The Treatment of Choice, Part 2

Dr. Atkins' Vita-Nutrient Solution : Nature's Answer to Drugs
by Robert C. Atkins, M.D.

(Page 2 of 2)

By contrast, mainstream medicine's treatment of choice for fluid retention is the diuretic, a drug that also encourages excretion — not by allowing our cells to function more healthfully, but by impairing the kidneys' ability to reabsorb and hold on to vitally necessary minerals. In the process, diuretics elevate blood sugar, cholesterol, and triglycerides; disrupt heart rhythm; increase uric acid levels; and drain the body of trace minerals and other nutrients.

All things considered, which treatment would you prefer?

To give another example, heart disease, our nation's number one killer, arises in large part from atherosclerosis, the condition that results when our bodies deposit plaque within the walls of our vital arteries. Conventional medicine identified cholesterol as the enemy and has been waging a public health campaign to reduce the national cholesterol count by all means possible, including the widespread dispensation of cholesterol-lowering drugs. These medications may reduce the proportion of fats in the bloodstream, but should we accept a victory at any price? Drug treatments have proved successful only two times in eighty trials. Most of these studies have shown that more people die sooner from causes other than heart disease if they take these medications than if they aren't treated at all.

I certainly don't agree with the use of pharmaceuticals to lower cholesterol, because it may be only the harbinger, not the cause, of heart disease. Cholesterol is too valuable for us to remove it deliberately from our diets. To lower its concentration in the blood, however, nothing is more effective than pantethine, a derivative of the B-complex nutrient pantothenic acid. At least eight studies agree that pantethine impressively lowers triglycerides, low-density lipoprotein (LDL, the "bad" cholesterol), and total cholesterol while increasing high-density lipoprotein (HDL, the artery-cleansing "good" cholesterol).

You will not read about pantethine in standard cardiovascular textbooks, and you'll be hard-pressed to find a physician familiar with it. Instead, cardiac specialists typically wait until the anticholesterol drugs fail, then begin to consider surgical solutions — a heart bypass, angioplasty, maybe a heart transplant. Their records of success are no more impressive than those of the cholesterol-lowering drugs. If the field of cardiology took into account only the work of its own scientists, it would soon discover other choice solutions: nutrients like magnesium, coenzyme Q_10, and carnitine. These substances strengthen the heart and, as part of a total therapy, can eliminate the need for a heart operation.

Literally dozens of other nutrients offer smarter fixes for the health problems that prescription drugs presume to address. Not all of them are documented as solidly as I'm sure they will be one day, but in the absence of published research evidence, we have the equally persuasive and conclusive experience of hands-on health practitioners. These are far-thinking professionals who prescribe nutritional supplements almost daily and see the results directly on their patients.

Enablers Vs. Blockers: Complementary Therapy

Vita-nutrients and pharmaceuticals need not be rivals. The fact is, both accomplish many of the same things — they can decrease blood sugar, raise your spirits, make you drowsy, control heart rate, minimize inflammation, or any number of other responses. The difference is in how they work. Nutrients are enablers: they give your body a chance to do what it needs to do by facilitating a natural physiological process, thus causing the body to function better. Usually the impact isn't immediate; they perform best over the long term. In contrast, drugs, which can master acute situations, become problematic when used chronically. Why? Because they are disablers, or blocking agents. They work by preventing a normal process from taking place, usually an enzyme performing a vital role. For drugs to work, there must be a disease; only in a disease state can one hope to benefit from blocking an essential life function. Think about this: Drugs, by their inherent nature, can play no role in health care — only in sickness care.

Though drugs almost always carry an inherent risk (which is seldom true for nutrients), their use isn't necessarily hazardous or detrimental. With diametrically opposed mechanisms of action, medications and vita-nutrients can and should work in harmony. Long ago I selected the term "complementary medicine" to designate a health care system that takes advantage of this happy synergy. In many instances we need to block or abruptly change a bodily function. At other times we need to achieve a response that no nutrient can perform. Many of my patients must continue to take prescription drugs, but because I emphasize nutrient therapy, most of them require fewer medications, and in smaller, far safer dosages. The best medical care will always emphasize enabling our bodies to heal themselves. How can it be appropriate for the first treatment of choice to be something that's potentially harmful when there are safer, equally effective alternatives?

Why, then, do so many of our doctors prescribe pharmaceuticals so exclusively that they give you the impression that enabling substances do not exist? One answer is that the pharmaceutical approach is all that is being taught to our doctors-in-training. For more insight, a brief understanding of the history of nutrition may be helpful to you.

A Brief History of Nutrition

Modern medical education has never truly appreciated nutrition, even though it is just as crucial as anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and pharmacology to understanding human health. Because nutrition is the only one of these basic disciplines that medical schools do not typically offer in their curricula, nature's pharmacy has received the short end of the therapeutic stick from the start. Even with the explosion of nutritional research in the last decade, the newest edition of Cecil's Textbook of Medicine, the authoritative reference work that is a medical student's bible, still fails to mention the Harvard studies that prove that vitamin E cuts the incidence of heart disease by almost 50 percent. Nor does it mention more than a handful of the studies you'll read about in this book.

