Psyberspace » Science

Psyberspace

Walter — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 09:02:52 +0000

What is this blog about? It might be all over the place but this picture shows how my filter works.

At the heart is a patch where there is a psychological, or soulful aesthetic, cyberspace phenomena that makes the world a better place.

Evolution of the Good

Walter — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 03:27:07 +0000

More on evolution and the basis for altruism. I heard this show ages ago, I can recall listening to it while scrambling up a steep loose rockface! (Miles reminded me about it on Facebook) The kinship theory makes total sense to me, but it does not mean the group theory is wrong does it? Why the either/or here?

The Good Show – Radiolab:

In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another? The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today’s plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness … or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?

Copy of the audio:
The Good Show

Studio-d/flikr

Steven Rose & Richard Dawkins (Video)

Walter — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 23:59:15 +0000

Further to the last post, look at this video (thanks Josh)

Steven Rose by blindwatcher

It seems to me they all agree on the question where does “good” come from. Steven Rose is systemic in his thinking, Dawkins more reductionist.

Background to this discussion:

Steven Rose – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Research and scientific controversies With Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin, Rose championed the “radical science movement.”[3][page needed] The three criticized sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and adaptationism, most prominently in the book Not in Our Genes (1984), laying out their opposition to Sociobiology (E. O. Wilson, 1975), The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins, 1976), and other works promoting an evolutionary explanation for human social behaviour. Not in Our Genes described Dawkins as “the most reductionist of sociobiologists”. In retort, Dawkins wrote that the book practices reductionism by distorting arguments in terms of genetics to “an idiotic travesty (that the properties of a complex whole are simply the sum of those same properties in the parts)”, and accused the authors of giving “ideology priority over truth”.[4] Rose replied in the 2nd edition of his book Lifelines. Rose wrote further works in this area; in 2000 he jointly edited with the sociologist Hilary Rose, a critique of evolutionary psychology: Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology. In 2006 he wrote a paper dismissing classical heritability estimates as useful scientific measures in respect of human populations especially in the context of IQ.[5] Rose was for several years a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4′s ethics debating series The Moral Maze.[1] Rose is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.

Die for the group and spread your genes

Walter — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 08:56:37 +0000

I enjoyed this essay:

Where does good come from? – The Boston Globe: Instapaper

On a recent Monday afternoon, the distinguished Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson was at his home in Lexington, talking on the phone about the knocks he’s been taking lately from the scientific community, and paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer to explain his current standing in his field. “All new ideas go through three phases,” Wilson said, with some happy mischief in his voice. “They’re first ridiculed or ignored. Then they meet outrage. Then they are said to have been obvious all along.”

Wilson is 81, an age at which he could be forgiven for retreating to a farm and lending his name to the occasional popular book about science. Over the past year he’s tried his hand at fiction writing, publishing a novel about ants — his scientific specialty — and landing a short story in The New Yorker. But he has also been pressing a disruptive scientific idea, one he reckons is currently in phase two of the Schopenhauer progression: outrage.

The idea is that if the group that benefits from altruism, the tribe will live to spread the genes. This “outrageous” idea by Edward O Wilson is not so silly. Nor is it new. It is the bread & butter of what I learned at the University of Canterbury in the 60s from Dr Bigelow.
I enjoyed his classes and book. He taught the simple idea that the unit of evolution is the “gene pool”, not the individual carrier of the genes. Amazon

Social cooperation, which leads to the Golden Rule and what we call the highest human qualities, was demanded by what we call the lowest of human qualities: the ferocity of human enemies. Shakespeare’s two opposed foes that still encamp us therefore evolved together. They were not even two different sides of the same coin, but were as intimately interdependent as our brains and hearts are. Cooperation was not substituted for conflict. Cooperation-for-conflict, considered as a single, hyphenated word, was demanded — for sheer survival.

page 7 & 8 The Dawn Warriors.

Researching this a bit more, it is evident that Wilson is adhering closely to Darwin:

It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in the standard of morality and an increase in the number of well-endowed men will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection (Darwin, 1891, Vol. I: 203; italics added).

Found that quote in an interesting paper on the history of these ideas while searching for Robert Bigelow AND Edmund O Wilson: Human Evolution and the Origin of War: a Darwinian Heritage

[A fitting post for Easter Sunday!]

Stanislav Grof on Future Primitive

Walter — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 11:45:29 +0000

Personal Experience and Spiritual Quest « Future Primitive Podcasts:

Stanislav Grof, M.D., is a psychiatrist with over fifty years experience researching non-ordinary states of consciousness.

