As we approached 25 February 2023, the season of political lightening, thunder and rain in Nigeria after the respite of 2019, I checked my food supplements wardrobe for plant medicines relevant to the occasion. Some of them were Kyolic Stress and Fatigue, Hawthorn berries, Ubiquinol or Co-Enzyme Q10(CoQ10) of high dosage, ISK clear, Vida Max, Cardiotonic Pills, Magnesium, Choleduze (Omega-3 oil and Vitamin E), among others.
This wardrobe is in one corner of my bedroom. In it, I stock some of the plant medicines of food supplements often requested by members of the KUSA GREEN PASTURES chat group. In my health care review as the 2023 Presidential and general elections approached, I sighted, also, other important food supplements as Kyolic Blood Sugar, Kyolic Immune, Maria Treben Bitters, Curcumin 2000X, Jobelyn, Amazon Prostate Support, Prosta Plus, Prostate Easy Flow Tea, Amazon Liver Balance, Healthy Liver, Liver Balance and a lot more.
The first group of food supplements are HEART specific. Many of us are not aware that our hearts are weak, and that the Presidential election results can trigger certain events in the blood circulation system of the heart and blood vessels which, in turn, may cause what doctors call “cardiovascular accidents” and, in some cases, death. One such death was the one I was informed of last week by one of my cousins. The gentleman was an acquaintance of both of us. He arrived from work and settled into a settee, waiting to be invited to table for dinner. When his wife came to call him over, he was gone!. He had a heart attack!
I knew joy on 25 February 2023 as I was walked down about one kilometer of road by Good Samaritan, Mr ALABA FADOLA,l from around my house to my polling station. He was voting for the first time, he told me. I could not remember for how long I had been voting. In 2011, I voted Jonathan, but went for Buhari in 2015 and 2019. I did not think I would vote this year until the election landscape began to get messier, and I did not wish, through inaction, to fuel lethargy against the fortunes of my preferred candidate. This is a serious matter. If everyone pulls back from inconvenience, believing someone else would do it anyway, no one or many persons may not do it in the end. That is what we often experience in low voter turnout. Yet many of us have learned from the Biblical story of the TALENTS that the talents not used and hidden are taken away and given to those who use their own talents properly. From this, we come face-to-face with the Justice in taking (something) away from him who hath not and giving it to the one who already has a-plenty. Nothing must be wasted!. If some persons are DETERMINED and others are LETHARGIC, who would the elections favour?
Mr Alaba Fadola was DETERMINED. At about 50 or something like that( I couldn’t determine his age because I am vision challenged), he was determined, as I was. But we never spoke about our preferred candidates. What I meant by the walk giving me joy was that, because I hardly had time and opportunity for physical exercises nowadays, a walk such as that afforded some of the opportunity to stretch my muscles and check how my heart may be working under a little more exertion. Mr Fadola didnt know what was going on in my head. That walk was a small “do”. For readers of this column who are familiar with Ikeja area of Lagos, I have been walked a few times from UNDER BRIDGE to Alausa Secretariat by JOY JOHN, who assisted with the typing for this column before she went to her nursing school. She was about 22, about 50 years younger then. One or more times, she would request we stop to board a bus. I would object and tell her she was experiencing results of a diet of white bread, soft drinks, sugar and shawarma. I never, as also happened last week, experienced breathlessness, chest pains, exhaustion and my joints did not give way.
In this election season, many persons challenged with cardiovascular ailments may not be lucky with their systems as the results come in, and after. So, it is a wise decision to boost the health of the cardiovascular system with plant medicines at this time. Such persons are hypertensive. Hypertension connotes the image of blood vessels(arteries, veins and capillaries), which have hardened (ARTERIOSCLEROSIS) because excess blood CALCIUM has settled in their soft muscles, or become blocked (ATHERIOSCElEROSIS) by cholesterol and other fatty plaque. That is not to mention blood vessels in which the NON-RETURN VALVES have been weakend or damaged. All these conditions cause the heart to pump blood harder through obstructions or over-resistant vessels, weakening it and, sometimes, causing it to enlarge. It is worse for the heart when the arteries which supply it with blood are hardened and blocked, and it is expected, in this condition, to work harder. That is when a simple task such as climbing staircases of taking short walks becomes huge tasks for the heart. It is not getting enough blood and oxygen(petrol) for the task, and it’s muscle fibers are dying instalmentally. Some people are likely to have an early warning signal in ANGINA PECTORIS, a pain in the chest which may radiate to the left shoulder blade(scapula) and down the left arm. Some persons may not be so lucky with early warning system.
