How to Boost
the Body’s
Miracle Molecule
to Prevent and Reverse
Chronic Disease
Neogenis
248 Addie Roy Rd. Ste. B-201
Austin, Texas 78746
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© 2010 Neogenis
All rights reserved.
Recipes © 2010 Jennifer Adler, CN
Recipes, Raw Beet Salad and Fresh Green Cashew-Walnut Pate
© 2010 Janet Zand, OMD
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America.
ISBN: 978-0-615-69548-8
Cover design by Neogenis. Interior design by Sterling Hill Productions.
Packaged by Good For You Books
The information in this book is for educational purposes only. It is not intended to replace the advice of a physician or medical practitioner. Please see your health care provider before beginning any new health program.
Part I: NO: The Body’s Miracle Molecule
1. What Is NO?
The Little-Known Key to Preventing and Reversing Heart Disease
2. NO vs. Disease
NO Contest!
Part II: Say Yes to NO
3. NOtrition: NO-Boosting Foods and Supplements
Go for the Leafy Greens
4. NO-Sweat: Easy Exercises to Enhance NO
Can You Spare 11 Minutes to Save Your Life?
5. NO-How: More Smart Methods to Increase NO
From Naps to Saunas, Increasing NO Is a Gas!
Part III: The New Science of NO
6. Is NO a No-No?
The Scientific Truth about the Supposed Dangers of NO, Nitrate, and Nitrite
About the Authors
Index
Imagine for a moment a “miracle molecule” that could dramatically improve your health—if you could increase the amount of the molecule in your body.
Now, this molecule won’t turn water into wine or raise anyone from the dead. It’s not that kind of miraculous. But biologically speaking, it’s definitely a miracle-maker. Because it can:
• prevent high blood pressure (hypertension), a disease that damages your heart, brain, and kidneys.
• keep your arteries young and flexible.
• prevent, slow, or reverse the buildup of artery-clogging arterial plaques.
• help stop the formation of artery-clogging blood clots—the result of plaques bursting and spilling their contents into the blood stream.
• lower cholesterol.
• by doing all of the above, reduce your risk of heart attack and stroke, the #1 and #3 killers of Americans.
But this molecule has more miracles to perform. It can also:
• reduce the risk of diabetes and disastrous diabetic complications, such as chronic kidney disease, blindness, hard-to-heal foot and leg ulcers, and amputations.
• limit the swelling and pain of arthritis, and boost the power of pain-relieving drugs.
• reverse erectile dysfunction (ED).
• calm the choking inflammation of asthma.
• protect your bones from osteoporosis.
• help provide the mood-lifting power behind antidepressant medications.
• assist the immune system in killing bacteria.
• limit skin damage from the sun.
“There may be no disease process where this miracle molecule does not have a protective role,” we were told by Louis J. Ignarro, PhD, a 1998 Nobel Laureate. What is this miracle molecule?
Nitric oxide—otherwise known (by its chemical formula) as NO.
What you’re reading—right now—is a signal, a message, a communication that is moving from the page to your eyes and deep into your brain, where an energized collection of brain cells (neurons) makes sense out of it all. And that process happens fast—in nanoseconds, in less than the blink of an eye.
Nitric oxide (NO) works just like that.
Nitric oxide is a signaling molecule. A molecule, of course, is a combination of atoms, held together by electrical charges. Water is H2O—two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Nitric oxide is NO—one atom of nitrogen and one atom of oxygen, as simple as can be. So simple, in fact, that it’s a gas, not a liquid or solid.
When it’s created and released, this gas easily and quickly penetrates nearby membranes and cells, sending its signals. In less than a second, NO signals:
• arteries to relax and expand.
• immune cells to kill bacteria and cancer cells.
• brain cells to communicate with each other.
Will the Real NO Please Stand Up?
In fact, NO sends crucial signals within every cell, tissue, organ, and system of the body.
But perhaps its most important signaling function is within the circulatory system—the system that, in 21st-century America, so often goes wrong, triggering heart attacks and strokes.
The stark statistics tell the story.
Eighty-one million American adults have cardiovascular disease (CVD)—one in three.
