1365. Atherosclerosis 101: From Causes to Cure – Part 2

Join Dr. Martin in today's episode of The Doctor Is In Podcast.

 

TRANSCRIPT OF TODAY'S EPISODE

Announcer:  You're listening to The Doctor Is In Podcast, brought to you by MartinClinic.com. During the episode, the doctors share a lot of information. As awesome as the info may be, it is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent any disease. It's strictly for informational purposes.

Dr. Martin:  Well, good morning everyone, and once again, welcome to another live this morning and hope you're having a wonderful start to your day. And we always appreciate you guys coming on live with us and those who can we understand that that's not always possible, but we sure appreciate the audience. Okay, now, yesterday, this is part two of coronary heart disease, and I showed you on my old atlas, I showed you a picture of coronary heart disease, and I'm bringing it up here. For those folks who are listening on a podcast, you can't see it, but the narrowing, okay, there's a normal one. And then as they go over, and maybe you guys can see that narrowing of the coronary artery, and we call that coronary heart disease or atherosclerosis, the plaque that forms in a coronary artery, very dangerous, of course, often silent. We talked about that yesterday.

Sometimes no symptom. Some people might get high blood pressure, but most people, there's no signs of it particularly until it's almost too late. Okay? Now, okay, what causes coronary heart disease? We spend a lot of time on that yesterday. Let me do a little review. Okay? We're going to just do a little review, and I don't know if you can read my writing here, but I'll take a picture of this after and I'll post it in our or private Facebook group. Okay? Martin Clinic, private Facebook group. Are you not a member of that yet? You should be. Okay. I'll post these. I'll post my notes. Okay, so what I said, there's a couple of main reasons. One of them is inflammation. If you talk to most integrative medicine doctors who actually use the best of both worlds, okay? Natural food and medicine, the best of medicines, they're called integrative doctors.

And if you talk to them, they'll mostly tell you mostly they really understand inflammation and its destructiveness over a period of time. The problem with that is, as we say at the Martin Clinic, inflammation is not Houdini. It just doesn't come out of nowhere. There's a reason for inflammation, and this is what we got into yesterday because inflammation left unchecked will damage arteries. The endothelial layer, your Teflon layer, Teflon layer of your blood vessels, especially near your heart, they need to be slippery, not sticky. Inflammation makes them sticky and destroys little by little, that Teflon layer. And because it's being destroyed, your body reacts to it. It tries to heal it. That is inflammation, okay? But inflammation, not Houdini, where does inflammation come from? So I wrote down, okay, a few things that cause inflammation here. Again, I don't know if you can read my writing or if you can see my notes.

Low grade inflammation. See that? Not Houdini. Autoimmune diseases. We talked about that yesterday. Like lupus and psoriasis, right? We talked about that. Rheumatoid arthritis. I remember reading a study you've got to go 40 years ago, and it really, really piqued my interest. It was a study showing that people who had rheumatoid arthritis were almost 50% more likely to have a heart attack. And what was the connection? And then there was another one that came out. I'm going to say around the same time, maybe a year later, a year before, I don't know. I can't remember. Okay? I always pull my senior card, I can't remember, but it was like yesterday. In this sense though, there was links between periodontal disease, okay? Periodontal disease and heart attacks. So they were talking about bacteria, but bacteria, yes, that was in periodontal disease, but because the body tried to respond to it, there was an inflammatory response.

It's an infection. It was low grade and the body, okay, let's take care of this. And they were showing that actually that bacteria could have traveled down to the heart. That was their one theory. I think it was more in a generalized inflammation. And inflammation left unchecked will damage blood vessels, especially the endothelial level of the blood vessels. Okay, so what else did I write here? Insulin resistance. When your cells are sick and tired of their pesky neighbor insulin, okay? The body responds to it after a period of time by creating an inflammatory response. So inflammation's, not Houdini, but inflammation starts plaque. And that's why you hear a lot of doctors say, oh, inflammation is at the root of heart disease. Inflammation is at the root of cancer. Inflammation is at the root of Alzheimer's, inflammation is at, and they're not completely wrong, but you got to bring it back even another step because again, inflammation doesn't just happen.

