Speaker 1 0:00
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast, where Dr. Steven Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone. Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long happy life.
Dr Gundry 0:23
Did you know that each year around 655,000 Americans fall victim to heart disease and with women Heart disease is the number one cause of death today. But here’s the good news. This is not your fate. You can beat these statistics by measuring this health marker. And here’s a shocker it’s not your cholesterol and incorporating simple daily habits. Today’s episode is all about heart health, including some poignant insights and practical tips from Jonny Bowden, author of The Great Cholesterol Myth. Amid the sea of heart health advice on the internet, it’s easy to get misled if you’re not today, we’re going to separate fact from fiction ensuring you’re armed with the truth to truly safeguard your heart. It’s time to unravel the mysteries of heart health myths and reclaim your well being stay tuned. I want to set the record straight because chances are you’ll see one of these heart health myths in just about every article you read. I know you want to stay healthy, and I’m here to help. So let’s bust these heart health myths once and for all. Myth number one, you need to stop eating fatty foods fat is terrible for your heart. The truth, some fats are terrible for your heart. Things like trans fats, hydrogenated vegetable oil, and oils derived from lectin heavy ingredients like sunflower or peanut oil, but other fats have actually been shown to help boost your heart health. And you should actually try to eat more of them. I’m talking about fats like olive oil and perilla seed oil, nuts, wild caught seafood and avocado. The truth is omega three fatty acids are actually connected to reducing the risk of heart disease and stroke. That’s one of the reasons I eat an avocado just about every day. And I suggest my patients do the same. Here’s my favorite myth number two, you need to eat more whole grains for a healthy heart. I’m pretty sure this lie was created by food companies who wanted to sell more whole grain because here’s the thing. It’s dead wrong. But whole grain cereals, brown rice, bread and a whole assortment of unhealthy foods have been marketed using the heart healthy label. Even foods loaded in sugar and lectins. And even the American Heart Association is hopped on the heart healthy whole grains bandwagon. But when you look at the diets of people with the lowest instances of heart disease, you’ll see that they have one thing in common. They actually don’t eat a lot of whole grains. France actually tops the list, and they do eat a lot of bread in France, but most of it is made with refined white flour. And in Japan, white rice is common. While brown rice is practically unheard of the takeaway eating whole grains won’t keep your heart healthy. But eating a diet rich in omega three fats, leafy green vegetables and poly phenols will so look to the Mediterranean diet or even the Okinawan diet for heart health inspiration and leave the whole grains on the table. Myth number three, eating high cholesterol foods will raise your cholesterol. The truth when it comes to your cholesterol you are not what you eat. Sure, doctors used to believe that eating foods like eggs and shellfish would raise your cholesterol to problematic levels. But the truth is moderate intake of cholesterol rich foods. Yes, even things like egg yolks and shrimp won’t raise your cholesterol. Again, take a look at the Japanese diet one rich and shellfish eggs and seafood. The Japanese have some of the lowest instances of heart disease in the world despite eating cholesterol rich foods. That’s because most of the cholesterol in your diet just can’t be absorbed by your gut. And what is absorbed actually plays a role in helping your body run smoothly. So go ahead, eat your Omega three eggs or your wild caught seafood from time to time When they’re part of a balanced diet, they’re fine for your health. Myth number four, you need to work out for hours a week to improve heart health. The truth, exercise is good for it, but you don’t need hours of cardio to improve your heart health. In fact, extreme cardio like running marathons, triathlons, or climbing mountains can actually put more strain on your system than is healthy. Studies of triathletes recently shown that it causes severe fibrosis of your heart that’s thickening like gristle in your heart doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. Now, this isn’t to say you should be a couch potato, get active. But remember, 30 to 45 minutes a day is a good start, especially if you’re not used to a long workout routine. And it’s fine to start by walking around the box or swimming laps at a pace that’s comfortable to you. And you don’t have to be in pain for your workouts to work myth number five. For a healthy heart, eat fruits and vegetables. Wait, how is that a myth? It’s the fruits part. You absolutely should eat vegetables, and some in season fruit as a treat. But by putting fruit first you’re putting sugar first. And that’s bad for your heart health, your blood sugar, your kidneys and your gut. So go ahead and eat plenty of vegetables, especially things like cruciferous vegetables, tubers, like sweet potatoes, or Hiko and leafy greens. And when it comes to fruit, remember three things. If it has a seed, it’s a fruit. That includes things like peppers, tomatoes, and squash. eat seasonally, maybe have a little citrus for dessert this time of year, or have some berries in the summer. But remember, fruit is nature’s candy. So treat it like candy. The only fruit you can and should be eating every day is an avocado because it’s all healthy fat, and protein and fiber. And it’s actually good for your heart.
