Dr. Sanjay Gupta: What are all these various diseases that you say are linked to sugar?

Dr. Robert Lustig: Obesity, type II diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease itself.

Lustig says the American lifestyle is killing us.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: And most of it you say is preventable?

Dr. Robert Lustig: Seventy-five percent of it is preventable.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Is it worse than just table sugar?

Dr. Robert Lustig: No. ‘Cause it’s the exact same. They are basically equivalent. The problem is they’re both bad. They’re both equally toxic.

Since the 1970s, sugar consumption has gone down nearly 40 percent, but high fructose corn syrup has more than made up the difference. Dr. Lustig says they are both toxic because they both contain fructose—that’s what makes them sweet and irresistible.

Potassium bicarbonate reduced my blood pressure by about 20 points from roughly 140/70-something to 121/72 mm Hg.

Potassium chloride is the more commonly-recommended form, however, the research suggests to me that potassium bicarbonate is superior to potassium chloride for many reasons. Here’s why.

Reducing body fat lowers blood pressure even without a change in body weight according to a 1998 study.

People who reduced their percent body fat by 2 percent reduced their blood pressure by 8/6 points after one year from 149/92 to 141/86 mm Hg.

However, in patients who had a similar reduction in body fat without a change in body weight had a similar reduction in blood pressure of 11/6 from 151/93 to 140/87 mm Hg.

This suggests that it is excess body fat rather than body weight that causes elevated blood pressure.

Men who were given 200 grams of fructose per day for two weeks had an average increase in blood pressure from 128/78 to 135/84 mm Hg, an increase of 7/6 mm Hg according to a new study.

For those of us who enjoy the use of weasel words and non-scientific rubbish dressed up as fact, this is indeed a grand territory to explore…. 

I have written about hypertension a couple of times. So I thought that I should throw my hat into the ring about the controversy surrounding the ALLHAT trial. A trial which wins my official tortuous acronym award? ALLHAT stands for the Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering treatment to prevent Heart Attack Trial.

(This article was written by Malcolm Kendrick, MD, author of the wonderful, eye-opening, paradigm-shifting book The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It .)

I write this before I have read all the details on the new Heart Lung and Blood Institute guidelines on raised blood pressure [as of 2003]. But there has been enough information flying around to know what they are saying. Frankly, I knew what these guidelines were going to say before the committee met for the first time. Before, in fact, the members of the committee even knew they were going to be on the committee.

Now we are all to be officially ill.

(This article was written by Malcolm Kendrick, MD, author of the wonderful, eye-opening, paradigm-shifting book The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It .)

Let’s suppose that one day you went to the doctor and she decided to take your temperature, just to see what it was. To your surprise it was two degrees higher than normal. As we all know, a high temperature is associated with a higher than normal level of mortality, so the doctor decided to use a drug to get your temperature down, along with advice to wear less clothes and take cold baths.

Time passes and you have been on this drug for five years. The baths and chilly walks are getting to be a bit of a pain. On the bright side, at least the temperature is back to normal.

I think you would agree that such a scenario is, quite frankly, nuts.

(This article was written by Malcolm Kendrick, MD, author of the wonderful, eye-opening, paradigm-shifting book The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It .)

The one-fifth of people consuming the most potassium were 35% less likely to die from coronary heart disease than the one-fifth of people consuming the least.

The top one-fifth consumed an average of 3363 mg of potassium per day versus 1720 mg per day for the bottom one-fifth.

Hi, this is Larry Hobbs @ FatNews.com

The one-fifth of people consuming the most sodium versus the one-fifth consuming the least were:

• 42 percent more likely to have cardiovascular disease
• 55 percent more likely to have a stroke of any kind
• 104 percent more likely to have an ischemic stroke (2X as likely).

The top one-fifth consumed 6523 mg of sodium per day versus 2322 mg per day for the bottom one-fifth.

Type 2 Hypothyroidism can cause high blood pressure (hypertension) according to Mark Starr, MD author of the wonderful book Hypothyroidism Type 2: The Epidemic.

The prevalence of hypertension increases as body weight increases as found in a study of 56784 men aged 18-25 years, entering the Swiss army.
The prevalence of obesity by weight category was as follows:

• 12.5% in underweight men with BMI less than 18.5
• 23.9% in normal weight men with a BMI less than 18.5 to 24.9
• 37.6% in overweight men with a BMI of 25 to 29.9
• 49.7% in obese men with a BMI of 30 to 34.9
• 56.7% in obese men with a BMI of 35 to 39.9
• 54.2% in underweight men with a BMI of 40 or greater

“[H]igh blood glucose in diabetes is NOT the cause of the pathology,” wrote Richard Moore, MD, PhD, professor and research scientist, and author of the book “The High Blood Pressure Solution”.

In other words, health problems associated with diabetes are NOT caused by high blood sugar.

“[T]hiazide diuretics lower blood pressure because they get sodium out of the body (through the kidneys),” notes wrote Richard Moore, MD, PhD, professor and research scientist, and author of the book “The High Blood Pressure Solution”.

“[A blood pressure study called the ALLHAT study found that three newer blood pressure drugs] had far worse health outcomes than the original, cheap thiazide diuretics,” wrote Richard Moore, MD, PhD, professor and research scientist, and author of the book “The High Blood Pressure Solution”.

“As one author of the paper wrote, ‘We cant say whether the diuretics were better than—or not as bad as—the other groups of drugs.”

“Since it is well established that thiazide diuretics often cause diabetes, it well may be the later.”

