Did you know that your liver does 600 different things? You can't live without the liver… and did you know it can even regenerate? You truly are fearfully and wonderfully made!
Dr. Martin gets asked several times a week about a condition called hemochromatosis, which is increased iron levels in your blood. The liver is accumulating too much iron and it’s all because of a fatty liver!
So how do you get rid of hemochromatosis? You need to empty your liver… and that starts with changing your food! Empty your liver, and you'll empty your iron. Dr. Martin explains more of this on today’s episode!
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 great day, great start to your day here. Okay, here we go. Why do we see so much... and then we'll fill in the blanks. Why do we see so much more today than we ever used to see of a lot of things? Okay. It's incredible. You would think that in the year 2021, there'd be an improvement in almost everything, especially coming from medicine, coming from in terms of health, and some things are better. Some things are better. But most things are not better at all. As a matter of fact, they're a lot worse.
And one of them, because I get asked this, I'm not going to say daily but three or four times a week, I get asked this question because when people are sending me their blood work or they're asking questions, one of them is why do we see so much more of a condition called hemochromatosis. Now that's a big word. Do you know what it means? Increased iron levels. Now there's a lot of people who are on the opposite end of that and they have anemia. I see that every day. I look at blood work, a lot of people are anemic. And they can have anemia for a couple of reasons. One of them is low iron, they're not absorbing it, or they have low B12 levels. So B12 deficient anemia is very common.
And again, medicine's not good at picking it up because they rely on blood work. Blood work for B12, for example, is a hundred years old. But there is a lot of accumulation in a lot of people of iron and they call that hemochromatosis. And what that is is because of liver. It's the liver. You're never told that, but it is. It's the liver. The liver is picking up too much iron. Why would it do that? Because the vast majority of people in North America, the vast of people in North America have metabolic syndrome. What is metabolic syndrome? High blood pressure, belly fat, obesity, high triglycerides, low HDL, high levels of uric acid, and high what we call fatty liver, and fatty liver is at the root of hemochromatosis. So if you know anybody that's accumulating iron, one thing that they will do, I mean one of the medical treatments, is to go and give blood. You take your blood out of your body.
Now medicine learned over a hundred years ago don't take blood out of your body, give blood. Because the life of the flesh is in the blood. I mean, medicine... I'm going back a couple of hundred years, they used to do bloodletting. It had been going on for centuries. They were taking blood out of the body. Why were they doing that? Because they figured, well, disease is in the blood, let's take the blood out. But if you go to the hospital today, I mean unless you have hemochromatosis, they're not taking blood out of your body. They're giving you blood. They're giving you transfusions. And transfusions have saved millions of people's lives over the years because they should have read their Bible. If they read the Bible, they would have realized you don't take blood out, you give blood. Now that's besides the point of what we're talking about, because they do take blood out of your body with hemochromatosis.
But I tell people, look, you want to get rid of that. Get rid of your fatty liver. Get rid of your fatty liver. Because fatty liver is what causes the accumulation of iron. When your liver is gummed up full of fat, not only are you going to elevate your triglycerides and lower your HDL, which is very unhealthy, it all starts in the liver. So does diabetes. Diabetes doesn't start with the pancreas, diabetes starts with the liver. Why do we see so much more hemochromatosis? Why do we see so much more diabetes? What are they saying now, 50, 60% of the population is diabetic. And guess what guys? Guess what? It's higher than that, because if you have metabolic syndrome, you're really effectively a diabetic.
Remember what we've been teaching at the Martin Clinic is we call it the lagging indicator. The last thing that's going to happen in your body is your blood sugar is going to go high. Why is that? Because everything in your body fights to keep sugar out of your bloodstream. So doc, my blood sugars are normal. I look at blood sugars, but I don't rely on blood sugars because it's the last thing. Oh, I'm not a diabetic. Yes you are. You're a carboholic, you really are a diabetic. You have elevated liver enzymes, you're a diabetic because it starts with insulin and insulin resistance.
One of the first factors in that is that the liver starts to get gummed up, because remember when you're eating crappy carbs, they're going to be turned to sugars rapidly and they must be stored. And one of the places that your insulin loves to store your sugars is in your liver, and they are stored as glycogen. Glycogen, triglycerides, what are they? Fat balls in your bloodstream and they come out of your liver when the liver is full. So this is why we see conditions like... Oh, how come I have extra iron in my blood? Which isn't good for you by the way. But you have to get to the root cause of that and that's your liver. Empty your liver, you'll empty your iron.
How do you empty your liver? Well within seven days, and this is why I'm always preaching, preaching, preaching don't give up on The Reset. It's not easy. It's not an easy diet. It's simple, but it's not an easy diet. And I saw someone yesterday on Facebook on our private group talking about calories. I don't go there. I don't care about calories. What does calories got to do with anything? They have nothing to do. That's the food industry. Just eat a balanced diet and calories. Calories in, calories out. Eat less, move more. That has been the model of the diet industry for as long as I've been in practice. I have to remember, I'm not in private practice anymore, but I was for 46 years. And in May, it'll be 47 and now slightly over a year of teaching rather than private practice.
