From:
Guy R. Schenker, D.C.
June, 1998


Dear Doctor,

                  CHOLESTEROL PHOBIA ...

the epidemic that has afflicted the Western world for 
three decades, is finally showing signs of waning -- but 
it is not giving up without a fight.  Countless millions 
of the ignorant are still suffering its major symptoms:

- deficiencies of eggs and the other foods high in          
  cholesterol and saturated fat that are essential to a     
  long, healthy life (and, essential to keeping blood       
  levels of cholesterol down).

- anxiety suffered over serum cholesterol levels above      
  200, even though there is almost no correlation with      
  cardiovascular disease (CVD), and absolutely no           
  causative effect on CVD.

- liver destruction from drugs that interfere with normal
  cholesterol metabolism, thus artificially lowering serum
  levels of cholesterol while doing nothing to correct the
  causes of CVD.

     If you have been reading your NUTRI-SPEC LETTERS as 
well as some of our published articles, you have long 
known (and presumably so educated your patients) that 
cholesterol is only one very small component of CVD --    
and a much over-rated component at that.  As importantly,  
you know that dietary cholesterol is completely unrelated 
to CVD.

     You also know that a malady closely related to 
cholesterol phobia, namely saturated fat phobia, is an 
equally pernicious pathology.  You are well aware that 
cholesterol and saturated fat are essential for the 
development of the brain in infancy.  You know too
that cholesterol and saturated fat are essential to 
preserve brain function in the elderly.  You also
                          - 2 -


recognize that these delightful fats are an essential part 
of all our hormones and are the functional constituents of 
all biological membranes.  Anyone ignorant enough to fear 
these friendly fats has been victimized by the most 
vicious propaganda machine -- the agri-business and 
pharmaceutical establishment.

     As is so often the case, the common wisdom of our day 
is not only inaccurate, it is exactly opposite to the 
truth.  The establishment has convinced the masses that 
unsaturated fats are saviors that are not only healthy in 
themselves but somehow protect you from the perceived 
damage of cholesterol and saturated fat.  You know this is 
false.  The damaging effects of unsaturated fats vs. the 
healthful effects of saturated fats were covered at some 
length in past Letters.  So you know the truth -- but are 
you effectively getting the message to your patients?

     Only you can save your patients suffering from fat 
phobia.  Tell them, "Cholesterol is not a deadly 
substance.  Quite the contrary, it is the vital substance 
from which your brain is made; from which your hormones 
are made; and from which your cell membranes are made.  
Cholesterol is so important that your own liver produces 
2000 milligrams of it daily just to make sure you have 
enough.  If you fall for the popular anti-fat propaganda 
and eat a low cholesterol diet, your own liver will make 
all the more in a desperate attempt to produce enough.     
Understand that when cholesterol does build up to 
abnormally high levels in your blood it has nothing to do 
with how much cholesterol you ate.  It has to do with an 
imbalance in your body chemistry that prevents you from 
handling cholesterol properly.  I am going to find and 
correct whichever of those metabolic imbalances you may 
have.  That is the purpose of NUTRI-SPEC."

     Above all, make your patients understand that there 
are dietary considerations important in maintaining normal 
cholesterol metabolism and thus normal cholesterol levels.  
There are two food groups that derange metabolism and 
elevate cholesterol levels:

- sugar
- unsaturated fats (vegetable oils)

     Think of all the foods that contain sugar.  Then 
think of all the foods made with toxic vegetable oils.
These would include the obvious such as salad dressings, 
margarine, and all fried foods -- but also include all 
bread, all processed cereals, all crackers, virtually any 
baked good, and almost anything else that comes in a
                          - 3 -


package.  I would venture to say that scarcely a person in 
this country eats a single meal in a typical week that 
doesn't contain vegetable oils and/or sugar.    These are 
the causes of high blood fats.  These are, as well, the 
causes of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and really any 
of our degenerative diseases.

