The Percentage Calories From Protein in Common Plant Foods

Jeff Novick, MS, RD ©2013

The following numbers are from the USDA Standard Reference Release 26, which can be

found here. All items were calculated at 454 grams (1 lb). To see the exact description,

look up the USDA NDB# in the USDA SR 26 Database.

http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list

Vitamin C, lysine and Dr. W. Gifford-Jones

posted on February 14, 2014 by Carolyn Thomas
http://ethicalnag.org/2014/02/14/w-gifford-jones-vitamin-c-lysine/ Author Carolyn Thomas

It all started with a simple question from one of my blog readers at Heart Sisters.  Another heart attack survivor asked me if I’d heard about the use of high-dose vitamin C and lysine to prevent or reverse coronary artery disease, a treatment duo often touted in health food stores. It turns out that almost any Canadian who reads any daily newspaper across our great country has likely heard of these particular supplements, thanks to a syndicated health columnist named W. Gifford-Jones MD whose columns have been published in over 70 newspapers in Canada and beyond.

He’s a University of Toronto- and Harvard-trained MD and author whose bio also includes “family doctor, hotel doctor and ship’s surgeon”. (That’s not his real name, by the way – which is Ken Walker).  In one of his columns published in the Windsor Star in December, the 89-year old Gifford-Jones/Walker described his own personal experience taking this vitamin C and lysine combo:  

“Following a severe coronary attack, cardiologists warned me I’d die without using cholesterol-lowering drugs. Rather,  for the last 16 years I’ve relied on high doses of vitamin C and lysine as recommended by Dr. Linus Pauling. It was a risky decision at that time as there was no evidence that this combination could reverse coronary blockage.

“Now, photos of arteries show that combined vitamin C and lysine not only prevents but also reverses blocked arteries. This combination powder known as Medi-C Plus is available at health food stores.

“It’s a monumental discovery. But this research is collecting dust due to the closed minds of cardiologists who refuse to look at it.”

One of the “closed minds” objecting to this blanket endorsement of Vitamin C and lysine to reverse coronary artery disease belongs to endocrinologist Dr. Raphael Cheung of the Windsor Regional Hospital. He responded to the Windsor Star like this shortly after he read the December column:

“Dr. Gifford-Jones’ anecdotal experience belongs to medicine that was practiced half a century ago!”

But he also spanked the Star itself, asking why the newspaper shouldn’t bear some responsibility for running Gifford-Jones medical columns like this one in the first place:

“Why does (the Windsor Star) keep printing articles written by a retired OB-GYN regarding vascular health? Not knowing any better, there are patients who are at high risk for heart disease and stroke in our community who have stopped taking their medications after reading Gifford-Jones articles.

“While there is always a disclaimer at the end of a Gifford-Jones article that relieves him of any legal liability, the Windsor Star should be held to a higher standard by providing a more balanced approach by at least interviewing a medical expert in the field for another opinion.

“Our motto should be: First do no harm.”

Dr. Cheung also told the Star that he had noticed something else about the unreserved recommendation by Gifford-Jones/Walker of the Medi-C Plus supplement to miraculously prevent and reverse heart disease:

“I was surprised recently when a patient with coronary heart disease told me that he had stopped his heart medications and had started taking Dr. Gifford-Jones’s Medi-C Plus treatment purchased online.”

Suddenly, that folksy anecdote in his syndicated health column has now morphed from casual endorsement to retail marketing tool for the good doctor.

In fact, he’s able to use his considerable public profile (plus his free lectures and online webinars he calls “The Dynamic Duo For Fighting Heart Disease”) to shill his own W. Gifford-Jones MD line of supplements. He recommends that people consume 2-3 scoops of his Medi-C Plus a day; that’s 2,000 mg of vitamin C and 1,300 mg of lysine per scoop.

But evidence suggests that lysine supplements may interact with cardiac medications that can increase bleeding risk, such as anti-coagulant medications like Coumadin or anti-platelet medications like Plavix.  Lysine may also increase the risk of low blood sugar if you take medication for diabetes, and Health Canada warns against taking lysine for more than six months at doses higher than 300 mg per day.

In Canada, we tend to take a dim view of docs who go retail.

Here in my province of British Columbia, for example, our B.C. College of Physicians & Surgeons code of conduct guidelines specifically warn MDs here against the practice, calling it “not only unethical, but constituting a direct conflict of interest”, adding:

“A conflict of interest occurs when a professional or business arrangement provides an opportunity for a physician to receive a personal benefit over and above payment for his or her professional services. Conflict of interest can be direct or indirect, real or perceived, financial or non‐financial.

“Such transactions might reasonably be perceived as self‐serving. Even if there is no direct financial gain for the physician, the selling of products might be considered ethically questionable since patients often believe that a physician’s recommendation naturally implies an endorsement of the product’s value and/or efficacy.”

I’ve added emphasis to that second sentence in the last paragraph because the Gifford-Jones/Walker website claims that sales of Medi-C Plus “help support the Gifford-Jones Professorship in Pain Control and Palliative Care at the University of Toronto.”

We don’t really know what “help support” means in this case. Does it mean that 50% of all Medi-C Plus sales do the “helping” – or just .05% of sales? And why doesn’t he spell this out for consumers?