There are two things that I’ve appreciated about Grof that have made a real difference in the way I do psychotherapy. One is the importance of perinatal experience, traumatic and otherwis3. The other is Co-ex systems. Both come up in this interview, though the latter is not named specifically.

Zeitgeist

Walter — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 09:39:52 +0000

I just watched the movie Zeitgeist: Addenda Here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912#

I got to it because I saw in Google news that the movie is showing in Christchurch tonight. What I like about the movie is that it shows the end is night. It shows the nature of the problem, essentially the crumbling of the US empire.

It does it quite well! It shows the power of the IMF and World bank, the corporations, and shows really well how the US conducts its empire. It is holistic in many ways, drawing on people from a lot of fields for their opinion.

Critique and and a link follow, and a pdf:

But I hated the solutions that are proposed. The actions are ok, ie use less fuel, boycott certain banks etc, but it is the Al Gore movie all over again. The analysis is a bit deeper than the Al Gore movie but the solution is as effete. It is worse because it does not match the analysis. How can such a potent analysis propose such empty ideology? To be honest the analysis is a bit flawed as well. The movie has a reasonable exposition of the macro forces, however it’s technological focus is annoying. The problem, it says over and over, is money, it is not holistic or open ended, or marxist in that regard, but almost like social credit in its one eye perspective.

The Zeitgeist movement is itself a sort of institution, not based on a real movement. It may have half a million subscribers, but that is clicktivism.

Maybe I’m unduly critical. I’d be just as critical if it had a marxist solution. I might then be more sympathetic with the ideology, but marketing revolution like this won’t do the trick. The medium is the message.

So would I recommend the movie? Certainly, and even their actions, and I bet they are good people showing that movie tonight.

I am running a sociodrama workshop on the zeitgeist at the ANZPA conference. It will be interesting to see what *emerges*. I have been reflecting on just what is going on in the times right now. Clearly zeitgeist is in the zeitgeist! Integration of the internet and action is also looming… as is an emergent and holistic approach… maybe this movement will be a force for good?

http://www.zmf.co.nz/index.pl?page=about_zmf&m=213

This film will feature experts in the fields of public health, anthropology, neurobiology, economics, energy, technology, social science and other relevant subjects which relate to social operation and culture. The three central themes of the work are Human Behavior, Monetary Economics, and Applied Science. Put together the work creates a model of understanding the current social paradigm; why it is critical to move out of it – coupled with a new, radical, yet practical social approach based on advanced understandings which would resolve the current social woes facing the world today.

Zeitgeist-Movement.pdf

PREFACE:
The Zeitgeist Movement is the activist arm of The Venus Project , which constitutes the life long work
of industrial designer and social engineer, Jacque Fresco. Jacque currently lives in Venus, Florida,
working closely with his associate, Roxanne Meadows. Now, let it be understood that Mr. Fresco will
be the first to tell you that his perspectives and developments are not entirely his own, but rather
uniquely derived from the evolution of scientific inquiry which has persevered since the dawn of
antiquity. Simply put, what The Venus Project represents and what The Zeitgeist Movement hence
condones, could be summarized as: ‘The application of The Scientific Method for social concern.’

What’s happening?

Walter — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 05:59:45 +0000

And Stephen J Gould says the same thing. Why is this on my mind? Thinking about “Listening to the Spirit of the Times”. A sociodrama workshop I’ll be conducting at the ANZPA conference in Sydney. Evolution comes into it, so does the technium (see Kevin Kelly), so does Moreno and his perspectives on creativity, and Marx on class… and lots more. If we integrated all this theory would it be a theory? How do we make sense of the times we are in?

Evolution is a Fact and a Theory:

Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don’t go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s in this century, but apples didn’t suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

Theory is higher than law

Walter — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 05:29:52 +0000

This is a useful little notion.

Evolution is Not Just a Theory: home:

Some people think that in science, you have a theory, and once it’s proven, it becomes a law. That’s not how it works. In science, we collect facts, or observations, we use laws to describe them, and a theory to explain them. You don’t promote a theory to a law by proving it. A theory never becomes a law. This bears repeating. A theory never becomes a law.

In fact, if there was a hierarchy of science, theories would be higher than laws. There is nothing higher, or better, than a theory. Laws describe things, theories explain them.

DIY Energy from hydrogen – forget dams

Walter — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 08:01:20 +0000

NZ should invest in this instead of damning the Mokihinui River. Imagine!

Dan Nocera on Kim Hill

Item on Green Optimist Blog Clearly shows how a house might look using this system.