Fear, anxiety and stress
Fear and anxiety, like stress, are inescapable in every day activities. Who has not experienced all three in Nigeria’s ongoing cash shorty? Where is that parent who does not encounter them in the upbringing of children?. I am yet to learn of courtships and even settled marriages which did not wade through them. Since the political campaigns for the 2023 elections began last year, we have had them a-plenty. I recall that this column advised in a series of articles then that everyone guard his or her health against the swirling storms. Here we are at last, those storms are breaking over the landscape, not swirling over it any longer. As the election results are being announced, lightening is flashing, thunder is roaring and rain is pouring down. Mother Nature equips our bodies to withstand these pressures, although not in perpetuity. When a cat and a dog square up for a fight, the hairs of the cat stand on end. This means it is preparing for a fight and stress hormones, especially CORTISOL and ADRENALIN are building up in it. Once the danger or need for a fight or flight is over, the body “calms down”,as we say, and the hairs fall back “at ease”.
When the election results do not go our way, and we constantly realise we may not like the faces and the activities of the new President or Governor over the next four years, there is a tendency for us to weather the unpleasant situation and thought of it in fear, anxiety, if not grieving and even sliding into depression, all of which subject us to STRESS, especially PSYCHOLOGICAL STRESS. The danger in this is that stress hormones will build up in the body and their accumulation can cause dangerous health problems, including CHOLESTEROL BuILD UP iN THE CIRCULATION, HiGH BLOOD TRIGLYCERIDES LEVRLS, AGGLUTINATING BLOOD PLATLETS, DIABETES, HYPERTENSION, HEART DISEASE, HEART ATTACK and STROKE.
In fact, several studies now suggest the possibility of a heart attack occuring even in the absence of hypertension and such other well-known risk factors such as diabetes, obesity, sedentary lifestyle of smoking, once cortisol blood or tissue or urinary cortisol levels are high. That is why it is important at this time to support the body’s efforts to overcome effects of fear, anxiety, grief and stress with plants medicines or nutritional supplements. Over about 40 years, I have studied some literature on many of the ones I suggested above for improving the health of the blood vessels and the heart(the cardiovascular system) to prevent the risks of hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, heart attack and stroke. The summary below on some of them is a summary as the word implies…
Kyolic stress and fatige
Kyolic is garlic aged for about 20 months to make the extracts 50 times more potent than farm garlic extracts. It was developed by the WAKANUGA company of Japan and now produced and marketed in the United States. Wherever recalls that the Children of Israel, as slaves in Egypt, were fed garlic rations with their meals to make them healthy and energetic fit for manual labour may appreciate its impact on the cardiovascular system, bones, nerves and muscles. We learn, also, that what may have amounted to the first recorded labour dispute in history occured in the desert when the children of Israel rebelled against Moses in the desert because they had no garlic rations for them. The angry, wandering people actually asked that he lead them back to Egypt!
Modern studies of garlic extol its health virtues for such effects as normalising blood cholesterol levels,raising the counts of the good cholesterol (HDL), lowering the bad cholesterol ( LDL), killing bacteria,viruses and fungi, improving endurance,fighting cold and some throat ( remember Garlic perles!), improving blood circulation and strengthening the heart, culting blood sugar, aiding digestion and doing much, much more. There are about 20 versions of Kyolic Garlic. Each one has,complexed to this aged garlic, certain plant or nutritional factors specific to certain conditions to give it a special KYOLIC brand name. Accordingly, KYOLIC STRESS and FATIGUE combined 600mg of Kyolic Garlic with THIAMINE(VitaminB1) Vitamin of nerves and muscles, VitaminB6, Vitamin B12 and GABA, an anti-stress and anti-fatigue substance which naturally occurs in human bodies but is rapidly consumed in stressful condition.
Hawthorn berries
Persons who are challenged with hypertension, rapid heart beat ( thachicardia), palpitation and perhaps, angina PECTORIS and who have been trying Hawthorn berries where prescription medication seemed to not have been much helpful,should give a salute to this herb. It is sold some timed as Hawthorn berries only or as the berries combined with the seeds or flowers or all three together. The more comprehensive it is, the costier,though. In many human and animal experiments, Hawthorn has been reported to dialate arteries of the heart, Thus,expanding their internal passages for blood flow, making more blood to flow to the heart and increasing oxygen and other nutrient supplies and saving the delicate muscle fibers from starvation, stress and instalmental death. Additionally, Hawthorn is reported to improve the mechanical pump action of the heart muscles in hypertension and in normal circumstances without necessarily causing it more stress and threatening its health. On secondary hypertension, some organs, apart from the blood vessels, may have been calcifying, and resisting blood flow through them. Such organs may include the liver, kidneys, spleen e.t.c. This causeds the heart to pump harder to drive blood circulation through. Doing so without assistance may cause the heart to weaken or begin to enlarge. Such a heart may be on its way out and eventually give way in “congestive heart failure”. Prescriptions drugs slow down the heart, rather than energise it to do the work for which it was created. Slowing down the heart worsen blood, oxygen and nutrient supplies to all parts of the body and slows waste and poison removal, thereby predisposing the cells,tissues and organs to premature aging and in inefficiency or subnormal functioning. One of the order well known side effect of anti Hypertensive drugs is ERECTILE disfunction. A penil shaft not well supplied with blood finds turgidity difficult to achieve or to maintain. In an old, old book titled MIRACLE MEDICINE FOODS , Rex Adams suggests that Vitamin B1 ( thiamine),combined with Garlic and Hawthorne helps to revive an enlarged heart.