There's a reason before inflammation. Inflammation. Now the second one I put down is oxidative stress. You have inflammation, you have oxidation that's rusting out, again, attacking the endothelial layer of your blood vessels. Free radicals we're rusting out, okay? And that's part of life. My blood vessels obviously at my age are not going to be the same as they were when they were 20 years old. But I do everything, and we'll talk about this a little later in the program, what to do to protect your blood vessels and oxidative stress. Well, free radicals are part of aging, but you don't want to prematurely age. So oxidative damage occurs. What creates more free radicals? Well look at the environment we're in. One of the things that they've shown over the years talked about it yesterday too, was smoking. Smoking created not only an inflammatory response, but a big time oxidative response.

You want to age your body quickly, well just smoke. And everybody got that memo just about. Okay, everybody got that memo. Medicine got the memo. Doctors who used to push smoking here have a cigarette. It'll clean out your lungs. I'm not kidding you that actually occurred. Doctors said, here, smoke. You'll cough out the garbage. Can you believe they actually, well, in the 1940s and the 1950s, my dad smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, okay? I remember the day he came home and said, I quit. And I was 10 years old, 1962, and he put the cigarettes in the waste paper basket in front of his kids. I was shocked, but my dad, he wasn't thinking of heart disease as much. He had read articles about smoking and cancer and he said, I quit. He went Cold Turkey, never had another cigarette. I was wondering whose cigarettes I was going to steal.

I stole my mother's, Peter Jackson's. Okay? My mother never quit smoking. She should have, but she didn't. Okay, oxidative stress. We talked about these, but let me list them again for you. Okay? I got 'em right here on my little chart. Okay? And what do I have there? Okay, oxidative stress creates plaque. See that? And oils. Oils that were meant for your car when they told us to quit. Butter for margarine. Margarine is for your car, not for your body. Your body doesn't even know what margarine is. What is that? What is it your body says? What are you giving me? So that creates oxidation free radicals. Not only that, it creates inflammation. The double-edged sword, sugar. Do you think your body was meant for every 10 years? Consume. You guys don't. But the world does. 200 pounds a year on average in 10 years.

That's a ton. You think your body was meant to consume a ton of sugar, a boatload? No, we've gone crazy. And plus they changed the sugar. That makes even more dangerous when you use high fructose corn syrup and smoking is there. Insulin resistance. It's called glycation. Glycation and sugars create glycation. They age your body. Glycation is what they call a GE apostrophe. ESA end products destroys it destroys the endothelial layer. So all these things attack, attack your blood vessels to cause atherosclerosis. Okay? Got the memo and plaque formation. You can see over here. And plaque, plaque, plaque, plaque. What causes plaque? Okay, and now I'm going to talk to you about deficiencies again. I'll take my notes and I'll take a picture of them after we talked about this one yesterday, vitamin K two. Because when you analyze plaque, I told you the story yesterday about Ansel Keys.

He saw one thing at the formation of plaque, the scar tissue, and he called it the boogeyman cholesterol. And I don't know how many times I'm going to have to say it in the next little while, but it's every day I have to. I don't know about correct people, but at least give them the other side. Cholesterol is being blamed because they're at the crime scene. They're at the scene of injury plaque, but it's not the bad guy. Your body sent it there to help heal the plaque. It's the firemen at the fire. They're trying to put the fire out. But that became the narrative in coronary heart disease. And I'm not even optimistic in my lifetime I'll ever see that change. It's so ingrained in medicine. It's so ingrained in dieticians. It's so ingrained in the craw of our world that cholesterol is the boogeyman.

