Bar Update

A word from the Medical Profession

Prevention! Will Hotchkiss, a Central Florida car salesman, is glad he's into prevention. Sure, the surgeon had to prop his left coronary artery open with a little chicken-wire-look-alike spring - as tent but it could have been much worse! Without Will's knowledge, layer upon layer of gooey plaque had been forming inside his arteries the past 50 years. Now atherosclerosis was ready to deliver its final assault.
"Your cholesterol is 265. You must diet and exercise; we'll try statin drugs if that doesn't bring it down," his doctor told him after his physical in August 1997.
Dieting and exercise? He'd tried before and hadn't kept it up. Instead, he bought ProFibe, a natural cholesterol-lowering medication he'd heard about.
Will got home and poured a scoopful of the powder into a glass of water and mixed it. It tasted OK. One month later his cholesterol had dropped to 213. He was ecstatic! It took effort to make the drinks a daily habit, but he stuck with it. Nevertheless, 16 months later he began having chest pains.
"I was having trouble breathing. I thought I had a lung infection."
An angiogram showed why - his left coronary artery was 90 percent plugged; very little blood was getting through to his heart. But to his doctor's surprise, the exam also showed that the rest of his arteries were normal. Will was hospitalized, and a stent was guided through his groin and into the plugged artery 'Turns out," said Will, "That one artery had old, hardened plaque in it, and ProFibe can't touch that." But the rest of his arteries were dean. The soft plaque that could have shut him down was gone.

At the age of 49, David Rumph, an executive at a floor-covering business in Anderson, S. C., had become, in his own words, "something of a couch potato."
Says Rumph: "I was overweight, and not too active. Sure, I'd play rounds of golf, but I made a lot more trips to the fridge for beer. I always thought I was invincible, and had no symptoms that anything was wrong. But when I turned 49 in 1996 1 had a physical and my cholesterol was about 270! Worse, I was diagnosed with 80 percent blockage in the left descending heart artery. The doctor said it might be possible to address it with diet and exercise, but he recommended surgery. I told him no way was he going to cut me open to fix an artery, and I looked into natural medicines. I read about ProFibe and was intrigued, but skeptical. I know a lot of doctors socially, and heard that a lot of alternative treatments are worthless. You've got to be careful. I wanted to be sure I was dealing with a reputable company. So I went to the library and started reading about water soluble fibers and pectin, and I looked at Dr. Cerda's research, and decided to try it. I took it religiously for six months starting in May 1997 and the improvement was remarkable. My doctor said to me, if you were on a bell curve, you wouldn't even be on the paper. I had 100 percent improvement on the Thallium stress test. I felt better than I ever had. I was more energetic. Since then, I've taken to running three to four miles every other day, and on alternate days I do two hours of aerobics. My total cholesterol now fluctuates between 114 and 150. 1 had my most recent echocardiogram three weeks ago, and the doctor said I did twice as well this year as I did the year before. So yes, I believe in this product, and I still take it religiously, three servings a day mixed in water.

Joan Levin, a retired Chicago public-interest lawyer, saw her total cholesterol climb as high as 295 after menopause. She disregarded her doctor's advice to try statin drugs and attacked the problem with low-fat diets and exercise. A savvy health consumer - Levin also had a master's in public health from Johns Hopkins - she reasoned it was better to try benign treatments first and use pharmaceuticals as a last resort. But the diet and exercise didn't help.
Then she tried ProFibe. About a month later, her cholesterol had plunged to 208. She kept using the supplement, and without effort lost excess weight - 15 pounds in three months. Newly energetic, she started speed-walking, and in a Chicago race, beat all the men in her age group.
Levin had written on medical topics for consumers, and volunteered to write about ProFibe in layman's terms for CerBurg. Her work became the "frequently asked questions" section of CerBurg's Web site at www.profibe.com.
But a year later, despite her results, enthusiasm and involvement, Levin stopped taking the supplement. "Somehow, I fell off the wagon, "said Levin. "I injured a foot and stopped speed-walking; then I was traveling a lot, and decided it was inconvenient to carry the ProFibe around. Now I've gained weight and haven't had my cholesterol checked for two years.
Levin's story is not unusual. "We're aware," Al Burgin said, "that many people slip out of the habit, or cut back to a less effective dosage."
This realization led in part to the development of ProFibe bars.
The incredible product that made Hotchkiss' effective prevention possible is the result of years of work by two men: gastroenterologist Dr. James Cerda and chemist Charles Burgin. The two shared a fascination with organic chemistry and medicine, visionary minds and a bulldog-like determination to find answers to their questions. Jim and Charlie batted around ideas and developed theories. They had a well equipped lab and a $300,000 grant from the Florida Citrus Commission to study vitamin C in citrus fruit.
"Once a week, we'd come in early," Jim said, "close the doors, put on Mozart and just think..."