Sun Catalytix Website:

Sun Catalytix :: Our Technology:

Our technology is founded on cutting-edge science from the lab of Professor Daniel Nocera at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We are commercializing new, active, versatile, and affordable catalysts that split water into oxygen and hydrogen fuel, mimicking photosynthesis. To learn more about our technology, please read the peer-reviewed publications presented below.

Save the Mokihinui

Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., MD Chatpter One Eating to Live

Walter — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 10:19:52 +0000

Book Excerpt http://www.heartattackproof.com/excerpt.htm

Book Excerpt

EXCERPT from PREVENT AND REVERSE HEART DISEASE Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., MD Chatpter One Eating to Live

“It was a Friday in November 1996. I had operated all day. I finished, said good-bye to my last patient, and got a very, very bad headache. It hit me in a flash. I had to sit down. A minute or two after that, the chest pain started. It radiated up my arm and shoulder and into my jaw.”

These are the words of Joe Crowe, the doctor who succeeded me as chairman of the breast cancer task force at the Cleveland Clinic. He was having a heart attack. He was only forty-four years old. He had no family history of heart disease, was not overweight or diabetic, and did not have high blood pressure or a bad cholesterol count. In short, he was not the usual candidate for a heart attack. Nonetheless, he had been struck—and struck hard.

In this book, I tell Joe Crowe’s story, along with those of many other patients I have treated over the past twenty years. My subject is coronary artery disease, its cause, and the revolutionary treatment, available to all, that can abolish it and that has saved Joe Crowe and many others. My message is clear and absolute: coronary artery disease need not exist, and if it does, it need not progress. It is my dream that one day we may entirely abolish heart disease, the scourge of the affluent, modern West, along with an impressive roster of other chronic illnesses.

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.

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 annually for all research and development—including R&D for defense and national security.1

But here is the truly shocking statistic: nearly all of 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. And even if they are successful, they provide only temporary relief from the symptoms. They do nothing at all to cure the underlying disease or to prevent its development in other potential victims.

I believe that we in the medical profession have taken the wrong course. It is as if we were simply standing by, watching millions of people march over a cliff, and then intervening in a desperate, last-minute attempt to save them once they have fallen over the edge. Instead, we should be teaching them how to avoid the chasm entirely, how to walk parallel to the precipice so that they will never fall at all.

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.

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.

I don’t want my patients to pour a single thimbleful of gasoline on the fire. Stopping the gasoline puts out the fire. Reforming the way you eat will end the heart disease.

Here are the rules of my program in their simplest form:

• You may not eat anything with a mother or a face (no meat, poultry, or fish).

• You cannot eat dairy products.

• You must not consume oil of any kind—not a drop. (Yes, you devotees of the Mediterranean Diet, that includes olive oil, as I’ll explain in Chapter 10.)

• Generally, you cannot eat nuts or avocados.

You can eat a wonderful variety of delicious, nutrient-dense foods:

• All vegetables except avocado. Leafy green vegetables, root vegetables, veggies that are red, green, purple, orange, and yellowand everything in between

• All legumes—beans, peas, and lentils of all varieties.

• All whole grains and products, such as bread and pasta, that are made from them—as long as they do not contain added fats.

• All fruits.

It works. In the first continuous twelve-year study of the effects of nutrition in severely ill patients, which I will describe in this book, those who complied with my program achieved total arrest of clinical progression and significant selective reversal of coronary artery disease. In fully compliant patients, we have seen angina disappear in a few weeks and abnormal stress test results return to normal.

And consider the case of Joe Crowe. After his heart attack in 1996, tests showed that the entire lower third of his left anterior descending coronary artery—the vessel leading to the front of the heart and nicknamed, for obvious reasons, “the widowmaker”—was significantly diseased. His coronary artery anatomy excluded him as a candidate for surgical bypass, angioplasty, or stents, and at such a young age, with a wife and three small children, Dr. Crowe was understandably disconsolate and depressed. Since he already exercised, did not use tobacco, and had a relatively low cholesterol count of 156 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL), there seemed to be nothing he could modify, no obvious reforms in lifestyle that might halt the disease.

Joe was aware of my interest in coronary disease. About two weeks after his heart attack, he and his wife, Mary Lind, came to dinner at our house and I had a chance to share the full details of my research. Both Joe and Mary Lind immediately grasped the implications for Joe of a plant-based diet. All at once, instead of having no options, they were empowered. In Mary Lind’s words, “It was our own personal disaster, and suddenly there was something small we could do.” Immediately, Joe embarked on my nutrition program, refusing to take any cholesterol-lowering drugs, and he redefined the word commitment. He stuck to the plan rigorously, eventually reducing his total blood cholesterol count to just 89 mg/dL and cutting his LDL, or “bad” cholesterol, from 98 mg/dL to 38 mg/dL.

