Metabolic Cardiology is a concept he developed to revitalize the heart through targeted nutraceuticals that help stimulate healthy enzymatic and bioenergetic reactions in cells. Translated: Foods can revive the heart by stimulating cells!
Maximize the amount of oxygen your heart extracts from your bloodstream by accelerating the rate at which your cells convert nutrients to energy.
This approach focuses on the supplemental use of key nutrients such as CoQ10 and Magnesium
Heart Cells Renew and People With Heart Failure Thriving and OFF Transplant Lists!
Excerpt: Heart cells renew and people with heart failure OFF transplant lists and thriving over 30 years later while on supplements for supporting their ATP, the energy of the mitochondria!
Author’s Note to the 2011 Revised Edition
The two most important parts of this book are his brief introduction at the beginning and a chapter at the end where he shows the dosages of the supplements he uses for each condition.
The first important section of the book is called author’s note to the latest revised edition, where Dr. Sinatra overthrows the old medical consensus with science that shows the latest research proving ‘heart cells actually DO renew’. Finally this is the science to back up the types of results naturopathic doctors had been getting all along with nutritional therapies. The old medical consensus ‘that heart cells don’t renew’ was what regular medical doctors used to be taught prior to 2003 and it could be 30-40 years before they have all caught up with the latest science which means they are not telling you and it is not yet embraced by standard cardiology care – to date. To date, patients tend to get passed on a message of hopelessness instead of hope aregarding heart failure and blocked arteries, so one of Dr. Sinatra’s primary goals is to restore hope in the patient, and then healing.
The ability of heart cells to renew is a real game changer in outlook for us patients with heart failure or heart damage, and going by the 37 years and counting of Sinatra’s heart patients off the heart transplant list and thriving, this gives significant hope for as full a lifespan as an individual without heart failure.
The second best chapter in my opinion is some pages at the end where Dr. Sinatra lists all the different conditions that would benefit from the supplements he discusses and precisely what quantities he uses for those – bearing in mind that Dr. Sinatra has over 30 years clinical experience in this as a cardiologist.
Of course all the chapters in between have great information too and I’ll get round to them next after this review, but I’m starting with the chapters on ‘hope and strategies’, with a bit of thought and research input along the way.
New Research Finds Heart Cells DO Renew Themselves!
For years the consensus in medical science was that heart muscle cells could not be regenerated. The generally accepted theory was these muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, grow bigger during childhood but they don’t divide and renew. But since 2009 there has been new evidence that they do actually renew themselves. Swedish cellular biologists published their research in April 2009 in Science, and in a later review of that Swedish study, doctors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Cardiovascular Institute confirmed in the New England Journal of Medicine that the Swedish study provided the most definitive evidence to date that human cardiomyocytes are renewed during postnatal life.
However notice the definition and terminology used there, that is the sort of 'definitive evidence' medical science looks for, whereas when someone recovers they refer to that as 'anecdotal evidence', that has not been proved in a lab. So it's not that people never recovered from serious illnesses before, but 'mere recovery' just 'doesn't count scientifically'. The history of healing shows people recovering heart strength all along by natural means if you know where to look, and Sinatra immediately gives the example of a patient of his own from the early 1980's who has seen heart cell renewal with certain supplements which he now calls his 'awesome foursome' and is still thriving today and yet at that time in 1981 had severe heart failure and was on a heart transplant list.
Woman Gets Off Heart Transplant List With Nutritional Supplements
It was a form of heart failure called postpartum cardiomyopathy, a rare condition in a young woman who had just given birth, and doctors believe it could be that the fetus drains some vulnerable mothers of vital nutrition.
Dr. Sinatra was the attending hospital cardiologist in 1981 when a woman named Joan was rushed to the emergency room with severe shortness of breath two weeks after giving birth. He used the conventional therapies of the day to get her out of the crisis, however her condition didn’t improve much over the next two years seeing other cardiologists and she came back to his office for a consultation and second opinion. Her ejection fraction was in the range of 15 percent versus a normal reading of 55-70 percent, and she was on a heart transplant list.
By the early 1980s Dr. Sinatra says he had become interested in nutrition and was following the work of Karl Folkers at the University of Texas on coenzyme Q10, CoQ10.
Folkers and his colleagues at the University of Texas identified a consistent CoQ10 deficiency in heart failure patients.
Sinatra explains that to give Joan CoQ10 was experimental by conventional standards back in the 1980s but there was no reason not to try it, the worst that could happen was the supplement wouldn’t help her, so he decided to go ahead and try it, starting real low at first.
