Abstract
Addressing the effect of nutrition on heart disease requires a dialogue somewhat different from contemporary practice.
Heart disease is used here as a generic name for at least a dozen or more cardiovascular disease subtypes. Each subtype has its own identity, its own causes, its own pathology, its own biochemistry, and its own treatment protocols. Although disease specification certainly has advantages, it also has a shortcoming that is commonly overlooked. The more detailed this information is, the more difficult it is to comprehend prevention and treatment protocols that may benefit all heart disease subtypes.
Questions arise, for example, whether information specific for one disease subtype applies to other subtypes. This likely requires additional research, regulatory development, and health claims oversight. However effective this information may be, increasing disease fragmentation and specification nonetheless increases opportunities for confusion, both for the public and the practitioner.
Relying on specialized information, however, presents a serious dilemma for understanding nutrition, unless it is characterized by specific nutrients in food, specific mechanisms of action for each nutrient, and specific heart disease subtypes. This is reductionism, which is the popular but incorrect perspective on nutrition.
In contrast, wholist interpretation of nutrition refers to the combined biologic activities of countless nutrients when consumed as food, and countless metabolic activities for each nutrient, working in unison when the proper food is consumed. At the tissue level during metabolism, this dynamic is highly sensitive to change, and it does so very rapidly. Change simultaneously occurs with changing supply of nutrient substrate and changing demand of the tissues. The default position for nutrition, by definition, is that which optimizes health, prevents, and even reverses (treats) disease development. Numerous enzymatic and hormonal mechanisms, acting like transistor switches, are available to manage this extraordinary dynamic.
Oft cited evidence shows that nutrition, when properly understood and used, can control as much as 70-85% of the premature mortality caused by cardiovascular disease. This nutrition is ideally powered by whole foods from the plant kingdom, with nutrients acting wholistically in the body in a way to benefit all disease subtypes, even though effect size and outcome responses for each heart disease subtype may differ.