Nutrition Articles by Richard Kunin, MD

 Coenzyme Q should be called vitamin Q because the amount that the body can make is insufficient for the best of health, and extra amounts of Q must be obtained from food. That makes CoQ fit the definition of vitamin: a natural, organic substance in food that is required for health and survival. However the abbreviation, CoQ, has caught on and since it is concise it will continue in use.

Read more: Coenzyme Q10: A Miracle Vitamin

Diets low in fat and high in vegetables have become increasingly popular in the past few years. Major medical journals are now endorsing low fat and vegetarian diets as a health strategy.ⁱ However there may be a downside to the low fat health diet. In 1991 we began hearing reports of large numbers of people with blindness and nerve damage in Cuba. Over 50,000 cases have been reported,ii almost one victim for every two hundred people in Cuba, a country of about 10 million. Half the cases involved loss of vision and the others suffered pain and numbness. Imagine if that were to happen in the United States, with a population of 250 million: there would be almost a million Americans, some of them totally blind and others complaining of a dark cloud, blind spots and loss of color vision, and an equally large group with tingling, burning pain and numbness. Would that not be our number one national health problem? You bet.

Read more: Cyanide Poisoning: A Low-fat Diet Disease

Delusion, Error and Fluorosis: The DEF of Fluoridation

DELUSION AND DENIAL

In the previous two installments of the ABCDEF of Fluoridation I have described the dangers due to the accumulation of fluoride in our bodies, bone cancer in young men, bone fractures in our senior citizens, and a variety of diseases, especially digestive and skeletal that seem to be on the increase.  How can we pretend there is NO risk?  But that is exactly what almost all health professionals are forced to do.  They are presented the same one-sided information as everyone else: that fluoride is an essential mineral (which is not proved); that it reduces dental caries by 60 percent (which has never been verified) and that there is no danger to the public (which is clearly untrue). 

Read more: DEF of Fluoridation...Delusion, Error and Fluorosis

The name of Dr. Linus Pauling brings up an immediate association to his recommendation of vitamin C for the common cold.  Of even greater impact, however, is his endorsement of nutrition as a fundamental approach to health and treatment of disease, a concept for which he coined the name, orthomolecular.  In the past four decades the young specialty of orthomolecular medicine has advanced in large part because of the tremendous improvement in laboratory technology.  By now it is possible to obtain laboratory measurement of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, enzymes and hormones in almost any body tissue at a price that is relatively modest.  

Read more: Diagnostic Lead Testing: Pubic Hair Preferred

An apple a day may keep the doctor away--but not if it is juiced.  That seems to be the most obvious message from the recent outbreak of E. coli food poisoning that has been laid at the door of the Odwalla Juice Company.  By now almost everyone has heard about the severe dysentery that afflicted over 60 American children, one of whom died.  There were 10 cases in Seattle a day before Halloween and six of the patients said they had drunk an Odwalla apple juice product.  The county environmental health director was in a quandary about what to do.  On the one hand he lacked direct evidence that the E. coli O157 bacteria had actually come from Odwalla juice.  So he called FDA and initiated a bureaucratic conference involving 40 health officials nationwide in a massive conference that went on until past 3:00 AM. 

Read more: E. Coli And You

“I often have the feeling I have to go but when I get to the bathroom nothing happens. I am irregular and my stools tend to be thin and there is mucous. I am full of gas—I wake up with it in the morning and have to control it all the time. I feel fat because even if I lose weight my abdomen looks too big. After several medical examinations they find nothing wrong!”

The foregoing gives a patient’s view of the misery of spastic colon. Usually the doctors do find nothing demonstrably wrong with the bowel. It is simply the diet that doesn’t fit the individual. And the most frequent troublemaker is MILK! No, this is not allergy to casein, the milk protein. This is lactose intolerance, inability to digest the milk sugar. Lactose is the same, whether it is obtained from humans, cows, goats, sheep, horses, or camels. One cup of animal milk contains between two and three teaspoonfuls (10 to 15 grams) of lactose. As a rule, lactose intolerant people get bowel symptoms if they ingest more than 5 to 10 grams per day, i.e. less than a 8 ounces of milk.

Read more: Everybody Needs Milk

Something clicked in my mind this week, an insight that I have resisted for many years.  There is a bit of the contrarian in me, I must admit; but I do hold back, I fight the urge to find fault.  I do respect authority and I dread anarchy.  But I don’t believe in blind obedience in politics--and certainly not in questions of science.

However the fact is that our health bureaucracy, which is political, regulates medical research, products and commerce in most areas of vital personal interest, e.g. Food, Drugs and Health products and services in general.  The FDA is the only agency of our government with censorship powers that can abridge constitutional freedoms, such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press. 

Read more: Expertosis: Diseases Caused By Government Experts