Every year, nearly one million people with CVD have their first heart attack. Of those, 141 thousand die.
In fact, CVD is the leading cause of death in the US, accounting for 36 percent of all deaths. If all forms of CVD were prevented, Americans would live an average of seven more years.
Another way to think of the nonstop tragedy of CVD: every 37 seconds (about the time it took you to read from the start of this section to the end of this sentence) another American dies of CVD.
It’s time to say NO to CVD.
And to understand how NO works to protect you from CVD—the hardened, plaque-clogged arteries that lead to heart attacks and strokes—you have to understand how the endothelium works.
The endothelium is the lining of your blood vessels—every blood vessel, from the large coronary arteries of your heart to the tiny capillaries that transfer oxygen and nutrients from your bloodstream to your tissues. The endothelial lining is only one cell thick, but that’s still a lot of cells: if you took all the endothelial cells in your body and laid them out on a flat surface, they’d cover a soccer field.
To get a better view of the endothelium, let’s zoom in on a coronary artery. In a healthy artery, the endothelium is smooth and blood flows freely. The artery is also flexible (as compared to a “hardened” artery affected by heart disease): it easily widens, or dilates, a function medical experts call vasodilation.
Zoom in even closer, and we find out that NO is manufactured in the endothelium, via several different biochemical pathways. (You’ll read more about them in Chapter 3.)
In one pathway, the amino acid L-arginine (a component of protein foods such as meat, fish, dairy, beans, and nuts) combines with oxygen to produce NO. This process is sparked by three enzymes collectively called nitric oxide synthase (NOS). One of those enzymes—endothelial nitric oxide synthase, or eNOS—starts the activation of NO in the endothelium. NO is also produced directly from the chemical compounds nitrate and nitrite.
But no matter the pathway, the end result is the creation of the molecule that has been dubbed the “endothelium-derived relaxing factor.”
Why that name?
Because NO diffuses out of the endothelium into a layer beneath it, the smooth muscle of the artery. There, it signals the muscles to relax—to widen, to expand, to undergo vasodilation.
Needless to say, vasodilation increases blood flow—instead of a measly trickle, there’s a steady and health-giving current of nutrient- and oxygen-rich blood circulating throughout your body.
What if you don’t have enough NO?
Well, the opposite of a relaxed, widened artery is a tense, tightened artery—and when blood flows through that smaller space, blood pressure rises. Without enough NO, in other words, you develop high blood pressure, or hypertension—a major risk factor for heart disease and stroke, as the increased pressure damages artery walls, setting the stage for artery-clogging plaques to grow. (For more about the progression of heart disease, see the box “The Many Steps of Cardiovascular Disease” on pages 6–7.)
But NO does much more to protect the heart than regulate blood pressure.
If there’s too little NO:
• Two of the building blocks of plaque (the white blood cells of the immune system and the tiny, plate-shaped blood factors called platelets) become glue-like, stick to the endothelium, and start the buildup of plaque.
• The smooth muscle cells of the artery wall start multiplying, growing into plaque.
• There’s more chronic inflammation and oxidation in the arteries—the two driving forces of CVD.
Chronic inflammation is a low-grade version of the same redness, heat, and swelling that occur when the immune system rushes to a cut to stop infection.
Oxidation is what happens when a sliced apple turns brown or a chunk of iron rusts—only now it’s happening to your cells.
• Inflammation and oxidation (also called oxidative stress) damage arterial cells, promoting plaque. Once plaque is formed, inflammation and oxidation destabilize plaque: it can burst open, spilling out the toxic contents that trigger artery-plugging blood clots.
• There’s also more risk of the condition called sudden cardiac death (SCD). In more than 50 percent of people with heart disease, a sudden, unpredicted, deadly heart attack is the first sign of heart disease—and endothelial dysfunction (and low NO) plays a key role.
As you can see, the low-NO process is the process of CVD. And it’s also a vicious cycle: the high blood pressure, chronic inflammation, and oxidation of the plaque-making process further decrease your ability to make NO, leading to more CVD, leading to less NO, leading to more CVD, and so on, and on.
