Recent events involving people close to me have caused me to take a fresh look at research in the field of cardiovascular health. I've been reading books, medical journals, web sites - boy, we sure aren't lacking in information these days! All this effort, however, has served only to remind me and strengthen my support of a decades-old controversial theory put forth by Dr. Linus Pauling and his colleagues.
I've written about Dr. Pauling here in the past. He's one of the reasons my family got into this business. The only man ever to win two unshared Nobel prizes, he amazingly continued producing groundbreaking scientific work right up until his death in 1994 at the age of 93. In fact, his theory of cardiovascular health was published just a mere five years before he left this earth.
Dr. Pauling's "unified theory" centers on collagen, something most people would not even consider when thinking about heart health. But did you know that collagen is the most abundant protein forming the most prevalent tissue in the human body? Pauling's theory, far too complex for me to describe here in detail, suggests that it is collagen breakdown within the arteries that opens the door for the development of arterial plaques. Cholesterol is not the culprit in Pauling's theory; it's merely a bench player that would have no cause to get into the game if it weren't for injured collagen.
Click here for an easy-to-understand video that explains the mechanism in Dr. Pauling's theory. For an article on the subject by my friend and colleague Dr. Joseph Mercola, click here.
According to the unified theory, or collagen breaks down and we subsequently develop arterial plaques for one simple reason: we don't produce vitamin C and lysine, two vital components in the maintenance and repair of healthy collagen fibers. Dr. Pauling firmly believed that we could reduce and perhaps eliminate our risk of cardiovascular concerns through daily supplementation of these two very simple, yet very important, nutrients.
As I said earlier, it's a controversial theory. But when it was made public late in 1989 it caused a stir that continues to this day. It also makes as much if not more sense to me than many of the more convoluted explanations being bandied about today.
It's interesting, isn't it, how many ways we come full circle as we progress through our lives? Yes, science moves forward, new discoveries are made and we advance to a new and brighter future. But so often those ideas we encounter early in our lives, sometimes the simplest of all, prove more resilient and more relevant the older we become. As I reach the age my father was when he began following Dr. Pauling's work and taking daily doses of vitamin C, I'm proud and humbled to find that these same ideas are as important to me and my peers now as they were to him and his generation then.