About two and a half years after Joe adopted a strict plant-based diet, there came a point when he was exceptionally busy professionally, under considerable stress, and he noted a return of some discomfort in his chest. His cardiologists, worried about the recurrence of angina, asked for more tests to see what was going on.

On the day of his follow-up angiogram, I went to Dr. Crowe’s office after work. After we greeted each other, I thought I saw moisture in his eyes. “Is everything OK?” I asked.

“You saved my life,” he declared. “It’s gone! It’s not there anymore! Something lethal is gone! My follow-up angiogram was normal.”

Nearly ten years later, Mary Lind recalled that they had wondered, that first evening at our house, “how the Esselstyns did it”— how we had managed to completely change the way we eat. “Now it’s part of our family,” she says. “We’ve eaten the same things for a long time, and I’m on autopilot.”

Later, when I asked Joe what made him decide to change, he responded very simply. “We believed you,” he said, and added, “since I had nothing else, the diet came first. If I had had bypass surgery, diet would not have been first. The diet set us on another path, empowered to do something we knew we could do.”

Joe Crowe’s angiograms—both the original, taken after the heart attack, and the follow-up, two and a half years later—are shown in Figure 1 (see insert). It is the most complete resolution of coronary artery disease I have seen, graphic proof of the power of plant-based nutrition to enable the body to heal itself.

The dietary changes that have helped my patients over the past twenty years can help you, too. They can actually make you immune to heart attacks. And there is considerable evidence that they have benefits far beyond coronary artery disease. If you eat to save your heart, you eat to save yourself from other diseases of nutritional extravagance: from strokes, hypertension, obesity, osteoporosis, adult-onset diabetes, and possibly senile mental impairment, as well. You gain protection from a host of other ailments that have been linked to dietary factors, including impotence and cancers of the breast, prostate, colon, rectum, uterus, and ovaries. And if you are eating for good health in this way, here’s a side benefit you might not have expected: for the rest of your life, you will never again have to count calories or worry about your weight.

An increasing number of doctors are aware that diet plays a crucial role in health, and that nutritional changes such as those I recommend can have dramatic effects on the development and progression of disease. But for a number of reasons, current medical practice places little emphasis on primary and secondary prevention. For most physicians, nutrition is not of significant interest. It is not an essential pillar of medical education; each generation of medical students learns about a different set of pills and procedures, but receives almost no training in disease prevention. And in practice, doctors are not rewarded for educating patients about the merits of truly healthy lifestyles.

Over the past one hundred years, the mechanical treatment of disease has increasingly dominated the medical profession in the United States. Surgery is the prototype, and its dramatic progress— light-years removed from the cathartics, bloodletting, and amputations that dominated medicine in previous centuries—is nothing short of breathtaking. But surgery has serious flaws. It is expensive, painful, and frightening, often disabling and disfiguring, and too often merely a temporary stopgap against the disease it is intended to treat. It is a mechanical approach to a biological problem.

Perhaps no area of medicine better illustrates the mechanical approach to disease than cardiology and cardiac surgery. Consider: the United States contains just 5 percent of the global population, but every year, physicians in American hospitals perform more than 50 percent of all the angioplasties and bypass procedures in the entire world. One reason is that mechanical medicine is romantic and dramatic, a natural magnet for media attention. Remember the drama several years ago surrounding implants of artificial hearts? Most of the recipients died within weeks of their surgery, and all lived their last days tethered to life-support machinery that, far from enhancing their quality of life, drastically reduced it. But no matter: the dramatic interventions engaged the national imagination for months on end.

All told, there has been little incentive for physicians to study alternate ways to manage disease, so the mechanical/procedural approach continues to dominate the profession even though it offers little to the unsuspecting millions about to become the next victims of disease. Modern hospitals offer almost nothing to enhance public health. They are cathedrals of sickness.

There are some signs of change. Physicians and researchers increasingly agree that lifestyle changes—controlling blood pressure, stopping smoking, reducing cholesterol, exercising, and modifying diets—are essential to overall health. It is hard to deny the evidence, mounting with every passing year, that people who have spent a lifetime consuming the typical American diet are in dire trouble. Dr. Lewis Kuller of the University of Pittsburgh recently reported the ten-year findings of the Cardiovascular Health Study, a project of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. His conclusion is startling: “All males over 65 years of age, exposed to a traditional Western lifestyle, have cardiovascular disease and should be treated as such.”2

Even interventional cardiologists are beginning to question the rationale of their procedures. In 1999, cardiologist David Waters of the University of California performed a study that compared the results of angioplasty—in which a balloon is inserted into a coronary artery to widen the vessel and improve blood flow—with the use of drugs to aggressively reduce serum cholesterol levels. There was no disputing the outcome. The patients who had the drug treatment to lower cholesterol had fewer hospitalizations for chest pain and fewer heart attacks than those who underwent angioplasty and standard postoperative care.3

The larger lesson of that study is that systemic treatment of disease through aggressive reduction of cholesterol is clearly superior to selective intervention at a single site where an artery has been clogged and narrowed. And it caused considerable uproar among cardiologists. As Dr. Waters observes, “There is a tradition in cardiology that doesn’t want to hear that.”