He explained to her that anyone could be at risk for a nutritional deficiency of CoQ10 or any other nutrient due to a number of contributing factors, including taking certain medications, eating an inadequate diet, or having a genetic defect that interferes with the absorption of dietary CoQ10. Those scenarios could be at play in the background when suddenly she was in a situation where extra critical nutrients were needed and tipped the balance to create dangerous deficiences making her susceptible to heart failure.
Joan’s Journey
Dr. Sinatra explains that Joan was his first patient that he tried nutritional supplements on and she is thriving as of the time of writing this book, 2011, 30 years later.
As one of the first patients on CoQ10, he started with a low dose and when he saw she had no negative side effects he doubled that dose and also put her on a multivitamin and mineral formula, plus extra vitamin C
Joan continued to follow his program while waiting for a transplant, and when her name finally came up she was feeling better and wondering if she should actually go ahead with the operation. She had an impossible decision to make whether or not to take that available heart and risk never getting another chance. Her intuition led her to turn down the transplant and stay on the program.
By this time Dr. Sinatra was becoming more comfortable using CoQ10 and increased Joan’s dose again, from the initial 10mg three times a day, up to 20mg thrice a day, to now giving her 30mg three times a day, and added additional supplements into the mix like magnesium. Looking back, Dr. Sinatra now considers Joan his first real case study of Metabolic Cardiology.
Notice that Sinatra was getting results for Joan with only 20mg of CoQ10 three times a day which is a total of 60mg, and his multivitamin and multimineral and vitamin C - he had NOT YET ADDED the L-carnitine and ribose in his awesome foursome and yet he had already got a woman with heart failure off the heart transplant list! Metabolic Cardiology is a concept he developed to revitalize the heart through targeted nutraceuticals that help stimulate healthy enzymatic and bioenergetic reactions in cells.
He applied this idea to ailing heart cells first with CoQ10, then magnesium, then in the late 1990’s with L-carnitine. About 6 years ago he added D-ribose, which would have been around 2005. This is now 2018 and according to his website Dr. Sinatra is still using D-ribose with great success.
This ‘awesome foursome’ does an awesome job of increasing ATP throughout the body and revitalizing weak, ailing hearts like Joan’s. This is medicine working in the engine room, so to speak, of each cell.
39% of Heart Failure Cases in 1990s Stated as ‘Idiopathic’
Dr. Sinatra describes an American College of Cardiology meeting he attended in Southern California in the mid-1990s, sitting among thousands of cardiologists listening to a lecturer from the UK say that there had been a dramatic increase in new heart failure cases in the UK, and 39% of the cases were idiopathic, meaning they couldn’t find a cause for the heart failure.
Yet Sinatra felt that what was being called ‘idiopathic’ was likely due to nutritional deficiencies, yet ”nutritional deficiency is not a common consideration of cardiologists, not then, and to their continuing shame, not even now”
By integrating nutrition into my treatment strategies I had significantly separated myself from mainstream cardiology that still is blindly locked into the pharmaceutical paradigm. Every case of heart failure I have seen over the years has improved by at least some demonstrable degree with this approach.
However he points out that Joan’s journey was no plain sailing either, at various times she experienced episodes of arrhythmia, shortness of breath, some asthmatic problems, and arthritis. ”However the quality of her life changed dramatically and from very early on, the program emancipated her from heart failure. At the time of writing in January 2011, Joan was nearly 60 and her ejection fraction has been holding for years in the high 40s, ‘just a tad south of normal’. She has no shortness of breath and her arrhythmias are under control.
In my opinion, maybe if Joan had done some more things in the line of natural healing she may have even got better results, add to that some of the new wave advanced functional medicine testing and that ejection fraction could be even way up over 40, yet she still did amazingly to not only survive but thrive 30+ years and counting, without the proposed heart transplant for her condition of 'heart failure'.
…Sinatra says all the other patients with heart failure that he treated went on to live long lives.
**He is dismayed that the Swedish researchers whose study showed the heart cells can renew ‘predictably hoped for the development of pharmaceutical therapies to stimulate cardiomyocyte renewal’. Sinatra tells people straight out that his experience with Joan and so many other people shows that you don’t have to wait for the launch of ‘the miracle drug’.
