Heart Surgeon Admits Medicine Made a Mistake

By Dwight Lundell, M.D.

Heart Stethoscope EKG

We physicians with all our training, knowledge, and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong.  So, here it is.  I freely admit to being wrong.  As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries, today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.

I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labeled “opinion makers.”  Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, as physicians, we insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.

The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter, of course we insisted, would lower cholesterol and heart disease.  Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in a malpractice claim.

It Is Not Working!

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible.  The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.

The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering, and dire economic consequences.

Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications, and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.

Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes, and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.

Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes.  Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended.  It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.

Inflammation is not complicated – it is quite simply your body’s natural defense to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin, or virus.  The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders.  However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process, a condition called chronic inflammation occurs. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.

What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body?  Well, smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully.

The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream diet that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels.  This repeated injury creates chronic inflammation which leads to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and obesity.  Let me repeat that. The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low-fat diet that has been recommended for years by mainstream medicine.

What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn, and sunflower which are found in many processed foods.

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. Let’s say you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.

Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.

Fresh Homemade Cinnamon Rolls

Does the smell of a sweet roll get your heart pumping? There’s a good reason…

While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond with alarm — as if a foreign invader declaring war had arrived. Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life, have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.

How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?

Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin, whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises, producing more insulin, and the glucose converts to stored fat.

What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When your blood sugar level spikes several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.

While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator – inflammation in their arteries.

Let’s get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goodie not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils, such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil and most processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6’s are essential —they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell – they must be in the correct balance with omega-3’s.

If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation. Today’s mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That’s a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today’s food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle that, over time, creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and finally, Alzheimer’s disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.

There is no escaping the fact that the more prepared and processed foods we consume, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.

There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose complex carbohydrates such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation-causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them. One tablespoon of corn oil contains 7,280 mg of omega-6; soybean contains 6,940 mg. Instead, use olive oil or butter from grass-fed beef.

Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labeled polyunsaturated. Forget the “science” that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that proclaims saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. In addition, the science that accuses saturated fat of raising blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.

The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that, in turn, created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.

What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not the ones your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.

Don’t Miss Jesse Cannone’s Interview with Dr. Lundell,
The 4 Real Reasons of Heart Trouble

Listen FREE with a No-Obligation Free Trial Membership
to Get Healthy & Fit®
Plus Get Over $100 In FREE Fitness Products
(Yours to keep whether you continue your membership or not!)

Click Here to Give It a Try & Listen Now!


About the Author:  Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital, Mesa, AZ. His private practice, Cardiac Care Center was in Mesa, AZ. Recently Dr. Lundell left surgery to focus on nutritional treatment of heart disease.

We highly recommend Dr. Lundell’s book The Great Cholesterol Lie, which can be purchased at www.greatcholesterollie.com.

Filed Under: General Health
Written By:  Updated:
my avatar

Jesse Cannone, CFT, CPRS, MFT

Jesse is the co-founder and visionary CEO of The Healthy Back Institute®, the world-leading source of natural back pain solutions. His mission as a former back pain sufferer is to help others live pain free without surgery and pharmaceuticals.

Sign Up Now For LESS PAIN, MORE LIFE Our FREE E-Newsletter…

Kiss your pain goodbye when you sign up to receive our free, LIVE PAIN FREE email newsletter, which is always full of the latest and most powerful, pain relieving information from the world’s leading pain relief experts.



Sign Me Up!

We are 100% Anti-Spam Compliant



1 thought on “Heart Surgeon Admits Medicine Made a Mistake”

  1. Esther Churchill says:

    This is just what Joe Morton and his team at Xango have been saying for 10 years! Thank you for being brave enough to speak the truth!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


The reCAPTCHA verification period has expired. Please reload the page.