You know, despite modern advancements heart disease remains the number one most common disease among Americans. And it’s the case of one in every five deaths. So what’s the big problem? Well, 42% of Americans are officially obese. As I say fat in your gut, you’re out of luck. So belly fat contributes directly to heart health, as I explained in all of my books, and I’m going to spend even more time in the upcoming book, but it releases bacteria and bacterial particles into your bloodstream. And that sets up inflammation. Heart disease is not a problem of cholesterol heart disease is a problem of inflammation in blood vessels. Most people don’t realize that statin drugs don’t work by lowering your cholesterol. Statin drugs work by lowering the inflammation in your blood vessels. But there’s lots of other easy ways to do it. So let’s start with number one. Eat walnuts. First of all, fat does not make you fat. Not only does fat not make you fat, but fats in the form of walnuts or an olive oil actually benefit heart health. Walnuts are also a great source of a funny chemical called poly amines. I’ve written extensively about poly amines have been shown to increase your overall health, your health span, and longevity. Now one of the miracle fats in walnuts is actually a short chain Omega three fat called alpha linolenic acid, abbreviated A L A. and I promise there won’t be a test. ALA has been shown in numerous studies, including this one, but also in the Leone heart diet study to dramatically lessen the incidence of coronary artery disease in people who have coronary arteries. ALA is present in walnuts. It’s present in flax seeds. It’s present in organic canola oil, but it’s President my favorite oil for ala perilla oil. So anyway, you can get ala into your diet including walnuts, that’s what to do. Now alpha linolenic acid is an essential fatty acid. What does that mean? It means we don’t manufacture it but we have Have to have it to fatherly function, cell membranes and mitochondrial membranes. So get yourself some more alpha linolenic acid ALA. And one of the easiest ways to get it is to have a handful of walnuts every day. Alright, number two, take a shot of extra virgin olive oil. Now there are multiple studies showing the benefit of extra virgin olive oil, extra virgin olive oil is a great way of getting poly phenols into your system, poly phenols actually interact extremely well with blood vessels. And in fact, I’ve written several papers showing the benefit of poly phenols on arterial health, on stickiness of blood vessels. And in allowing blood vessel flexibility. There is a saying in longevity that you are only as young as your blood vessels are flexible. And so poly phenols, particularly in olive oil are one of the great ways to do it multiple areas of the Blue Zones, for instance, in Crete, Italy, in Sardinia, and even in ECI, early south of Naples, all use about a liter of olive oil per week. Now, they even have olive oil soup in Crete. There’s some fantastic poly phenols and olive oil, one of the best is hydroxy tyrosol. It’s a powerful poly phenol that can have huge beneficial heart health benefits. I actually performed a science experiment showing this right here on my YouTube channel. Check it out, it’s incredibly eye opening. And once again, fat is not your enemy. So I recommend everyone should can try to consume about a liter of olive oil per week like they do in Crete. But to make it easy, have a shot of olive oil every day. Bring olive oil to the table. Pour it on your meats, your chicken, your fish, horrid on your vegetables, corn on your ice cream number three. Now this one sounds like almost a non starter but bear with me swallow a whole clove of garlic. Now there’s a compound in raw garlic called Allison, chronic oral administration of Allison lowered blood pressure in hypertensive rats. If you cook garlic, it’s inactivated. Sorry about that. So swallow it whole or used aged garlic extract. Now garlic was actually well known as being great for your immune health. Now, since you’re swallowing garlic whole, you won’t get that potent garlic breath. So it’s a win win. So how do you do it, just peel the clove of garlic. I personally like to roll it in olive oil, pop it in your mouth and swallow it. The olive oil mix it slippery and it goes right on down. Number four, your microbiome your gut begins at your mouth. And your oral microbiome and your oral health