Milestones on the Way to Eradicating Heart Disease

I would like to share with you an account of this advance in cardiovascular health, the milestones we have already passed, the obstacles we have overcome and the breathtaking perspective of the improvement of human health on a global level.

The Background

In 1990, I came to America with a discovery in my suitcase that would lead to a new scientific rationale in cardiovascular disease. The message was clear: vitamins are the key to the control of cardiovascular disease, the number one killer in the industrialized world. But this breakthrough was not immediately embraced. When I decided to give up my clinical career to pursue this research avenue, many of my colleagues in Germany warned me that working on vitamins would ruin my career.

During 1989, I presented lectures and introduced my research project to leading cardiovascular research centers in America, among them the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, the University of Chicago, the National Institutes of Health and the University of California at La Jolla. Everywhere, the new risk factor lipoprotein (a) was met with great interest, but work on vitamins was still considered too controversial. In early 1990, I accepted the invitation of Dr. Linus Pauling to work with him, only to discover that at age 89 he had become tired of fighting and a breakthrough for vitamins in medicine was nowhere in sight. Heartened by my discoveries, Pauling and I founded two companies in order to jump-start this process.

1990 was also the year when America’s worst prescription drug disaster came to light. An estimated 50,000 Americans had died from taking an anti-arrhythmic drug that actually caused arrest of the heartbeat and sudden cardiac death. This was the same number of people killed in the Vietnam War. A Congressional investigation established that the FDA had approved this drug without any controlled clinical studies. This tragedy is presented in Thomas Moore’s book Deadly Medicine, a must-read for everyone. Thus, while drug research had reached another deadlock, vitamins and essential nutrients as effective and safe alternatives were still ostracized by conventional medicine and restricted by the regulatory climate.

Nutritional medicine was a “stepchild” in America, but the situation was even worse in Europe. When you wanted to ship a bottle of 1,000 mg tablets of Vitamin C to Germany, it was returned by customs because vitamin C pills above 500 mg were considered drugs. This was the state of affairs only five years ago. It is with this background that we can truly appreciate the milestones we have reached and the obstacles we have been able to remove in the meantime. In the next section of this book, I will give you an account of this process from my personal experience.

Milestone 1: Breakthrough Discovery

The first step toward the control of cardiovascular disease was the discovery of the connection between lipoprotein (a) and vitamin C. The human body produces the risk factor lipoprotein (a) to compensate for a lack of the body’s own vitamin C production. As a result, every second human being dies from heart attacks and strokes, while cardiovascular disease is essentially unknown in the animal world. This discovery fueled my interest in vitamin research.

By 1991, the conceptual work was completed and I summarized it in two scientific articles: “Solution to the Puzzle of Human Cardiovascular Disease” and “A Unified Theory of Human Cardiovascular Disease Leading the Way to the Abolition of This Disease as a Cause of Human Mortality.” These publications presented for the first time the scientific rationale that heart attacks and strokes are preventable and that cardiovascular disease can be eradicated. I cited Linus Pauling, who supported these far-reaching conclusions, as co-author.

Milestone 2: New Understanding of the Nature of Cardiovascular Disease

The new understanding about the nature of cardiovascular disease is presented in detail in this book. This new understanding clarifies that the primary cause of cardiovascular disease is not high cholesterol or a high fat diet. These factors can only become risk factors if the wall of our arteries is already weakened by vitamin deficiency and only then. I had identified cardiovascular disease essentially as an early form of the sailor’s disease scurvy.

It also became clear that atherosclerotic plaques in our arteries are not random events; these plaques are simply a “scaffold” of nature to stabilize and repair the blood vessel walls once they have become weakened by vitamin deficiency. Finally, this new scientific rationale can also explain why we get infarctions of the heart and not of the nose or ears. Moreover, I found that most inherited disorders known today as risk factors for cardiovascular disease — including high cholesterol, triglycerides and homocysteine levels — can be ameliorated by high vitamin intake.

