Heart Surgeon's Viral Confession

A Heart Surgeon's Viral Confession: Natural Food Is the Answer

Behind the beloved idea that processed food is "slowly poisoning everyone"

James Hamblin Jan 28 2014, 2:04 PM ET

 

Around 237,000 people now have Dr. Dwight Lundell's confession on their Facebook walls. His essay, headlined "Heart Surgeon Declares On [sic] What Really Causes Heart Illness," was published on a website called Tuned Body in December. Over the past week it has taken off across social media with phenomenal force.
In the essay, Lundell describes his purportedly newfound understanding that a diet of natural, unprocessed food can prevent and reverse heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease. He recalls two and a half misguided decades as a cardiac surgeon prescribing cholesterol-lowering medications and recommending a low-fat diet. He says that he recently realized the error of his ways, stopped practicing, and dedicated his career to heart disease prevention.
"We physicians with all our experience and authority" he writes, "often acquire a rather large selfishness that tends to make it hard to accept we are wrong. So, here it is. I openly admit to being mistaken. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having done more than 5,000 open-heart surgeries, today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific proof."
The viral essay goes on to say that recommending cholesterol-lowering medications and low-fat diets is "no longer morally defensible." That's because the low-fat, high-simple-carb diet is actively destroying the walls of our blood vessels by causing chronic inflammation, he explains. That inflammation makes cholesterol stick to said walls, forming the plaques that eventually block them, resulting in a heart attack or stroke.

Lundell (Tuned Body)

"When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels," he writes, with the cool hand of a surgeon who has "peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries." His eye for imagery is also hardened. "Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding," he writes. "This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now."
READ IT ALL HERE!!!