     If your patient still is convinced that high serum 
cholesterol is bad and low cholesterol is somehow healthy, 
then enlighten them with the following facts.  Cholesterol 
levels less than 180 are associated with:

- a 200% increase in strokes
- a 300% increase in liver cancer
- a 200% increase in lung disease
- a 200% increase in depression (and increased suicide)
- a 200% increase in addictive behavior

     (Here is a side note on the emotional and behavioral 
aspects of low cholesterol:  A group of Dutch Doctors 
headed by Diederick Grobee, a professor at Erasmus 
University Medical School found that cholesterol is 
essential to make serotonin.  Serotonin, as you probably 
know, is the "feel good" brain chemical that is deficient 
in so many people with depression and anxiety.  Most of 
the common antidepressant medications are serotonin uptake 
inhibitors.  How many of the people that are desperately 
in need of extra serotonin are suffering depression and 
anxiety because they eat low fat processed food?)

     Furthermore, the correlation between serum 
cholesterol and CVD is becoming more tenuous all the time.  
Even William Castelli, M.D., a former director of the 
famous Framingham heart study (the one that originally 
supposedly implicated cholesterol as a problem in CVD) 
notes that people with cholesterol lower than 200 suffer 
nearly 40% of all heart attacks.  Think of it -- low serum 
cholesterol means you have a 200%  increased chance of 
having a stroke, and now, high cholesterol is no longer 
thought to be significantly correlated with heart attacks.  
How many people over the last 30 years have negatively 
impacted their health by decreasing saturated fat and 
increasing unsaturated fat in their diet in the name of 
preventing CVD?  It has all been a hoax perpetrated 
largely by the seed oil industry abetted by the 
pharmaceutical industry.

     The evidence against any relation of cholesterol to
cardiovascular disease is pouring out from everywhere.  A
study done by Gillman et al and published in the December 
24, 1997 Journal Of The American Medical Association found
                          - 4 -


that the more saturated fat you eat the less likely you 
are to suffer a stroke.  The study found that 
polyunsaturated fats (the ones that the propagandists will 
have us believe are good for us) have no protective 
effect.  The study quantified the protective effect of 
saturated fats -- your risk of stoke decreases by 15% for 
every 3% increase in your saturated fat intake.

     Here is another interesting study done by Leddy, et 
al and published in 1997 in Medicine And Science In Sports 
And Exercise, Volume 29.  The subjects of this study were 
elite male and female endurance athletes who were placed 
alternately on a high fat diet and a low fat diet.  On a   
high saturated fat diet the patients maintained low body 
fat, normal weight, normal blood pressure, normal resting 
heart rate, normal triglycerides, and normal cholesterol 
levels.  All their fitness and training parameters were 
maintained at the elite level.  When put on the low fat 
diet, however, it was found that the low fat diet negated 
many of the beneficial effects that exercise is expected 
to produce.  The subjects actually suffered lower HDL 
cholesterol and higher triglycerides (both of which are 
significant CVD risk factors) on the low fat diet.

     Of course the propaganda against cholesterol and 
saturated fat has not been limited to mis-information
about CVD.  These delicious and nutritious fats have been 
blamed at one time or another for almost any disease you 
can think of -- including cancer.  Now a seven year study 
by researchers at the University of Cambridge published in 
the October 18, 1997 British Medical Journal showed that 
frequent consumption of red meat was not a contributor to 
cancer.  The major dietary factor associated with 
increased cancer incidence was a deficiency of vegetables.  
Meat consumption per se showed no correlation.

     All the while that the good news regarding saturated 
fats is finally coming before the public's eye -- the bad 
news about polyunsaturated fats is becoming ever more 
difficult for the processed food industry to hide.  
Recently the vegetable oils have been implicated as a 
causative factor in poor bone development and in
osteoporosis.  A study published in The Journal Of Bone 
and Mineral Research showed that the polyunsaturated fats 
inhibit bone growth as a result of their negative effect 
on prostaglandin balance.

     Having reaffirmed that saturated fat in the diet is 
good and unsaturated fat and sugar are bad, we should
look closely at the NUTRI-SPEC Fundamental Diet that you 
recommend for all your patients.
                          - 5 -


     The essential purposes of your NUTRI-SPEC Fundamental 
Diet are quite simply these:

1.  To insure that each patient obtains adequate nutrient 
intake (which requires the addition of Oxy B as a source 
of trace minerals).

