Vitamin C for Heart Disease Prevention

February 28, 2018

Dr. Hotze reveals the true cause of heart disease and how you can prevent and reverse it naturally. Learn why vitamin C is essential for heart disease prevention.

Stacey B.: Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. I’m Stacey Bandfield here with Dr. Hotze, founder of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center and Hotze Vitamins. Today we are talking about a very, very important vitamin, it’s actually one of my favorites, vitamin C. Vitamin C not only protects your heart, it also increases your immune system and it builds collagen. I’m very, very interested in this particular vitamin and I use it religiously. So Dr. Hotze, why don’t you share with us the benefits of vitamin C and why everybody should be taking this amazing vitamin?

Dr. Hotze: I want to share with you what I believe, that you and every individual you know needs a health coach. You need a doctor and a staff of professionals who can coach you on a path to health and wellness naturally so as you mature, you enjoy better quality of life. Does that make sense? That’s without pharmaceutical drugs. Does that make sense to you? If it does, then you’re listening to the right podcast today and I welcome you here. We’re going to talk today about vitamin C. Vitamin C, everybody’s heard of vitamin C.

Stacey B.: I think so.

Dr. Hotze: The common thing you may hear is, well you have a cold, take vitamin C. I don’t want to talk about vitamin C in colds. I want to talk about vitamin C today in heart disease. Contrary to common opinion, in the lay public as well as the propaganda that the pharmaceutical companies in conventional medicine promote, cholesterol, elevated cholesterol, is not the cause of heart disease. Coronary artery disease is caused by inflammation in the coronary arteries and that inflammation has some underlying causes. One of which is not cholesterol. As you’ll find out, cholesterol is the solution to the problem of inflammation that the body has.

Cause of Inflammation in Your Coronary Arteries 

What causes inflammation in your arteries? Well and it tends to settle in the coronary arteries because the coronary arteries are under such stress from the heart beating 72 times a minute or a 100,000 times an hour. So what causes the inflammation? Well, toxins in the environment. Things you eat, breathe, drink, and slather on your body. All these contain petrochemical products. And those petrochemical products are very toxic and they cause inflammation in the coronary arteries. Lead and mercury, heavy metals, cause inflammation in the arteries. As do viral and bacterial infections, particularly people that have bad gum disease or tooth disease, those toxins are emitted and they cause inflammation of the coronary arteries. So does high sugar diet. If you’re eating high sugar with a lot of simple carbohydrates, that creates inflammatory products in your body which inflame the coronary arteries.

When the arteries become inflamed, they become raw just like you scraped your skin, it gets raw, somebody took sandpaper rubbed it raw and it bleed or you scrape it, it bleeds and it scabs over. This is what happens inside your arteries. They get inflamed and they start to deteriorate. That’s not good because here you’ve got a major vessel providing blood to your heart and all of sudden it begins to deteriorate, the body goes, hold on for a second. We don’t like that because here’s what happens. Think of my hand as the heart and you see my vein right here, think of that is the main artery to the heart, the left anterior descending artery. Every time the heart squeezes, it compresses the artery and stretches it. So if it’s inflamed and deteriorating, it’ll fall apart and guess what? You just bleed to death. So the body doesn’t like it.

Collagen Heals the Arteries

The primary mechanism for healing the artery is collagen. It’s the protein made by the body, made by the cells which is the glue which holds all the cells together. That’s why you’ve got skin turgor. I can pull my skin up, it pops back in place because it’s held together by collagen. Well, collagen when the arteries are inflamed the body produces collagen in that area and it has to produce a lot of collagen because there’s a lot of deterioration and it puts that collagen to heal the artery so you don’t have the inflammation any longer.