But I always taught that. I taught even to my individual patients. Very, very important. It's not calories in, calories out and get on the treadmill and just burn off calories. You'll notice a lot of people if you go to the gyms today, they're still doing that. I tell them, look, you can't out exercise a bad diet. You just can't. Maybe when you're 15 but not if you've got any kind of metabolic deficiency. You're not out-exercising a bad diet, you can't do it. And a bad diet it's what you eat. It's not how much, it's what. It's what fuel you're giving your body. What fuel are you giving your body? Is it logs on the fire? Is it rocket fuel? Is it nutrient dense food? Are you just counting calories? This is why I never liked calories. Who cares?
Give your body the right fuel and it will know what to do with it. If you give your body the right fuel, your liver will never, never, never get stuffed up with fat. It won't. When you eat eggs, meat, and cheese, your liver is on a holiday man, along with your pancreas. Now the organ that's working a little bit is your gallbladder, and I get that question all the time. I don't have a gallbladder, can I do eggs, meat, and cheese? Yeah, you can. You might have to take it a little bit easier because you don't have a gallbladder. The gallbladder is not what produces bile, your gallbladder is a reservoir for bile. So when you don't have a gallbladder, yeah, it's a little bit more difficult until your body adjusts to it, but your bile is made in your liver. And again, when you empty your liver... The Reset is aiming at your pancreas at your liver, but they work together.
And once you empty out your liver... Your liver does 600 things by the way. You can't live without the liver. Now isn't God wonderful? The liver can regenerate. Cirrhosis of the liver, this is what we used to see in the 1970s. I'm not kidding you, I'm not pulling your leg here. Do you know that in the 1970s, if you looked at any of my textbooks that are behind me and on the side shelf over there, if you look in any of my textbooks in the 1970s, can I tell you something? You will not find NAFL. What is that? Non-alcoholic fatty liver. You won't find it. It's not in our textbooks. And now they're saying like 50, 60, 70% of the population have some form, and even in kids some form of fatty liver. Fatty liver.
It used to be cirrhosis of the liver. Alcohol. Alcoholics used to get cirrhosis of the liver, very deadly. You get cirrhosis now, you can, if you don't empty that liver of its fat and your body tries to by sending that fat into your bloodstream with triglycerides, which is extremely dangerous for your heart. It ain't cholesterol, it's triglycerides. Those are the lipids. And I don't care how many times I have to repeat it, if you want to send me your blood work, I’m not interested in your total cholesterol. Your doctor's interested in that because that's what they've been trained. But only since the 1980s. Do you know that? They weren't trained in the '70s the way I was trained. We used to look at the triglycerides. Now they look at LDL and your total cholesterol because the pharmaceutical industry has taken over medicine. They sponsor everything.
Let me just see if I can find... I flagged this yesterday. I want to show you something. Let me see if I can find it. I think Pfizer, they're famous right now because they've come out with a vaccine, but let me just see if I can get this study here because I flagged this yesterday. Incredible. They were fined not a million or millions of dollars, Pfizer received the biggest fine in US history, $2.3 billion. I'm just reading you the headlines. This happened in 2009. Pfizer received the biggest fine in US history of 2.3, not million, billion dollar fine for bribing doctors and suppressing adverse trial results. I'll tell you what I'm going to do, I'm going to post that on our private Facebook group so that you can read it for yourself. But why is that important? Do you think Pfizer was the only one doing that? And the FDA made an example of Pfizer, $2.3 billion fine. Guys, for pharmaceutical companies that's chump change. It doesn't matter, it's a big fine. But why did they fine them? Because they were bribing doctors and suppressing adverse trial results. Two point three billion.
The point I'm making is that in the 1970s, cholesterol wasn't a big thing with heart disease. It was coming but it really... it wasn't until the 1980s with the introduction of statin drugs. Lipitor, the number one selling drug of all time. It made more money for Pfizer and all these other companies, they started coming out with statin drugs and they had to produce a new test, one that nobody even used to look at, and I mean that, and it's called your total cholesterol or your LDL cholesterol. And because statin drugs lower your LDL, the world went hook, line, and sinker for something that doesn't cause heart disease.
And here's the proof, heart disease kills more people today than it ever used to. Do you know that yesterday in the United States, 2,400 people died yesterday either from a heart attack or stroke? Folks, this comes from the insurance industry. You know one thing about the insurance industry? It's all risks. They know the risk. You get an insurance policy or whatever, insurance companies are all risk. They know how many people died, I can give it to you, I memorized it, yesterday in the United States. Here's what the insurance company tells us, 2,400 people die every day, 365 days a year of heart disease or stroke, 2400. Sixteen hundred and change died of cancer yesterday. We're not talking about that because all we want to hear about is how many people are dying from the virus. But yesterday 1600 people died of cancer, and a lot of them were alone. Now don't get me started on that, that bothers me.
