Nancy Appleton Books Health Blog

© 2009 Nancy Appleton PhD and G.N. Jacobs

www.nancyappleton.com

Dr. Appleton has spent more than 35 years writing, lecturing and preaching, for a lack of a better word, this simple thought: our modern diet does more to harm us than bullets, car wrecks, falling from high places and possibly those scary viruses with names like Ebola Zaire combined will ever do. Mainstream medical opinion has not always been positive during that time. When she brought in Mr. Jacobs to manage the day to day aspects of her business, she admitted to being tired and despaired of why she couldn’t continue like one of her role models, Coco Chanel who ran her fashion and perfume empire well into her eighties.

“Coco Chanel was never beaten up by the medical establishment for thirty years,” Mr. Jacobs replied.

And now perhaps the wheel has turned. People begin to listen and we are still here spreading the word. The latest support comes from the backers of a new bill before the California Legislature concerning medical choices and informed consent. Assembly Bill 1478 is intended to provide accurate information about the risks and benefits to cardiac and diabetes patients in the State of California. The logic says that if people become aware that traditional therapies aren’t nearly as effective as diet, exercise and other lifestyle changes then people will opt out and try something with more hope of working. But, the patient needs to be informed.

Statistics cited by the bill’s backers are quite frightening:

• Approximately, 44,800 bypass surgeries are performed per year in California.
• Up to 5-percent die.
• Nearly 80-percent experience cognitive difficulties afterwards.
• Repeat bypass surgeries increase the fatal risk to between 15 and 20-percent.
• Nearly 131,400 angioplasties performed every year with a 25-percent failure rate.
• Costs to California: $48.36 billion per year or which $8.22 billion is paid directly by Medi-Cal.
• Two million Californians have diabetes.
• Diabetes costs California $36 billion per year of which $6.12 billon is paid by Medi-Cal.

The Authors of the bill listed Dr. Appleton’s book Lick the Sugar Habit as a primary “Must Read” sourcebook. But, perhaps the backers aren’t as aware of our continuing work in the nutrition field as we know more now.

We suspect that part of the problem is the medical approach of most doctors who have based much of their work on Louis Pasteur’s Germ Theories. In essence, doctors seek to whack disease with medicine instead of rooting out the causes. Dr. Appleton’s PhD thesis has been published, alternately titled The Curse of Louis Pasteur or Rethinking Pasteur’s Germ Theory.

The work continues in such works as Stopping Inflammation and Suicide by Sugar where further information about sugar and the related problem of inflammation are discussed in more detail. In Suicide by Sugar, the doctor discusses soft drinks and many other sugar-added drinks in detail. It may open your eyes.

Why is it important to include health choice and informed consent laws as part of the total healthcare plan for the country? Consider Congressman Mike Roger’s harsh comments on the cost of healthcare and healthcare reform.[i] While we won’t comment here about the Congressman’s apparent lack of concern for people who can’t pay for their own insurance, he does seem to understand that healthcare costs a lot of money.

Our position and that of the backers of AB 1478 is that prevention over allopathic intervention with drugs and surgery must be considered a viable treatment plan as part of overall healthcare reform. It will certainly reduce the costs of treatment and may make public option health insurance or whatever improvements come out of the political process cheaper to implement.

A home cooked meal of two hamburger patties, mashed potatoes, grilled onions and a salad compared to the same building block foods prepared differently and consumed at McDonalds probably represents at least 300-percent price differential in cost per meal. So does the price break at the register also represent a break when it comes to calculating healthcare costs? Dr. Appleton’s work certainly has always said so, but let’s hear from the supporters of AB 1478 and the position papers they used to justify this legislation.

Dr. Pamela Poppe, one of the experts tasked to defend AB 1478, presents many examples of the comparative ineffectiveness of many traditional treatments for many common diseases. A long-running study conducted by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn started with 24 patients in 1983, of which 18 were still on the program of a healthier diet in 2000, showed that the patients still on the program had no new cardiac events, while the six that left the program had 11, including one death.[ii]

Dr. Poppe continues to list examples for almost all of the main diseases that kill us and in many cases the results of the dietary approach are vastly superior to the drug and surgery approach. A 35-year study on multiple sclerosis patients found that over the time of the study a low-saturated fat diet prevented the disease progression to the tune of a 95-percent success rate.[iii] The traditional therapy shows that half of all patients are dead, in wheelchairs, or using walkers.[iv] Something is wrong.

These facts are but a small sample of how modern medicine hurts us more than helps us. We encourage you to venture to www.camedicalchoice.com for more information on health and the fight to include heart disease, diabetes and other diseases on the long list of things your doctor must tell you before starting treatment.

[ii] Esselstyn, CB Jr. “Updating a 12-year Experience With Arrest and Reversal Therapy for Coronary Heart Disease (An Overdue Requiem for Palliative Cardiology)” The Am J of Cardiology 1999 August 1; 84:339-341

[iii] Swank, RL, Dugan BB “Effect of Low Saturated Fat Diet in Early and Late Cases of Multiple Sclerosis” Lancet 1990;336:37-39

[iv] Munari, L, et al. “Therapy With Glatiramer Acetate for Multiple Sclerosis.” Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2004 (1):CD004678