The Many Steps of Cardiovascular Disease
A series of scientific discoveries in the 1970s and 1980s led to the discovery that won three scientists the Nobel Prize in 1998: NO is the compound manufactured by the endothelium to relax and dilate arteries.
Since that time, there has been an explosion of research about NO and its many functions—more than 100 thousand scientific studies. Some key and interesting findings about NO:
The three little enzymes. NO production is triggered by three enzymes, proteins that spark chemical reactions. In the brain, it’s neuronal nitric oxide synthase—nNOS, or NOSI. In the immune system, it’s inducible nitric oxide synthase—iNOS, or NOSII. In the endothelium, it’s endothelial nitric oxide synthase—eNOS, or NOSIII.
Nitroglycerin works via NO. We now understand that this old and effective treatment for angina (chest pain from narrowed arteries) works because it is transformed into nitrite, which is converted to artery-relaxing NO in the body.
Viagra depends on NO. Viagra and other medicines for erectile dysfunction (ED) work because they improve NO signaling in the penis.
Tibetans have 100 times more NO-forming nitrate and nitrite in their blood than people living at sea level. It dilates their arteries, helping them cope with the low levels of oxygen at high altitudes.
Plants produce NO, too. The molecule protects plant cells from cellular oxidation and disease.
But the most important discovery about NO has been its role in protecting you against CVD.
Hundreds of studies have been conducted demonstrating the artery-protecting power of NO. We report a few of them here to help convince you of the utter importance of maintaining or boosting levels of this molecule in your body.
(In Chapter 2, we discuss other diseases that can be prevented or treated by NO. And in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 we discuss the how-to of boosting blood and tissue levels of NO.)
Remember as you read these studies: where there’s smoke, there’s fire—and where there is what doctors call endothelial dysfunction, there is a deficiency of NO.
Endothelial dysfunction predicts heart disease. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) conducted a type of study you’ll read a lot about in this book: they injected the artery-dilating compound acetylcholine into an artery of study participants and measured how much the brachial artery of the forearm widened (dilated). This is a standard method for testing endothelial health (or the lack of it).
In a study of 308 people—176 with coronary artery disease (CAD) and 132 without it—the researchers measured endothelial function and then followed the study participants for the next four years, tracking “acute unpredictable cardiovascular events”—hard-to-control (unstable) angina, heart attacks, strokes, and deaths from cardiovascular disease.
Among those with and without heart disease, endothelial function was an accurate predictor of who did and didn’t have a cardiovascular event. Those with a well-functioning endothelium (a sign of normal levels of NO) were unlikely to have a cardiovascular event; those with a weak endothelium (a sign of low levels of NO) were likely to have them. The findings were in the medical journal Circulation.
In a similar study in Circulation, Italian researchers tested the endothelial function of 42 women with chest pain but arteries that appeared normal when they were injected with dye and x-rayed (angiography).
Over 10 years, those who had vasodilation in response to an acetylcholine injection (a sign of a healthy endothelium and normal levels of NO) had “complete resolution” of their chest pain.
In contrast, of those who had vasoconstriction in response to the injection, one died and 13 continued to complain of chest pain—and a second angiography showed the development of CAD.
“Endothelial dysfunction in a setting of normal coronary arteries is a sign of future development of atherosclerosis,” concluded the researchers.
And a review of studies on endothelial function and heart disease by a team of researchers from the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine showed that people with endothelial dysfunction had:
• more heart attacks.
• more need for surgery to open clogged arteries.
• more deaths from heart disease.
These studies, they concluded, “underscore the systemic nature of endothelial dysfunction and its pivotal role in prediction of cardiovascular events.”
Less NO, less endothelial repair. In an animal study, researchers found that low levels of NO impaired the number and function of endothelial progenitor cells—cells that are responsible for maintaining and repairing the endothelium.
High fat, low NO. How many times have you heard—from the press, from your doctor, from your spouse—that eating less saturated fat can help you avoid heart disease? We’d guess a lot of times. But those folks probably didn’t tell that you one of the main reasons why a high-fat meal hurts your heart is because it decreases your NO. Case in point:
Researchers in the Department of Cardiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine studied two groups of students. One group ate a fast-food breakfast containing 900 calories and 50 grams of fat; the other group ate the same amount of calories for breakfast, but no fat. After the meals, the researchers measured vasodilation—and found that vasodilation in those who ate the high-fat meal was dramatically decreased for the next four hours!