That is an extremely important point, scientific research is not so much interested in a solution as in a 'pharmaceutical solution'. That means that if those supplements were to keep you alive for decades and get people off heart transplant lists, the doctors and scientists would still not recommend them to you, they are waiting for a drug to be invented to do the same job - it's not that they don't believe the natural approaches won't work, but they can't patent foods and natural substances whereas they can patent the drug, and the pharmaceutical industry is a trillion dollar industry and those researchers get their research grants from the pharmaceutical companies, as do the universities. It's about profit, not actually about health or solutions. You need to know that, because that is not what we expect when we walk into that doctor's office, we somehow believe they are there to help when really it is a business. However, it is your life and my life and that's more important than their bank accounts and keeping the wheels of industry going.
Optimum Nutrition Has a Predictable Outcome
Optimum nutrition through metabolic cardiology appears to repair ailing hearts and slows the progression of illness.
- Perhaps buying the patient additional time to allow for more of the slow turnover of the cardiomyocytes
- And perhaps the right nutrition even accelerates the process as well.
Sinatra has seen people with ejection fractions of 20, 15, even 10 percent beat the odds and not just survive but thrive for decades after their initial diagnosis.
- Did metabolic cardiology give them additional time for the process of cardiomyocyte renewal to take over?
- Could metabolic cardiology be the missing ingredient?
- Could ATP support repair and rejuvenate and restore vulnerable heart cells?
- Why did they survive on these nutrients against the odds?
…and Hope
Sinatra likes to combine his metabolic cardiology program / targeted nutrition with positive thinking and hope, which he also considers pivotal raw materials required to survive.
He likes to make sure people know that the old medical consensus has been overturned, whether your doctor knows that or not, because under the old erroneous view patients were being robbed of hope, the very thing they need to survive.
Of Joan, Sinatra says as he gave her hope to heal she gave him hope to heal others. Her success with his nutraceutical approach gave him the confidence to try the nutrient regimen with other ‘hopeless’ patients who in many cases were given new leases of life. 2011 was the 30th anniversary of metabolic cardiology, 2018 makes that 37 years now adn Sr. Sinatra is still saying these things via his website and newsletter, nothing has changed for him, he still gets these amazing results for almost 4 decades, and nothing has changed for the doctors, they still don’t tell their patients, it isn’t being taught at med school – I had not heard of this or been told about this before – had you?
My Opinion – There Are Other Things, So Even MORE Hope! 🙂
Of course there are other things we could add to his program:
- There are ways to make it more individual this way or that with advanced functional testing
- Maybe even use natural foods to support the DNA like wheatgrass or herbs such as hawthorn and ginger.
- A bigger effort could be made than we’ve heard here in terms of lifestyle and detox too.
When I see the improvements in my own heart strength on solely natural herbs and supplements and foods that these people don’t seem to have been using, then yes I’m thinking there could well be more to add to the mix here. But as always, the real advantage of knowing what Dr. Sinatra got to work is that he is a top cardiologist who got these things to work alongside regular heart medications that many people needing help are often already on, and once on meds you must stick with them and work with your doctor. When your condition improves it will be visible in testing and then the doctor is the one to help you reduce any meds at that point.
Next Steps?
- However most people are on medications already for these serious conditions and can’t take the large therapeutic doses of natural products like herbs while on those meds, at least not as a first step.
- And as for the advanced functional testing to individualize which nutrients and underlying causes a person needs or that may have led to the person’s condition, well those tests are expensive and severely ill people may not be able to work or afford them.
But it would seem a no-brainer to at least take the few things that got Joan the good results straight off
Basics
- The CoQ10
- and the magnesium
- along with a multimineral
- and multivitamin formula, though you have to be careful choosing those latter two.
I will go into much more detail on all of these later, and I’ve listed my favorite sources of them at the bottom here.
Update: In a further interview with Dr.Sinatra he mentions though Joan got off the heart transplant list and got stronger with just CoQ10 she ultimately had some issues until he added the other 3 supplements in his ‘awesome foursome’ ie the L-carnitine, magnesium and D-Ribose along with that CoQ10
Extra Testing
If you can afford testing then it is possible to find out why the CoQ10 is deficient and precisely what your magnesium levels are as well as all your other nutrient levels. It is possible now with functional medicine to find out way more than your doctor is even looking for, including BNP, TMAO, food sensitivities, stealth infections, much more on that later.
Drug Depletions and Contraindications
It is possible to look at your meds and their contraindications and see whether or not you can take high dose greens for magnesium or whether a supplement would be best for you, for example those on warfarin cannot, whereas those on Xarelto have practically no dietary restrictions according to the manufacturer’s label.
On the flip side it is also necessary to compensate for depleted nutrients while on medications, because that tends to be one of their biggest side effects that can easily be overcome.
Detox & Lifestyle
Actually from a natural healing point of view, and even from a functional medicine point of view, you’d also work on your detox channels, which has to be done carefully, slowly, and in the right order. Along with all lifestyle factors.
