Save Your Sight!

by Marc R. Rose

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  10

  Keeping Your Blood Vessels Strong

  Now that you know how important good digestion and absorption of nutrients is to healthy eyes, let’s take a look at your nutrient delivery system, otherwise known as your circulatory system. The cells of your eyes are fed with oxygen and nutrients through tiny blood vessels; if these are clogged or damaged, guess what? Your eyes literally start to die. That’s how important good circulation is to clear vision, and why we’re going to take you on an extended journey through the circulatory system. But first let’s introduce you to Fred.

  Fred came to us for a checkup because for a few months he had noticed that his eyeglasses weren’t strong enough, and he was concerned because he had been in for a new prescription just a year ago. Fred is a go-getter, an overachiever who has had great success in his professional life. He’s one of those energetic people who thrive on the kind of stress the rest of us would rather avoid. He loves to eat, he smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, and has a couple of martinis when he gets home from the office. He’s always felt fine and been healthy, so he has never worried about his health.

  But when Fred walked into the office on the day of his appointment, we hardly recognized him. He had gained a few pounds, and he looked sallow and exhausted. Still, he managed an enthusiastic greeting. As I examined him, I asked him how things were going.

  “Not great,” he said. “My vision is getting foggy. I look at things that should be straight, and they’re bent. I went for my physical two months ago, and they prescribed three different drugs because I have high blood pressure and high cholesterol. They flipped out when I told them I had some chest pains. I guess now that I’m over fifty, everything is catching up with me.”

  “How do the drugs make you feel?” I asked.

  “Awful. I’m tired all the time, and for the first time in my life I’m impotent. I can’t tell you how bad that feels, Doc. It makes me feel old, like it’s all downhill from here.” He started to cough. “Oh, and they want me to quit smoking and switch from martinis to red wine. I’m not a red-wine kind of guy. And they want me to exercise, but who has the time?”

  After the exam was finished, I had to tell Fred that he had the first signs of macular degeneration, a disease of gradually failing vision. I explained that I could see from the condition of the blood vessels in his eyes that his circulation wasn’t great. The age spots on his retinas showed that left alone, his eyes would most likely continue to deteriorate, with loss of central vision a distinct possibility. Fred was shocked. “What can I do, Doc? I’ll do anything. I can’t lose my sight.”

  I told Fred that if he was going to save his vision, he needed to make changes in lifestyle even more drastic than his internist had asked for, and that I needed 100 percent cooperation. Fred said he would give 200 percent if it would save his vision, and made an appointment with our staff nutritionist. She created an individually tailored program of diet, supplements, and exercise for healing his eyes. We also asked him to work with his internist to get off the prescription drugs as his health improved because we knew they would only aggravate his eye problems.

  Six months later, Fred returned to see us, and this time he looked like his younger, healthier self. He had lost his sizable belly. His skin was smooth, and his color was wonderful. Best of all, he was smiling.

  “Dr. Rose!” he hollered when he saw me. “You saved my life! I’m off all the drugs. My blood pressure and my cholesterol are perfect. I kicked the cigarette habit and cut my work hours. I’m playing racquetball with a friend from the office and,” he whispered conspiratorially, “I’m not impotent anymore.”

  “That’s great, Fred,” I replied, “but how are your eyes?”

  “Oh, right, they’re fine, they’re great. My vision isn’t bent anymore, and my old glasses are working fine again.” When I checked Fred’s eyes I could see very little sign of the circulation problems that had shown up earlier, and told him that as long as he stuck with his new lifestyle, his eyes would be fine. There are millions of people afflicted with the same problems as Fred. High blood pressure and blood cholesterol, heart pains known as angina, and clogged blood vessels throughout the body are epidemic in America. And yet, if you take care of your circulatory system, you can avoid these problems almost entirely.

  Once you understand the miraculous nature of the system of blood vessels that your body uses to bring oxygen and nutrients to all its cells, we hope you’ll want to do everything you can to keep it healthy. We don’t want you to change your lifestyle out of fear of becoming sick; do it because you want to enjoy as many happy, active years as possible. It can be a positive, life-enhancing choice.

  Let’s Take a Journey through Your Bloodstream

  Blood brings life to your cells. It’s a unique fluid that carries vital substances throughout the body to every cell. Blood carries

  • Oxygen.

  • Nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, and amino acids.

  • Immune cells such as white blood cells for defense against infection.

  • Substances that cause blood to clot when there is an injury.

  • Substances such as cholesterol for repairing injuries to blood vessel walls.

  • Dozens of hormones that regulate bodily functions.

  • Waste products your cells produce, such as carbon dioxide and urea.

  Ninety-one percent of your blood is water, which is one very good reason why we want you to drink plenty of clean water every day, and why that is one of the Ten Steps described in Chapter 1. All told, blood makes up 8 percent of your body weight.

  Arteries carry oxygen-laden blood from the heart to the rest of the organs, while the veins bring it back once its oxygen has been unloaded. Every twenty-six seconds, our arteries and veins recirculate about 5.25 quarts of blood from the heart and lungs to the organs and tissues and back again.