is really just as important as your gut microbiome in terms of heart health. Heart disease begins in the mouth and gums, bacteria get through your mouth, through your gums into your bloodstream, and actually begin to affect the blood vessels in your heart. In fact, people with gum disease have two to three times the risk of having a heart attack, stroke, or other serious cardiovascular event. Believe it or not when I’m doing surgery, and we’ve actually looked at the plaque that we take out of people when we do bypass surgery. These plaques have been shown to contain oral bacteria and how they get in there it came from your mouth. So the benefits of brushing and flossing go way beyond fresh breath. Also, speaking of fresh breath, most commercial mouthwashes destroy your oral microbiome and actually raise your blood pressure exactly what you don’t want to do. So instead of mouthwash, use oil pooling and you’ll get great results. In fact, I actually talked about this on episode 221 with Dr. Puneet Nanda aka Dr. Fresh it’s worried watching and it’s very entertaining to hear his story. Last but not least, cheese please. Now recently big news was made with a study out of Norway looking at people with stable angina stable angina means that these people had coronary artery disease and if they did too much activity if they walk too fast if they Exercise too fast. They got chest pain, angina. When they stopped doing that the chest pain went away. And it was predictable. This is called stable angina. Now what they did was they looked at the effect of dairy consumption, butter consumption, and cheese consumption on what happened to these people’s stable angina. Now what made the news was that dairy and butter dramatically worsened stable angina. In other words, they went on to have heart attacks are needed stent, but was not mentioned was the fact that the more cheese people ate, the better their angina got, it went away. Hmm. Well, I’ve written extensively about this in unlocking the Keto code, and I’m going into it even more in the upcoming book. But cheese has fascinating products that improve heart health in multiple areas. Interestingly enough, four out of the five Blue Zones actually are blue zones because they eat goat and sheep cheeses. The fermentation process of making cheese produces very important compounds that actually protect against heart disease, having nothing to do with cholesterol. Now, no, you can eat nachos and cheese sauce, or other highly processed cheeses. If you’re going to have cheeses, look for the fact that they’re made out of casein a to these are most cheeses in France, most cheeses in Italy, all goat and sheep cheeses and water buffalo cheeses are KCNA too. So enjoy your cheese’s, the right cheeses, please. Finally, exercise snacking. Now everyone knows that regular exercise is absolutely essential for heart health. But that doesn’t mean you have to spend hours in the gym every week. Instead, try exercise snacking. It’s super easy, fun and great for even the busiest of people like me. So what do you do wall set wall set for up to two minutes several times a day. Now this is hard to do. This is how I get ready for ski season. So don’t give up. Just sit against the wall for as long as you can before your quadriceps are screaming, and then try to push it a little bit longer every day. Get to two minutes and you’ll be shot at the benefit of wall setting couch planks, get off the couch and a commercial and just do a plank against the couch. It’s really easy. It’s effortless. My personal favorite do deep knee bends when
you’re brushing your teeth. Come on, folks, you’re not doing anything else twice a day, just do deep knee bends while brushing your teeth. Okay, time you’re brushing with your deep knee buddy, walk and talk. Instead of taking a call at your desk, get up, carry the phone with you and walk around the office walk down the hall instead of just sitting there talking. It’s also incredible for your overall health, including your heart. It’s really the most underestimated form of exercise, go out and walk every single day. And you’ll notice better health, more energy and a slimmer waistline. And that’s what I tell all my patients please get a dog, a dog will demand a walk twice a day, and it’ll get you out as well. Let’s address a question that everybody wants to know if it’s not cholesterol, what is the best indicator for determining your heart health?
