Why Vitamin E? By Wilfrid E. Shute
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With well over a million people a year dying of heart disease in the United States alone, you will not be surprised to read that coronary thrombosis - the major cause of heart attack death - is the greatest single killer in the world today. What you may find very surprising, however, is that coronary thrombosis was unknown as a disease entity in 1900 and apparently hardly existed at that time. Indeed, three cases were reported by Dr. George Dock in 1896, (1) but his reported findings of clots in coronary arteries were not corroborated by other investigators. It was not until 1912 that Herrick (2) in Chicago reported six cases and medical practitioners began to be aware of coronary thrombosis as a possibility.
Dr. Paul Dudley White writes: (3) "... when I graduated from medical school in 1911, I had never heard of coronary thrombosis, which is one of the chief threats to life in the United States and Canada today-an astonishing development in one's own lifetime! There can be no doubt but that coronary heart disease has reached epidemic proportions in the United States, where it is now responsible for more than 50 per cent of all deaths...
"The truth is, an ever-increasing number of young men are being struck down before the age of 40 (including a large number of physicians) at the time when they are most needed by their families and when they are prepared to make their greatest contribution to society." Is there even a remote possibility that the physicians of 50 years ago were both so ignorant and incurious as to be utterly unaware of tens or hundreds of thousands of coronary thromboses occurring before their eyes? Of all possibilities that would seem to be the least likely. In fact same of the most acute and observant pathologists in American medical history were active at this time! it is by far more reasonable to assume that 50 years ago, or any time before then, coronary thrombosis simply was not occurring of ten enough to constitute any kind of observable disease entity.
We must then ask ourselves, in the light of what we know about this major killer, what changes have occurred in the general conditions of life. What has so recently made people, formerly immune to clots in the coronary arteries, now so very susceptible?
There are many theories, of course. No other disease except cancer has ever provoked so many somewhat plausible, contradictory and unhelpful ideas about causation and prevention. Heart attacks have been blamed on stress and strain, on overexertion, on the fast pace of modern living, on soft drinking water, on hard drinking water, and, of course, on diets rich in animal fats.
Among the prominent and more widely held theories, each of these ideas has its own kind of plausibility. Yet with each and every one it can be shown that the same condition was present in the lives of all or many people prior to 1900, but did not cause coronary thrombosis. Without attempting any complicated statistical proofs, let us simply consider what is obvious about these theories.
While we tend to think of modern living as being conducted at a faster pace, the speed is really more an attribute of our machines than it is of our own lives. We can drive 60 miles an hour, but the stress and strain of traveling 60 miles is infinitely less in driving a car than it was in traveling the same distance in a jolting stage coach threatened by robbers and hostile Indians, or than traveling the same distance on horseback or on foot along bad roads with danger threatening from behind every tree.
Before the turn of the century there was more stress involved in caring for larger families on lower earnings; an employee was unprotected before the whims of his bass and knew that if he lost a job it might take months, years, or forever to find another. Even savings were relatively unsafe in banks that failed without warning.
Actually, there are very few stresses today that were not present in prethrombotic times.
Dr. Howard B. Sprague of Boston, a former president of the American Heart Association, has stated that "one man's stress is just another man's challenge" and probably has little to do with heart disease.
If our ancestors could live on isolated farms threatened by Indian raids and not get coronaries, stress can hardly be bad for the heart.
Overexertion, like shoveling snow after a blizzard, would be a joke to our forebears, who wrestled horse-drawn plows or worked 12 hard hours a day in factories. True, men do have heart attacks while shoveling snow, but for the causation, except the immediate provocation, we must look elsewhere.
Soft water and hard water, of course, have not changed appreciably. There is no doubt that 50 years ago, 80 or 100 years ago or as far back as you want to go, some people drank hard water and some drank soft, and none of them developed a coronary thrombosis. Even when it comes to the animal-fat theory, whose adherents are world-wide and whose numbers are legion, there are obvious weaknesses that only need pointing out.
In the American diet it can be shown that the number of foods containing animal or saturated fats has increased greatly, but it can also be shown that in times past people ate all the animal fat available to them. They did not trim their meats. They ate more fried foods than are eaten today.
Billions of people subsisted for their entire lives on types of meat with names like "fatback" - and they were not affected with coronary thrombosis. Actually, the intake of animal fat in the American diet has, over the past 15 years, been reduced to approximately one-third of what it was, while, far from decreasing, the coronary rate has gone up every year.
