High Blood Pressure (IV)

By Dr. Gary Tran Quang Minh

Dear Zorro:

People kept distracted me from writing about your problem faster. Here I am back with the 3rd substance that you will have to take to drop your blood pressure and protect your brain, heart, and blood vessels from getting damaged.

But before that, I need to add a few remarks concerning CoQ10's properties that I ran into since I wrote you guys about that utterly important nutritional supplement for the heart.

It turns out that this molecule is also very important for the brain in many research trials. It is really helpful in treating and more importantly in preventing what they call mitochondrial diseases of old people--in other words, people like you and I. The mitochondrial diseases are degenerative diseases of aging like Alzheimer's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, and Parkinson's diseases. By the way, they said that these diseases are on rise due to the increase of baby boomers retiring. None of these diseases have well understood causes, but they all have very low CoQ10 in the brain and when that molecule was given to people affected by these diseases at high dose (500 mg to 1200 mg even at 1500 mg) the diseases showed improvement. They said that since these diseases are incurable when they are in advanced states, it's better to prevent them than to treat them. It was expected that 20,000,000 baby boomers would have them before they die--that's about a third of us. They said that the 2 substances best used to deal with mitochondrial degenerative diseases are CoQ10 and Alpha Lipoic Acid (ALA). ALA is precisely the 3rd substance that I will write about to treat hypertension. By the way, mitochondrial diseases are the malfunctioning of the mitochondrial electron tranfer system in the cytoplasm of the cell where energy is produced for cellular functions of all kinds. Remember the analogy I gave you: the spark from the spark plug that fires the car engine? By the way, if you can afford only one nutritional supplement, take CoQ10. It's that important to the heart because this organ has to pump 8000 liters of blood through 104,000 km of blood vessels, beat 100,000 times a day. I have just gone over more recent researches that really blew my mind about how it helps the heart in so many ways that I will share with you when I discuss about cardiovascular diseases with you since HYQ has issues with them and I want him to live a long time to manage our goddamn K7CM for our benefit since no one has done a better job. A major finding about the heart recently was that a disease heart can regenerate myocytes (heart muscle cells) and heal itself when damaged, something that in the past scientists thought that it could not do and CoQ10 plays a major role in this action. So, don't hesitate to take high level of this wonderful and vital substance to fix your heart problem or to prevent it from failing and damaged. Don't you blame me for not stressing enough on this matter that allows you to live longer and healthier

ALPHA LIPOIC ACID (ALA) OR THIOCTIC ACID:

ALA is a universal antioxidant and the most powerful of all antioxidant in your body. It's the only antioxidant that is both water soluble and fat soluble and it can penetrate the blood brain barrier easily. A lot of antioxidants cannot penetrate the fatty tissue of the brain. ALA is very potent because it helps regenerate or recycle other important antioxidants that the organs need like Vitamins C, B complex, E (all forms), glutathione, SOD... Researchers found more and more roles that this mother of all antioxidants plays in our body functions especially in tandem with CoQ10. If you have money only for 2 nutraceuticals, take this cap bai trung CoQ10 +ALA and you'll be ahead of all the people who only rely on drugs. By the way, you can take these with your drugs in the beginning and find out after a while that you can drop more and more of the drugs because drugs taken on a long term basis will lead to nasty side effects that will kill you. In fact, one of the biggest regret I had in this life was that I did not learn about this long ago enough and my dad died of a heart failure at 72 some 3 decades ago. He died of a the side effect of Propanolol a cardiologist used to treat his cardiac arrythmia. Actually, that prompted me to learn frantically about alternative medicine. So far I lived longer than anybody in my clan even though I inherited pretty bad genes from my ancestors (heart disease from my father's side, diabetes from my mother's side.)

ALA was proven to play the following roles:

*It benefits greatly in the treatment and prevention of congestive heart failure and strokes of all kinds.

*It helps a great deal in the treatment and prevention of Syndrome X. (I will write about this in my discussion about cardiovascular diseases)

*It stabilizes arrhythmia. (HYQ, this is of great interest to you, my friend)

*It shows powerful antioxidant property in all tissues.

*It in antiprevents the glycation of protein, and consequently it plays an vital role in the anti-aging process.

*It prevents the oxidation of LDL (Low Density Lipoprotein or bad cholesterol) that lead to plaque formation in your arteries. If you have cholesterol problem, taking ALA will help you more than taking statin drug that will kill you in the long run by knocking off your CoQ10 formation unless you take high level of CoQ10 with your statin drugs. Or if you read about the new study just published about niacin doing a better job than statin drugs. (Hiep, go to Yahoo home page and scroll the different news of this week you will see this big news. All you need to lower your triglycerides and LDL and increase your HDL (High Density Lipoprotein or good cholesterol, the good stuff that help Thanh's body to make all his sex and brain hormones to allow him to do his dem 7 ngay 3 vo ra không kể tricks. Thanh, you'd better kể luôn your vô ra or else you misscalculate your energy need and underdose your CoQ10, man.)