2.  To help your patients achieve glycemic control -- 
since aberrations in sugar metabolism are a causative 
factor in CVD, in cancer, in allergies, in depression and 
anxiety, in fatigue, in PMS, and in nearly every other 
symptom or condition you can name.

3.  To avoid the highly toxic components of the common 
diet -- most particularly vegetable oils and aspartame.

     Think of it -- these are the most critical dietary 
considerations for every human being on the face of the 
earth -- and your NUTRI-SPEC Fundamental Diet achieves 
these three so simply and so effortlessly.  You have no  
patient who cannot comply with these recommendations, as 
they involve no extraordinary measures.  No one is 
required to eat any wild and exotic foods.  Neither is 
anyone required to totally delete from their diet any of 
the less than perfectly healthy foods that they may enjoy.

     The keystone of your fundamental diet involves eating 
three meals daily each of which contains several ounces of 
meat, fish, poultry, eggs, or dairy -- with a prescribed 
quantity of allowable carbohydrates in proper proportion 
to the animal protein consumed.

     Many of you have assumed that the requisite quantity 
of meat, fish, or poultry was designed to provide adequate
protein.  This is not strictly true.  The formula you use 
to obtain the number of ounces of meat, fish, or poultry a 
person requires at each meal yields a quantity of protein 
that is actually more than most people require as a 
percentage of their caloric intake.

     What is the more important intent of this thrice 
daily ingestion of "animal protein?"  It is to be certain 
that each patient is getting their required quantity of 
healthy saturated fat.  Remember -- these saturated fats 
are essential not only to brain structure and function, 
and cellular membrane structure and function, and cellular 
energy production, and hormone production, but are also 
the only means to obtain glycemic control.  In other words
it is saturated fats and only saturated fats that help 
your body regulate blood and brain sugar.

                          - 6 -


     There is one other point we need to make regarding 
your NUTRI-SPEC Fundamental Diet and the eating plan as it 
is presented in your Report of Findings that you give each 
patient.  When we put together this eating plan we 
included nuts as a permissible addition to the NUTRI-SPEC 
Fundamental Diet.  The reason we included this dangerous 
source of unsaturated fats requires some explanation here.  
Since by far the biggest problem with people's diets is 
that they cannot maintain glycemic control, we decided to 
give them something to eat in addition to their NUTRI-SPEC 
Fundamental Diet if they were still munchy after a 
balanced meal -- and something that would be less harmful 
than cookies or other sugary starchy garbage.

     This may or may not have been a mistake.  That 
inclusion of nuts may have helped people maintain glycemic 
control, but, it gave NUTRI-SPEC doctors and their 
patients the (wrong) idea that NUTRI-SPEC endorsed the 
ingestion of toxic unsaturated fats.

     Please keep in mind that all vegetable oils (with the 
exception of mono-unsaturated olive oil) are damaging.  
That means that all nuts and seeds are damaging.  There 
are some patients, however, for whom glycemic control is a 
problem of such great magnitude that a trade-off seems 
warranted -- trading peanuts for cookies.

     So -- your Report of Findings eating plan is written 
up that way but in all honesty I have to say that for more 
than 90% of your patients you should, while individual-    
izing the plan, strike a line through any mention of nuts.
In other words, at least 90% of your patients should 
totally delete from their diet salad dressings, margarine, 
mayonnaise, nuts and nut butters, and any foods cooked in 
polyunsaturated oils.  Even complying with those 
recommendations still leaves a person subjected to 
tremendous quantities of deadly oils just in the bread and 
other processed foods they eat.  Make your patients 
understand that all oils are harmful to a degree, and the 
only thing that makes them even more damaging is if you 
heat them or hydrogenate them.

     To drive this message home to your patients make the 
point that the damage of vegetable oils is expressed most 
generally in their contribution to premature aging, and, 
their damage to mitochondrial energy production.  For your 
purposes as a NUTRI-SPEC practitioner, keep in mind that
there really aren't too many conditions or symptoms that 
can't be made immediately worse by the ingestion of 
vegetable oils.

                     Sincerely,

                     Guy R. Schenker, D.C.


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