During this same period, the intake of animal fats in Canada was relatively unchanged. Yet, although the average Canadian ate three times as much as his American counter-part, the incidence of coronary thrombosis in Canada leveled off, came to a halt, and began to decrease during that same period.
An interesting study of myocardial infarction (heart attack caused by shutting off of the blood supply to the heart by a coronary artery obstruction and consequent death of heart muscle tissue) was reported by Dr. S. L. Malhotra (4) of Bombay, India. He made an illuminating comparison between natives of North India (the Punjab) and those of the South. Natives of the Punjab, he showed, have a fat intake that is largely of animal origin and is eight to 19 times as great as that of the Southerners. But the prevalence of myocardial infarction in Southern India is seven times greater than in the Punjab.
There is much evidence to suggest that there is no relationship between dietary fat and coronary artery disease, although the theory still has its adherents. Similarly, the commonly held relationship ,between arteriosclerosis and coronary thrombosis may have no validity. Indeed, Morris (5) in England in 1951 demonstrated that in the year 1910 there was more coronary artery atherosclerosis than there is now. Yet, there was little or no coronary thrombosis at that time.
For a very good specific example let us consider the chairman of the Diet-Heart Committee of the American Medical Association, who was scheduled to present to the annual A.M.A. meeting in June, 1967, his recommendation for a very expensive long-term evaluation of the restriction of animal fats in the diet. He, himself, had followed his own recommended low fat regimen for years, had kept slim and exercised frequently, and in all ways followed his own "authoritative" advice on how to prevent heart attacks. He was unable to attend that June, 1967 meeting because he was in hospital recovering from a coronary thrombosis! Of course, coronary thrombosis as such is not the only form of heart disease. Atherosclerotic changes causing the coronary artery to narrow bring a decrease in blood supply to the heart muscle, which, in turn, leads to gradual changes in the heart. Eventually, there is decreased tolerance to stress or to exertion or excitement, leading to pain in the chest, shortness of breath, or both.
Elevated blood pressure leads to increased strain on the walls of blood vessels, to an accelerated rate of tissue damage, and to an increased possibility of cerebral artery, coronary artery, or peripheral artery insufficiency. The advent of new and effective antihypertensive drugs has brought about a marked improvement in the life expectancy of such patients in the last 15 years. Acute rheumatic fever, which is of ten preventable by antibiotic treatment of the preceding tonsillitis or pharyngitis, is actually on the decrease.
The fact remains that heart-disease deaths have doubled since 1945, far outstripping the growth in population and amounting today to more than one million deaths a year in the United States alone. By far the major cause of such deaths is coronary thrombosis, which occurs frequently even when there is no atherosclerosis.
Is there, then, a more rational explanation than the animal fat-atherosclerosis theory to explain why a disease entity that did not occur prior to 1910 has become a greater ravager of human life than any plague recorded in history?
There is an explanation so simple that it would automatically be suspect had its truth not already been demonstrated in clinical practice of more than 20 years involving many thousands of patients. I have found in my own practice that alpha tocopherol (vitamin E) is, in addition to its other properties, which will be described herein, a superb antithrombin in the bloodstream. Not only will vitamin E dissolve clots, but circulating in the blood of a healthy individual will prevent thrombi from forming.
Historically, it is irrefutable that when new and more efficient milling methods were introduced into the manufacture of wheat Hour, those methods permitting for the first time the complete stripping away of the highly perishable wheat germ, the diet of Western man lost its only significant source of vitamin E. Flour milling underwent this great change around the turn of the century, and it became general around 1910. The amount of vitamin E in the diet was greatly reduced, and with the lass of this natural antithrombin, coronary thrombosis appeared on the scene.
The result of the removal of our major, naturally occurring, circulating antithrombin then explains our present predicament quite fully. The failure of all other methods is apparent from the following statistics of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. A "slight increase" was recorded yet again for 1968 in "diseases of the heart, which currently account for nearly two-fifths of all deaths in the United States.
The mortality rate for the ischemic type of heart disease, mainly coronary, increased by about three per cent." Other methods having failed, the time has come when the medical profession must adopt a method of proven success, basically sound, scientifically and abundantly verified by surgeons, physicians, and scientists the world over. As will be apparent in succeeding chapters, this process has already begun in many medical centers.
Source: Vitamin E for Ailing & Healthy Hearts
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