Obviously, a new scientific rationale that could suddenly explain so many unsolved mysteries about the number one health problem would not go unnoticed. At that time, it became clear to the pharmaceutical companies and medical opinion leaders that the cholesterol dogma and a huge prescription drug market would eventually collapse. The time this would take was dependent only on one factor: how fast the discovery of the scurvy-heart disease connection could be spread globally. Thus, it was in 1990 that a giant battle for public perception began with the trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry fighting for its survival.

But there were also other voices early on. One of the first encouraging messages came from Dr. Valentin Fuster, then head of cardiology at Harvard Medical School and later president of the American Heart Association. Already in 1992, Dr. Fuster wrote to me, “You may be quite correct in your predictions about the role of vitamin C in cardiovascular disease.” He stated that his own department would start in this line of research. Unfortunately, I have not heard any results since.

Milestone 3: Watershed Media Event

The next step in this process was the key media support for vitamins and nutritional medicine. The cover story “The Real Power of Vitamins” in the April 1992 issue of TIME Magazine was triggered by an international conference on vitamins held by the New York Academy of Sciences in February of that year. Many scientists contributed to this conference. I was privileged to be one of them, and introduced our new understanding about the nature of cardiovascular disease, including the key role of vitamins in its prevention.

After decades of bias and boycotts against vitamins in the media, this issue of TIME Magazine became a watershed event. Studies documenting the benefits of vitamins in the prevention of many diseases were no longer being automatically rejected. Only weeks after this TIME Magazine article, an important epidemiological study led by Dr. James Enstrom and his colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles received national attention. It showed that long-term vitamin C supplementation, as opposed to the average American diet, could cut the rate for heart disease almost in half. Thus, the suddenly available and positive media coverage led to a change of perception in favor of vitamins with worldwide repercussions.

Now, more than a decade later, the “media battle” about the health benefits of vitamins is still being waged with fierce opposition organized from drug companies rapidly losing ground.

Milestone 4: New Legislation Guarantees Free Access to Vitamins

In retrospect, 1992 was a remarkable year. On July 2, 1992, Linus Pauling and I held a press conference in San Francisco issuing a “Call for an International Scientific Effort to Eradicate Heart Disease.” Our simple but powerful message was that the scientific basis and means to eradicate heart disease — the number one cause of death in industrialized countries — were available.

Only weeks after this public announcement, the FDA, heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, launched another attack on vitamins. Their goal was to pass legislation that would make vitamins and other essential nutrients available by prescription only. Why did the FDA start this battle in 1991 and why was it the fiercest attack on nutritional supplements to have been waged? This book gives you the answer: If vitamins are the solution to the cardiovascular disease epidemic — a prescription drug market of over hundreds of billions of dollars annually is going to collapse.

But the people of America said “no” to these plans and defended their health freedom. In August 1994, the U.S. Congress unanimously passed legislation preserving free access to vitamins and other essential nutrients. This victory in the battle for vitamin freedom has a truly historic dimension, and it pro vided an important window of opportunity to win similar battles in other countries and eventually, worldwide.

Many contributed to this historic success, but most important were those millions of Americans who made it unmistakably clear to their political representatives that they would have free access to their vitamins today — and in the future! The medical breakthrough in vitamin C-heart disease research that triggered this battle also helped to win it.

Milestone 5: A Scientific Breakthrough Becomes Available for Everyone

Much of the power of this medical breakthrough comes from the fact that it has direct consequences for the health and lives of millions of people. Thus, it has to be presented in a language understandable to everyone. Dr. Rath's popular health books — including the one you are now reading — are written so everyone can understand this medical breakthrough and immediately take advantage of it.

Why has this step been so important? One hundred years ago, when bacteria was discovered as the cause of infectious diseases, it still took several decades before the first antibiotics and vaccines were developed.

Now, with the breakthrough in cardiovascular disease, no such time is needed. Vitamins and other essential nutrients, the solution to the cardiovascular disease epidemic, are available for everyone right now. Thus, the time it will take to control this epidemic depends on one main factor: the time it will take to spread the message about the health benefits of vitamins.