Speaker 3 18:43
Well, that is a great question. And I’m so glad you asked this because it is my mission in life to answer that question to as many audiences as I can. So when we wrote the first edition of the great Cholesterol Myth 10 years ago, we knew that the search for heart disease in the HDL LDL test was not the way to go. And we knew the particle test was a huge improvement. But we couldn’t say for certain like what we should really be looking at. We knew it wasn’t that we knew there was a hell of a lot more to it than that. We weren’t quite sure. And when we did this deep dive this time around, looking to connect the dots. Because remember, first one to say I’m not an original researcher. I’m not the smart guy that wants the college sophomores and the rats wearing a lab coat and doing the statistical analysis and getting four stages of clinical studies done. But I can translate that stuff really well to the audience that I speak to and I think you speak to you and I’m able to make that clear. And what I went on was a mission to see what research had been done here and what was it and can what could we uncover? So we uncovered a very direct line of research and it has been hiding in plain sight since the 1970s and it is not mind boggling, mind boggling the doctors do not notice. So in the 70s, it was adopted name craft who discovered the insulin assay. Now insulin I’m sure everyone who listens to you knows what Insulin is the very, very important hormone one of its main things that it doesn’t the bodies it clears the bloodstream of excess sugar, it’s kind of a sugar Sherpur goes in their pancreas releases it comes out and sees the sugar takes it out, takes it into the muscle cells drops it off the muscle cells. Wait, we need it for energy, everybody’s happy. But in most people, that is not how it works and the numbers of in how many the percentage of how many people it doesn’t work, it is staggering. 88% in America is the most recent figure 52 worldwide. And we think that’s an underestimate. So it doesn’t work, right. What happens is, instead of the cells accepting insulin, they reject it, there’s just too much sugar, too much noise, too much insulin and they go no mas, we gave it the office, they closed their doors. And now your bloodstream is got this high sugar and high insulin, the definition of pre diabetes. Alright, so this insulin resistance, the ability to cells to just resist the effect of insulin was something very important. And Kraft figured out a way to measure it, it was a very complicated essay required his patients to sit in the office for several hours that would be hooked up to two different infusions. One would infuse sugar, the other would infuse insulin, you’d watch how quickly or how effectively, insulin was able to clear that sugar, you could really get perfect lab measures of it. And he developed this great test. And he tested it on 114 1000 patients over the course of his years. And he followed them up. He just wanted to see what happened to be gleaned put them in categories, 20% categories are very insulin sensitive, which means your blood sugar goes up when you eat insulin comes right out from compounding things right up, and you’re back to normal and everything works in. That’s about 20% of the population and went downhill from there to the next 20% Not a little bit of insulin resistance all the way up to major insulin resistance in these people with abdominal belly weight, and all of the risk factors that go with that. And then he wants to see what happened to these people. So the first 20%, the really insulin sensitive ones, nobody died in 10 years, which is unheard of, in a population that size, no major heart attacks is nothing. Then the second group, you start to see disease and death, and it goes up and it’s just like that until you get to the highest level of insulin resistance. And he said, you know, we knew it was kind of the basic condition for diabetes, but it looks like it’s connected to a lot of other stuff. Okay, this kind of got buried and nobody paid much attention to it. In the 1980s, a guy from Stanford comes along named Gerald Whedon. And he invents or labels something called syndrome X and syndrome, X was quickly replaced by metabolic syndrome, which is somewhat later replaced by pre diabetes, it’s all the same thing. And guess what he was talking about? Insulin resistance. And he said, You know, when you have insulin resistance, and you have high blood pressure, you’re done or fat. That’s a condition of a group of conditions. We call that metabolic syndrome. It always is pre diabetes. Well, we looked at all of this literature, and we made the hypothesis, which is not a big leap of faith that pre diabetes is diabetes, it just hasn’t gotten the diagnosis yet. And guess what diabetes is pretty heart disease. 