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With today’s epidemic of heart disease—and its risk factors of high blood pressure, stress, elevated cholesterol, obesity, and diabetes—it’s hard to wrap your mind around a concept such as total heart health. Yet in their book Total Heart Health: How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease with the Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health (Basic Health Publications, 2006), authors Robert Schneider, M.D., F.A.C.C., and Jeremy Fields, Ph.D., provide a simple, step-by-step guide for improving heart health naturally and without harmful side effects..
No one can dismiss the fact that the average American’s heart health is in a sorry state. Even with modern advances in heart surgery, heart disease claims more people than the next 16 causes of death combined. And the authors make it clear that if this is not your heart they are describing, it’s the heart of one of your family members or closest friends. Because heart disease affects one in two Americans, it is personal to us all.
The centerpiece of the first section, titled “The Mind Approach,” is the compelling research on the Transcendental Meditation® program and heart health that Dr. Schneider and colleagues have conducted in collaboration with top medical institutes over the past two decades, with the support of over $20 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Take this finding, reported in the American Heart Association’s journal Stroke in 2004. After the subjects—who were at risk for atherosclerosis due to high blood pressure—were divided into two groups, the control group practiced the Transcendental Meditation program, a simple technique found to reduce stress and improve a wide range of health parameters in 600 earlier studies. The reductions in thickness of the subjects’ artery walls after eight months of practice, twenty minutes twice a day, were comparable to reductions achieved by subjects taking conventional medications or engaging in intensive diet and exercise programs. Yet the subjects in the group practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique made no other lifestyle changes or changes in medications. This is a revolutionary finding—that the Transcendental Meditation technique alone can reverse atherosclerosis, thus lowering the risk of both stroke and heart disease.
I was especially drawn to the second section of the book, which gives many natural solutions and practical preventive measures that can be applied right away. Drawing on the ancient knowledge of the Maharishi Vedic Approach to HealthSM, the book outlines three main approaches to heart disease: Mind, Body, and Environment. All of these approaches aim to awaken the body’s inner intelligence—getting the body to repair itself from the inside in a holistic sense rather than waiting for doctors to try to repair it piecemeal from the outside with drugs or surgery.
For example, “The Body Approach” includes an overview of the Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health in terms of diet, daily routine, and lifestyle choices. We learn that disease is caused by mistakes in dietary and lifestyle choices. This book tells us how to repair those mistakes. Even those familiar with these concepts will find plenty of new material here—specific diets, recipes, and lifestyle guidelines for preventing diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, stress, and high cholesterol. With its precise illustrations by Judith Hans-Price and ample graphs, tables, and charts, the information is easy to understand.
In discussing “The Environment Approach,” the authors indicate just how fragile the human heart is. Heart health is affected by secondary smoke from our immediate environment; by the stress of war, economic instability, and social unrest in our collective environment; and even by cycles of the sun and moon in our cosmic environment. Fortunately, the authors also describe Vedic technologies to turn the tables and use the near, collective, and cosmic environments to actually improve heart health.
The authors are well qualified to write this book. Robert Schneider is a physician, scientist, and educator, and one of the world’s leading authorities on natural medicine and its scientific use in the prevention and treatment of heart disease. Over the past 20 years, he has directed the Institute of Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, receiving more than $20 million in research grants from the NIH for his pioneering research on natural approaches to heart disease.
The results of this groundbreaking research have been published in more than 100 articles in authoritative medical journals and proceedings, including the American Heart Association’s journals Stroke and Hypertension and the American Medical Association’s Archives of Internal Medicine. Dr. Schneider’s work has sparked the imagination of the popular media as well, and has been featured in more than 1,000 television, radio, magazine, and newspaper reports, including ABC’s 20/20, CNN Headline News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Time magazine.
Coauthor Jeremy Z. Fields, Ph.D., has 30 years of scientific experience conducting NIH- and VA-funded medical research. He is also a veteran science writer and editor.
In the final pages, the authors leave us with a vision of individual and collective recovery. By implementing all three approaches—mind, body and environment—it’s possible to stop heart disease. It becomes clear that this is not a fanciful dream, but the solid conclusion of many research studies published in leading medical journals. Read this book to take a new look at heart health—and envision a time when individuals living without heart disease create a stress-free, peaceful, and healthy world.
Linda Egenes is the author of two books on the Maharishi Vedic Approach to Health.
For more information and to order the book, go to www.totalhearthealth.info. It’s also available at bookstores online and off.