Either way, much like the B.C. practice guidelines specify, the optics are sketchy even if a physician receives no money personally through retail product sales.

And aside from the pure stomach-churning queaziness surrounding a person with the letters M.D. after his name shilling dietary supplements produced within an entirely unregulated industry (as illustrated in his Twitter page below), there’s also the rather sticky issue of credibility.

Gifford-Jones/Walker cites the work of both Dr. Linus Pauling and Dr. Sydney Bushfor their work on the benefits of mega doses of vitamin C, including its miraculous claim of preventing/curing diseases ranging from the common cold to cancer and heart disease. Pauling himself reportedly took at least 12,000 mg of vitamin C daily, and up to 40,000 mg if symptoms of a cold struck. [1] By comparison, according to the National Institutes of Health, the current Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA) for the vitamin is 75 mg per day for women (that’s the equivalent of eating one medium orange) or up to 120 mg if you’re pregnant or breastfeeding, and 90 mg for men (about 1/2 cup of red pepper).

But as Dr. Stephen Barrett of QuackWatch reminds us:

“Pauling is largely responsible for the widespread misbelief that high doses of vitamin C are effective against colds and other illnesses. While his basic science work was brilliant and his peace activist work was highly significant, his clinical vitamin C work was never accepted by the medical profession as it failed to withstand the scrutiny of clinical trials.”[2]

“For many years, the largest corporate donor of The Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine that he founded in 1973 was Hoffmann-La Roche, the pharmaceutical giant that produces most of the world’s vitamin C.”

“Natural products and any claims made about specific products on the site have not been evaluated by the United States Food and Drug Administration nor Health Canada.”

That’s known as a CYA disclaimer, strictly for legal liability protection. It’s like saying that, even though there’s no proof that any claims I make about this stuff is true, I will continue to keep on making them.

Or as Dr. Cheung wrote to the Windsor Star:

Posted by: TLB Staff
advertise here
Published August 9, 2014, filed under HEALTH

by Scepcop

Dr. Niall McLaren, an Australian practicing psychiatrist for 22 years, explains what is wrong with the psychiatric profession: That it cannot/will not take criticism, for fear the entire model of biological psychiatry will unravel.

That there is no science to psychiatric diagnoses, no brain based diseases. And that psychiatry only pushes mental disordersas biological disease in order to convince people to take psychiatric drugs, causing a host of dangerous side effects.

For more psychiatrists/psychologists and doctors who have spoken out against the fraud of psychiatry’s biological model of mental disorders (chemical imbalance, etc) click here:http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-diso … fic-tests/

Psychiatrists, Physicians & Psychologists That Debunk Psychiatry as a Science, “There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.”

— Allen Frances, Former DSM-IV Task Force Chairman “…modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness…Patients [have] been diagnosed with ‘chemical imbalances’ despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and…there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like.”

— Dr. David Kaiser, psychiatrist: “There’s no biological imbalance. When people come to me and they say, ‘I have a biochemical imbalance,’ I say, ‘Show me your lab tests.’ There are no lab tests. So what’s the biochemical imbalance?”

— Dr. Ron Leifer, psychiatrist“DSM-IV is the fabrication upon which psychiatry seeks acceptance by medicine in general. Insiders know it is more a political than scientific document… DSM-IV has become a bible and a money making bestseller—its major failings notwithstanding.”

— Loren Mosher, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry: “All psychiatrists have in common that when they are caught on camera or on microphone, they cower and admit that there are no such things as chemical imbalances/diseases, or examinations or tests for them. What they do in practice, lying in every instance, abrogating [revoking] the informed consent right of every patient and poisoning them in the name of ‘treatment’ is nothing short of criminal.”

— Dr Fred Baughman Jr., Pediatric Neurologist: “Psychiatry makes unproven claims that depression, bipolar illness, anxiety, alcoholism and a host of other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin…This kind of faith in science and progress is staggering, not to mention naïve and perhaps delusional.”

— Dr. David Kaiser, psychiatrist : “In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of ‘disease,’ formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.”

— Dr. Thomas Dorman, internist and member of the Royal College of Physicians of the UK: “I believe, until the public and psychiatry itself see that DSM labels are not only useless as medical ‘diagnoses’ but also have the potential to do great harm—particularly when they are used as means to deny individual freedoms, or as weapons by psychiatrists acting as hired guns for the legal system.” — Dr. Sydney Walker III, psychiatrist

“The way things get into the DSM is not based on blood test or brain scan or physical findings. It’s based on descriptions of behavior. And that’s what the whole psychiatry system is.” — Dr. Colin Ross, psychiatrist

“No biochemical, neurological, or genetic markers have been found for Attention Deficit Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Depression, Schizophrenia, anxiety, compulsive alcohol and drug abuse, overeating, gambling or any other so-called mental illness, disease, or disorder.” — Bruce Levine, Ph.D., psychologist and author of Commonsense Rebellion

“Unlike medical diagnoses that convey a probable cause, appropriate treatment and likely prognosis, the disorders listed in DSM-IV [and ICD-10] are terms arrived at through peer consensus.” — Tana Dineen Ph.D., Canadian psychologist

Intro to Psychiatry: Industry of Death

“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged