Join Dr. Martin in today's episode of The Doctor Is In Podcast.
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TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE
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Dr. Martin:Â Well, good morning everyone, and once again, welcome to another live this morning. Hope you're having a great start to your day, and we sure appreciate you guys coming on live when you can For sure. And we thank our audience in general. Okay, guys. Angie asked the question, what causes atherosclerosis? Okay, big word for hardening of the arteries, okay? Atherosclerosis. And we're more specifically talking this morning about your coronary artery. Okay? So I want to show you on a diagram so those listening to a podcast later, visualize what I'm going to show here this morning. Okay? Here's the coronary artery. Let me get that out here. Okay, there's the coronary arteries. Can you see that? Yep. Okay. Now there's an artery without any hardening or plaque. Okay? The first one. And we get over here to very, very narrow artery. See that? And it's full of plaque hardening, okay?
That's called atherosclerosis. And unfortunately, okay, when you see this compared to this, okay, so when you see an empty blood vessel the way it's supposed to be, no plaque compared to the advanced atherosclerosis, unfortunately, and oftentimes you are not getting any symptoms. Now, you might develop high blood pressure, but usually, and that's the problem. A myocardial infarction, for example, oftentimes will come without symptoms necessarily, okay? Without symptoms. But what I want to do this morning is answer Angie's question, what causes the plaque in the first place? What causes atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease? What causes that? So we want to get into that a little bit this morning, and so we do a little bit of teaching on it. Okay? So let's look a couple of causes. Okay, so the number one cause is inflammation. Okay? Inflammation, okay? Again, what do I mean by that?
Well, if you have an injury, right? You scraped your knee, well, you're going to get inflammation there. Your body's ambulance system that's on your side because it brings healing to the area, extra blood, extra enzymes, extra healing factors, everything comes to the site of an injury or an infection. Think about an infection like you get a cold. What gives you a headache? When you have a cold? What gives you sinus pain? What gives you, you just feel rotten? Well, it's your body's ambulance system coming to the site of the infection. It's on your side. It's meant to heal. The problem is if inflammation doesn't go away, oh, now that becomes dangerous. I'll give you an example, okay? And I'm going to connect this here. Okay? Someone that has rheumatoid arthritis, okay? I remember, man, oh man, I don't know. I think I'm going to go back to the eighties.
I don't think it's earlier than that, maybe a little bit earlier than that, but 1980s, there was a lot of ink about a person with rheumatoid arthritis had a much higher incidence of heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, heart disease, okay? Here was another one, probably the 1980s. Again, maybe a little later, but I don't think so. Okay? I just have to go back in my mind here. There was a huge link between periodontal disease and heart disease. What's the common denominator between rheumatoid arthritis, periodontal disease, even psoriasis or eczema, chronic inflammation. That was the common denominator. People with rheumatoid arthritis, for sure, right? I mean, think about it. You ever seen a person with rheumatoid, no fun under the sun, but they're much more likely to have a heart attack?
What's the connection? It's inflammation. Inflammation is not Houdini. Okay? So if you have an autoimmune, your body turns on itself. Your immune system is overreacting, and that gives you a much more susceptibility to heart disease. Okay? I'm going to show you a little bit more as we get into that. Okay? Now the other thing that causes inflammation, what causes inflammation? Well, an autoimmune disease, the body's turning on itself. The ambulance doesn't go away. If you have inflammation after an injury, that's a good thing. You have inflammation after an infection or during an infection, that's a good thing. But what if it doesn't go away? Well, that inflammation now becomes your enemy because it becomes destructive.
It affects the blood vessels. One of the areas primarily that it affects is that endothelial, the Teflon layer of your blood vessels, they start to form a plaque. Okay? So that's inflammation again, inflammation. The connection between infection, a chronic infection like periodontal, chronic inflammation like an autoimmune. And here's one that the world doesn't talk about near enough. Insulin. Insulin, again, it's your friend. Insulin has a job to do. Okay? So insulin is very important. It's a storing hormone. It's a traffic cop. It will not allow sugar to stay in the bloodstream. It calls sugar out of the bloodstream. And if you don't use that as energy right away, insulin is a storing hormone. It stores, it loves to store in your muscle if you have any or your liver, and it will make as much fat as it needs to. But once the body senses that insulin is used too much and at the cellular level, your cells resist insulin.
Hey, get out of here. You're always around. You're the worst neighbor I've ever had. Insulin says, well, I know, but you insist on eating a lot of crappy food. Too bad. So sad, I have to come and open up the cells because of your bad eating. And the body responds by creating an inflammatory response. Okay? So you have autoimmune, you have a chronic low grade infection, you have bad eating, which makes insulin go crazy, and then you develop insulin resistance, and that will create an inflammatory response in the body. And inflammation unattended starts its destructive process in the blood vessels. Why do you think diabetics have so much trouble with circulation?
Right? Sugar unattended, very destructive to blood vessels and inflammation because of bad eating will be double destructive to blood vessels. So this is why we at the Martin Clinic have talked about inflammation for eons of years. It's a very, very important factor. Now, another factor is a double-edged sword. I wrote about this, oh, I can't remember now. 40 years ago, the destructive process of oxidation. Oxidation. So think about that. Cut an apple in half, you're going to see that apple very quickly, rust out. You'll see it turns brown. It shrinks up like a prune, right? That's oxidation. The very same oxygen that you live by will eventually rust you out. Now, oxidation can be very destructive to your blood vessels. Okay? Think about that for a minute. Oxidation damages, blood vessels, it rusts you out. What causes oxidation? One thing that was a huge factor in lowering cancer levels for a short period of time was when people stopped. What smoking? What was the connection between smoking and heart disease? Well, inflammation for sure, but oxidation, smoking really, really created a lot of what we call free radicals.
And remember, we don't smoke as much today, but smoking and heart disease, huge connection. And again, what does it do? Well, smoking decreases your nitric oxide. So when you smoke, your blood vessel can't open as much, and smoking created an inflammatory response and an oxidative response where it rusted out the blood vessels and created even more plaque. So when they told people to stop smoking, if there's a doctor in the world that still believes smoking is good for you, even though they used to tell you that in the 1940s and the 1950s, it almost blows my mind. Almost nine out of 10 doctors smoke camel cigarettes.
We laugh about it. It's so silly, but everybody and their dog smoked when I was a kid. Everybody smoked just about. It was an exception when you saw people that didn't smoke. I thank God I never got into the habit. My oldest brother, he said, here, you want to smoke? Okay. He smoked all his life, by the way. He said, you want to smoke? Okay. He was, what? Seven years older than me. I want you to puff on this cigar. And it looked cool to me. I might've been 10 years older, I don't know, and I inhaled. He said, now, suck it in. What a cigar.
I got so sick, I puked right there. And you know what? I think that cured me? I never wanted to again, so I can thank my brother for making me sick. Okay, so smoking. What does it do? Atherosclerosis. It increases that. Here's another factor that creates inflammation and oxidation. Those bad oils, right? Your seed oils, what the world calls vegetable oils, the oil that was made for your car, not for your body. Okay, so when you go see in the grocery store, all those, the hateful eight are there. Canada's gift to the world is canola oil. Put it in your car. If you put it in your body, it's going to create an inflammatory response. Why is that? Because your body says, what are you giving me? I don't know what this is. You put it in the wrong nozzle. You should have put it in your car and not put it in your mouth.
Canola, soy, corn, safflower, sunflower, right? Go to a fast food restaurant. What oil are they using? A peanut oil. Those are a highly industrialized oils. They should be using butter or G or lard. I like olive oil too. I like coconut oil. Those are good oils, but they use the other ones. They're cheap. They last forever. And the worst thing they do with those things is they reheat them, and that creates an enormous amount of inflammation in the body, and it's a double whammo. Oxidation seed oils. This is why guys, when you go on the reset and you're eating eggs and you're eating meat and you're eating cookie, no, that was my grandson. He said, grandpa, I'm doing the EMC, eggs, meat and cookies. No, no, no, no. I said he knew he was teasing me. Eggs, meat, and chase.
Okay, now, so that plaque formation is caused by inflammation and oxidation. Now, the other thing, let me talk about, okay, so you've got that plaque formation in the body. Okay? The other thing that's important, because Ansel Keys, I'm going to bring the chart up again, okay? I've got to bring this to you because they're very important. Okay? Now, when Ansel Keys saw that fourth blood vessel, okay? In pathology, he was a pathologist, and when he saw the plaque formation, he saw cholesterol there, a yellow substance, and he started a huge booboo, a huge mistake because he set the world on a course that because cholesterol was there at the plaque formation, he thought that that was the cause of plaque formation was cholesterol. He was completely mistaken. It's like, and I've said this to you a million times, cholesterol at the plaque formation. It's a fire truck at the fire, okay?
You got a house burning on your street and you see all the fire trucks coming. Are they the bad guy? No. Of course they're going to be at a fire. They're there to put the fire out. Cholesterol is on your side. You cannot live without it, and there's no such thing as bad cholesterol. But because Ansel Keys in combination with the food industry, and later on with the pharmaceutical industry, they got people away from cholesterol and people started, no more cholesterol in my diet, or I'm limiting cholesterol, therefore I'm going to limit eggs. I'm going to limit butter. I'm going to limit steak. I'm going to limit cheeses. Cho cholesterol is at the root of heart disease. Nah, it's the good guy. Cholesterol is always circulating through your blood vessels, okay? There are carriers, they carry your hormones, and oftentimes a women have trouble with their hormones. It's good they don't eat enough cholesterol. You know how many times I heard this in the 1980s? Oh, Dr. Martin, I'm eating low fat. And they would look at me for my response and I'd say, well, that's stupid. Why are you eating low fat?
Well, cholesterol one, two, fat makes me fat, Dr. Martin. And I said, no, it doesn't. Sugar makes you fat. Those stupid oils that were meant for your car makes you fat and it's very damaging to your blood vessels, atherosclerosis, cholesterol's on your side, but for 60 years now, it goes against the narrative. It's so hard to get people to change their thinking. It's so hard to get a cardiologist to not focus on cholesterol. It's almost impossible. That's what their blood tests tell 'em, and that's what they look at the wrong things in lipids. They're looking at the wrong fat.
They don't look at triglycerides. They could hardly care less. And all they're worried about is what your total cholesterol is or what your LDL is. Why do you think statin drugs became the number one selling medication of all time based on athero sclerosis? And I'll tell you what folks, just to put the proof in the pudding, heart disease is worse than ever. Why? Because we're looking for love in all the wrong places. They're not looking at inflammation. They're not looking at oxidation. They're looking at the boogeyman of cholesterol that's been going on for so long. I don't hold my breath to see a change anytime soon. It's ingrained. It's taught in medical school, it's taught to dieticians. It's taught in a lot of places, even to gurus. I had to undo my nutritional studies. I put in over 2000 hours. I had to undo most of it.
I'm not saying, look, you got to learn the fundamentals. But when they talked me about cholesterol, I didn't believe it for a minute. Not for a minute, didn't make any sense to me. Biologically, it wasn't true. It was never true. Okay, so atherosclerosis, the formation of plaque inflammation and oxidation and calcium formation, because that's what it is. It's calcified by inflammation. That plaque and oxidation, and this is really important. Low levels of vitamin K two, I'm going to talk about deficiencies for a minute. People are very deficient in vitamin K two. You know why they don't eat enough eggs? They don't eat enough meat and they don't eat enough cheese. Dr. Martin, how much eggs, meat and cheese can I eat? I don't care as much as you want. Look, God, okay, God, we have food. Think of nature for a minute. Okay? We have food. You take an egg.
Is calcium good for you? Yep. Okay. I don't want you to take a supplement of calcium. I want you to eat your calcium, but I'll show you the genius of our creator. Take an egg and what do you got there? You got calcium in an egg. Oh, that's good, isn't it? Yeah, it's really good as long as it ends up in the right place. You don't want calcium in your blood vessels. You want calcium in your bones and your teeth. Okay, so what is nature? Calcium never alone with vitamin K two together, and it ends up in the right place. Otherwise, calcium in the blood vessels is bad news because it's another factor in calcifying your blood vessels. You know what? Calcium in your blood, you need a little bit, okay? But your vitamin K two, no, you out. Calcium, come with me like a traffic cough, like insulin is. So vitamin K two says calcium.
Follow me. Okay? We're going to take you out of your blood vessels and we're going to put you into bone, okay? Now, I could go into a whole dissertation and maybe I will, won't be today on people that are osteoporotic. Okay? Osteoporosis. What is that? A lack of calcium in the bones. Okay? A lack of calcium in the bones. Bones. You know what? Osteoporosis, you know what they've shown? You got osteoporosis. You've probably got hardening of your arteries too. The calcium is in the wrong place. My bones are weak, but my blood vessels are plaque with calcium. There's a connection there.
I think I got to do part two of this. I just got myself excited, but we got heart disease. Really? We got it wrong. We got it wrong. What a mess we put ourselves in. People don't understand. They've been taught the wrong way. You know what the number one selling supplement is? Still, it should be vitamin D. The sun will talk about that. It should be vitamin D, it should be probiotics. But you know what? The number one supplement is based on a falsehood. It's calcium. You know how many people take calcium? It's insanity. And if you take calcium without vitamin K, two, it's in nature. We're to eat our calcium with vitamin K two, the plants don't have vitamin K two. So when someone, any guru, anyone here online, because I get it even online, I get it at the Martin Clinic Facebook group. Well, whatever tickles your fancy, if you feel better with just vegetables and all, I get it. It's not true because you're not getting vitamin K two, you're just not in the plants.
You're going to get hardening of the arteries. You're going to get calcium. You can get some calcium in plants. The problem is, it's not accompanied by vitamin K two. I get a migraine. I get a migraine when I see the world BSing people. It's unreal. I can't stand it getting my blood pressure up. Be careful. Okay, now we got to finish this up, okay, because I got a lot more I wanted to tell you about. We'll get into those deficiencies, okay? What's Friday? Question and answer. Are you got your questions out? My staff is laughing at me because I got question and answer Friday, Monday and this week was Tuesday. Well, that's all right. We're here to answer your questions. Okay? We thank you guys for being such faithful followers. Tell your friends, Hey guys, you know how this works. Of course. It's you guys telling people, Hey, even if you can't come live, listen to Dr. Martin's podcast. The Doctor Is In. Okay, fun, fun, fun. Yeah, very popular. And that's because of you guys. We thank you. Leave us questions, reviews, tell people, okay. A common sense podcast. I think it's common sense. Okay? We love you guys. We’ll talk to you soon.
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