80% of diabetics die of heart disease. So when we looked at the literature that Raven had done, which was basically the same thing, he spent his career identifying this insulin resistance as a causal central cause for diabetes and the entire cardio metabolic stuff towards the end of his life and his end of his research, he said, I wonder what else is insulin resistance is related to any basically did what practice he took everybody and he put them in categories. And once again, cancer, lung disease, kidney disease, there was not a disease that it wasn’t linked to. And Dr. Gundry, we put our book out to great cholesterol is late last year, and we basically say insulin resistance is the cause of heart disease. Now, let me put the caveat in the asterik. There, obviously it doesn’t, it doesn’t explain every case of heart disease in the world or a three year old who were born with heart disease, it but it tracks with heart disease as well as cigarettes track with lung cancer. I mean, like cigarettes don’t account for every lung cancer case in the world. There are people who get lung cancer who don’t smoke and there are people who smoke a lot and don’t get lung cancer, but it sure is a good tracker. It’s Casper like 800% increased likelihood and it’s the same thing with insulin resistance. So we wrote our book We said insulin resistance, we think it’s the cause of heart disease. With that caveat, a couple of months later, a great doctor that I have great admiration for Dr. Jason Fong. He’s the father of intermittent fasting. He comes out with a book called The Cancer code. And it says, Guess what? Insulin resistance is the cause of cancer. And two months later, a PhD who I’d never heard of who’s brilliant named Dr. Benjamin Britten writes a book called Why We get sick. And guess what he thinks insulin resistance is the cause of everything else. So we’ve got these three independent I don’t even know Berkman, I met Fung once, we’ve got these people who are kind of coming to the same conclusion, which is insulin resistance is at the core of everything.
Dr Gundry 25:43
Other than diet, what other factors can can affect our risk of cardiovascular disease?
Speaker 3 25:50
Well, I’m so glad you asked that, because as a nutritionist, and I’m sure for you as well, as a medical doctor, we tend to focus on that narrow area that we were trained in. And, you know, I always looked at it the beginning of my careers. It’s it’s exercise and diet, it’s it’s diet and supplements. It’s all nutrition related. What I’ve noticed, in my colleagues over 30 years of doing this, that all the best people, no matter how they started out, and I started out as a weight loss coach at Equinox fitness clubs. However, they started out, none of them are looking at food diaries anymore. None of them are looking at exercise lots, because every one of them has figured out that the things that really impact health go way beyond what you eat, what you do with your body. And that seems almost like heresy to say that because it’s so important to nutrition, food, exercise movement are so important. But we really do forget the impact that our mental attitude, our spirituality, if you will, our calmness of mind, our ability to form relationships with other people are the amount of love in our life, the relationship we have with our animals with our outdoors with how much sun we get, because we’re walking in the actual sunlight in the greenery as opposed to just taking a pill. We forget the power of those things. And I taught there’s a very, very famous story called The Roseto phenomenon which we actually talk about in the book, The Great Cholesterol Myth. It’s a very famous thing you can please everybody Google the Roseto phenomena. But in the 20s, there was this hardscrabble town in Pennsylvania called Roseto. And the weirdest thing happened is is that the doctors there were not seeing any heart disease. And these doctors would meet in these kinds of towns in between in these bars that were sort of centrally located near all exchange notes and talk shop and in the ones in Rosetta were constantly sent me you guys see all this heart? We don’t see any What do you think’s going on. And this led eventually, to some real research attention being paid to this area and the research has started coming in, by God. There’s like no heart disease, you’re now this would not have been so amazing, except if you looked at how the people are most at a lift. This was a hardscrabble, Pennsylvania town this may Scranton, Pennsylvania, look like Beverly Hills. This was like they worked in the mines, they they bleed the worst stuff, you can