Jonathan Campbell, Health Consultant
Natural Therapies for Chronic Illness & Health Maintenance

HealthAlert

Helping people take charge of their health

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The connection between fitness, diet, health, and longevity has been known for many generations. Documented anecdotal evidence, corroborated by extensive studies, show that humans of all races can live to 100, 120, and beyond. Thomas Parr, a poor farmer in England, lived for 152 years, outliving 9 monarchs. (He promptly dropped dead after feasting on a Royal diet for two weeks). Los Viejos de Ecuador (the old ones of Ecuador) typically lived to 120 years, and some longer, subsisting mostly on corn and milk and climbing miles into the mountains to tend their crops each day.

Somehow this connection between a low-fat diet and exercise and longevity got lost, and in the industrialized countries most people's dietary and exercise habits set them on a course for heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and overall debilitation. And even as some researchers began to make the connection between our lifestyle and these diseases, we had somehow come to believe that their onset was inevitable.

Then in the 1970's, a lay heart researcher named Nathan Pritikin shocked the medical community by proclaiming that he had found a diet and exercise regimen that could not only enable people to live longer, happier, energetic lives, but could actually reverse the ravages of our sedentary habits and high-fat diet. He claimed that people who followed his program had literally cured heart disease (except for people that had endured physical damage to their hearts as a result of a heart attack), age-onset diabetes, high blood pressure, and, surprisingly, arthritis.

One of Pritikin's famous patients, a woman named Eula Weaver, came to him with high blood pressure, heart insufficiency, and debilitating angina (heart pain on exertion). She could not walk more than 50 feet without stopping to rest. Two years later on the Pritikin program she was running in the Senior Olympics.

Despite Pritikin's successes and the phenomenal success of the Pritikin Longevity Center in improving thousands of people's lives, the mainstream medical community changed very little. No one had overcome doctors' skepticism or obtained the approval or positive review of the American Medical Association (AMA). Then in 1990, Dr. Dean Ornish seemed to accomplish the impossible. Not only had he developed a diet and exercise program that reversed heart disease, high blood pressure, and other age-onset diseases, but had obtained the full approval and endorsement of the AMA and the American Heart Association. While this was a proven way to reverse heart disease, the life style changes necessary to make it successful seem overwhelming for many heart patients.

Finally, in 1991, Linus Pauling and Matthias Rath discovered the root cause of all cardiovascular disease, and proposed a simple supplemental therapy to reverse it. Since then the therapy has been proven by Rath, and thousands of people (primarily in Europe) have used it successfully. But the pharmaceutical industry - the primary source of medical information for doctors and the media - has successfully kept this information from the public.