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. Once again, welcome to another live here this morning. I'm on the road and traveling, but I want to do a little session here this morning. We love you dearly. Thanks for coming on. I can just imagine the names that are there because I know you as family and we appreciate that guys, you have no idea. And you know what? Tomorrow is? Q and A. I'll be on the road, but we're going to have our Q and A tomorrow. Okay? So I don't think it's too late. You can get your questions in, send them to info@martinclinic.com. So those are your questions for tomorrow for the Q and A. And I just want to follow up a little bit on what we talked about. I got a few other studies that I flagged that we'll talk about, but I want to finish up yesterday's topic, which was how to lower your triglycerides, and we talked about that yesterday and this morning we're going to talk about increasing your HDL.
Now, we just put out an email this morning talking about one of the biggest culprits in heart disease in damaging your blood vessels was sugar. So if you didn't get that email, make sure you sign up at martinclinic.com. Okay? Go on our website martinclinic.com and sign up for the emails if you don't get them. We put a lot of information in those emails that I don't necessarily touch on our daily podcasts, The Doctor Is In podcast. So anywho, coming to the two things in your two blood tests that are the most important when it comes to heart related, and that is your triglycerides and your HDL. We went into a lot of detail yesterday about how to lower triglycerides. So what you want to do, get your triglycerides down and elevate your HDL.
Now, people were asking questions afterwards. I noticed that. What's the ratio? Well, listen, I'm really big, okay, let me just give you the big picture first. Your triglycerides and your HDL. If they're equal, that's all right. You're still in pretty good shape, but really what you want is your triglycerides to be down and your HDL to be elevated. Some say up to two times higher. I like the fact that just that if you are triglycer, and women, we try and get it under one, but even then the ratio is more important, that ratio, because you always look at the both of them. If your triglycerides are low and your HDL is equal to it, but even better if it's above it.
See, a lot of people, it's the other way around. They have high triglycerides and they have low HDL and we talked about the mechanism yesterday that makes HDL so important to your triglycerides, because by the way, your triglycerides, when you're eating sugar, especially high fructose corn syrup, the liver gets gummed up. There's no more parking spots. Your insulin has to park sugar. It can't park in the bloodstream. If you don't have any room in your muscles, it'll park it in your liver. When that gets full, you know what happens? Your liver will excrete the extra triglycerides and you need HDL to go in there and HDL hooks their wagon on the triglycerides and brings those triglycerides back. Instead of them clogging up your arteries and causing heart disease, they will be brought back to the liver for processing. Okay?
So it's really, really important that you get your triglycerides down and your HDL up. How do you do that? Well, yesterday we talked about triglycerides and some of this is redundant, but cut way back on carbs and sugars. Remove fructose completely. If you get your blood work back and your triglycerides are high, do this immediately. Don't wait, don't procrastinate. This is dangerous. So what do you do? Lower your triglycerides. Cut way back on your carbs. Get rid of your sugars. High fructose corn syrup, especially, completely. So watch your condiments, watch your ketchup, your crackers, things like that because a lot of people, they don't even think of those things being a cause of high triglycerides, but they are. It's those added sugars. And then never drink orange juice or anything like that. Apple juice. Don't drink any juices because you want to lower your triglycerides.
Replace carbs with healthy fats. So it's not like you're not eating, but you're eating eggs, meat and cheese. You can have some olive oil. Eat bacon. Bacon will lower your triglycerides. I'm not kidding you. We talked about supplementing with DHA. I thought about this yesterday, but I forgot to mention it. There's actually a medication that you can get, okay? I'm not necessarily recommending that. I really don't, but I like the idea of it. There's a medication out there, I think it's called Vascepa if I'm not mistaken. V-A-S-C-E-P-A, Vascepa and it is a medication, but it's a natural product. It's very expensive, but it's fish oil. It's very specialized and they use EPA only. Okay? Remember in a good fish oil, you've got DHA and EPA. This medication is strictly EPA and it lowers your triglycerides, but it costs you about three or $400 a month from what I heard. Look, you can do this naturally, guys. I did it in my office. Tens of thousands of times I lowered people's triglycerides and I elevated their HDL.
Build muscle. I talked about it yesterday, intermittent fasting. But for fasting to work, here's the studies. To lower your triglycerides, you have to go 16 hours without eating. So a lot of people do that. They don't find it difficult. So maybe look at doing that. Okay? Now how do you get your HDL up? High density lipoprotein. How do you get that up? And again, it's a teeter totter. So if you lower your triglycerides, generally your HDL will go up just automatically. But let's talk about some specific ways. These are all studies done in my own experience in the clinic, okay? Increasing your HDL. Exercise. Exercise. So we already talked about it in a lowering triglycerides and lowering triglycerides, were very specific to getting strong. Any kind of movement that you do exercise will help to elevate your HDL. Okay?
