A Stroke of Bad Luck

[Guest guest]

A Stroke of Bad Luck JoAnn Guest May 01, 2005 14:24 PDT

 

Fifty years ago, a young medical student performed an

autopsy on a 9-year-old girl with golden-blonde hair and a

slender athletic body.

 

As the attending physician during her illness (he was a

second-year medical student at the time), Charles Attwood

was also required to perform a careful dissection of the

internal organs upon his patient's death. A few years ago,

he described to me, firsthand, the pain of holding her heart

in his hands.

 

What Dr. Attwood found in her coronary artery affected him

greatly, and shaped his future medical career. Bright yellow

thickening of the arterial wall indicated heart disease. Her

artery was clogged with atherosclerotic placquing from

cholesterol.

 

On Wednesday morning, my dearest friend suffered a stroke. I

spent part of the day with him in the emergency room at

Englewood Hospital in New Jersey while a CAT scan and other

tests were performed.

 

The Tuesday night before his stroke, he ate the " steak-

special " at Charlie Brown's Restaurant. This was the 24-

ounce New York cut that came from a cow and was finely

marbled with delicious saturated animal fat. The meal was so

good, that he splurged a bit and had cheesecake for dessert.

When indigestion and reflux threatened to rob him of a good

night's sleep, he took that one reliable medicine which

always works to buffer the acid in his stomach, vanilla ice

cream.

 

During dinner, his stomach immediately went to work

digesting that steak. After dinner, the cheesecake

neutralized the acid in his stomach, preventing that organ

from performing the task it was designed to do. During his

pained act of indigestion, the vanilla ice cream neutralized

the stomach acid once more, and the contents of his stomach

sac emptied into his large intestine where the remaining

food containing three extra-large doses of saturated fat

were absorbed into his bloodstream.

 

I have heard Caldwell Esselstyn, a cardiologist at America's

premiere heart hospital, the Cleveland Clinic, describe a

pint of blood taken from a man who had previously ingested a

similar saturated-fat lunch. An hour after the blood was

drawn from the man's vein, a thick coating of fat had risen

to the top of that pint, and had to be skimmed before the

donor's life fluid could be infused into a recipient. Much

like fatty cream rises to the top of a container of milk

(before homogenization), so too did the saturated animal fat

from the foods he ate coagulate into the arteries and brain

of my friend, the man who suffered his stroke.

 

He is a warrior, this friend. He lives by that three-pronged

sword otherwise known as a fork. Live by the sword, die by

that sword. The stroke subtracted from the efficiency of

many of those normal daily functions that we take for

granted. His speech is now slurred. His vision is impaired.

His gait is not as lively today as it was on Monday. The

doctors do expect a full recovery. The stroke was a signal

from a body under siege. A body fashioned by the most

intelligent of forces, designed to send a series of signals,

first subtle and then powerful, when things go wrong.

Indigestion, discomfort, strokes, heart attacks. Some

signals are soft, and some are like the crashing of cymbals

at the conclusion of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Each of

life's warning signs are designed to alert the mind of the

body to alter an inefficient or improper behavior.

 

We as a society eat meat and dairy products because they

taste so good. Because they are so-called comfort foods.

Because the saturated animal fat creates wonderful taste

sensations upon our taste buds. Two out of three of us who

eat such food as our body's fuel will die of a

cardiovascular event such as a stroke or heart attack.

 

It is never too late to reverse heart disease. Day one

begins with a recognition of gastronomy's cruelest joke.

That which tastes the best, pizza, barbecued ribs, ice

cream, hamburgers, does the most damage. The choice is to

either live a life free of heart disease, and not spend ten

to twenty years dying like the average American does, or

give up those most delicious hard-to-digest foods, and live

a longer, healthier, and more active, pain-free life in

which the body and mind remain true to the initial design

plan.

 

My friend will improve. He may or may not return to that

same diet which causes strokes to occur. The quality-of-life

decision for him to continue eating delicious fat-filled

foods may result in shortening his life. Some people say

that a meal consisting of steak with ice cream for dessert

is " to die for. " In the end, it is up to him to come to

terms with his future.

 

---------------------------

ICE CREAM AND STROKES

 

The dairy industry recently featured a milk mustache ad with

the Three Stooges.

 

The advertisement posed Curly with a milk mustache, just

after he had been hit over the head with a crowbar--one of

the many slapstick routines used frequently by the Three

Stooges.

