By Femi Kusa/
Website: www.olufemikusa.com
johnolufemikusa@gmail.com
As we approached 25 February 2023, the season of political lightning, 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 such 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 is 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 a table for lunch. When his wife came to call him over, he was gone! He had had a heart attack!
I knew joy on 25 February 2023 as I walked down about one kilometer of the road with Good Samaritan Mr. Alaba Fadola 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 for 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 spiritual 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 know 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 is that, because I hardly have time for physical exercises nowadays, a walk such as that afforded me the opportunity to stretch my muscle and check how my heart copes with the pressure. That walk was a small “do”. For readers of this column who are familiar with the 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. One or more times, she would request we stop to board a bus. I would object and tell her she was experiencing the 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 system with plant medicines. Such persons are hypertensive. Hypertension connotes the image of blood vessels (arteries, veins, and capillaries) that have hardened (ARTERIOSCLEROSIS) because CALCIUM has settled in their soft muscles, or become blocked (ARTERIOSCLEROSIS) by cholesterol and other fatty plaque. That is not to mention blood vessels in which the NON-RETURN VALVES have been weakened 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 or taking a short walk becomes a huge task for the heart. It is not getting enough blood and oxygen (petrol) for the task, and its muscle fibers are dying by installment. Some people are likely to have an early warning signal in ANGINA PECTORIS, a pain in the chest that may radiate to the left shoulder blade(scapula) and down the left arm. Some persons may not so lucky with an early warning system.
FEAR, ANXIETY, and STRESS
Fear and anxiety, like stress, are inescapable, unlike everyday activities. Who has not experienced all three in Nigeria’s ongoing cash shortage? 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 that 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 switching storms. Here we are at last, those storms are breaking over the landscape, not switching over it any longer, as the election results are being announced, lightning 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 realize 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 DIABETES, HYPERTENSION, HEART ATTACK, and STROKE.
In fact, several studies now suggest the possibility of a heart attack occurring even in the absence of hypertension and 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 the effects of fear, anxiety, grief, and stress with medicines or nutritional supplements. Over about 40 years, I have watched 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 FATIGUE
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 in Japan and is now produced and marketed in the United States. Whoever recalls that the Children of Israel, as slaves in Egypt, were fed garlic rations with their meals to make them healthy and energetically 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 occurred 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 leads them back to Egypt!
Modern studies of garlic extol its health virtues for such effects as normalizing 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 peeled!), improving blood circulation and strengthening the heart, cutting blood sugar, aiding digestion and doing much, much more. There are about 20 versions of Kyolic Garlic. Each one has, compared 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 GABS, 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 heartbeat (tachycardia), palpitation, and perhaps, angina PECTORIS and who have been trying Hawthorn berries where prescription medication seemed to not have been much help, should give a salute to this herb. It is sold sometimes as Hawthorn berries only or as the berries combined with the seeds or flowers or all three together. The more comprehensive it is, the costlier, though. In many human and animal experiments, Hawthorn has been reported to dilate arteries of the heart. This, expanding their internal passage for blood flow asked more blood to flow to the heart and increasing oxygen and other nutrient supplies, and saving the delicate muscle fibers from starvation, stress, and death by installment. Additionally, Hawthorn has reportedly helped researchers 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. In 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, etc. This causes or induced the heart to pump harder to drive blood circulation. Doing so without assistance may cause the heart to weaken and begin to enlarge. Such a heart may be on its way out and eventually give way to a congestive heart.
Doctors’ prescription medicines slow down the heart, rather than energize it to do the work for which it was created. Slowing down the heart worsens 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 inefficiency or subnormal functioning. In an old, old book titled ‘NATURAL CURES’, Rex Adams suggests that Vitamin B1 (thiamine), combined with Garlic and Hawthorne helps. To obtain a rounded picture of these food supplements, I advise you to read as much as you can about DR. KARL FOLKERS on the internet. He has been researching this energy-producing substance since about 1952 and is nicknamed by many researchers “the Father of CQ10 research”.
It’s erroneous to assume this substance works only for the heart supply because many studies have established it as indispensable for heart health. Primary, CoQ10 is found in the mitochondrion of the cell, the energy factory where energy is produced. The more CoQ10 a cell has, the more the number of mitochondium (mitochondria) that is present in it, and the more the energy output of that cell. It has been theorized that cells may be unable to successfully fight diseases because they do not have enough CoQ10, mitochondria, and energy. Really, what can a weak (and lazy) person do? Dr. Fillers emphasizes CoQ10 for the heart because he found that heart diseases begin when the level goes below a certain level. The heart is an organ that works right from the womb, non-stop, day, and night, all the years of one’s life. It requires a lot number of energy to do its work, and its cells should have the maximum supplies of Q10 and mitochondria and other energy-producing materials for this.
Europe cheated Nigeria in the 1980s when the knowledge of the importance of CoQ10 reached Nigeria. The dosages per capsule or soft gel 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. Today, we know the healthy heart requires 300mg of CoQ10 every day or about 100mg of UBIQUINOL. Today, UBIQUINOL is scarce and expensive in Nigeria.
There are three more points I would like to make in this summary. The first is that Dr. Fillers, working with some medical doctors, carried out a “landmark” study in the Netherlands in which UBIQUINOL reportedly helped to reverse about 30 cases of Terni Al breast cancer. He prescribed UBIQUINOL at about 90mg daily along with some other nutritional supplements. Nothing seemed to happen for three-month 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 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-bursting animal, goes first for the heart of its prey. Is this so because the heart has the largest concentration of CoQ10 in the body?
Thirdly, the heart is the only organ’s 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 her request for this weekend if her preferred Presidential candidate emerges as president-elect.
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 normalizes 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 nightcap for persons who are prone to risk factors of hypertension, heart attack, and stroke. Indeed, does anyone have to wait to be prone to them?
ISK CLEAR
ISK is a code of ischemic, which relates to health accidents in the heart. The product is about two years old in Nigeria. Sunflower Oil, Vitamin E, and Vitamin B6 (Pyrodoxin). Vitamin B6 removes excess water from the blood water volume, thereby acting like a diuretic, to reduce the workload of the heart. Vitamin E is a blood thinner and a friend of muscles and the heart, which is a trouble of muscles. Sunflower Oil brings essential fatty acids which are good, also, for preventing blood clots and protecting heart health.
CARDIOTONIC PILLS
This was rare in 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 their life. The secret was one percent camphor added to other ingredients.
Read the first part of this article here: https://www.newsmakerslive.org/recipes-for-health-in-thunder-lightning-and-rain-1/
FEMI KUSA was at various times Editor; Director of Publication/ Editor-in-Chief of THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER; Editorial Director/ Editor-in-Chief of THE COMET NEWSPAPER. Currently, he keeps a Thursday Column on Alternative Medicine in the NATION NEWSPAPER.
Some of his health columns may be found on www.olufemikusa.com and in MIDIUM a digital platform for writers. He is active also on Facebook @ John OLUFEMI KUSA.
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