And yesterday there was 400 people yesterday that died of Alzheimer's in the United States alone and 300 and change died of diabetes. Now you know me, I connect all of those. I connect hemochromatosis. It's really diabetes, but you just haven't been diagnosed with it, because the lagging indicator is sugars. Oh, my blood sugars are normal. Well, first of all they're higher than normal, but they're not enough to call it diabetes. When you look at A1C, oh doc, my A1C. That's an average. How do they do that? Well, hemoglobin lasts four months. Because every red blood cell in your body, you get new ones every four months. What sugar does, is it attaches to your red blood cell, the hemoglobin in the red blood cell. It never lets go. That's how they calculate it. They can tell how much sugar is attached to the hemoglobin and they take an average because they know it lasts so long and then they give you a number. If it's under six it's... no, it's not normal. When I see 5.5 A1C, man, you're a diabetic. You're on the Titanic. You got any kind of fatty liver, you're on the Titanic. And what we're missing is it's food. Everything that I just talked about, heart disease. It's not genetics. Even if it is a little bit of genetics, you can override genetics by changing your diet, changing your lifestyle. You can override genetics.
Look, we're all going to get sick eventually and die. I got that. But in the meantime, we need to take care of ourselves. And the thing that you can control, can't control everything, you just can't, but you can certainly control what you eat. It's amazing. People in the health care field, including dieticians... God bless them, they know so little about nutrition. It ain't salt, it's sugar. It ain't fat, it's sugar and carbs. It's bad fat that comes from sugars or when you're eating crappy carbs, you're eating those vegetables oils that we talk about, are very inflammatory. And inflammation when it gets out of control starts to damage blood vessels and this and that.
This is why you have the connection of all these disorders, they're connected. It's not calories. It's not calories in and calories out. It has nothing to do with calories. It has to do with what type of fuel you're using. I am 100% focused in, I focus in, guys, on your pancreas, I focus in on your liver because if I focus in on your pancreas getting insulin down and emptying your liver, I can tell you your body will turn itself around. And I don't care if you're 80 years old, now it's going to be slower, but I'm telling you, it's a secret. I want to teach that. I know you guys when you follow along with me I'm teaching you. It's something that 99.9% of all medicine, they don't know this. They're still hung up on you can't eat red meat, red meat is bad. It's bad. It's acidic. It causes heart disease. It's full of fat. True or false isn't that what you're hearing even today? True or false. What I'm saying is they're looking for love in all the wrong places. Name me a disorder, and if you don't see a connection to food, I can't help you. There's a connection to food.
By the way, I wanted to say this right at the start, I forgot. We've renamed SIBO, that's the medical term. Small intestine bacterial overgrowth. Nope, it's SIFO, small intestine fungal overgrowth. That's the one. I'll tell you, I'm a senior citizen. That's the one I remember. I like the other one, SIBO and SIYO, nobody likes SIYO. Yeast overgrowth. But it's a fungal overgrowth. And you know what? We're bad at fixing it. Medicine is bad at fixing heart disease, at fixing fatty liver, they're bad at it. As I said to you, it's the elephant in the room.
One thing we didn't learn out of all this, you guys learned it. But through this whole pandemic, we didn't learn the lesson that we should have learned. We didn't learn anything. Oh, just keep doing what you're doing and wear your mask, wash your hands, and social distancing and this and that thing, but we didn't learn a thing about food. We should have. Anybody that got sick just about 99% of them, unless they were well over 80 years old and even then they had to have these pre-existing conditions. And what were those pre-existing conditions? The pancreas and the liver. Because the pancreas, insulin affects your heart. It affects your blood pressure. It affects your blood sugar. You don't get fat from eating eggs, meat, and cheese. It's an impossibility. You don't. It's not calories. It's not calories. It's not calories. So why do we see so much of these things today? That's the topic today.
And we talked about hemochromatosis. We talked about how the liver... it does 600 things. You better empty it. You see one of the biggest things that the liver does, think about it with hemochromatosis. You see, if you eat steak, you get good heme iron. And then yesterday, actually I read this because somebody said, the doctor told me to stop eating red meat because I had hemochromatosis. I got a headache. I got a headache. Honest. As soon as I read that, I got a headache. Oh, my blood pressure is going up because it's the exact opposite on red meat. Well, the doctor's right, because red meat has the best iron. Yep. So you got too much iron? Let's stop eating. No. It's the liver. Empty the liver. The reason you had too much iron is not from steak, it's because you eat too many carbohydrates. 100%. No exceptions. Eat all the steak in the world. You're not going to get hemochromatosis from eating steak. It's the opposite. You're getting it from eating bran and pasta and rice and cereals. That's why we see so much of it today. Yeah, it's not steak. It's sugar.
Nothing but fun. Nothing but fun. Okay. Tomorrow is Question and Answer. We appreciate all your questions. I know some of them have already come in because I seen a few and that's good. I'll try and answer all of them tomorrow. Martin Clinic Facebook group. Enjoy. We want you to join, family and friends. It's a great community. Okay, we love you guys and I'll go on and say hi to you afterwards. 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!