Let's get cholesterol down. Well, here's what's happened. Cholesterol is down and heart disease is up, cholesterol is down, but heart disease is up. People insist on getting cholesterol down. Heart disease is up. We're looking for love in all the wrong places. If cholesterol was at the root of heart disease, we'd have got rid of heart disease by now, but it's not at the root of it. And there's really no such thing as bad. Here's bad cholesterol. When it's low, now it's bad. Now you're in trouble. You don't have enough cholesterol. Anyway, I know I'm not going to win. My job is to educate people that listen, Hey, God gave you a brain, use it. I'm not expecting people to be rocket scientists, but I expect people, Hey, do your own research. Here's me. I've been doing this a long time. I was never convinced about cholesterol. I was never trying to lower it, and the world went silly. And what has the result of that been? Hasn't been good, hasn't been good. And the problem isn't cholesterol. The problem is low levels of vitamin K two. That's one.

People don't have enough. Vitamin K, two vitamin K. Two takes calcium. You need calcium, guys, okay, eat it. I like calcium. I'm not against calcium, but what if it doesn't get to its intended destination? Calcium does not look a little bit, okay? It don't belong in your blood vessels. It doesn't belong in your tissue. It hardens calcium. My head bone. Okay? Your bone's supposed to be hard. Your teeth are supposed to be hard and strong, okay? Not your blood vessels. You want your blood vessels to be slippery, pliable, soft, not calcium. And when they look at plaque, what you got hardening of the arteries. That's what atherosclerosis means. Sclerosis is hardening, and athero is your arteries. Your arteries have become sclerotic hard plaque. So they blame cholesterol when they should have been blaming calcium. And I was telling someone yesterday, calcium is still the number one supplement sold in the world because women think they need calcium.

Well, they do, but not in a supplement without vitamin K two, vitamin K two, and I called it the Rodney Dangerfield of vitamins because it never got any respect. And guys, I'm going to say it again. I know for the millionth time, but I got to say it again. When someone please, when someone, if it's a guru, if it's a doctor with 10 PhDs after their name, if it's your friends, if it's your family, and if they tell you to stop eating eggs, meat and cheese run forest run, they don't know what they're talking about. In all due respect, how could it be? Think about this for a minute. How could it be that in the animal kingdom you have a vitamin? Well, you have more than one, but I'm going to talk about vitamin K two. You have a vitamin. It's called vitamin K two. It's only found in the animal kingdom.

How could that be bad for you? How could they tell you to avoid that? How? Nevermind B12. How could they tell you that and be truthful? I know they mean it. I'm not saying they're not sincere. Have you ever met somebody that's sincere but is sincerely wrong? They're sincere but wrong. I get a migraine. You think I deal with migraines every day? I do. I get a migraine. It can't be true. It can't because otherwise you're missing. Okay, so we see deficiencies in coronary heart disease, vitamin K two being really important. That's why guys, when you take your vitamin D, make sure you're taking K two with it. One, two, when you're eating eggs, meat, not cookies. Like my grandson says, grandpa, I'm doing EMC, eggs, meat, and cookies. No, the third one is C for cheese, dairy, okay, you're getting K two With calcium, you get a lot of calcium, but with vitamin K two, that means that calcium is going to head to vitamin K two.

Like insulin is a traffic cop. Insulin says to sugar, you get your boots out of blood, you can't park there, and vitamin K two is telling calcium you can't park in the bloodstream. Do you understand me? Come with me. I'm going to send you to where you can park in the bones and in the, you need calcium, vitamin D. Why is vitamin D if you go to sun steak and steal? Okay, I wrote about this. Okay, I wrote about this. Let me quote this. Quack, Dr. Martin, I'm going quote him. How does vitamin D help your heart? Okay, one, it elevates nitric oxide. Hello? What is nitric oxide?

When they give you nitroglycerin for angina, do you know that they didn't know why nitroglycerin worked for angina. You get chest pain and they used to give you nitroglycerin in a small dose because your body has nitroglycerin. It's called nitric oxide. They only discovered it in the eighties, and the guy that discovered it won a Nobel Prize. He founds out. We have nitroglycerin in the body. You have little wee explosions that open up your blood vessel. Isn't that wonderful? Well, vitamin D causes your nitric oxide to go up. When you get in the sun, there's another boogeyman. Nothing better for your heart. Get in the sun. What? For your heart? Yeah, for everything else too. You are a human solar panel for heaven's sake. I'm just quoting myself. It lowers all markers of inflammation such as C reactive protein. CRP. Get your CRP check. It is an indicator.