Natural Healing
Coming from the natural healing camp myself, I’m always going to question supplements and nutraceuticals. I tend to try to get things natually if at all possible.
- However CoQ10 is one of those things has to be supplemented.
- As for D-ribose, I’d probably have other things that give energy and more sustained energy however notice that D-ribose has been considered to have no contraindications with standard heart medications, and is cardiologist approved, and now in use successfully over a decade with serious heart conditions in Sinatra’s and other top cardiologists’ clinical practice. If the heart ATP need a constant source of energy and you don’t have another one lined up then taking D-ribose has to be one of the easiest solutions.
- As for L-carnitine, I’ve seen some questions regarding it so I personally asked top cardiologist Dr. Joel Kahn what was the story there, because he is a vegan vegetarian and he too recommends it and recommends all Sinatra’s awesome foursome. According to Dr. Kahn, he’d test TMAO levels, simple as that. Which means he takes advantage of the extra support it gives to the heart ATP but treats people as individuals when it comes to that particular supplement and watches levels within the body. It’s a matter of not ignoring the great results.
- Again naturally I’d be aware of other things that help ATP, things that have given me huge boosts of energy in particular are these four, but I could add much more:
Vitalerbs, a natural food sourced multivitamin by Dr. Christopher. 6-18 capsules no matter how fatigued I’ve been are like rocketfuel. Been around over 50 years that formula. Best of all the superfoods out there.
Jurassic Greens, this is powdered green juices of kamut wheatgrass, alfalfa and barley grass juice by Dr. Christopher. I’ve tried all the various green powders and liquids and that one gives a boost unlike the others. I now get it in bulk in the US. Greens are how I like to get my magnesium. Also transdermally with ‘magnesium oil’ by massaging it into the skin.
Wheatgrass juice, when I grow it myself and take a tray a day, needs to be a high amount, not just one shot. Again magnesium but with many other vitamins and minerals in a food source.
Complete Tissue & Bone, another Dr. Christopher wholefood formulation which acts as a multimineral, these are powdered herbs.
**For people who do not want to do herbs, I’ve heard good things about the brand Wild Nutrition for making food based vitamins and minearls, unlike the synthetic types in huge doses in many of those at the local healthstore. This brand is available online in the UK and Ireland, eg nourish.ie
- There are a few other key supplements to consider like vitamins D3, E, B12, which I will cover in the section on Supplements.
A Peek at Sinatra’s Supplement Dosages:
From page 228 of his book, Dr. Sinatra lists a number of conditions and what doses of supplements he’d give for each of them – however please note that 227 pages have been written BEFORE this list, so there is a context for all of this. It is not medical advice, you’ll have to do your own research and consult your doctors if on medications.
Congestive Heart Failure
This is what he’d do for congestive heart failure:
- CoQ10, coenzyme Q10, 300-360mg daily
- Magnesium 400-800mg
- L-carnitine 2000-2500mg daily, which is 2-2.5 grams
- D-Ribose 10-15 grams
- Multivitamin/mineral foundation program [remember from his video NOT just any formula]
- 1 gram fish oil [best to take something like Igennus EPA]
I’ll be doing more on these in the upcoming section on supplements.
The list of conditions he applies this sort of nutraceutical therapy to with success include:
- Congestive Heart Failure
- High Blood Pressure
- Stable Angina Pectoris
- Cardiac Arrhythmia – Prevention of Premature Contractions, Premature Atrial Contractions, and Intermitent Atrial Fibrillation
- Severe Congestive Heart Failure, Dilated Cardiomyoptahy, PatientsAwaiting Heart Transplantation
- Mitral Valve Prolapse
- Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndromre, or Mitochondrial Cytopathies
- Syndrome X, Insulin Resistance, and Type 2 Diabetes
- A program for Proessional or World Class Athletes
- Age Management
- A program for the Couch Potato
Well I’ve got to admire the guy’s perspective! I’ve always seen the correlation between certain fatigue conditions and the heart and athletes. And interesting to see the couch potato in the list! No kidding, that person is in trouble too!
A Peek at a free chapter by Sinatra in a the book Advancing Medicine with Food and Nutrients
Meanwhile if you don’t have Sinatra’s book Metabolic Cardiology, he has written a chapter for the book Advancing Medicine with Food and Nutrients, 2nd Edition, which is free online. If you scroll down to the summary section what he has written there, you’ll get him in a nutshell.
https://books.google.ie/books?…
Any questions or comments, feel free to contact me or leave them below.