“In my book, ‘The High Blood Pressure Solution’, you will find that [there] is no evidence that antihypertensive drugs save lives,” wrote Richard Moore, MD, PhD, professor and research scientist,

”[In fact,] the very best study ever done of drug treatment of 17,000 hypertensives over a five year period found ‘no overall reduction in death rate’ in those treated with drugs.”

In 1986, professor and research scientist, Richard Moore, MD, PhD, showed in his book “The K Factor: Reversing and Preventing High Blood Pressure Without Drugs”, that 95% of the cases of hypertension are due to a low ratio of potassium to sodium in the American diet.

“We did not emphasize it, but since you can’t repair a dietary deficiency with a synthetic chemical [a drug] this clearly indicated that drugs are not the answer for hypertension,” Dr. Moore noted.

Dr. Moore also notes that back in the 1980’s, the largest blood pressure drug study to-date at that time, which included “17,000 people over a 5-year period, demonstrated that lowering blood pressure with drugs had zero effect on over-all mortality!”

Women taking a diuretic plus a beta blocker were 21% more likely to die of cardiovascular disease during the 5.9 year follow-up than women taking NO blood pressure medicines even though the average systolic pressure was 15 points LOWER in the drug group than the no drug group (134 mm Hg vs 149 mm Hg) according to a 2004 study.

To say this the other way, women taking women taking NO blood pressure medicines were 18% LESS likely to die of cardiovascular disease during the 5.9 year follow-up than women taking a diuretic plus a beta blocker.

(YouTube videos are limited to 10 minutes, so I had to split the video into 2 parts.)

Women taking a diuretic plus an ACE inhibitor were 12% more likely to die of cardiovascular disease during the 5.9 year follow-up than women taking NO blood pressure medicines even though the average systolic pressure was 16 points LOWER in the drug group than the no drug group (133 mm Hg vs 149 mm Hg) according to a 2004 study.

To say this the other way, women taking women taking NO blood pressure medicines were 11% LESS likely to die of cardiovascular disease during the 5.9 year follow-up than women taking a diuretic plus an ACE inhibitor.

(YouTube videos are limited to 10 minutes, so I had to split the video into 2 parts.)

Women taking a diuretic plus a calcium channel blocker were 2.4 times MORE likely (136% more likely) to die of cardiovascular disease during the 5.9 year follow-up than women taking NO blood pressure medicines even though the average systolic pressure was 11 points LOWER in the drug group than the no drug group (138 mm Hg vs 149 mm Hg) according to a 2004 study.

To say this the other way, women taking women taking NO blood pressure medicines were 58% LESS likely to die of cardiovascular disease during the 5.9 year follow-up than women taking a diuretic plus a calcium channel blocker.

(YouTube videos are limited to 10 minutes, so I had to split the video into 2 parts.)

Women taking a calcium channel blocker were 74% MORE likely to die of cardiovascular disease during the 5.9 year follow-up than women taking NO blood pressure medicines NO blood pressure medicines even though the average systolic pressure was 10 points LOWER in the drug group than the no drug group (139 mm Hg vs 149 mm Hg) according to a 2004 study.

To say this the other way, women taking women taking NO blood pressure medicines were 43% LESS likely to die of cardiovascular disease during the 5.9 year follow-up than women taking a calcium channel blocker.

Women taking an ACE Inhibitor were 4% MORE likely to die of cardiovascular disease during the 5.9 year follow-up than women taking NO blood pressure medicines even though the average systolic pressure was 12 points LOWER in the drug group than the no drug group (137 mm Hg vs 149 mm Hg) according to a 2004 study.

To say this the other way, women taking women taking NO blood pressure medicines were 4% LESS likely to die of cardiovascular disease during the 5.9 year follow-up than women taking an ACE Inhibitor.

Older, hypertensive women taking a diuretic were 9% MORE likely to die of cardiovascular disease during a 5.9 year follow-up than similar women taking NO blood pressure medicines even though the average systolic pressure was 13 points LOWER in the drug group than the no drug group (136 mm Hg vs 149 mm Hg) according to a 2004 study.

Let me say this the other way.

Women, 50- to 79-years-old with high blood pressure and no history of cardiovascular disease who were NOT taking any drugs for blood pressure were 8% LESS likely to die of cardiovascular disease during a 5.9 year follow-up than similar women taking a diuretic even though the average systolic pressure of the women taking NO blood pressure medicines was 13 points HIGHER than those taking a diuretic. (149 mm Hg vs 136 mm Hg)

(YouTube videos are limited to 10 minutes, so I had to split the video into 3 parts.)

Women taking a beta blocker were 15% less likely to die of cardiovascular disease during the 5.9 year follow-up than women taking NO blood pressure medicines according to a 2004 study.

The average systolic pressure was 11 points LOWER in the drug group than the no drug group (136 mm Hg vs 149 mm Hg).

To say this the other way, women taking women taking NO blood pressure medicines were 17% MORE likely to die of cardiovascular disease during the 5.9 year follow-up than women taking a beta blocker.

(YouTube videos are limited to 10 minutes, so I had to split the video into 2 parts.)

The belief that “the higher your blood pressure, the higher your risk of death, and the lower your blood pressure, the lower the risk of death” is WRONG.

This according to a brilliant paper from UCLA statistician, Sid Port, PhD.

The belief that “the higher your blood pressure, the higher your risk of death, and the lower your blood pressure, the lower the risk of death” is WRONG.

This according to a brilliant paper from UCLA statistician, Sid Port, PhD.