What Happens If You Don’t Have Enough Vitamin C to Make Collagen

If you don’t make enough collagen, why wouldn’t you? Because you have to have vitamin C to make collagen. If you don’t make enough collagen, the body has a backup mechanism to heal the arteries. It’s a substance called lipoprotein A. And lipoprotein A is a type of low density lipoprotein cholesterol. It’s a type of cholesterol that band aids the artery. You just start putting a band aid on the inflamed parts of the artery and you build up a plaque. A kind of gooey plaque. That plaque then absorbs calcium in it in it gives rigidity to the artery so it doesn’t break down. That’s the body’s mechanism. It begins to calcify the artery. So when you get calcified arteries, you have atherosclerosis. That comes from a Greek term athero which mean porridge and sclerosis means hardening. So it’s hardened porridge. It’s like all the plaque, the cholesterol plaque that builds up the artery all of a sudden gets the calcium in it and now you’ve got calcification of your arteries, you have atherosclerosis.

CT Heart Scan Determines If You Have Atherosclerosis

This can be measured safely without any invasive process by doing a CT heart scan. That’s a computer tomography heart scan. We do it here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center and we can measure whether or not you have any calcium in your arteries of your heart and how much. And everybody over the age 40 ought to have baseline study of that. There are measurements on that and we can, if you have calcified arteries and they’re different, they’re low levels and they’re very extremely high levels and there’s a whole bell shaped curve between that. If you have any calcium developing in your arteries, then you know you have inflamed arteries and you need to do something to address that and arrest the calcification and the inflammation and cause it to regress, to improve. And that can be done naturally without any pharmaceutical drugs. There’s no evidence that any pharmaceutical drugs will remove calcium from your arteries and cause it to regress. We do that all the time here with our vitamin and mineral supplementation for heart disease at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center.

It’s vitamin C that is essential for the production of collagen in that area of the heart that needs high levels of collagen. It needs high levels of vitamin C to make the collagen and if you don’t have that then you’re going to end up having the cholesterol glom onto your arteries and you’re going to get hardening of the arteries and as those arteries narrow as they get more hardening, then you flick off a plaque, it blocks the artery, next thing you know you’ve got heart attack.

Stacey B.: Exactly. And Dr. Hotze I just want to add one thing, that this is silent, so it is important you get a baseline heart scan so you know what’s going on. And Dr. Hotze’s actually close friends, family members who he’s had to actually twist their arm to come and they’ve been saying, “Oh I’m fine. I’m fine.” And then when they had that done. 

Dr. Hotze: And then you find out they’re not fine.

Stacey B.: They’re shocked to find out they’ve got that calcification and then Dr. Hotze when you put them on this program, a healthy eating program, the vitamin and mineral supplementation then it’s been amazing to see how that’s gone down. That it actually will reverse itself. It’s really incredible. It is important that everyone get this done if they’re 40 and above. 

Why don’t mammals get heart attacks, but people do? 

Dr. Hotze: It’s interesting that no other mammals get heart attacks except human beings. I don’t know about monkeys, I don’t know about guinea pigs and I don’t know now about bats, but no other mammals get heart attacks. And you might say, “Why did you mention those?” Because only four of the mammals don’t make vitamin C. All the other mammals in God’s creation, as a matter of fact all the vertebrates, any animal with a spine, makes vitamin C. And mammals make vitamin C about a 1,000 milligrams per 25 pounds of body weight. If a mammal weighed, a goat weighed a 150 pounds, he’s going to make at least 6,000 milligrams of vitamin C. As a matter of fact, adult goats make somewhere on the order of 12 to 13,000 milligrams a day. If they get under stress they make a 100,000.

There was a book written by Dr. Matthias Rath who worked in concert with Linus Pauling in studying vitamin C and its relationship to heart disease. Their presupposition was that coronary artery disease was really low grade scurvy in the coronary arteries. What’s scurvy? Scurvy is a disease caused by a vitamin C deficiency. A vitamin C deficiency. If I took you off vitamin C for a month, you’d begin to have symptoms, within a year you’d be dead. If you had no vitamin C in your body for year, you’d be a dead person. It must be pretty important that if you don’t have it, it’ll kill you.

Scurvy is a Vitamin C Deficiency

Vitamin C in scurvy, how would anybody get scurvy? Well it was plague of sailors sailing the ships for thousands of years on long journeys. They weren’t getting any vitamin C. They ate some hardtack and had some water and that was about it. Maybe ate, I don’t know if they ate fish overboard or not, but they didn’t eat well. It was hardtack and water. Between the years 1500 and 1800 it’s estimated that at least two million sailors, they went on these long voyages across from Europe to then colonies or what is now the United States or they came to America or South America or they went around to India or traveled around the world like Magellan did in 1519.