My books have already empowered millions of people to take greater responsibility for their own health. They share my books not only with their family and friends, but they also discuss them with their doctors and send them to their political representatives.

Over the years, the spread of this new information has had farreaching impacts: Major medical schools have integrated courses on nutrition in their teaching programs and nutritional medicine has become an accepted form of medicine for three out of four people. As opposed to 1992, today more people visit physicians and other health professionals who apply natural therapies than conventional physicians. These are just a few highlights documenting the dramatic transition of health care in the past decade.

Milestone 6: Cellular Medicine Foundation of a New Health Care System

The discovery of the nature of cardiovascular disease was just the beginning. With the course of further research, it became clear that most of today’s most widespread diseases have one common denominator: long-term vitamin deficiencies. The time had come to shape this new understanding as the broad scientific concept of Cellular Medicine, which has become the foundation of a new era of health care.

There are three main elements of Cellular Medicine that set this new health concept fundamentally apart from conventional medicine:

1. Cells vs. Organs: Health and disease are not determined at the level of organs, but at the level of millions of cells composing these organs. The long-term dietary deficiency of vitamins and other biocatalysts for cellular metabolism are the most frequent cause of cellular malfunction and disease.
2. Cause vs. Symptoms: Most pharmaceutical drugs are merely symptom oriented. Accordingly, pharmaceutical dependent conventional medicine has limited options for prevention, root cause treatment or elimination of diseases. In sharp contrast, the target of Cellular Medicine is to correct the impaired metabolism of cells, thereby allowing effective prevention, treatment and, eventually, elimination of the disease.
3. Patient Control vs. Dependency: Cellular Medicine not only allows millions of patients to understand the causes of diseases, but also gives them the means to correct these causes in the form of specific vitamins and essential nutrients. Conventional medicine frequently relies on Latin language to make it impossible for the patient to understand the cause of disease and creates dependencies on the therapeutic options offered by drug companies. In contrast, Cellular Medicine educates the patient about the basic functions of the body, the primary causes of diseases and the basic therapeutic options for prevention and correction. Thus, Cellular Medicine becomes the tool for millions of patients to liberate themselves from the deadlock of pharmaceutical medicine.

Cellular Medicine has become the scientific basis for health liberation not only for millions of patients, but also for the implementation of effective and affordable public health measures in many nations. In fact, Cellular Medicine has become synonymous with the worldwide transformation of profit-oriented medicine toward patient-oriented health care.

After the discovery of the nature of cardiovascular disease, the next milestone of Cellular Medicine was to identify the natural means to control cancer. Once again, our detailed understanding of cellular function paves the way so that the diagnosis “cancer” is no longer a death verdict for patients. That discovery, too, is being heavily fought because it inevitably destroys one of the most lucrative pharmaceutical markets — toxic cancer drugs (chemotherapy) and the drugs subsequently prescribed to ameliorate the inevitable health damage done by them.

The details of this discovery in cellular cancer research go beyond the scope of this book. They are documented in detail in my book Cancer and on our research website at www.drrath-research.org. These and other advances in Cellular Medicine are being investigated at our Cellular Medicine Research Institute in California.

Based on the breakthrough discoveries described in this book, we have developed natural health programs, which today are available around the world. At the same time, this medical breakthrough is featured on the Internet. Today, the website www.drrath.com has become the leading resource on the Internet for natural health information.

Of course, a breakthrough of this magnitude triggered massive reactions on the part the pharmaceutical industry, which had to defend its trillion dollar stake. These reactions can be summarized as “fight it” and “use it.” The principle reaction of the pharmaceutical industry was to categorically fight this breakthrough in natural health by seeking to impose “protectionist laws,” not only in the U.S., but worldwide. Since this would take several years to accomplish, some pharmaceutical companies decided — in the meantime — to take economic advantage of this breakthrough. This criminal conspiracy for the price-fixing of vitamin raw materials is known today as the “Vitamin Cartel.”

