The Potbelly Syndrome: How Common Germs Cause Obesity, Diabetes, And Heart Disease by Russell Farris and Per Marin

Russell Farris is a retired artificial-intelligence researcher who spent most of his life solving problems for the U.S. Navy. After suffering a heart attack in 1998, he began to apply his problem-solving skills to the study of heart disease and related illnesses. Per Marin, M.D., Ph.,is a distinguished scientist, physician, and clinical teacher from Sweden. He has been writing about obesity since 1985, and many of his eighty-two publications deal with the effects of cortisol on weight and health.

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This book, by a layman who has put in years of intense research to try to find a solution to his own serious health problems, claims that potbellies, and perhaps most cases of obesity, are due to ongoing inflammation, something most doctors ignore or even deny. Although this is clearly not a proven theory, there is plenty of evidence presented that infectious diseases, often in chronic form that the standard tests fail to identify, are also the cause of heart disease and diabetes. Physicians are reluctant to accept that standard tests might not be foolproof and even more reluctant to accept that the same type of bacteria and viruses present in healthy people could cause a variety of diseases in sick people, even though almost all healthy people eventually die of the same diseases such as cancer, heart disease, or stroke (see PS below). The obesity culprit appears to be cortisol, produced by the adrenal glands, and the evidence that excess cortisol is (basically) to blame was well supported. For those of us who assumed we had underfunctioning adrenal glands, this is an interesting reversal. Today's prevention and treatment approaches are clearly inadequate as no one ever seems to be cured (it's called ageing but you simply can't go on blaming everything on this!). Also worth reading is Alan Cantwell's "Four Women Against Cancer" which explains how CWD bacteria - they can live without having a cell wall and therefore act more like a virus - cause cancer and how, since this bacteria is inside the cancer cells, tests don't find them and anti-microbial treatments (both natural and synthetic antibiotics, antifungals, antiprotozoals, and antivirals) do not cure cancer. The Potbelly Syndrome seems to be about a similar underlying basis for other incurable health problems. Farris recommends specific steps but most are lifestyle changes many of us have already adopted: reducing and avoiding stressors, including mental/emotional, noise, TV and substances (caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, sugar) as well as adding music, exercise and happy relationships to your life. I doubt these have worked for many of us who have been early adopters of most of these recommendations, over the last decade and more. This includes the author, who has atrial fibrillations and congestive heart failure and states clearly that he remains obese and requires frequent and expensive medical treatments, none of which have improved his situation, much less cured him. The author also recommends various nutritional supplements but, again, the trouble is that natural supplements just don't get rid of chronic infections - it is fairy tale thinking and those claiming otherwise are stealing credit from the body's own ability to recover from most inflammations; they are usually the same alternative health practitioners who don't hesitate to accuse us of "not really wanting to get better" when they are unable to heal our chronic illnesses. On his website, the author writes "Even if a doctor believes that chronic, low-level infections cause obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, there are no easy, safe, effective, and proven treatments for him or her to prescribe." All the recommendations in his book certainly haven't helped the author, who believes that if only doctors would give him months or even years of (low-dose) antibiotics and other drugs that would kill his main infections, and thus reduce cortisol production in the body, he could get better. I wonder, since the negative consequences of antibiotics are now well-known: research indicates that long-term antibiotic use is counterproductive. Hence I have docked one star. It is so distressing for me that the book does not really provide a solution that I'm almost sorry it's been published. I pondered whether to dock another star because of this, but the book does have much value because it shows how modern medicine always puts the cart before the horse. Illness causes obesity, not the other way around. Dieting doesn't work yet doctors still recommend it ("because it absolves them of blame when patients die from diabetes or heart disease"). Healthy people don't need to be told to exercise and don't need to use will power to do so; healthy bodies naturally seek movement, play and sports. P.S. There are a few other books on this point: "The Heart Attack Germ" by Dvonch (see my review there), "The Inflammation Cure" by Meggs and Svec, "The Inflammation Syndrome" by Challem (dietary remedies only, in this one), "Stopping Inflammation" by Appleton (food again, particularly sugar, dairy and wheat as the bad guys), "Inflammation Nation" by Chilton (good and bad fats), and The Anti-Inflammation Zone by Sears (nutrition again) all appeared in 2003/4/5 - and all discuss the role of inflammation in the major diseases of our time, and some of the things that one can do to limit infections. All those books are also fairly easy to read but, as I know too well after more than a decade of careful nutrition, none really has a complete solution for the problem - nor can I find anything more recent that might have offered newer/better advice even though there's more and more evidence to back up the book's claims - in 2009 one report suggests that high blood pressure could be caused by a common virus, known as CMV, affecting between 60 and 99 per cent of adults worldwide and that it is also linked to stroke, kidney disease and even cancer. I suspect one of the reasons is that they are looking at fairly conventional solutions. I'd recommend looking instead at a well-researched book called "Outsmart Your Cancer" - anything that can HEAL cancer is also a general healer and should be able to help much else in the body, at "Trick and Treat" by Groves which turns modern eating advice on its head, backed up by plenty of evidence, and at "Never Fear Cancer Again" by Raymond Francis, a brilliant distillation of what is truly needed for health. All 3 books should be on the "top 10" of any list of books on health. Also, the most impressive (but subtle) physical and mental benefits I have had - in more than 2 decades of voracious reading and intensive self-experimentation - are from the little-known supplement Indiumease which I recently discovered.