(In a similar study, the same researchers found that giving people two antioxidant vitamins before the fatty meal—1,000 mg of vitamin C and 800 IU of vitamin E—prevented the decrease in vasodilation. Those results were in the Journal of the American Medical Association.)
More risk factors for heart disease, less NO. Nearly every risk factor for heart disease—high blood pressure, high “bad” LDL cholesterol, high total cholesterol, low “good” HDL cholesterol, high triglycerides (a blood fat that can hurt the heart), diabetes (which dramatically increases the risk of heart attack and stroke), cigarette smoking, physical inactivity, high levels of the amino acid homocysteine, and aging (discussed later in this chapter)—also causes endothelial dysfunction and low levels of NO.
Why?
One probable reason: all those factors increase the compound asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA). This chemical shoves aside L-arginine—blocking the production of the NO-generating enzyme NOS, and therefore blocking the production of NO.
Another reason: those factors also increase oxidative stress, which quickly inactivates NO after it’s produced.
There are many risk factors for heart disease. High blood pressure. High cholesterol. A mom or a dad (or both) who died of heart disease.
African-Americans and NO
But one risk factor that is common to everybody who reaches age 40 is . . . reaching age 40. Yes, aging—all by itself—is a risk factor for a heart attack or stroke. Why?
Aging leads to an accumulation of protein in artery walls, making them stiffer. With aging, you have fewer capillaries, the tiniest, cell-wide blood vessels. But perhaps most importantly, as you age, so does your endothelium: you don’t generate as much NO, and your arteries don’t dilate as easily and as widely. They’re narrow. They’re stiff. They’re a setup for a heart attack or stroke.
A couple of studies graphically demonstrate the effect of aging on your endothelium.
In one study, Italian researchers evaluated forearm blood flow—the standard measurement of endothelial health—in 47 people with normal blood pressure and 49 people with high blood pressure. They found that in both groups, those who were older had poorer endothelial-dependent vasodilation: the NO-sparked ability of arteries to widen and permit health-giving blood flow. And that weakening of the endothelium was in perfect parallel to aging—decade by decade, NO-powered, endothelial-dependent vasodilation decreased. Specifically:
30 years old and younger. Endothelial-dependent vasodilation was strongest.
31 to 45 years old. Vasodilation was 11 percent weaker than in the 30-and-younger set.
46 to 60 years old. Vasodilation was 13 percent weaker than in the 31- to 45-year-olds.
60 and older. Vasodilation was 28 percent weaker than in the 46- to 60-year-olds.
All in all, those 60 and older had vasodilation that was 52 percent weaker—less than half as strong—as those 30 and younger. And these were older people who did not have high blood pressure!
“Advancing age is an independent factor leading to the progressive impairment of endothelium-dependent vasodilation in humans,” concluded the researchers in the journal Circulation.
Why does the endothelium weaken with age?
“A progressive reduction of NO availability,” wrote the researchers. In fact, they wrote, their findings suggest that “in aged individuals NO availability is almost totally compromised.” (Emphasis ours.)
In a similar study, Japanese researchers tested vasodilation in 18 healthy people, aged 23 to 70. A list of the patients and their response to the vasodilator is striking, showing a near-perfect correlation between age and endothelial health.
The 23-year-old in the study had an artery that expanded more than five times its width when the individual was given a vasodilator; the artery of the 70-year-old expanded a little more than two times.
“Coronary blood flow response to acetylcholine (an endothelium-dependent vasodilator) decreased significantly with aging,” concluded the researchers in the journal Circulation.
Why?
Probably because of the age-related decrease in the release of “endothelium-derived relaxing factor”—a scientific name for NO.
Another study by the same team of Japanese researchers found a loss of 75 percent of endothelium-produced NO in people 70 to 80 years old as compared to 20-year-olds.
It’s important to emphasize that this decline happens not only to people with CVD but to healthy older adults: people who don’t have high blood pressure . . . people who don’t have high cholesterol . . . people who don’t have circulation-damaging diabetes.