Milestone 8: Vitamin Cartel

By the turn of the century, the world’s largest pharmaceutical and nutritional companies, including Hofmann-La Roche, BASF, Rhône-Poulenc, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Takeda and other multinational corporations, had admitted to forming a so-called “vitamin cartel” to conduct criminal pricefixing for vitamin raw materials. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide were defrauded for almost a decade and had to pay artificially high prices for vitamins and certain other essential nutrients. The U.S. Justice Department declared that this vitamin cartel was the largest cartel ever discovered and named it an “economic conspiracy.” Hoffman-La Roche, BASF and the other cartel members agreed to pay more than one billion dollars in fines in the U.S. for committing these crimes.

While the audacity of these criminal practices and the magnitude of this consumer fraud made headlines around the world, no one asked the decisive question: Who or what triggered the formation of this global cartel? Coordinated criminal activities of this nature just don’t appear out of nowhere. They are the result of corporate greed, and the direct consequence of events that promised financial benefits for the criminal conspirators that far outweighed any risk of getting caught.

The background of this illegal vitamin cartel is the scientific breakthrough documented in this book in relation to vitamins and the prevention of cardiovascular disease. Already at the beginning of 1990, I had informed Hofmann-La Roche about these discoveries. On June 2, 1990, I sent a summary of the discovery that heart attacks and strokes are — like scurvy — the result of vitamin C deficiency to Professor Jürgen Drews, head of Hofmann-La Roche Research Worldwide and a member of its executive board.

Hofmann-La Roche is the world’s leading manufacturer of vitamin C raw material. Hofmann-La Roche executives realized immediately that my discovery would boost their international demand for vitamin C and create a multi-billion dollar market for it and other vitamins. In order to get further information from me, the executives of Hofmann-La Roche signed a confidentiality agreement and invited me to represent the new understanding of heart disease at their global headquarters in Basel, Switzerland. However, Hofmann-La Roche decided not to promote this medical breakthrough, despite the fact that they acknowledged it as such. The reasons they gave to me in writing were that Hofmann-La Roche did not want to finance the dissemination of this understanding of heart disease for all their competitors, and they did not want to compete with other in-house pharmaceutical drug developments, such as cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Thus, while they refused to promote this medical breakthrough, which could have saved millions of lives, this pharmaceutical company turned around and decided to conspire in the formation of a vitamin cartel in order to take advantage of the breakthrough. Hofmann-La Roche apparently invited BASF, Rhone-Poulenc, Takeda and other manufacturers of vitamin raw materials to engage in criminal price-fixing on a global level. The fraudulent profits these companies made from their criminal practices may have reached hundreds of billions of dollars over the past 10 years. Compared to that, the fines these companies had to pay were insignificant.

Not only should governments have sued these companies for the damage they had done, but above all, consumers worldwide should have filed class action lawsuits against them. These companies have harmed millions of people twice: First, they knowingly refused to promote and disseminate livesaving information about the use of vitamins for the prevention of heart disease, thereby causing millions of heart patients to die unnecessarily over the past 10 years. Second, they caused financial damage to hundreds of millions of people — literally every vitamin consumer on earth.

My correspondence with Hofmann-La Roche executives also proves the statements they and others made that the corporate executives did not know about these criminal activities were lies. The opposite is true: These corporate executives not only knew about these crimes, they were the organizers. The executives responsible for these crimes should be prosecuted and held responsible for their actions.

While that may take time, one benefit is already here today. All these companies have pleaded guilty to criminal activities. Thus, everyone can describe these companies and their executives for what they are — criminals who distinguish themselves from a street robber only by the magnitude of their crimes.

Milestone 9: Protecting Natural Health Freedom Against the Pharmaceutical Cartel

The principal strategy of the globally operating pharmaceutical cartel was the fundamental obstruction of the breakthrough documented in this book. Its primary goal was — and still is — to achieve a global ban on the dissemination of related natural health information and natural therapies.

