Amidst the 2000 presidential election firestorm, Dick Cheney had a major reality check early Wednesday – not about becoming vice president, but about surviving. With three heart attacks and a quadruple-bypass operation in his medical history, he suffered chest pains
Amidst the 2000 presidential election firestorm, Dick Cheney had a major
reality check early Wednesday – not about becoming vice president, but about
surviving. With three heart attacks and a quadruple-bypass operation in his
medical history, he suffered chest pains again, caused by a narrowed artery.
Now, in his post-surgery medical surveillance, the numbers threatening
Cheney – and many other Americans – are not thin vote margins in this or that
Florida county. The numbers he really needs to worry about are on his
cholesterol test. And his worst enemies are not dimple-reading vote counters,
but malignantly conservative doctors who don’t know beans about diet.
Most
doctors still scoff that patients, Cheney included, really want to alter the
lifestyles that put them in the emergency room. So they suggest only modest
diet changes: “Cutting back” on the red meat, eating skinless chicken, and
gently nudging cholesterol under the 200 mark, a pathetically short distance
from the U.S. average of 205.
None of this serves Cheney well. Fully
one-third of U.S. heart attacks strike those with under 200 cholesterol.
Aggressive, cautious medical practice puts the cholesterol goal much lower. For
35 years running, not a single person in the classic Framingham Heart Study
with under 150 cholesterol had a heart attack. Getting to that safety zone
means checking dietary conservatism at the dining room door.
A
chicken-and-fish “heart diet” drops cholesterol merely 5 percent. But chucking
chicken – and all animal products, as is done in heart-disease reversal
programs – brings at least three-fold more efficacy in clinical trails,
including our own published in April’s American Journal of Cardiology. Our
participants cut “bad” cholesterol by an average 17 percent without
medications, in just five weeks.
It’s time for Cheney to revote, dumping
the meat-and-dairy rich diet that’s imperiled him and, let’s face it, most
other Americans with serious illness at the highest of productive careers. When
he develops a taste for spaghetti marinara, veggie stew, baked beans and every
other vegan recipe he can sink his teeth into, he’ll save something much more
valuable than just his political future.
NEAL D. BARNARD,
president
Physicians Committee for
Responsible
Medicine
Washington, D.C.