  The Arteries: Your Nutrient and Oxygen Delivery System

  We’ll start our journey through the bloodstream in the left side of the heart. This half of the heart muscle is divided from the other half by a thick wall called the septum. Although the two halves of the heart beat in synchrony, they function as separate pumps, so we’ll look at them separately.

  The blood within the atrium, the top chamber of the left side of the heart, is bright red, indicating that it is saturated with oxygen. As it contracts, the blood rushes through a valve into the ventricle, the lower half of the left heart. The sound of this valve closing is the familiar “lub” of the heart sound. The ventricle contracts almost immediately after the atrium does, and when another valve closes behind the blood, the “dub” heart sound is heard.

  Each heartbeat pumps about a third of a cup out into your arteries. The big artery we’ve passed into, the aorta, is just the beginning of a huge system of arteries running throughout the body. Arteries have muscle in their walls that contract to help rush blood along to where it’s needed. The aorta branches out into smaller arteries. A healthy artery is much more than a channel for blood to flow through. There are several layers, all of which play their own roles in the vessel’s health and disease.

  Not Just a Simple Tube

  The arteries aren’t just simple tubes that blood courses through. They have three layers, each with its own function and its own type of cellular structure.

  The inner wall (endothelium) of the artery is a smooth membrane packed with special receptors for substances needed to feed and repair itself and the tissue behind it. As molecules such as cholesterol (for cell-building) and growth factors (to control cell growth) whiz by in the blood, endothelium receptors identify and “catch” them, bringing them through to the central layer of the artery. Some cells that make up the endothelium secrete substances that can cause the artery wall to constrict or expand, while other substances affect the clotting of blood.

  The middle layer of the artery is made of tough connective tissue and smooth muscle that moves blood along in a wave-like motion. This is t
he location of the lumps and clumps called plaques and lesions, that block the arteries. The smooth muscle of this inner layer contracts when you are excited, stressed, or angry, and relaxes when you are relaxed. This is why stress and anger can contribute so significantly to a heart attack.

  The outermost layer of the arteries is rich in blood vessels, and brings nutrients and oxygen to the other layers of the artery. Just as the heart muscle needs its own blood vessels because it can’t absorb what it needs from the blood that pumps through it, the blood flowing through the arteries is “off-limits” to the artery wall. These structures have their own separate blood flow.

  Exchanging Oxygen and Nutrients for Waste

  As vessels continue to branch off the large arteries, they become smaller in circumference. These smaller vessels are called arterioles. Branching from these are even smaller vessels called capillaries.

  Capillaries number in the billions, and they are responsible for letting what each cell needs out of the bloodstream. Simultaneously, wastes from that area of tissue that surrounds the capillary enter the blood so that they can be excreted. The density of capillaries in your muscle is 2,000–3,000 per sq. mm!

  A capillary is only the thickness of a human hair, and the membrane that lines it is only one cell thick. Red blood cells pass through in single file. Healthy capillary membranes are porous enough to let nutrients and oxygen in and wastes out, but not so much that vital blood components and proteins can escape the bloodstream.

  Back to the Heart

  Now the blood, having given up most of its oxygen and nutrient supply, and loaded with waste products including carbon dioxide, travels out of the capillaries and into small veins, called venules, for the journey back to the heart.

  The venules converge into the veins. There is no muscle in the walls of the veins; blood pools in these vessels, and the blood pressure is much lower than in the arterial system. Blood is drawn back to the heart by a pressure gradient, in a kind of suction similar to what happens when you drink liquid through a straw. You create negative pressure with your mouth, which draws fluid up the tube against gravity. The muscles of your arms and legs help to actively pump blood back towards the heart. This is why exercise, or even body movement of any kind, is so important to good circulation. Your blood will circulate back to the heart even if you aren’t moving your body, but it certainly moves better when you move.

  From the Right Heart to the Lungs

  Loaded with wastes and low in oxygen, the blood returns to the right side of the heart. Lub!—through the right atrium; Dub!—through the right ventricle, and on into the lungs, where the vessels again branch out into minuscule capillaries so that oxygen can pass into the blood and carbon dioxide can pass into the lungs. The carbon dioxide is exhaled. Newly oxygen-laden blood travels from the lungs through what is called the pulmonary (meaning “lung-related”) vein and back into the left heart, where our journey began.

  Lost on the Circulatory Highway

  Sarah is in her late sixties, a widow, and very independent. Her great love is painting seascapes near her home in Santa Monica. “Dr. Rose,” she said, “no matter which way I look, there’s a dark tunnel around what I see. I can still see, but I’m afraid it will get worse and I’ll have to give up my painting.”

  I asked Sarah if her health was generally good. “Except for a touch of high blood pressure, yes,” she said. “My doctor gives me pills, and I hardly notice a difference except that I have to get up two or three times at night to use the bathroom. Still, the doctor says I have to lose fifty pounds before I can go off the medication. I just don’t think I’ll ever get there. He says I should exercise too, but I’m not sure how to start. It’s been so long.”