imagine they ate an American diet that was as bad as you can imagine, American diets being they smoked. They should be they should have been dying like twice the weight of everybody else. And the best the researchers could come up with after a couple of years of investigation and this is what you’re reading in Wikipedia is that these people had such strong social bonds, that it somehow overcame a lot of risk that no become all and some did die. But these people became they will often the same area of your they shared certain genetics, they did everything together. They had, you know, Sunday dinners, square dancing, gardening, whatever it was, it was such a community, nobody lived alone. And they believe that those things really made that much of a powerful difference. And that’s been kind of supported over the years to Blue Zones, that wonderful research where they went across the globe to find at first four. And then a fifth place was discovered as well, five places around the globe where people live to over 100 And they’re all fine. I mean, there’s a very high percentage of centenarians, the highest percentage of Healthy People over 100 And these are not people in assisted living homes. They’re they’re marching goats up the hills in Sardinia, they’re doing stuff and what the research has found National Geographic team of researchers was that they didn’t only the same diet. We weren’t all vegetarians. They weren’t that we know. They were they were just kind of lots of very big differences that they couldn’t find like What’s one thing do they all ate meat all not eat meat. The only thing that they all had in common was this absolutely unbreakable social fabric. They were all part of a community. They didn’t know what it was like to be isolated. The old people didn’t go to old age homes, they looked at the family, everybody was important. Everyone felt like they contributed. And this was the continual thing that was true for all five of the areas around the globe where people live the longest. So in our book, the last third of the book almost is about all the stuff besides what we talked about. In the first two thirds, we talk about how important nutrition is, obviously, you and I just talked about a higher fat, lower carb diet reversing insulin resistance, which we think is the cause of all disease. We talk about exercise. But then in that third section, we talk about meditation. We talk about stress reduction, we talk about tech foods, like Heart Math, where you can actually monitor your your own physiology in a very creative way. It’s almost like a video game, because 99 bucks and it’s fun, actually changes your blood pressure and your brainwaves. We talk about the ecotherapy that the actual proven demonstrated benefits of being in greenery, they even show that there’s research showing that if you’re in a hospital and your view of the garden, you’re better than if you don’t. So I mean, there are all these things that actually do change our physiology. We talk about the science of psychoneuroimmunology, which is basically the notion that what you think about affects your immune system, something I’ve been preaching about, since the beginning of the pandemic, I’m sure you have to. So we talked about all these things. And we want people to understand that things, it’s so easy to feel overwhelmed, because you’re not doing all the right things in you’re not eating in late changing the stuff about nutrition, which supplements are good and which ones aren’t and what exercise is most effective. And people can easily be overwhelmed. And when I never want people to lose sight of is all the other stuff that they are in charge of that actually are making contributions to their health bank. Every time you have a you cook a meal together with your friend or family, you made a contribution to healthspan. Every time you take vitamin D, you make a contribution. This is a little contributions in you make them every day, or you can make them every day. And I don’t want people to get so overwhelmed by either a lab test. It’s a bad lab test. Because sometimes you have bad lab tests, and you don’t have that many risk factors. Because unbalanced. You’re doing all these good things. So I want people to be aware that it is more than just eating by age, and exercising load. And yes, those things are vitally important, but so are the relationships that you have in your everyday life, how you sleep, how you digest, the time you spend with your dog, all of those things, they matter profoundly to our health. And we cannot just omit them because they don’t fit under the you know, the medical establishment of pharmacology and all the interventions we do these things are really, really important.
