Nutrition Articles by Richard Kunin, MD

 Coenzyme Q should be called vitamin Q because the amount that the body can make is insufficient for the best of health, and extra amounts of Q must be obtained from food. That makes CoQ fit the definition of vitamin: a natural, organic substance in food that is required for health and survival. However the abbreviation, CoQ, has caught on and since it is concise it will continue in use.

Read more: Coenzyme Q10: A Miracle Vitamin

From Cholesterol to Arthritis

I have had to retract nothing from my 1980 book, Mega Nutrition. The most controversial position that I took was in favor of individualizing intake of dietary fat and carbohydrate according to my innovative OrthoCarbohydrate Diet ™. Some people feel and function best on a high fat intake and, contrary to current medical dogma, many do poorly on a high carbohydrate diet, even the best of the complex carbohydrates.

Clinical experience with thousands of patients in my practice plus systematic observations in my initial group of about 100 patients made it clear that for many people, the only authority that they can trust for accurate and sensible advice is their own body. Eventually I renamed my program, "The Listen To Your Body Diet™." It is not my intent to describe all of this here and now, I already have done so at length in my two books, Mega Nutrition and Mega Nutrition for Women.

Read more: Copper, the Misunderstood Mineral

Diets low in fat and high in vegetables have become increasingly popular in the past few years. Major medical journals are now endorsing low fat and vegetarian diets as a health strategy.ⁱ However there may be a downside to the low fat health diet. In 1991 we began hearing reports of large numbers of people with blindness and nerve damage in Cuba. Over 50,000 cases have been reported,ii almost one victim for every two hundred people in Cuba, a country of about 10 million. Half the cases involved loss of vision and the others suffered pain and numbness. Imagine if that were to happen in the United States, with a population of 250 million: there would be almost a million Americans, some of them totally blind and others complaining of a dark cloud, blind spots and loss of color vision, and an equally large group with tingling, burning pain and numbness. Would that not be our number one national health problem? You bet.

Read more: Cyanide Poisoning: A Low-fat Diet Disease

Delusion, Error and Fluorosis: The DEF of Fluoridation

DELUSION AND DENIAL

In the previous two installments of the ABCDEF of Fluoridation I have described the dangers due to the accumulation of fluoride in our bodies, bone cancer in young men, bone fractures in our senior citizens, and a variety of diseases, especially digestive and skeletal that seem to be on the increase.  How can we pretend there is NO risk?  But that is exactly what almost all health professionals are forced to do.  They are presented the same one-sided information as everyone else: that fluoride is an essential mineral (which is not proved); that it reduces dental caries by 60 percent (which has never been verified) and that there is no danger to the public (which is clearly untrue). 

Read more: DEF of Fluoridation...Delusion, Error and Fluorosis

The name of Dr. Linus Pauling brings up an immediate association to his recommendation of vitamin C for the common cold.  Of even greater impact, however, is his endorsement of nutrition as a fundamental approach to health and treatment of disease, a concept for which he coined the name, orthomolecular.  In the past four decades the young specialty of orthomolecular medicine has advanced in large part because of the tremendous improvement in laboratory technology.  By now it is possible to obtain laboratory measurement of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, enzymes and hormones in almost any body tissue at a price that is relatively modest.  

Read more: Diagnostic Lead Testing: Pubic Hair Preferred

An apple a day may keep the doctor away--but not if it is juiced.  That seems to be the most obvious message from the recent outbreak of E. coli food poisoning that has been laid at the door of the Odwalla Juice Company.  By now almost everyone has heard about the severe dysentery that afflicted over 60 American children, one of whom died.  There were 10 cases in Seattle a day before Halloween and six of the patients said they had drunk an Odwalla apple juice product.  The county environmental health director was in a quandary about what to do.  On the one hand he lacked direct evidence that the E. coli O157 bacteria had actually come from Odwalla juice.  So he called FDA and initiated a bureaucratic conference involving 40 health officials nationwide in a massive conference that went on until past 3:00 AM. 

Read more: E. Coli And You

Contrary to all that we hear these days about the dangers of dietary fat, there is also the problem of fat deficiency. Nature endows all living things with the capacity to adapt within a range of physical conditions. We couldn't survive in a world without water and we cannot survive without fat either. The question is how much and what type of fat works best. To some extent this question must be answered on an individual basis. But everybody needs fat. In the absence of dietary fat any and all of us would die!

I have recently observed real problems in a number of my patients who were following the present trend towards low fat diets. They all suffered with persistent fatigue, irritability, recurrent infections and irritable bowel. Diet analysis and lab studies confirmed low levels of some fat soluble vitamins, especially vitamin A. In some cases absorption of folic acid, a water soluble B vitamin, is also impaired, not by low fat but due to intestinal irritation by excessive intake of wheat and grains.

Read more: Everybody Needs Fat