*It drops you total cholesterol. To find out about your bad cholesterol (LDL) you take this total cholesterol you minus your good cholesterol (HDL) and you minus that result further by 1/5 of your triglycerides because 1/5 of your blood fat (triglycerides) is included in the tested total cholesterol. Here are the normal values to shoot for: total cholesterol = 180-200 mg/dl;  triglycerides = 30-200 mg/dl (if you have 100 mg/dl you are fine and you don't worry about a goddamn thing if Thanh ever asks you to join him going anywhere and doing anything strenuous.); the risk factors of heart disease are calculated by dividing the cholesterol by the amount of HDL. If it's 4.5 you are at average risk. If it's higher than 4.5 you have have increased risk, so take higher doses of your heart-healthy nutraceuticals to fix this problem ASAP and I would not go anywhere to do anything with Thanh if he offers to pay for it all. I'd stay home doing my Càn Khôn Thập Linh exercise. If it's below 4.5, I wouldn't hesitate for a second following Thanh anywhere, even to VN (But, don't forget to bring TQM Cure with you, though.).

Research showed that ALA reduced systolic blood pressure by increasing tissue cysteine and glutathione.

Research also demonstrated that ALA is valuable in treating diabetic and non-diabetic congestive heart failure by being able to protect the heart muscle from free radical damage and subsequent arrhythmia due to its powerful antioxidant property or free radical scavenging action. This is the most important property of ALA because the heart is the organ which is the most susceptible to free radical damage as seen in coronary disease and myocardial infarct for the simple reason that the heart is the organ that cannot stop to rest and heal injury done to it. Old hearts have 3 times more radical than young ones. So you must get rid of these tên nằm vùng in your heart. Think of ALA as our former Biet Cach Du. Drugs cannot do this.

Research also showed that stroke death dropped from 78% to 26% among people who took ALA compared to the poor souls who were treated by doctors who were mù tịt about this molecule.
Other researches showed that ALA is the substance of choice to reverse or prevent Syndrome X by increasing the burning of blood glucose. Remember the energy-regenerating Krebs Cycle that Thầy Hải or Thầy Tâm taught you guys in biochemistry or physiology? ALA plays a much bigger and more efficient role than all the B vitamins. If you forget this goddamn cycle--we used to call it in vet school the Craps Cycle--this is the scheme whereby high energy is produced in the powerhouse of the cell or the mitochondria. Remember the old CoQ10 spark plug in the mitochondria I told you about earlier? It's like Thầy Hải and me in the Ban Súc Khoa or Thầy Trình and Thầy Tụng in Ban Nông--you just cannot not have one without the other to be any good. Free radicals are produced beaucoup in this stupid cycle and ALA squenches the free radicals that are not being kềm hãm in these biochemical reactions.

Here is another discovery about ALA that excites the hell out of me more than Thanh's đêm 7 ngày 3 stuff because I am a diabetic: As your blood glucose is fueling your Krebs' Cycle, its level drops and so does insulin. Not only that, insulin sensitivity increases. Now if you take ALA, this burning of glucose as induced by increased sensitivity of insulin went up by a whopping 50% compared to the diabetic patients treated by endocrinologists who did not take time out to keep up with research in holistic medicine. Blood sugar level drops 23-45% also in animals given ALA by sharp veterinarians like me.
The next discussion interests my Thien Loi Zorro: ALA was found to decrease the production of what they call glycosylated end products.  These are nasty products that are formed when proteins in the blood react with sugar. This process makes you prone to cardiovascular diseases because it oxidizes LDL to make your blood vessels tough and inflexible like a rubber or plastic water hose that you leave in the yard in the sun and snow that becomes hard from oxidation by sunlight.  If you let this process goes long enough it affects the left side of your heart and makes it enlarged or tired, and thus less efficient in squeezing oxygenated blood out into the organs. This leads to the increase of diastolic blood pressure (the low number of your blood pressure and makes it higher than the normal 80 mmHg). Of course, the hard inflexible arteries increase your systolic pressure due to higher resistance to blood flow through non-dilated vessels (The high number of your blood pressure higher than 120 mmHg). The bad thing about glycosylated cholesterol-carrying proteins is that they cannot hook-up to receptor sites in the liver cells (hepatocytes) to signal them to stop making more cholesterol (Remember the liver could make 1500 mg of cholesterol a day or more until the normal cholesterol-carrying proteins stops this by binding to the receptors on the liver cells.) Without this binding process, the liver keeps on making cholesterol unabated. ALA puts an end to this process từ trong trứng nước by stopping the glycation of blood protein and sugar. Free radicals are normal products of metabolism, but if you lack anti-oxidants to neutralize most of them they will cause severe damage to lipid cell membranes, cell organelles, and cell DNA.

Lastly, ALA is a universal anti-oxidant because it empowers and recycles all the other anti-oxidants like Vitamin C, Vitamin E, CoQ10, etc... to keep them in working order.

How much to take ALA depends on the conditions and whether you take also other anti-oxidants. The recommended low dose is 50-250 mg a day. The average dose is 250-500 mg. High dose--600-1800 mg-- is for people who have bad problems of the heart or bad problems of the vascular system that will lead to heart problems (hypertension, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia). I am taking 600 mg. Most German doctors recommend high doses. Zorro and HYQ should protect yourself with high doses. This product is very safe. Nobody has died from taking it on record. If you are afraid that your problem may cause you to have heart attack and stroke take this ASAP. It will save your heart and your brain by confining and limiting the tissues damage so your doctors have time to intervene. People who don't take this their heart and brain are shot pretty quick.

Take care.