These sailors died of scurvy. Scurvy manifested itself by by a breakdown of the skin. The skin became like tissue paper. It broke down. They bruised. It would turn black and they’d get ulcerations. Their gums would grow and they’d die and get a foul smell. Their teeth would rot out. They would get mental derangement. And then eventually because you have to have collagen to hold everything together, all the arteries were inflamed, they literally would bleed to death internally. It was a terrible death and it was called scurvy. Which they didn’t know was a vitamin C deficiency, they just called it scurvy.

Interestingly enough in Scotland in 1753 there was a physician there by the name Richard Lind. He started treating some of the sailors that had lived and came back and didn’t die of scurvy, but had it, and he began to give them citrus juice, vitamin C. Limes, from lemons and oranges. And they began to get vitamin C and they were cured. That was so impressive upon the Royal Navy that they required citrus juices to be put on all the ships and by the year 1800 there was no more scurvy on British ships. And to this day, British sailors are called Limeys. Yeah, they sucked on limes. They didn’t get scurvy.

This is what’s happening in the heart is that we don’t make enough vitamin C, and so Dr. Matthias Rath and Dr. Pauling showed this in their animal studies with guinea pigs, that they could create coronary artery disease if they removed all the vitamin C from the guinea pigs who don’t make vitamin C from their diet and then they’d feed another group vitamin C and they wouldn’t get any coronary artery disease and then they would, the ones that didn’t get vitamin C, they’d have coronary artery disease.

Dr. Linus Pauling was a strong advocate of vitamin C. I heard his first lecture in 1989 or 90. I was so convinced about what he said, I said, “You know, that’s what I’m going to do.” And I started taking 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C every day. And now, I’m taking 15,000 milligrams. I’ve had my heart scan done, I’m 67 years right now. I did it 10 years ago, I had no calcium in my arteries. I did it last year, I had no calcium in my arteries. I’ve got all kinds of friends younger than me that got calcification in their arteries. So I know that vitamin C has done its job. Besides, vitamin C, not only is it important to prevent inflammation of the coronary arteries which leads to coronary artery disease which is atherosclerosis which leads to heart attacks and when a person has a heart attack, half the time that person’s going to die. Half the people that have their first heart attack die. And this is preventable.

Other Benefits of Vitamin C

Let me just ask you this, when was the last time your doctor recommended that you take vitamin C? Did you know it lowers blood pressure? It lowers cholesterol. It has fibrinolytic activity. That means it breaks up clots and it keeps your blood smooth so you don’t develop a bunch of clots in your arteries and in your blood that would clog up arteries and veins, or maybe cause you to have a stroke. Vitamin C also strengthens the immune system. It’s important for the production of your adrenal hormones, your stress hormones. The adrenal gland concentrates vitamin C a 100 times more than any other organ in the body. It also is a natural antibiotic and antiviral in the correct dose. Those are high IV doses.

Listen, I had a patient of mine that was in the hospital. Wasn’t my patient in the hospital, friend of mine, but had been a patient. Was in the hospital, she was older and she had very significant health issues. Lung issues. She ended up getting infections in her lung and before they put her on all kinds of antibiotics for months and months and then she got four different organisms in her blood and I told her husband who finally convinced the pharmacist, give her vitamin C IVs. And when I saw her last I thought I, the last time I saw her at the hospital the day I left, I thought I wouldn’t see her again except at the funeral. After getting her on IV vitamin C in four days that woman was sitting up, had no bacteria in her blood and she was healthy. That tells you the power of vitamin C. Vitamin C is very powerful as an antibiotic and antiviral drug as well and it can be used in high doses.

As a matter of fact, before they had a polio vaccine, there was a physician, I can’t remember his name, I just read about him a couple of weeks ago who used IV vitamin C to treat polio and he cured polio with vitamin C. Vitamin C is inexpensive. When was the last time your doctor said, “To help you prevent getting heart disease I want you to take vitamin C.” Or did he say, “To help you prevent getting heart disease I want to lower your cholesterol and I’m going to give you a statin drug.”