Dr Gundry 33:00
Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. In fact, for years I used to give a PowerPoint lecture about disease is the absence of ease, and I wanted people to be at ease and ease is eating, attitude, spirituality and exercise. And there you go, and you just told someone how to be at ease. And if you have ease, it’s impossible to have dis ease. One of the biggest drivers of death in women is heart disease. It now ranks number one never used to be cancer used to be number one, but heart disease is now the number one killer of women. Problem is women don’t display the classic signs of having a heart attack like men have been taught. crushing chest pain, an elephant sitting on your chest. achy jaw pain going down your left arm. As a heart surgeon who’s operated on many women having an acute heart attack. Oftentimes the presentation is that of an upset stomach, or nausea, particularly after eating and women attributed to something ay ay. But more likely women will present with this nausea or upset stomach, maybe even a little shortness of breath when they’re doing the chores. Not the elephant sitting on the chest, not the arm pain, not the jaw pain. So if this is happening to you, it’s an alert that you got to go talk to your doctor and say, I think I’ve got heart Disease, don’t let them not work you up for heart disease. Now it’s time for the question of the week from at SU suits on YouTube. In your own practice, when is using a statin? Helpful? And when do you know it’s time to wean off of them? And how do I discuss this with my Doctor Who is a big fan of prescribing statins? Well, that is actually a great question. And I wish I had an hour to answer that. But let me give you an example from just last week, I have a new patient who had a stent placed because of chest pain he was experiencing, and quite frankly, his diet was atrocious, and he was a diabetic and his cardiologist placed him on a statin drug. And one of the first questions he had for me was, how do I get off this statin drug? And I said, well, first of all, if you broke a bone, I would put a cast on you. And you will wear that cast until the bone heal. And it would be a really good idea to wear that cast to allow the bone to heal. But after the bone healed, you certainly wouldn’t need the cast any longer. And I had nothing wrong with having this new patient on a statin for the time being because statins work, not by lowering LDL cholesterol. Statins work by lowering inflammation on the surface of blood vessels by blocking toll like receptors, tiny little radars that I talked about in the plant paradox once you correct the problem that got this guy, a stent in the first place, and that is reversing his Diabetes reversing his leaky gut, reversing his inflammation, then my practice is to gradually wean people off of statins. And let’s remind ourselves that there are actually very good studies looking at the use of statins in preventing heart disease in people. For example, this study took people 75 years of age or older and place them on a statin drug for five years at the end of five years. Of those 1000 people, only one person got a benefit from taking a statin in terms of avoiding a heart attack, a stent or death. 999 people got absolutely no benefit plus a large number of them had harm in terms of developing pre diabetes or diabetes from the statin drug. The other fun thing I’ll mention is that many times we have patients not use their statins but change their diet and lifestyle. And when their cardiologist or a family practice doctor sees them, they applaud how great their cholesterol looks. And aren’t they glad they’re taking a statin and my patients just smile and nod. So that’s my take on it. And it’s certainly worked out extremely well over the last 25 years of doing this. Now it’s time for the review and some criticism to address of the week. This comes from at Clark baga 7413 from YouTube commented on my recent best foods for Eye Health video doctor, you are sitting over there with big glasses telling us about eye care. Just joking with you. Thank you for your advice. It’s always valuable. Keep up the good work, Clark. Well, thanks very much for your comment. And I’d like to address any concerns you have as far as my eyesight. Well, it’s true. I do wear glasses and I have since I was 12 years old. Interestingly, if I knew what I know now, I probably could have prevented wearing glasses by changing my childhood eating habits. But that may be a topic for another day. What is important is my eyesight, My correction actually has gotten better and better and better. In fact, I legally don’t need to wear glasses to dry but I certainly do need them for reading what’s really important is more and more evidence points to the effect of poly phenols and fish oil on retinal health and avoiding or treating macular degeneration, which as most people know is a huge epidemic in this country. So protecting her eyes with appropriate supplements is a great idea. And I hope you like my glasses I have a fun time wearing them and buying them. So there you go.
Speaker 1 39:31
I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Dr. Gundry podcast. If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also the Dr. Gundry podcast YouTube channel where we have 10s of 1000s of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long vital life. Let’s do this together.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