Lose weight, okay? Remember if you get on the reset, the healthiest way to lose fat is the reset, by eating fat, okay? By eating fat. So that's really important. Okay? So lose weight because like I showed you that five pounds yesterday, six inches wide and a foot long. People don't realize five pounds. When you are eating the right food and you lose weight, look, you can starve to death and lose weight. Okay? I saw a cancer patient yesterday, not in my office, but I saw someone who's got cancer. You want to lose weight. That's not the way to lose weight, right? I could hardly recognize the person, but I'm talking about healthy weight loss. When you're losing fat and you're not losing muscle, you're not becoming sarcopenic. Eggs, meat and cheese because when you change fuels, your body will burn fat. And that's what you want.
No smoking, cut out smoking. That's shown to increase your HDL, okay? If you're still smoking, if you didn't get the memo yet on not to smoke. Limit alcohol. We talked about that yesterday. Lower triglycerides, elevate, HDL. I'm just giving you studies and things that I saw in my office. Increase your fatty meat. Steak, eggs, butter, cheese, fatty, increase that. Here's another one will increase your HDL. Okay? Are you waiting for the answer? Ready? 1, 2, 3, drink your coffee. What a blessing. I enjoyed every second of that. I was just increasing my HDL. Did you know that? Isn't that wonderful? That's how good coffee is for you. It increases your HDL. Give me a thumbs up for those who love coffee, okay?
Now, increase your vitamin D. Yes, get in the sun. The sun increases your HDL. So does the supplement of vitamin D. It increases your HDL. How about B12? Yep. You know me guys, I got my own list of vitamins and I've been preaching vitamin D and I preach B12. And I'll tell you, can I tell you why I do that all the time? Why am I so big on vitamin D? Because guys, here's why. The vast majority of people are very low in vitamin D. They're extremely low, and so are the vast majority of people that are extremely low in B12. They're the two vitamins that people are extremely low in, and it's a hazard to your health. And studies have shown when you take vitamin D or you get in the sun, it increases your HDL. Can you imagine?
Okay, so if you don't want to elevate your cholesterol, stay out of the sun. What? I want you to elevate your cholesterol, I want you to elevate your HDL, don't you? Yeah, you do. Doctors want to lower your cholesterol. I want to elevate your cholesterol. Curcumin study, elevates your HDL, and probably one of the reasons, it's because it's so good for your liver, helps to empty that liver. And of course, lower your bad fats, your seed oils, your industrial oils, all those things you want to lower, okay? So what to do, you want to decrease down triglycerides. You want to increase your HDL cholesterol. Those are the two markers in your blood you want to look at testing and educate yourself, my friend, okay? And I know you do. I'm preaching to the choir here.
You guys, what I appreciate the most is that you want to be educated. You want to participate in your health. Isn't it crazy that our system is set up for you not to participate. You just trust me. I had a cardiologist tell me that one time, you don't have to know anything. You just trust me. I said, well, I don't do that in my office. I'm the opposite of that. I want my patients to be educated. I want them to ask the question why. And I want to answer the question why. Why Dr. Martin, are you changing my diet? I want to know why. What are you aiming for? Hey, I like that. I want to prove to you, I used to tell my patients that all the time. I want to prove to you that what I'm talking about works. If you have high triglycerides, let's fix that. If you have low HDL, let's fix that. If you have high A1C, let's fix that. If you have high blood pressure, let's fix that. You have high blood sugar, let's fix that.
And the vast majority of the time you can do that without medication. You can do it without medication. I'm not saying there's not a place for meds. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that education goes a long way and your participation in your health, taking charge, okay? People will discourage you. Oh, Dr. Martin, he's a quack. You're going to have a heart attack. Your cholesterol's too high. You're going to have a heart attack. You're going to die on the spot. You're going to have to overcome that. You have to overcome that. I'm not telling you not to listen to your physician. I'm just telling you, you ought to be able to very much question them. You know what? I invited questions in my office. I used to tell people, bring a notebook, bring a pen. You know what a lot of people did? They recorded me. I said, well, I don't care. You want to record me? You can record me. Because they said, I want to go over it. You're telling me a lot of stuff and I'm going to forget.
So I used to tell 'em, bring your notepad. I tell people to do that even today, if you can. I was talking to a lady the other day and she's just been diagnosed with cancer and man, oh man, you can hardly see a doctor in Canada. Okay? I hate to say it, but I mean, it's crazy how long you wait, especially a specialist, but not if you get diagnosed with cancer. They can't get you in fast enough. And you got almost no time to think, and they tell you, this is what we're doing. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And you're not involved. You're just, oh, no. I mean, you're already hammered with the diagnosis. You're already reeling. And then you're told, well Friday, we're starting chemo, then we're doing radiation, or whatever, whatever. And you got no time to think. You got no time barely to ask any questions.
So all I'm saying is, guys, there's got to be a better way than that. And I told this lady, I said, bring a notepad. Here's some questions you should ask. Bring a notepad. And you know what? They might not like it, but too bad. It's your body. It's your health. I don't care if they're insulted, who cares? You're talking about life or death here, man. Anywho, why did I get on that diatribe? Anyway, okay, guys. Okay, so we're on the road. Thanks for joining me this morning. Tomorrow is Q and A. So even though I'm on the road, we're going to do our Q and A tomorrow. Okay? So guys, we love you. Thanks for joining us today. You guys are the greatest. You can share this. We're so thankful. Send your questions into info@martinclinic.com. Okay? Thanks 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!