Heart disease and diet and more…

This article by the cardiac surgeon Dr Dwight Lundell, concerns the link between diet and heart disease. In it he admits that science and medicine got it very wrong when it comes to diet and heart disease. He exposes the fact that medicine use to blame high cholesterol/fat diet as the cause of heart disease and thus advised people to eat low fat diets. He comments that this advice is now scientifically and morally indefensible. He reports that the science that saturated fat causes heart disease is non-existent. He states that despite lipid lowering drugs and low fat diets, more people will die of heart disease in USA this year than ever before. Thus medicine/science has indeed got it very wrong. 

The low fat diets were heavy in carbohydrates, sugar and processed foods and he acknowledges that these diets have in fact been harm-full to the human body. He states that such diets have contributed to the rise in diabetes, obesity and indeed also heart disease and Alzheimer’s along with a host of other conditions. In addition, he states that medicine made a grave mistake by advising people to replace saturated fats with foods high in omega-6 fats like soybean/corn/sunflower oil. 

He reports that the real reason people get heart disease is due to inflammation in the arterial wall that over time leads to damage of the lining of the artery, resulting in plaques and areas of narrowing or stenosis. He cites the fact that certain foods contribute to this inflammatory process as the reason why a diet high in sugar, carbohydrates and processed foods is so damaging.

It is great to see such an honest exposure of the errors in diet advice/heart disease by mainstream medicine from an experienced cardiologist. However, from an  esoteric and energetic perspective there is more to the root cause of heart disease than inflammation. Inflammation is definitely an important step in the whole process and diet does affect that also. But we need to broaden the horizon of the different factors that contribute to the inflammatory process to more than diet.

The field of psychoneuroimmunology has been doing just that and demonstrates the links between our thoughts and emotions and the inflammatory process. Hostility is heartbreaking and is one of the emotions linked to heart disease and PNI is demonstrating how that can occur by stimulating the inflammatory process. It has long been recognised that the so-called typical ‘type A personality’ who is prone to angry outbursts, is driven and competitive is prone to heart disease and this can also be understood to be a consequence of the emotional state of being of such people rather than some permanent trait.  

Energetically and esoterically it is known that the emotions are the root cause of illness and disease including heart disease. Undealt with emotions are also linked to our dietary choices that can exacerbate the inflammatory process as reported in the above article. Energetically our true nature is love and there is no emotion in true love.   The emotions are harming to our body because they are of a different energy to our true nature and over time this affects the immune system, leading to inflammation and ultimately illness and disease. More research is required before this is confirmed scientifically but it can be known and felt within oneself that the emotions are harming to our true nature and state of being. The root cause of heart disease comes back to the lack of love we have for ourselves, manifested in emotional ways of being like anger, hostility, rage to name a few. Likewise, pushing oneself in a driven, competitive way is also harming. 

Thus, rather than wait for science to admit it got it wrong, we can make the choices to develop a more centred and less emotional way of being today realising that that is a more harmonious way of being, a more loving way of being.

I previously would have disputed these esoteric and energetic understandings and the role of emotions in illness and disease and used the fact that science said otherwise to support that view. However, I now know without doubt through my own healing experiences that the emotions are toxic to the human body and that it is possible to heal the underlying emotional disharmony that gave rise to the illness and disease.

I have a family history of heart disease and can recognise that I use to display many of the emotional traits that lead to heart disease combined with a lifestyle that was far from self-loving – so I am 40+ years down the road to a heart attack! However, I also know that I have addressed many of the underlying emotional issues that lead to that behaviour and way of being such that I am now generally more centred, with much less anger and the so called A type behaviours that I previously displayed. Rather than being subject to a family history of heart disease that I can do nothing about, I recognise that alot of those behaviours were learned in one way or another and passed from one generation to the next and as such can be stopped and healed.

I now make choices that are much more self-loving in terms of what I put into my body and how I live on a daily basis, endeavouring to be gentle and self-caring. That said, I also recognise there is still work to be done!! Conscious effort and choice is required to live in a way that is truly self-loving and because I have lived in a way that was so far removed from that, it takes a bit of time to unfold and deepen the truly loving ways of being but hey…. I’m worth it – and so are you!! 🙂

Feel free to comment or discuss any of the points raised in the blog. Did you follow the low fat diet advice? Have you had any of the consequences of a so called healthy diet that wasn’t so healthy??