Health news blog

While animal studies can be interesting, for real people to use Chitosan in their everyday lives we must put this in perspective. Chitosan, in the simplest terms, does the following:

For each gram of Chitosan you consume half an hour before a meal, at least 3 grams of saturated fat—and as many as 6—will pass through your body undigested.

For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that 5 grams of saturated fats pass through the body unabsorbed for every 1 gram of Chitosan that you take. Suppose your dinner normally contains 40 grams of saturated fat (a dangerously high amount). If you take 5 grams of Chitosan before that dinner, the Chitosan can pull away 5 X 5, or 25 grams of that fat, leaving only 15 to be

absorbed by your body. The 25 grams of fat that are attached to the Chitosan pass through your body as if you had not consumed them in the first place.

How helpful is not digesting 25 grams of fat? Well, 25 grams of fat contain about 225 calories. If you cut your fat intake by 25 grams, and normally consume 2,000 calories per day, you’ll be lowering your calorie intake by 11 percent. And if you use Chitosan before two fatty meals a day, blocking the same amount of fat with each meal, the numbers can double—50 fewer grams of fat digested per day. That comes to 450 calories less, or 22 percent of your daily caloric intake. Not only have you reduced your caloric intake, you’ve also reduced the danger to your health represented by that excess fat.

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As excess cholesterol in the bloodstream flows through the body’s arteries, some of it binds permanently to the walls of the coronary and other arteries. More bits of cholesterol, plus fat and debris from the bloodstream, may join the buildup on the wall, eventually creating a lump inside the artery. This cholesterol/fat lump may continue to grow until the artery is completely blocked, triggering a heart attack. (Imagine a small car stuck on the side of the freeway. Traffic flows smoothly until another car smacks into the first, then another and another, creating a pileup. Now traffic is slow, but cars are still able to get through. Unfortunately, more and more cars join the pileup until the freeway is completely blocked and no cars can get through. Something similar can happen in the arteries, with cholesterol, fat, and debris taking the place of the cars.)

In other cases, a small blood clot which has formed in another part of the body may drift into the partially blocked artery and get stuck at the lump, blocking the blood flow. This occurs more often in the brain than the heart. (That would be like a
large truck getting stuck in a small tunnel, preventing any other cars from getting through.) Heart attacks can also be caused by stress-related arterial spasms. Muscles surrounding the coronary arteries may suddenly go into spasm and clamp down, stopping the blood flow. If an artery has already been narrowed by cholesterol/fat plugs, a minor spasm can be a major disaster.

Like cholesterol, fat participates in the making of the lumps that can clog arteries and block the flow of blood. And it has another way of causing trouble for the heart. If you have someone eat a very high-fat meal, draw a sample of their blood, set the blood in a test tube, and sit down to watch, you’ll eventually see the fat from the blood rise to the top of the tube, as the fat did in milk bottles in the days before milk was homogenized. It will be obvious; it’s the sludgy stuff. That same sludge clogs up your bloodstream, turning fluid that flows easily through the pipes, and some of the things in that fluid, into, well, sludge. For example, the red blood cells that carry oxygen are normally able to move easily through these blood vessels. But as the fat from the food gets into the bloodstream, the blood cells slush together, looking like a stack of coins. This is called the rouleau effect. Up to nine hours later, the blood cells may still be stuck together in misshapen clumps in the tiny blood vessels. How well can the red blood cells carry out their jobs when they’re bent out of shape and stuck together? Not very well. That’s why 4 or 5 hours after a fatty meal, when the blood fat levels have risen quite a bit, certain people have chest pains, abnormal EKGs, and possibly heart attacks. The fat also prevents the release of a substance called nitrous oxide, which relaxes and dilates the arteries.

I sometimes draw blood from my patients, then show them how milky and sludgy their blood looks (instead of fluid). I also have them look at a drop of their blood through a special dark-field microscope. They can see how their blood is filled with “snow,” which are white patches of fat. Later, after they’ve adopted a low-fat diet, they can see how clear and fluid their blood looks. It’s a great motivator.

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Perhaps worst of all, bad diets can make you sick. In the 1970s, many of the young nurses I knew became ill after going on the liquid protein diets. And I could always count on having one or two patients in the intensive care or the coronary care unit with cardiac arrhythmias due to the use of liquid protein diets and / or diuretics. People also came to the hospital with head injuries sustained when they passed out while on semistarvation diets. It became a routine thing to see patients with heart problems caused by fad diet-induced potassium or magnesium loss, and I saw numerous cases of colitis and diarrhea caused by what we doctors referred to as “fad-dietitis.”

At that time, some of my colleagues asked me to examine their secretaries in an effort to discover why they seemed to be constantly fatigued. One surgeon said, “Find out why she keeps walking into doors.” The culprit was usually a diet-related metabolic disorder. Some of them were eating nothing but rice or another single food for days and weeks at a time. Now, rice is a perfectly good food, but it does not contain all the nutrients and other substances that we need to thrive. I was actually astonished to see cases of beri-beri, replete with heart failure secondary to nutritional deficits, among the rice-only dieters. (Beri-beri, caused by a lack of vitamin B₁, had been all but eradicated in this country. It took fad diets to bring it back.) Another secretary told me that her new wonder diet consisted of nothing but carrots and enemas! It’s no wonder these women became ill.