About Dr. Jonny - Dr. Jonny Bowden, Ph.D, CNS, is a Board Certified Nutrition Specialist, MA Psychology, ACSM, ACE, NSCA, American Society for Nutrition, American College Nutrition, Speaker, Best-Selling Author and Weight Loss Coach

Idiot Doctors Baffled by CoQ10

by Dr. Jonny · 8 comments

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

This sale has ended!

Let’s do all we can to avoid the cardiac care unit of hospitals!

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January 27, 2010 at 3:21 am

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1 Leroy J. Tonn January 26, 2010 at 7:50 am

Your vitamin prices for coQ10 and L-Carnitine are out of whack!!! I can go to Wallgreens and pick these up for one third the price for a national brand.I bought 2 of your books and I think they are great but your prices for almost anything are 3-4 times what you’d pay anywhere else. Way ,WAY out of whack… why??. I wouldn’t buy any thing of yours online on a bet. Your ideas are excelent but your prices are through thr f!@#$%^ing roof. Too bad.

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2 Dr. Jonny January 26, 2010 at 12:01 pm

Hi Leroy,

Thanks for writing in. I do appreciate that there’s always a raging debate about quality, cost vs generic, and expensive vs inexpensive. There are many things to consider when purchasing vitamins.

I’ve spent 20 years in the field of nutrition on all sides of the table—involved in many vitamin formulation meetings—and I know first-hand how and why quality will vary widely.

Consider magnesium. For the non-professional, magnesium is magnesium; but, to the formulator there’s a choice- he can use magnesium oxide (very cheap) magnesium citrate, magnesium glycinate, etc… These all vary HUGELY in cost, as do all the other ingredients. And which one they choose- not to mention the amount they choose to put in- has a direct effect on the quality, benefits, etc. (And the price.)

Fish oil presents an even deeper problem. Inferior fish oil, non-purified, taken from any fish and mass produced in huge quantities for the “big box” stores is a very different product from fish oil extracted from fish that swim in pristine Alaskan waters. The fish oil companies I feature all make small batches and rigorously test for impurities every which way and back. One company I link to does no less than 37 tests for toxins, metals and impurities. And they make them in small batches which guarantees freshness.

Will this fish oil cost more? Absolutely—but the purification process has a price and the manufacturer must pass that on to stay in business.

Then there’s whey protein. Ordinary shopping mall whey protein originates with cows from the same type of cattle farms that supply McDonald’s- factory farmed animals, shot up with antibiotics, steroids, hormones, etc. Sweetened with either HFCS, aspartame, etc.

On the other hand, Paleomeal comes from grass-fed cows, no hormones, no antibiotics, no steroids, no HFCS, sweetened with Xylitol, etc, fortified with omega-3′s, phosphitadyl choline. Both are “protein powders”. Are they the same? Hardly.

You can go to CVS and buy something less expensive. You can always buy cheaper—but higher quality will cost more. What you find at Walgreens and what you buy through the companies on my website cannot be compared.

Think Kia vs. Rolls Royce. There is nothing “wrong” with buying a Kia and some cars at that price range are very good values, if you know where to look.

What we might ask is—which car is better made, will last longer and have more endurance? And unlike with cars, the difference between the cheapest Centrum type vitamin and the very very best most expensive is a lot smaller than, say, the difference between a Timex and a Rolex, or a Kia and a Lexus.

I am not involved in the manufacturing of the vitamins on my site nor do I have ownership in any of the companies that make them. The vitamins in my store are doctors’ brands of the highest quality. They are made in small batches (unlike the huge mass market for Walgreens) and tested every which way and back.

They are the exact same “health professional only” brands sold on Emersonecologics.com, where only health practitioners and their patients can buy, and at the exact same prices—and most importantly, I do not set the prices as that is done by the manufacturer. I simply do the work for you and select the ones I think are the absolute best in their category and then put them in my store.

Thanks for writing in. I think these discussions are invaluable for people considering quality vs. cost and I’m glad you liked my books!

warmly
jb

PS And if you’ve been a reader of my newsletter for any length of time, you know that I regularly give sales on all the vitamins to make them easier to purchase in our troubled economic times. Check my newsletter every week for sales. This month it’s CoQ10, PaleoReds, Barlean’s Greens, and Whey Cool Protein.

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3 Linda January 26, 2010 at 8:10 am

Did they even read the peer reviews? Did they have any valid criticisms, or is it just stubborness? The definition of stupidity is willfull ignorance.

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