates, is not simply reducing the amount of fat and cholesterol you ingest, but eliminating cholesterol and any fat beyond the natural, healthy amounts found in plants, from your diet.  The key is plant-based nutrition."

Comments

[jigs]

thanks for the info. just saw a CNN report of Dr Gupta about heart disease featuring President Clinton and Dr Esselstyn. I'm 37 yrs old and I totally agree that best cure/prevention for heart disease is a plant based diet. My wife is also willing but is having problems with food recipes to use since we grew up in a meat eating culture.Hope your book comes out soon. Would you know any Asian vegetarian authors??? thanks and God bless!

[Not off hand (on the road, no access to my cookbooks). Madhur Jaffrey has put out a great vegetarian cookbook (world recipes), but she did use a lot of oil.

You might find the following website (with reference to blog and List useful):

http://www.fatfreevegan.com

Susan's put together a marvelous resource for those wanting a no-added fat plant-based diet.

Best to you! And the book should be out NLT mid-October). Mark]

[Paul Beigh]

This is a great summary Mark, thanks for compiling and sharing.
I'm waiting "patiently" for your cookbook.

[Thanks! And so am I... 1st complete draft ('cept for Appendices, not sure how any yet) almost done. Dying to announce the title and concept. Possibly this week. Best regards, Mark]