Idiot Doctors Baffled by CoQ10

So, what’s so important about CoQ10 and L-carnitine? If you think of your body as an automobile, then L-carnitine and CoQ10 can be thought of as agents (like spark plugs) that help turn the gas in the tank into energy to make the car go.

Don’t you want your heart to “go?”

Frustrated by Idiot Doctors

When my 87 year old mother was admitted to the hospital the last week of her life, she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. I asked that she be given a high dose of CoQ10—unbelievably, her doctors didn’t know what that was or that it could help – they were idiots!

The first doctor said, “What is that?” The second doctor said he heard of it but it couldn’t do any good and wasn’t on their hospital pharmacy list. And the head nurse said, “Oh, that’s some kind of enzyme that the heart makes when it’s in trouble, right?”

“I knew right there we were in for trouble.”

It didn’t matter that I faxed them fifty pages of peer-reviewed literature from the National Institute of Medicine. They wouldn’t budge.

Let me be blunt: The doctors who told me that they didn’t know what CoQ10 was or that it couldn’t possibly help were idiots.

“Although coenzyme Q10 represents one of the greatest breakthroughs for the treatment of cardiovascular disease as well as for other diseases, the resistance of the medical profession to using this essential nutrient represents one of the greatest potential tragedies in medicine,” says my friend, board-certified cardiologist, nutritionist, and noted author Stephen Sinatra, M.D. “If there is just one thing you do to help maintain your heart’s health,” says Sinatra, “make sure you’re taking CoQ10 daily.”

CoQ-10 and L-carnitine Makes Your Heart “Go!”

L-carnitine’s job is to escort fatty acids into the cells where they can be “burned” for energy. Because the heart gets 60 percent of its energy from fat, it’s critically important that the body have enough L-carnitine to “shuttle” the fatty acids into the muscle cells of the heart. Nutritionists have long used the combination of L-carnitine and CoQ10 as an “energy” cocktail for just this reason. Though it doesn’t necessarily make you feel more “get up and go” (although for many people it does just that!), it definitely helps give your heart muscle the tools it needs to function optimally.

People who take L-carnitine supplements soon after suffering a heart attack may be less likely to suffer a subsequent heart attack, die of heart disease, experience chest pain and abnormal heart rhythms, or develop congestive heart failure (a condition in which the heart loses its ability to pump blood effectively). A well-designed study of seventy heart-failure patients found that three-year survival was significantly higher in the group receiving 2 g a day of L-carnitine compared to the group receiving a placebo.

If you think of your body as an automobile, then L-carnitine and CoQ10 can be thought of as agents (like spark plugs) that help turn the gas in the tank into energy to make the car go.

Add D-ribose, a 5-carbon sugar that’s made in your cells, and now you’ve added gas to the tank. . .

James Roberts, M.D., is a marathoner who began using D-ribose found that taking it before and after a run eliminated many of the problems, like pain, soreness, stiffness, and fatigue, associated with long-distance runs. He began putting his patients on D-ribose and found that his sickest patients improved within days.

Ribose can be of great benefit to people without heart disease, including athletes.

Athletes place a lot of strain on their muscles’ energy metabolism, according to Sinatra. While it might take a lot for trained athletes to subject their muscles to this kind of stress and strain on energy reserves, a less-conditioned person might experience it gardening or participating in a “weekend warrior” tennis match.

Any time the energy reserves of the muscle are depleted, whether through exercise or a heart condition, ribose supplementation can help. “An adequate dose of ribose will usually result in symptom improvement very quickly,” says Sinatra. “Remember that ribose therapy directly supports the heart’s ability to preserve and rebuild its energy pool,” he says.

Vegetarians Often Lack L-carnitine in Their Diets

Vegetarians most certainly lack D-ribose, which is primarily found in red meat and veal. And though certain vegetables, meats, and fish contain CoQ10, we only consume a tiny amount of CoQ10 in our diet, not nearly enough to have a clinically important benefit. Many people feel a lot better on an “energy” cocktail of L-carnitine and CoQ10.

How to Save 15% on L-carnitine and Ribose