They studied the role of citrus in health and disease, and focused on the chemistry of grapefruit pectin, a type of water-soluble fiber found in the membranes and rinds of grapefruit. Previous researchers had found that some connection existed between cholesterol levels and soluble fibers, so Cerda and his team looked into pectin-lipoprotein interactions in laboratory animals. The work began as pure scientific research, but by 1988 they'd learned enough to believe that soluble fibers might have an adjutant role in slowing down the progress of atherosclerosis in humans.
"Not in their wildest dreams did they ever think they would actually regress atherosclerosis," Al Burgin said. "It never entered their minds. All they were trying to do was slow it down."
It was the evidence of plaque regression that made Charlie and Jim think they had the makings of a commercial product. "Lowering cholesterol was good," Cerda said, 'but the regression side was fantastic. It was so fast! As best as we can tell, it takes between 12 and 18 months, and works in roughly 80 percent of patients."
"Nothing else short of natural regression based on a very strict diet and lifestyle changes - over a five- to 10-year span - can do this," Al claims.

TESTIMONIALS

Case Study No. 1: a 39-year-old white male.
Average: two ProFibe bars per day.
Case Study No. 2: a 40-year-old white male.
Average: two ProFibe bars per day.
Case Study No. 3: a 54-year-old white male.
Average: two ProFibe bars per day.

Before ProFibe 45 days after ProFibe Before ProFibe 30 days after ProFibe Before ProFibe 30 days after ProFibe
261 TC 235 205 TC 195 314 TC 314
31.4 HDL 29 44.5 HDL 44.5 46 HDL 45
186 LDL 159 131 LDL 121 224 LDL 197
217 TRIG. 235 146 TRIG. 146 220 TRIG. 358
43 VLDL 47 29 VLDL 29 44 VLDL 73
101 GLUCOSE 102 101 GLUCOSE 101 If you looked at just the subject's total cholesterol, you would incorrectly assume she experienced no change. This is not so. What happened is her LDL-C dropped nicely, but an unexpected increase in triglycerides caused her VLDL to increase dramatically. We suspect something else was happening during the test period.
This subject lowered his LDL-C by almost 30 points. His triglycerides went up slightly, however they were already elevated and the change probably would have been less significant if the triglycerides had been under 200 in the beginning, or if the subject had taken only one bar per day. This subject had the expected drop in LDL-C. (The lower the beginning number the lesser the drop as a number and as a percentage.) We saw no negative impact on glucose or triglycerides.

It works!! I did not get the bounce back as I did taking flax seed or Bio-Life 2. You told me I wouldn't get a bounce back and you were right! I take ProFibe in combination with red yeast rice. As I told you in my letter this past February I have tried everything under the sun to lower my cholesterol and finally found something that works. This has been a 20 year search.
Before ProFibe
2-10-2000 After ProFibe
3-17-2000
272 Total Cholesterol 195
70 HDL 74
186 LDL 110
78 Triglycerides 53
16 VLDL 11
2.66 LDL/HDL 1.49

Thank you!
Robert K.
Woodstock, Ill.

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I am sold on ProFibe.! I am 59 and in excellent health. However, my cholesterol levels have been high for many years. After taking just one serving daily of ProFibe for only a few months, I experienced the following improvements:
Total cholesterol dropped from 253 to 215.
Triglycerides dropped from 117 to 75.
HDL dropped from 92 to 78.
LDL dropped from 138 to 122
VLDL dropped from 23 to 15.

Also, I noted that my blood pressure has dropped as well. I had not expected that.
As you can imagine, I am singing the praises of ProFibe to everyone in my family and to my friends. I am thankful to the developers and producers of this fine product.

Yours sincerely,
N. D.
Ocean Springs, MS.