  “What about your diet?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’ve been so good about it. I eat almost no fat at all. Just pasta and bread. All those low-fat foods, like cheeses and skimmed milk and saltine crackers. They make some nice no-fat desserts that I just adore, thank goodness! I know I should eat more veggies and fruit. I do like to have a muffin at breakfast with a pat of butter.” Sarah thought she was doing the right thing for her health by avoiding fat, but fat would have been almost preferable to her diet of refined white flour and sugar.

  As I examined Sarah I saw the telltale signs of circulatory glaucoma: constricted blood vessels behind her retinas, low fluid pressure, and a pale optic nerve. I knew that the drugs she was taking were diuretics, and the frequent urination they caused was the reason her blood pressure had normalized. It hadn’t helped her eye vessels, and had probably made her problems worse. When you flush too much fluid from the system, vital electrolytes and water-soluble vitamins are flushed out as well.

  Nor were her blood vessels well nourished by her diet of white flour and sugar, so it was a double whammy. I knew that if she took steps to improve her nutrition, Sarah’s vessels would repair themselves and her vision would improve.

  During Sarah’s follow-up visit, after she had been on a program of diet and exercise for three months, her vision had stopped deteriorating. Within six months her eye vessels looked stronger and better able to carry blood to her optic nerve. After nine months she brought us one of her paintings, a gorgeous view of the California sunset. “Thanks to you, I won’t miss any of these,” she said.

  What Can Go Wrong with Arteries

  You can imagine that if the big, strong arteries coming out of the heart are narrowing due to an accumulation of plaques and lesions, other blood vessels are equally affected, and your billions of capillaries will start dying off.

  Here are some of the many ways that blood vessel blockage can affect you:

  • When the blood vessels to the brain are blocked, the result is a stroke or loss of mental function.

  • Loss of blood to the legs causes painful cramps with very little activity.

  • Loss of blood to the fingers and toes causes numbness and tingling, and in some diabetics may even result in amputation.

  • Loss of circulation to the blood vessels that feed the eyes can result in macular degeneration and other eye diseases.

  • Loss of circulation to the liver doesn’t allow it to cleanse your blood of toxins the way it should. If your blood circulates back through the heart still loaded with waste matter, it will contribute to damaged blood vessels.

  • Blockage of the carotid arteries in the neck, which bring blood to the head, can cause strokes and loss of sight.

  If arteries are clogged, the capillaries don’t get the blood flow they need to stay healthy, and they become leaky. Circulation is impeded, and cells die from lack of oxygen and nutrients. Tiny and delicate, capillaries are vulnerable to becoming clogged by clots that come loose from artery walls (this is called thrombosis) or to becoming encrusted with unhealthy calcium deposits. All of these problems prevent the capillary from doing its work.

  If the capillary membranes become too fragile due to lack of sufficient oxygen and nutrients, red blood cells leak through and cause hemorrhage, and fluid leaks through and causes swelling. This is one way that poor circulation to the delicate vessels that nourish your eyes can lead to macular degeneration and other eye diseases.

  Putting Risk Factors into Perspective

  There are a number of well-known “risk factors” for artery disease. High blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, and family history of heart disease are probably most familiar to you. But some of these risk factors have been given more importance than they deserve because research and publicity about them has been driven by drug company funding, advertising, and education programs. That’s right. Those screening programs at your local clinic or drugstore are sponsored by your friendly drug company, whose main mission is to get you to take their drug.

  The research studies showing that high cholesterol and high blood pressure must be lowered to treat heart disease is funded by drug companies. If these risk factors were that important on their own, we would have eradicated heart disease a long time ago because choleste
rol-lowering and hypertension drugs handle those symptoms very effectively. There must be more to it.

  Let’s take a more unbiased look at heart disease risk factors and put it in some perspective.

  High blood cholesterol is an indication that you have heart disease, but it is an effect of heart disease, not a cause. The real culprit is oxidized LDL (“bad”) cholesterol and a component of some cholesterol called lipoprotein(a), identified by Linus Pauling and Mathias Rath, M.D., as an important factor in clogging blood vessels. When low antioxidant levels allow oxidation damage to arteries, lipoprotein(a), which has a sticky quality, comes along and tries to repair the damage. This is good news if you’re about to spring a leak in an artery, but bad news if you’re low on antioxidants and the lipoprotein(a) just keeps piling on. If your arteries aren’t damaged, normal cholesterol floating through your blood is not going to hurt you.

  Let’s look at what actually happens in the artery when it becomes oxidized or clogged:

  • The vessel wall is injured.

  • The blood rushing through the injured vessel sends blood cells called platelets to the site of the injury, forming a kind of clot. This is the body’s normal healing response.

  • Due to the same factors that injured the artery, the injury doesn’t heal quickly, and the small clot attracts more platelets and secretes a substance that causes the vessel to constrict. This is an attempt to control blood flow past the injury, but it can also result in further injury to the vessel. If you’re under a lot of stress, and have a lot of adrenaline coursing through your body, your blood is more likely to clot too much around an injury.

  • Other substances at the injury site cause tissue growth and cell migration into the injury, which are healthy responses in a normal body. But if the blood is overly thick, there is too much buildup of tissue growth at the site. White blood cells also stick to the area and accumulate cholesterol from the bloodstream. This cholesterol-filled cell is called a macrophage.