With the battle to make vitamins prescription items in the U.S. lost, the pharmaceutical industry decided to regroup at the international level. In 1995, they launched a global campaign to outlaw all health information about vitamins and other natural, non-patentable therapies. Toward this end, the pharmacartel even abuses the international political institutions, such as the European Parliament and the United Nation’s “Codex Alimentarius Commission.”

The pharma-cartel’s Codex plans are a desperate effort by the international pharmaceutical industry to secure its survival as we know it today. If they lose this global battle — similar to the defeat in the U.S. — vitamins will become accepted worldwide as powerful preventive and therapeutic agents that benefit millions of people, and substantially reduce the markets for pharmaceutical drugs.

For almost 10 years now, the pharmaceutical cartel has been coordinating its “Codex” plans in Germany — until recently — the lead export nation of pharmaceutical products. In “closed door meetings,” they have been trying to push their plan for a global ban on vitamin therapies through the United Nations with no success. Together with patients and friends of our Health Alliance, we have been able to block these unscrupulous efforts again and again.

In 1996, 1998, 2000, 2001 and 2002, these unscrupulous plans to restrict health freedom worldwide were on the agenda of the Berlin Codex meetings. The main reason why these plans could not be passed were our protests against them. These protests came in different forms, including rallies, health conferences, Open Letters in newspapers, info-mailings, letters by patients to Codex delegates and many other actions. Particularly effective were petition drives in the form of email campaigns. In 2002, the number of emails sent to Codex members, politicians and governments supporting the Codex plans of the pharma-cartel surpassed 650 million from around the world. In parallel efforts, the drug companies were also trying to abuse national parliaments, as well as regional institutions.

Most recently, they twisted the arm of the European Parliament and its cabinet (European Commission). On the day in March 2002 when the vote on the restriction of natural health for the people of Europe was voted on, so many protest emails arrived at the EU Parliament that the entire email system was shut down — for the first time in its history.

What have we accomplished with these protests? A lot! First, we have prevented the unethical pharma-cartel plans for a global ban on natural therapies from being implemented long ago. Second, we have convinced Codex delegates from South Africa and other countries, primarily from the developing world, that by supporting the pharma-cartel’s Codex plans, they are not solving, but actually aggravating the health problems in their countries and increasing the dependency on the pharma-cartel.

Most importantly, we have informed millions of people about these unscrupulous plans. These people, among them scientists, doctors and politicians, were enabled to see behind the deceptive smoke screen of “consumer protection” and “trade standards” drawn up by the pharma-cartel as a pretense for their protectionist laws.

Many times during those years, I gave speeches on behalf of the people of the world. I spoke for millions of people in America, Asia, Africa and Europe. I spoke for the present generation and for generations yet to come. All these millions had one thing in common: the unscrupulous plans of the pharma-cartel directly affected their health and lives, and many of them did not even know about it.

When the history pages about the liberation of human health are one day written, they will be about the years when this liberation was most threatened. I am not asking you where you were all those years. Reading this book may be the first time that you have heard about the unethical plans of the pharmacartel. But now that you have learned about it, I am asking you: “What are you going to do?”

One thing is clear: Without you speaking out for your very own health interests, the pharmaceutical interest groups may still reverse everything we have accomplished so far.

Milestone 10: Building a Natural Health Movement Worldwide

There is no doubt: The turn from the second to the third millennium coincides with a change in health care worldwide. Millions of people are waking up and realizing that they have become dependent on a deceptive health concept that is little more than an illusion. The fact that it took so long to unmask this fraud is no surprise, either. Those who benefit financially from this deception — the pharmaceutical industry — are doing everything to cover it up. The information in this book has been a key factor in bringing the truth to light. Now that the scientific facts can no longer be suppressed, patients and health professionals are taking advantage of these breakthroughs in natural health. Tens of thousands of people worldwide are already working implementing a new health care system — irrespective of where they live.