I remember this came out in 2000. I was starting my radio show, and I remember the studies on C-reactive protein and your heart. It could tell you up to five years ahead of time. I remember the headlines like it was yesterday. If you get your C-reactive protein, what a test, because it will tell you if you have that silent inflammation in your body, vitamin D lowers your CRP C-reactive protein. You get in the sun, that silent inflammation goes down. Remember, inflammation is damaging your blood vessels inside when you don't even know it's happening. It reduces oxidative stress. You see, it does a double whammo. It lowers your inflammation and lowers when they tell you stay out of the sun because you're going to wrinkle and you're going to get old, and that's going to give you skin cancer and it's no good for you. You think they're right about that? No, because vitamin D, the sun actually reduces oxidative damage inside and out. Now, don't burn, okay? Because people come at you all the time. Well, doctor Mike every day, doctor Mike, don't. Yeah, I know.

I know. I don't live on another planet. I read everything too, and people want to educate me all the time. And that's all. I don't care if you ask questions. I like that when you're educating me. I've read it. I've read it, okay. And listen to this. It reduces arterial stiffness. Hello? It reduces arterial stiffness. My word, do you think that vitamin D is good for you? Okay. A large analysis study published in the European Heart Journal, I'm quoting my book, sun and Steel, looked at the relationship between vitamin D and cardiovascular disease in 268,000 cases of cardiovascular disease. 150,000 of these people were critically low in vitamin D, doubling their heart attack risk. This is backed up by an earlier research that suggested that 95% of patients with acute coronary syndrome were extremely low in the sunshine, vitamin low, vitamin D, not good. And 80% of the population, it's higher than not, are extremely low in vitamin D. They're scared, skinny of the vitamin. They're scared, skinny of the sun, scared skinny of it.

And if they get in the sun, they lather up with sunscreen. They bought the lie from Johnson and Johnson Johnson. That's what I used to say. I'm going back a lot of years. I always blame them because they were the first to come out with sunscreen. And then you got dermatologists that hired marketing firms to scare the living life out of us, to keep us out of the sun. Were they right? All they could think of was skin cancer. And they don't know any of the benefits of vitamin D. Why? They're scared of it. Vitamin D. Vitamin D, that'll kill you, you know, can become toxic with vitamin D. I've never seen a case. I've never seen a case. Oh, I know why you're in the hospital. You took too much vitamin DI know where you're dying. You took too much Vitamin D, never.

I think we're going to have to do part three. I ain't done yet. I'm just looking at a few things there. Oh, you know what a sixth thing was on that low grade inflammation? I'm just reading my own notes. Obesity, I didn't even talk about it. Now, maybe we'll go into a little bit. Okay, so that's coronary artery disease, part one and two. Okay? Are we going to do part three? Let me think about it. Okay? But tomorrow, as far as I know is question and answer Friday. Guys, I don't think we can put that off. We love those questions. Okay, guys. Okay. Okay. So tomorrow, stay tuned. We love you guys. Tell your friends, you know how algo rhythms work. I don't. I, here's what I know. Okay? Here's what I know. When you share Facebook shares, okay? When you give us a thumbs up, Facebook takes that and it's called algorithms, okay?

And Facebook will actually multiply our viewership. For example, like this morning, right now we're at 260 people live, but by the end of the morning we'll be at about three or 4,000 by the end of the day, somewhere around five to 10,000, depending on whatever, right? That's just on Facebook. Nevermind what happens to the doctors in podcasts. It just gets shared. Guys multiply. Get the message of give them the other side to what the world is hearing out there. Okay? Okay. Preaching to the choir. I know it. I love you guys. Talk to you soon.

Announcer:  You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts, Doctor Martin Junior and Senior. Be sure to catch our next episode and thanks for listening!

Back to blog