How did this come about? A hundred years ago or so, nutritional scientists believed that germs and other microbes caused all of our sickness and disease. The existence of very small molecules with essential health-promoting roles (later dubbed vitamins) was a new, even revolutionary theory. By the first decades of the 1900s, researchers had confirmed that people could be afflicted with deficiency diseases, and in rapid succession we learned that vitamin A cured night blindness, vitamin D prevented rickets, scurvy disappeared with a small dosage of vitamin C, and so on. The recognition of deficiency diseases was a major breakthrough that established nutrition as a medical science. Ironically enough, though, these remarkable discoveries would later create major obstacles to the broader approach to health care that works so effectively today.

From the beginning, nutritional research was always focused on the concept of "deficiency." A nutrient's value was measured only in terms of the consequences of its absence. If the lack did not lead to a deficiency disease, the nutrient tended to be dismissed as valueless and unimportant. It certainly didn't qualify to be labeled "essential," a title reserved for the vitamins and minerals that the body could not manufacture on its own and could not do without. Some substances provided beneficial effects only under certain circumstances, which called for the invention of a "conditionally essential" category that, in my view, established the basis for today's nutritional pharmacology. The conditions under which nutrients became "essential" generally are associated with sickness, which plants the notion of nutritional therapy squarely in the medical profession's lap.

Unfortunately, mainstream medical science failed to recognize this point, and decades passed before anyone posed the more pertinent questions: What roles does a given nutrient play in the body? How much of it do we need? What is the optimum amount of this nutrient? (Every constituent of our body — sodium, iron, glucose — has an optimum level.) The answers would probably reveal that most of us fall in the low end of the nutrient intake curve, ingesting only marginal amounts that are barely above what mainstream medicine considers a deficiency. True, the normal intake of vitamin B₁ might be sufficient to prevent beriberi, but is it enough to prevent a learning disability or cardiomyopathy? As you'll learn later on, giving B₁ supplements to children whose stores are low can increase their capacity to learn by 25 percent. Nevertheless, medical orthodoxy won't even consider the possibility that the inability to concentrate could in fact be a symptom of a suboptimum B₁ level.

Beyond Deficiency

Once researchers established all the deficiency diseases they were willing to consider, medicine's interest in nutrients waned. By the 1940s the story seemed so finished that Oxford University turned down a large endowment to conduct nutrition research. The gist of the school's response? "We've already identified all the essential nutrients. What more is there to do?"

The task of educating the public was taken up by lay nutritionists like Gaylord Hauser, Adelle Davis, and Carlton Fredericks (each of whom personally contributed to my pursuit of nutrition in medicine). They spread the word that nutritional supplements were proving to be safe, and higher amounts could often bring about striking health benefits. In clinical experience, Frederick Klenner, M.D., showed that extremely high doses of vitamin C could treat a wide variety of ailments. (Subsequently, Nobelist Linus Pauling, Ph.D., influenced millions of people to take such doses preventively.)

But it was the publication of Biochemical Individuality in 1956 that marked the birth of modern therapeutic and preventive nutrition. Roger Williams, Ph.D., the author of this landmark book, showed that our nutritional needs are as unique as our fingerprints and that an off-the-rack, one-diet-fits-all nutrient standard missed the point entirely. Alcoholism, diabetes, mental illness, arthritis, and many other health problems can result when we fail to obtain optimal amounts of nutrients, Williams argued. He even went so far as to suggest that people take vitamins and minerals in doses well beyond the recommended dietary allowances (RDAs), which by then had become the definitive standard of human nutritional needs.

Perhaps the lay nutrition movement infuriated the arbiters of official nutritional policy. They dug in their heels, maintaining the position that we get all the nutrients we need from food. Supplements, they claimed, were unnecessary unless the person was undergoing unusual stress or dietary restrictions. Thus the nutritional old guard continues to stick to its original deficiency-oriented beliefs, in spite of the fact that international research demonstrates one major clinical success after another. The debate is hardly academic. Such intransigence, to give an example, has kept expectant mothers from consuming the amount of the B-complex nutrient folic acid necessary to prevent fatal or crippling spinal birth defects.

If we are to realize the full power of nutrition-based medicine, we must look beyond deficiency. Only then can we solve the riddles of cancer, heart disease, and our other degenerative diseases. It is an achievable goal, but only if we understand that most of the power of vita-nutrients is derived from doses that have nothing to do with merely correcting a deficiency. When essentiality is applied as the yardstick, we're limited to a handful of vitamins and minerals, less than half of the amino acids, and two essential fatty acids. In the past two decades, however, we've discovered a host of nonessential (by the official definition) nourishing substances that play roles in the body so vital that, for all intents and purposes, we would all suffer without them. They are the nutritional equivalents of the automobile or electricity. We would not die without them, but without them we cannot regain good health, once it is lost. These vita-nutrients, for the proficient user, are indeed the tools of healing.

Copyright © 1998 by Robert C. Atkins, M.D.

About the Author

Dr. Robert Coleman Atkins, M.D. (October 17, 1930 - April 17, 2003) was an American doctor and cardiologist, best known for the Atkins Nutritional Approach (or "Atkins Diet"), a popular but controversial way of dieting that entails eating low-carbohydrate, high-fat and high-protein foods.