Daily Supplements
Save Lives
Thursday, April 19, 2012 8:14
AM
One never knows when tragedy will strike, but
those who are well-prepared are more likely to survive and have a
good recovery. Since many patients with life-threatening conditions
receive substandard treatment in hospitals — mainly critical care
units — you should supplement with essential vitamins, minerals, and
other nutrients long before such an event occurs. This will give your
body time to maximize its antioxidant system, boost immunity, and
reduce inflammation. It also strengthens your tissues, cells, and
organs so they can better withstand disease or injury.
Daily
supplementation with highly absorbable, buffered or lipsomal vitamin
C (1,000 mg three times a day, between meals) can protect against
death following a flu infection, no matter how severe it is. We know
this from studies of poor populations in Africa and Australia —
mortality is directly proportional to one’s nutritional status.
Adding vitamin E offers even more protection. (Read my special report
"Key
Vitamins that Save Your Heart, Prevent Cancer and Keep You Living
Long") for more details.
Antioxidants such as vitamin C and vitamin E
work as a system — that is, they need to all be present in sufficient
amounts. The risk of death from infections, especially the flu, is
directly proportional to a person’s vitamin D3 levels. This vitamin
stimulates the body to produce special, very powerful antibacterial
and antiviral proteins (antimicrobial peptides).
A physician in my
area recently measured the vitamin D3 levels in his patients and
found that virtually all were deficient, and many were extremely
deficient. Combine this with a low vitamin C level and you have a
prescription for a severe reaction to infections. To learn more about
vitamin D3, read my special report "Vitamin
D's Hidden Role in Your Health."
There is no question that vitamin C plays a
major role in protecting the brain from free radicals and lipid
peroxidation products, and helps the body fight infections. In fact,
in high doses it can perform miracles.
© 2012 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
Here was my response:
"Dear XXXX,
Instead of simply agreeing to
disagree, let's take a moment to review the article you sent.
First, let's focus on Dr.
Russell Blaylock. Here are some excerpts I quickly gleaned from the internet.
Do you take the flu vaccination? He is against it. According to these websites
he sells supplements. Here's the link. http://www.newportnutritionals.com/
Yet, on the site linked to the article, it states he makes no money from
supplements.
I maintain that you cannot take
supplement advice from someone who sells them because of the inherent conflict
of interest. That is why MDPrevent got rid of every last supplement in our
offices.
Here are some additional
articles about him. Although I cannot verify everything being written about
him, it gives me pause for thought and I trust it will do the same for you.
Here's a question and answer from a blog on the web about
him. Again, I did not verify the veracity of the statements.
"Can anyone tell me about Dr. Russell Blaylock? I've
googled him and have a general idea of his credentials, but outside of a lot of
articles and books he has written, I can't get a feel for if he is credible or
wacky. My mother has been getting his Blaylock Wellness Report and while a lot
of what he writes makes sense and is relatively mainstream, some of what he
writes seems a little wacky.
I've never heard of him before, so I took a look at his website. I'm extremely
unimpressed.
When you have to pump up your background by spinning being chief resident in
his final year of residency into "I ran the neurology unit for a
year", something's wrong. And when he boasts of publishing a variety of
papers in peer-reviewed journals--and it turns out, after I typed his name into
PubMed that he hasn't published a blessed thing since 1981, so ALL of the
peer-reviewed stuff was during medical school and residency.... And then after
holding up his "peer-review journals" publishing history, in the
material pumping up his newsletter he has the nerve to claim that he won't have
anything to do with the major journals because they're shills of big pharma!
He says he had a private practice in nutrition, but doesn't say a thing about
what got him interested in that, how he educated himself, etc.
And he doesn't write that newsletter, he merely edits it for the company that
puts it out."
Second, he makes a claim about
high dose Vitamin C protecting against after-flu death. I will wager that there is no such scientifically valid study published in
a peer reviewed journal in existence. Such as study, at best, cannot be a
double-blind randomized controlled study, which is the gold standard of
studies. There is no way researchers gave 1,000 mg of Vitamin C to study
participants, then exposed them or wiated to see who got exposed to the flu, and then watched to see how many
stayed alive and how many died. At best, such a study could have been an
observational study which is highly unreliable.
As you know, I am not a fan of
artificial sweeteners. However, Blaylock makes multiple adverse health claims
about such products that have simply not panned out in numerous reliable
studies. If you want to see such studies, I will get them for you.
Finally, in the article you sent
me, Blaylock masterfully blends facts and fiction. Vitamins, by their definition, are
essential to our health. There is no disagreement on that point. Also, you need
all of them and so, yes, your body works better when they are all present
together. Also, many people do have Vitamin D deficiencies because they have
little sun exposure which is required for the body to naturally produce Vitamin
D.
However, a recent study was
halted because of high doasgeVitamin E increasing cancer rates and in
a Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Study, Vitamin C pills were found to protect cancer cells as well
as normal cells.
Most importantly, while Vitamins
are very important, how you get them is more important. When sold in pill form,
what you get is the vitamin in isolation. Chemically, it is identical to the
same vitamin as it exists in its natural state in a fruit or vegetable.
However, in a fruit and vegetable, the vitamin is surrounded by enzymes,
co-enzymes, activators, precursors, antioxidants, and other synergistic
nutrients.
Our gut bacterial determine how we process the foods we eat and for
hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, man and his predecessors have
been consuming and processing natural foods. Only since the 1934, when Carl
Rehnborg sold the first vitamin (and he sold ground up vegetables, not isolated
vitamins), have these ageless bacteria even been exposed to vitamins in
isolation.
So in conclusion, if you feel strongly about supplements, which apparently you do, I think it would be prudent to make sure that you are
relying on accurate and reliable information.
My major opposition to
supplements is that they are generally a poor substitute for real food. I
continue to caution you against making the mistake
of choosing them over more valuable alternatives.
I welcome your feedback.
To your health,
Steve"
Addendum:
"By the way, for reliable people who are not
fans of supplements, here are two names.
They are the professors that head up the prevention departments at
Harvard (Brigham's and Women's Hospital), Dr. Joann Manson and at Yale, Dr. David Katz. Both decry the use of most supplements and
multi-vitamins except in specific circumstances like Folate for pregnant women."
In conclusion, when comparing facts versus fiction, it is good to know which is which.
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