COQ10 ( Ubiquinol)
I advise you read as much as you can about DR. KARL FOLKERS on the internet. He has been researching this energy- producing substance since about1952 and is nicknamed by many researchers in this field as”the father of CQ10 research”. It is erroneous to assume this substance works only for the heart simply because many studied have established it as indispensable for heart health. Primarily, CoQ10 is found in the mitochondrium of the cell, the energy factory where energy is produced. The more the CoQ10 a cell has,the more the number of mitochondium( mitochondria…pl) that is present in it,and the more the energy output of that cell. Thus, it has been theorised that cells may be unable to successfully fight diseases because they do not have enough CoQ10, mitchondria and energy. Really, what can a weak( and lazy) person do? Dr Folkers emphasises CoQ10 for the heart because he found that heart diseases occur when CoQ10 content of the heart fall below a certain level. The heart is an organ which works right from the womb, non- stop,day and night,all the years of one’s life. It requires alot of energy to do its work, and it is said to have the largest stock of CoQ10 among all the organs. This is why it has plenty of mitochondria and other energy producing materials for its work.
Europe cheated Nigeria in the 1980s when the knowledge of the importance of CoQ10 reached Nigeria. The dosages per capsule or softgel we sold in those days hovered between five and 10mg. Now,we know that in the processing of CoQ10 by the body,some of it is lost. The body processes CoQ10 to UBIQUINOL before it can use it. Thus, today,we know the healthy heart requires atleast 300mg of CoQ10 every day or about100mg of UBIQUINOL. Today, UBIQUINOL is sarce and expensive in Nigeria.
There are three more points I would like to make in this summary. The first is that Dr Folkers, working with some medical doctors, carried out a”landmark” study in the Netherlands in which UBIQUINOL reportedly helped to reverse about 30 cases of terminal breast cancer. He prescribed UBIQUINOL at about 90mg daily along with some other nutritional supplements in a study to determine if nutritional supplements have any impact on breast cancer management or cure. Nothing seemed to happen for three-months until one of the patients unilaterally raised the dosage to 290mg. Other women in the clinical trial did the same and achieved the same results. The researchers concluded that the cell differentiation or cancer reversal may have been achieved when the cells acquired more energy to offset their trouble. The second point is that the lion, an energy burstling animal,goes first for the heart of its prey. If this is so, is it because the heart has the largest concentration of CoQ10 in the body?. Thirdly,the heart is the only organs meat I eat nowadays, because of Ubiquinol, of course! Sometimes,though, I yield to”goat head” which is the preference of Udeme Edet James And who fixes meals in our household. For this week-end, if her preferred Presidential candidate,,becomes President-elect, there would be goat head and cow heart on the table!
Vida Maxx
This product came to Nigeria 11 years ago. It has two components…(a) fruitflow and(b) Resvida. Fruitflow is made from an extract of tomato which normalises platelet and triglyceride situations, preventing clumping. Resvida brings along Resveratol which dilates arteries. In eight human Clinical trials, one capsule starts to work within one hour of being injected and is active for the next 12 hours. Since many cardiovascular accidents occur at night, this product may be good as a night cap for persons who are prone to risk factors of hypertension,heart attack and stroke. In deed,does any -one have to wait to be prone to them?
ISK clear
ISK Is a code for ischemia, which relates to health accidents in the heart. The product is about two years old in Nigeria. Sunflower oil, Vitamin E and Vitamin B6 (pyrodoxine). Vitamin B6 remove excess water from the blood water volume, thereby acting like a diuretic, to reduce work load of the heart. Vitamin E is a blood thinner and a friend of muscles and the heart, which is a bundle of muscles. Sunflower oil brings essential fatty acids which are good, also, for preventing blood clots and protecting heart health.
Cardiotonic pills
This was a rave of the 1990s. The experiment which sold it out then was that of a man whose hand was frozen and given CARDIOTONIC pills after. In no time, the frozen hands regained its blood circulation and its life. The secret was one percent camphor added to the other ingredients.
I love to write about food supplements or plant medicines and about how they may positively impact health in health care or sick care. In other words, I like to chew salacious meat for long but for the hungry throat… so, more about food supplements and plant medcines summary very soon.