Good Food Makes Good Cells

By Milton G. Crane, M.D. and Barbara G. Crane, R.D. of Weimar Institute

While Guests are here in the NEWSTART session, they get loaded with knowledge of the advantages of a total vegetarian cuisine. The NEWSTART staff continues to find added evidence of the benefits of garden fresh produce, flavored with natural unrefined ingredients. No doubt you will hear in the news, now and then, conflicting reports about the role of cholesterol, and other things, in causing plugged arteries. Some of this news had half-truths which seem plausible, but which merely muddy the waters of the whole truth.

This write-up summarizes some of the recent information that has greatly enlightened our understanding of how arteries get plugged.

Imagine that you know a cell in the wall of an artery. We will name that one, Celly. Celly wants something to eat, but she is fastened right there in the artery inside Joe Person. She has to wait for some good food, prepared by the liver, and sent to her by the blood from the intestines and the liver. In Celly's skin is a mouth that is shaped just right to "eat" a little ball of fat, protein, and cholesterol of a certain size and shape. Doctors call this little ball of fat "LDL." Celly works hard night and day and needs food regularly. The intestines and liver know how to make this LDL just right, but they are dependent upon what Joe or Jane Person swallows.

Jane feeds Joe a good breakfast of whole grains, almond milk, and fruit. There is just the right amount of good oil, and the oil and protein are encased in a plant fiber package. The plant fiber keeps the oil and protein from being attacked by oxygen and getting partially burned (oxidized). Vitamin E, vitamin C, and carotene are right there, on the job, to keep the oxygen away from the oil and protein. With that natural food, the liver can make really good LDL, and not too much of it. The LDL floats down the artery, slips through special holes in the artery wall, and comes floating right over to Celly's mouth. Celly gets fresh, natural LDL that doesn't have any oxygen attached to it. All is well.

Ay lunch, though, Joe has to eat at a restaurant. Into his stomach goes some bread with margarine on it, some beans which had a "little oil" added, some salad with mayonnaise, and a baked potato with a bit if margarine. Joe picks a little candy bar. The stomach and guts have to deal with all that grease and oil right away. They send a message to the gallbladder and liver for some bile salts to emulsify the oily stuff. They signal the liver to make plenty of cholesterol, turn it into bile salts, and pour it down the bile duct. Eventually, all the fat is emulsified, absorbed, and made into LDL cell food. However, there is much too much LDL.

This big load of LDL floats down the arteries, slips through the artery wall, and floats by Celly and her neighbor cells. Celly eats some of the LDL, her neighbor cells eat all that they can, and then they quit. The extra LDL piles up in the wall of the artery.

The next part of the story is this. Oxygen is a friendly element. It loves to share electrons. This is like rusting or burning. But oxygen is supposed to share electrons only in special places inside the cell called mitochondria, to generate energy. Anyway, oxygen comes floating by on the way to the mitochondria in the cells. It so happens that oxygen just loves to ride on the back of protein or fatty acids that have a double bond (sort of like sitting in a saddle). It gets inside an LDL particle and climbs onto fat. When this happens, the protein in the LDL gets upset and bent out of shape. The LDL is no longer natural LDL, but "modified-LDL." Doctors call this "Mod-LDL" a "toxic radical."

Poor Celly, what is to become of all that Mod-LDL? Celly and the other cells don't want it inside their walls. If it got in there, the oxygen could jump onto a gene and damage it. Or it could jump on some chemical in Celly and upset all the important work that is going on inside the cells. Celly and the others might make some "half-burnt" chemicals.

Thankfully, our Creator taught a special macrophage (Big Eater) to look for Mod-LDL. You see, Big Eaters migrate from the bone marrow and move in the artery wall. Their main job is to search for germs. However, they take one good look at that Mod-LDL stuff and gobble it up. But all this Mod-LDL stuff must be digested and disposed of or else the cells get old too quickly, or they might get out of control, even turning into cancer.

The trouble is that the macrophages just eat and eat, trying to get rid of all that Mod-LDL. They just grow and grow and turn into what doctors call "foam cells." You might call them "obese macrophages." They get sick, swell up, and gradually plug the arteries. If good old HDL-cholesterol in Joe's body does not haul the junk fat and cholesterol away from Joe's arteries fast enough, they will get so plugged that he will have a stroke, or a heart attack, or arthritis in the hip, knee or back. Also, that sugar in the candy bar, etc., that Joe Person ate weakens the Big Eater immune cells.

As if that were not enough trouble, another lipoprotein, called Lipoprotein(a), has been recently recognized in the blood. It looks a lot like Mod-LDL. Over the last three years, we have routinely measured the level of this LDL-sized ball of fat in the blood. Let us call it Lp(a). It, too, would damage the cells if it were eaten. We have found that the level of this Lp(a) is very high in half of the persons who enter the NEWSTART program. The good news is that the Lp(a) decreases an average of 15% in two weeks on the NEWSTART program. Nearly all (95% of 65 people) who were on the NEWSTART for year or more, had Lp(a) levels below 15 mg%. The total vegetarians had an average value that was one-third that of individuals on the usual American diet. Our current research project is to find out how long it takes the Lp(a) level to drop below the 15 mg% mark, and what can be done to speed up the drop.

If you would like to know more about this subject and obtain references of the medical literature, please write to the author at Weimar Institute and ask for the manuscript entitled, Good Cell Food Keeps the Arteries Open.

We are indebted to the over 200 NEWSTART guests and staff members for allowing us to measure the levels of Lp(a) in their blood and for filling out a food history form. We give a special thanks to Barbara and Donald Cox for their funding of this research.

Copyright © 1995-2002 Milton G. Crane, M.D. and Barbara G. Crane, R.D., Weimar Institute, Weimar, CA 95736. All rights Reserved.