Why? Money! For many years, I resisted that conclusion, but the weight of the evidence is overwhelming. Interventional cardiologists earn hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and particularly busy ones make millions. In addition, cardiology procedures generate huge revenues for hospitals. And the insurance industry supports the mechanical/procedural approach to vascular disease. It is far easier to document and quantify procedures for reimbursement than it is to document and quantify lifestyle changes that prevent the need for such procedures in the first place.

As a physician, I am embarrassed by my profession’s lack of interest in healthier lifestyles. We need to change the way we approach chronic disease.

The work I will describe in the following chapters confirms that sustained nutrition changes and, when necessary, low doses of cholesterol-reducing medication will offer maximum protection from vascular disease. Anyone who follows the program faithfully will almost certainly see no further progression of disease, and will very likely find that it selectively regresses. And the corollary, overwhelmingly supported by global population studies, is that persons without the disease who adopt these same dietary changes will never develop heart disease.

Cardiologists who have seen my peer-reviewed data often concede that coronary artery disease may be arrested and reversed through changes in diet and lifestyle, but then add that they don’t believe their patients would follow such “radical” nutritional changes. But the truth is that there is nothing radical about my nutrition plan. It’s about as mainstream as you can get. For 4 billion of the world’s 5.5 billion people, the nutrition program I recommend is standard fare, and heart disease and many other chronic ailments are almost unknown. The word radical better describes the typical American diet, which guarantees that millions will perish from withering vascular systems. And in my experience, patients who realize that they have a clear choice—between invasive surgery that will do nothing to cure their underlying disease and nutritional changes that will arrest and reverse the disease and improve the quality of their lives—willingly adopt the dietary changes.

One of my patients, Jerry Murphy, came to me at the age of sixty-seven after his cardiologist recommended open heart surgery, something he was determined to avoid. “No male Murphy has ever lived beyond sixty-seven,” he announced. “What are you going to do about that?” I responded that the real question was what hewas going to do about it, albeit with my help. Now in his mid-eighties—well past the sixty-seven-year life expectancy for male Murphys—Jerry Murphy thinks my nutrition program represents a more natural way of eating, a return to healthier ways of the past. “It made sense to me,” he says, citing his Irish ancestors, who may have killed the fatted calf once a year, but who subsisted primarily on a low-fat, plant-based diet.

Each of us has friends, family, and acquaintances who are the victims of coronary disease. These people are often vigorous, in the prime of life, when they are struck down by a heart attack. If they survive, they are rarely the same again, always fearful of another attack or the onset of some complication. Those close to them share similar concerns. But the truth is that this disease need never occur at all. For the great majority of this planet’s population—the 4 billion who do not participate in the Western lifestyle—it simply does not exist.

I have an ambitious goal: to annihilate heart disease—to abolish it once and for all. Your arteries at the age of ninety ought to work as efficiently as they did when you were nine. My nutritional program is strict, and allows no shortcuts. I am uncompromising. I am authoritative. But as I always tell my patients, I am a caring presence. I want to see people succeed, and if they share my vision, they will.

If you do what I ask, your disease is history. Rather than detour around it, squish it with a balloon or brace it open with a wire bracket—either of which is just a temporary angina-relieving procedure—my program can prevent disease altogether, or stop it in its tracks. All the interventional procedures carry considerable risk of morbidity, including new heart attacks, strokes, infections, and, for some, an inevitable loss of cognition. Mine carries none. And the benefits of intervention erode with the passage of time; eventually, you have to have another angioplasty, another bypass procedure, another stent. By contrast, the benefits of my program actually grow with time. The longer you follow it, the healthier you will be.

A few years ago, I was on a cruise ship giving a presentation about my nutrition program and its dramatic results in patients with severe coronary artery disease. Toward the end a man in a straw hat approached me, and near tears, with audible anger in his voice, said, “I’ve been doing everything my doctor told me to, and now I have to have a second bypass. I can’t believe no one told me there was another option!”

That’s the point of this book: to tell the world what I have learned.

(via Instapaper)

Walter