Dangers of Statin Drugs

And remember, statin drugs poison your enzyme systems in the liver so you don’t make cholesterol, which your body needs for normal cellular function, because everyone of your cells is surrounded by membrane which is made up of cholesterol and is very important for the production of your hormones because it’s the building block of all the hormones. It’s also very important for brain function because you have a lot of fat and oil and cholesterol in the brain. For the brain to function right it has to have that. When people take statin drugs, it sucks the statins out of the brain and they get all kinds of mental disorders. They can get global amnesia. They get all kinds of cognitive dysfunctions. Besides it damages the muscles and the reason it does that is because it blocks the production of coenzyme Q10 in your liver which is important for cellular production of energy in the power plants in the cells, the mitochondria.

Vitamin C plays a very critical role in good health and when was the last time your doctor recommended vitamin C? I wonder why they don’t recommend vitamin C? Do you think it could be because the pharmaceutical companies have a huge influence on all the clinical recommendations that doctors are required to use in their medical practices? You know that they have clinical standards that are devised by a group of doctors, 87 or 90% of whom work for, have worked for or have been consulting or receiving drafts, I could call it grants. The Freudian slip keeps coming back. They’re getting paid off by the insurance companies is what happened. And what do you think they’re going to do? Their clinical practice guidelines are always going to be to use expensive pharmaceutical drugs.

Follow The Money Trail

My dad told me one time, he said, “Son if something seems kind of odd and there seems like a simple way to do things that less expensive and simpler and somebody wants to try much harder way that’s much more expensive,” he said, “there’s always a money trail.” Who do you think finances all the various medical organizations in the country? They’re financed by the drug companies. You open up any one of the journals, there’s loaded with drug ads. They underwrite all the conferences. That doctors are simply in bed with the pharmaceutical companies. That’s where they are. And that’s where the money is. And then they have all these lobbyists up in Washington. They have more lobbyists than they do congressmen and senators from the drug companies and they pass out their money in the way of campaign contributions. How do you think the FDA is so strong against natural approaches to health? Because the pharmaceutical companies have their people sitting on their various FDA commissions.

Vitamin C is important. And I want to encourage you to take at least a 1,000 milligrams per 25 pounds of body weight. Now you can start on that. If you get stool intolerance, you can back off. Sometimes people do better working up. Start on 1,000 milligrams a day then take two a day, then take two twice a day. Get up to five. Take two in the morning, split them up. Take them in the morning and the evening. And we carry a high quality, high grade vitamin C that I recommend here at Hotze Vitamin Store. That’s what we do and I use vitamin C on all our guests all the time and I’m strong advocate of it. I’ve taken it all my life and I recommend it to all my family and friends.

As a matter of fact, they have a good friend of mine who asked me to come out and speak to a group of men and it was totally off topic, I said, “What do you want me to do, give them a testimony or something?” There were about 800 men at this event and it was a church related event. He said, “No, I want you to talk about vitamin C to my men.” Because he understands and is a strong advocate of it as I am. To help his men protect against heart disease. Heart disease is a preventable problem. It takes about 20 years to cook a good heart attack. You don’t want to be cooking it friend because if you do cook it, when you get it out of the oven, half the time it’s going to fall on the floor. That means you’re going to die. You don’t want that to happen to you. Get on your vitamin C now.

I also recommend if you have coronary artery disease, that you also take L-lysine and L-proline which are two amino acids that help your body make collagen and help remove calcium from the walls of the arteries. Vitamin K2 also is important for helping remove calcium from the arteries and helping putting it in the proper places in your bones where it belongs. So when you get an imbalance of calcium, you don’t want it to end up in your coronary arteries. And we also recommend magnesium. Magnesium regulates the heart, lowers your blood pressure. Vitamin C cuts down on inflammation and helps heal inflammation in the arteries, helps you make collagen, lowers your blood pressure, lowers cholesterol, builds up your immune system, and helps with adrenal function. It’s also a great antioxidant and detoxifier. L-lysine and L-proline are amino acids that you should take if you have calcium build up. And then vitamin K2 would also be used to help correct the calcium imbalance that’s leading to the calcified arteries.

