DON FELTON'S WIFE, MACKIE, used to get up each morning, fry some bacon, then make gravy from the grease, and serve it to Don over toast or homemade bread. "I loved it, " Don said. "I ate it for years." And it wasn't just a matter of breakfast. "I remember side meat cooked in beans. " Side meat was pure fat, a two-inch-thick piece of fat off the side of a pig. The side meat is cured in salt, soaked overnight, rolled in cornmeal, and browned in a skillet with gravy made with the grease."
He was fifty-four, and had been informed by his cardiologist that after twenty-seven years of chronic heart trouble and treatment, including a double bypass that had begun to failthere was nothing more conventional medicine could do for him. An angiogram showed that the main artery in the leg was entirely blocked. Don was put on a program that required him to:
1. Avoid all meat, poultry and fish.
2. Avoid all dairy products.
3. Avoid all oils.
4. Eat all available varieties of vegetables, beans, peas, lentils.
5. Eat all whole grain products.
6. All fruits.
After three or four months, Don Felton's chest pain eased. He no longer had to sleep propped up by pillows to ease the angina, which had been much worse when he lay down flat. And about seven months after he started the program, he mentioned that he had been so focused on his heart that he had forgotten to tell me about his leg: he now was able to walk across the skyway to my office without stopping-without a single stab of pain.
I immediately sent him to the vascular laboratory for another pulse volume test, which showed that the flow of blood in the artery that had been blocked was back to normal Don is a test case in the power of the endothelial cells and how they respond to dramatically reduced cholesterol levels and lifestyle changes that eliminate all risk factors.
Drawn from Prevention and Cure of Heart Disease by Caldwell Esselstyn.