In other words, it happens to everybody who gets older!
But don’t despair.
All of these studies also show that the ability of arteries to widen didn’t change—just the ability of the endothelium to generate artery-widening NO.
And there are plenty of ways to generate more NO, as you’ll read about in Chapters 3, 4, and 5: a diet rich in NO-producing nitrate and nitrite (mainly from leafy greens); an NO-boosting supplement; NO-restoring regular exercise; and lifestyle factors that preserve and increase NO, such as sufficient sleep and stress control.
The age-related decrease of NO is not inevitable.
You can slow down the loss of NO.
You can stop the loss of NO.
You can reverse the loss of NO.
That’s what the rest of this book shows you how to do.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD)—the heart attacks, strokes, and heart failure that kill most Americans—isn’t the only health problem that NO can help prevent, slow, or reverse.
“NO, generated by eNOS and nNOS [two enzymes that spark the production of NO], plays a ubiquitous role in the body in controlling the function of almost every, if not every, organ system,” is the way a team of scientists at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana summed up the situation, in the medical journal Experimental Gerontology.
In other words, in your immune system . . . in the hormone-generating glands of your endocrine system . . . in your digestive system . . . in your respiratory system . . . in the brain and spinal cord of your central nervous system—in “almost every, if not every, organ system,” as those researchers put it—NO is hard at work, protecting and restoring your health.
So it’s no surprise that a huge (and growing) body of scientific literature (more than 100 thousand studies, some of them in a medical journal called Nitric Oxide that is devoted solely to the molecule) describes the many roles that NO plays and also might play in health and healing.
We say “might” because the fact that NO is a crucial signaling molecule in every organ is a relatively recent discovery, and scientists are still working out exactly how NO works to maintain health and heal the body. (And the role of NO in healing depends on “just right” amounts: as we describe in Chapter 6, too much NO can harm the body, like any other compound.)
In this chapter, we’re taking you on a guided tour through the highlights of the scientific literature on the role of NO in disease prevention and cure. The reason we’re presenting so much scientific evidence about NO and disease: we want to make the very important point—again and again—that this miracle molecule really is miraculous, with the power to positively affect “almost every, if not every, organ system.”
Let’s start with your bones . . .
In osteoarthritis, the cartilage that cushions bones wears away, the bones painfully rub together, and the structures around the joint—the tendons, ligaments, and muscles—become strained, inflamed, and painful. Osteoarthritis affects 27 million Americans, and is the #1 cause of disability in the US. (Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease, in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the joints; it affects 2.5 million Americans. This section will focus on osteoarthritis, calling it just “arthritis.”)
The type of drug most people take to deal with the chronic pain of arthritis are the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs. There are dozens of such drugs, but some of the more common ones include ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin), naproxen (Aleve, Naprosyn), and diclofenac (Voltaren, Cataflam).
But like any drug, NSAIDs have several downsides—including the fact that they can kill you. This was revealed when it was discovered that the new generation of NSAIDs—the so-called COX-2 inhibitors, such as celecoxib (Celebrex), and the now-banned valdecoxib (Bextra) and rofecoxib (Vioxx)—raised blood pressure and the risk of heart attack and stroke. (Some experts estimate the drugs killed at least 150 thousand people before they were pulled from the market.) In the wake of that pharmaceutical massacre, researchers turned their attention to the entire class of NSAIDs—and found that ibuprofen, naproxen, and diclofenac also increase your risk of heart attack and stroke.
That’s the bad news. The good news: taking an NO-increasing supplement with those drugs may help prevent the problem.
In fact, a French pharmaceutical company created a NSAID that also boosted levels of NO: naproxcinod, intended to prevent the rise of blood pressure and the risk of CVD with NSAIDs. To test the drug, doctors from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine conducted a 13-week study, giving nearly one thousand people with arthritis either naproxcinod, Aleve, or a placebo. Naproxcinod relieved the pain and symptoms of arthritis as well as Aleve and better than the placebo. But, unlike Aleve, naproxcinod didn’t increase blood pressure.
Osteoarthritis and Cartilage