Stacey B.: Well, Dr. Hotze just briefly here I know that anybody who is listening or watching to this podcast, everything that you’ve said about vitamin C and these supplements definitely resonates with people, however, could you also speak briefly to people who are in nursing homes because so many people have loved ones in nursing homes and I think that there is a real vitamin C deficiency. People just don’t even think about having that supplementation for those loved ones that could really help them. When you see those bruises and that thin skin, that’s all due to that vitamin C deficiency, isn’t that right?

Dr. Hotze: Right. I did emergency room medicine years ago, 30 or 40 years ago and we would see people that would come in that were alcoholics and they would have scurvy. Their skin would be, they get that, you’ve seen the alcoholics, they don’t really eat anything, they drink all the time, they’re not getting any vitamin C and their skin is like paper tissue. They bump something and it tears and rips apart. That is scurvy. That’s what they’ve got. And this happens in the nursing homes. These people in the nursing homes are being fed high carbohydrate diets full of sugar. They’re being drugged up. Any time they wake up they have PRN prescriptions written by the doctors that any time they cause a problem, give them this antipsychotic drug. They’ll give them antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication. They give them sleep medication. They keep them drugged up.

How many times I’ve heard people tell, “Well my mother, we put her in a nursing home and she went downhill.” Well, you would too if you got in a nursing home where they fed you all those drugs and then gave you terrible meals that were unhealthy. Of course you’re going to downhill. If you end up in nursing home, you’re not in very good health to begin with and it rapidly goes downhill. I do want to encourage you, if you have a family member in a nursing home, take them some vitamins for crying out loud and make them take them and put them up there and make sure the doctor requires them. You can get the Hotze power pack or something. Give them something.

Stacey B.: Absolutely.

Dr. Hotze: …as a basic baseline to make sure they get vitamins and minerals to keep themselves in some form of health. Otherwise you’re going to go downhill very quickly. 

Stacey B.: Absolutely. We hope that you found this section of Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution interesting and informative. We do want to let you know that if you are interested in learning more about vitamin C supplementation, you can certainly contact Hotze Vitamins at 1-800-579-6545. That’s 1-800-579-6545. You can also go to hotzevitamins.com, that’s hotzevitamins.com as well. Dr. Hotze? 

Dr. Hotze: Well, I do want to mention that all vitamin C is not created equal. If you buy the cheapest vitamin C on the market, you’re going to get what you pay for.

Stacey B.: Fillers. Absolutely.

Dr. Hotze: It’s going to be full of fillers. It may not even be digested right. We use the highest quality. We have it privately made for us at the highest quality lab in the country in order to ensure that we have the, look I do things first class. I want all our patients and all our guests and all our clients that use our vitamin store to get the highest in quality. The same thing at our pharmacy, the compounding pharmacy. We’re going to have the highest quality possible and we measure it to check and make sure it’s what it says it is. So if you’re getting discount vitamin C and discount vitamins and things, you’re going to get by on one multivitamin a day, you’re not going to do that.

Stacey B.: It won’t have the same effect.

Dr. Hotze: You’ve got to take vitamin and mineral supplementation seriously and when you do, then you’re going to feel better and you’re going to enjoy life more. You’re going to be enthusiastic. So I highly recommend a good vitamin and mineral program. I’ve used it for years, as a matter of fact, if I showed you how many vitamins I use, and you go, you’d shake your head. We have literally thousands and thousands patients in our vitamin store and I’ve asked them, they’ve said, “Nobody takes more vitamins and minerals than Dr. Hotze.” I practice what I preach, I guarantee you that.

Stacey B.: You absolutely do. Again that number for Hotze Vitamins is 1-800-579-6545, 1-800-579-6545 or hotzevitamins.com. That’s H-O-T-Z-E vitamins.com. So glad you joined us here today. Have a wonderful day. Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution.

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Tags: heart disease prevention, vitamin c

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