Medicine Keeps Getting Heart Disease Wrong

History has a way of humbling doctors. When my father, Dr. W. Gifford-Jones, was a student at Harvard Medical School in the late 1940s, one of his professors – Paul Dudley White – told the class something that would be unthinkable today: heart attacks used to be rare. So rare, in fact, doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital clamoured to see any case that appeared.

Today, every 20 seconds, someone in North America has a heart attack. Every 37 seconds, someone dies from heart disease.

Something went wrong. It wasn’t a sudden failure of the human heart.

My father spent his career repeating the message: the medical establishment often gets it wrong, for decades.

Doctors mocked Semmelweis for telling them to wash their hands, and women died as a result. The British Navy ignored citrus fruit as a cure for scurvy for 60 years, and sailors died needlessly. Today, we’re told to fear cholesterol above all else and to trust cholesterol-lowering drugs as the solution to heart disease. Yet half the people who suffer heart attacks have normal cholesterol. If cholesterol were the villain, this would be impossible.

Japanese living in Japan and in California can have identical cholesterol levels. Yet the Californians have far more heart attacks. Scots have three times the rate of heart disease as Swedes with similar cholesterol numbers. Something else is going on.

Heart health is not rocket science. Eat real food. Exercise. Sleep. Maintain a healthy weight. Stay socially connected. Laugh. Relax.

Drugs don’t fix a lousy lifestyle. They mask the consequences.

Medicine’s obsession with cholesterol has done real harm. Cholesterol-lowering drugs come with side effects doctors are far too quick to dismiss.

Dr. Linus Pauling, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, and a two-time Nobel Prize winner asked a simple question: why don’t animals suffer heart attacks? And his finding? Animals make their own vitamin C. Humans don’t.

Vitamin C is essential for making collagen – the “mortar” that holds cells together. When collagen is weak, microscopic cracks develop in artery walls. The body tries to patch those cracks. Plaque forms. Blood clots follow.

Pauling showed that high doses of vitamin C – far beyond what’s needed to prevent scurvy – combined with lysine, an amino acid that strengthens collagen like steel rods in concrete, could help prevent and possibly reverse atherosclerosis.

After his own heart attack at age 74, my father had to choose. Follow cardiologists who insisted on cholesterol drugs he didn’t trust or follow nature’s rules. He chose nature. And he lived another 28 years.

An English optometrist, Dr. Sydney Bush, documented improvements in hardened retinal arteries – visible proof that arteries elsewhere in the body were improving too – using high-dose vitamin C and lysine.

My father eventually got tired of swallowing handfuls of vitamin C pills every day. He helped develop a powdered formula that made it easier to take the high doses required for cardiovascular support – not the tiny doses meant for fighting the common cold. His legacy formula, Giff’s Own CardioVibe, also includes CoQ10 and quercetin, nutrients known to support heart muscle function and reduce inflammation.

Yes, your immune system benefits too. People taking high doses of vitamin C get fewer infections. But that’s a bonus, not the main event.

Heart disease requires daily high doses of C — in February’s heart health month, and all year long, forever.

Will the medical establishment embrace this tomorrow? Don’t hold your breath. Vitamin C can’t be patented. There’s no fortune to be made. And natural solutions are the hardest for medicine to accept.

But if there’s one lesson my father taught me, it’s this: nature doesn’t break her own laws.

This column offers opinions on health and wellness, not personal medical advice. Visit www.docgiff.com to learn more. For comments, diana@docgiff.com. Follow on Instagram @diana_gifford_jones

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