 

CURLY: Wait a minute. You know I'm temperamental! MOE: Yeah,

95% temper, 5% mental.

 

What better role model could dairymen have chosen to

represent them than an out of shape, obese drunk with

cardiovascular disease?

 

In the early 1940's, Curly's health began to deteriorate.

His eating habits, combined with his constant drinking and

smoking, caused him to gain enormous amounts of weight, and

he developed high blood pressure.

 

On January 23, 1945, Curly was diagnosed as having extreme

hypertension, a retinal hemorrhage, and obesity. He remained

at the hospital for tests and treatment and was discharged

nearly three weeks later.

 

On May 6, 1946, during the shooting of a movie, Curly

suffered a stroke and was rushed to the hospital where he

was placed on a strict vegetarian diet.

 

After Curly left the hospital, he went back to his old ways

and suffered several more strokes. In 1949, Curly's health

took a severe turn for the worse. The latest stroke left him

partially paralyzed and confined to a wheel chair.

 

This time, Curly's doctors placed him on a diet of boiled

rice and raw fruits and vegetables. This diet successfully

lowered his weight and blood pressure.

 

On January 18, 1952, Curly died at the very young age of 48.

His brothers outlived him by many years. Moe died at the age

of 73 and Larry died at the age of 78.

 

Just about the same time that Curly suffered his first

stroke, the nation of Japan got their first dairy cows.

 

In Japan, every year since 1946, tens-of thousands of

persons have been interviewed and their diets carefully

analyzed. 21,707 persons from 6,093 households were included

in the sampling. The results of the study were published in

Preventive Medicine (Yasuo Kagawa, Department of

Biochemistry, Jichi Medical School, Japan, 7, 205-217,

1978).

 

According to this study, the per-capita yearly dietary

intake of dairy products in 1950 was only 5.5 pounds.

Twenty-five years later the average Japanese ate 117.4

pounds of milk and dairy products.

 

While milk and dairy consumption increased from 1950 to

1975, cerebral vascular disease (strokes) increased by a

factor of 38 percent.

 

Dr. Benjamin Spock wrote about a related medical crisis that

changed his life. Spock was America's best known

pediatrician, and sold 85 million copies of his book, Child

Care. Spock wrote:

 

" Ever since I wrote my first edition of Baby and Child Care

in 1946, I have always put the emphasis on the need for

eating lots of vegetables, fruits, and whole grain cereals.

But due to the fact that dairy products and meats have been

considered ideal foods for so long, I was hesitant to talk

about their hidden disadvantages. In fact, I was not

entirely convinced, until recently, that all parents should

be alerted, and in some cases made to feel guilty, when they

continue to give these foods to their children. What changed

my mind was an episode in my own medical history.

 

In 1988, I fainted crossing the lobby of a hotel and

spattered the marble floor with blood. After a week's

hospitalization it was concluded that my condition was

partly due to the irregular rhythm of my heart (atrial

fibrillation), a familial condition I'd had for several

years. Also, I had a supposed narrowing of arteries in my

brain from arteriosclerosis, which had stopped or interfered

with the heart beat enough to allow blood to clot in my

heart. A piece of the clot presumably broke off and plugged

an artery of my brain long enough to cause the faint. Not

long afterward, I had a brief episode of speaking gibberish

instead of English. I was put on a digitalis medication to

slow and steady the heart beat and given a pacemaker to

substitute for my heart if it decided to stop again. Since

my mother and two sisters died of strokes, that was enough

to remind me that I am mortal like all humans, a fact that I

had ignored until then.

 

In recent years, we've discovered that a high-fat diet,

which means eating relatively large amounts of meat, dairy

products, and fried foods, is the main cause of

arteriosclerosis, coronary heart disease, stroke, certain

forms of cancer and obesity. Experts in these diseases

realize that the true cause is the excessively high animal

fat content of the average American diet including dairy

products. "

 

We should all learn from Dr. Spock's wisdom. My final

message: Get well soon, Dad. I am happy to see containers of

soy-based ice cream and sorbets in your freezer instead of

that " other stuff. "

 

 

 

 

--

 

 

Robert Cohen author of: MILK A-Z

(201-871-5871)

Executive Director (notmi-)

Dairy Education Board

http://www.notmilk.com

 

 

--

 

 

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_________________

JoAnn Guest

mrsjo-

DietaryTi-

www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest/Genes

 

 

 

 

AIM Barleygreen

" Wisdom of the Past, Food of the Future "

 

http://www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest/Diets.html