Transcript Of Today's Episode
Speaker 1: 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 Jr.: Hello, I'm Dr. Martin Jr.
Dr. Martin Sr.: I'm Dr. Martin Sr.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And this is the Doctor Is In Podcast, and this is episode 194. And today, we want to continue our discussion from the last episode, [00:00:30] which we titled The Four Culprits of Heart Disease. And in that podcast, if you haven't had a chance to listen to it, I strongly suggest you go back and listen to it because in that episode, we laid out the four culprits that indicate future heart problems more than cholesterol ever did or ever will because as we mentioned in the last episode, 75% of people that have a heart attack or more [00:01:00] have normal cholesterol levels.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Cholesterol's a terrible indicator of heart disease. We've said this in the past, but blaming cholesterol for a heart attack is like blaming a fireman for fires. Just because a fireman is at the scene of every fire, does not mean that the fireman is the cause of that fire. Cholesterol is involved, it's such an important part of your normal biochemistry [00:01:30] that your body makes it on its own, but it doesn't mean it's causing anything.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And I think research has shown that especially nowadays, research has come a long way. For years, that whole aspect of research really was bought and paid for, it makes it sound like conspiracy theories, doesn't it? But when the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine himself says, "Don't trust most data or most studies. Most of them are fake," it tells you.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, because they're sponsored, right.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Agenda-based.
Dr. Martin Sr.: [00:02:00] Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Right, a lot of research and that's exactly what you just said. What you just said is true. You can get science to say whatever you want it to say and publish your results. Now I've long said this before, I don't think we've talked about this on an episode, but I'm a firm believer that all research should be published whether or not it showed your point or didn't because again, if it didn't work out well, then [00:02:30] other people should see that as well, because then they can start from, they know where to start. It's not a bad idea to have everything there, but it doesn't matter.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Science for a lot of, a lot of science is bought and paid for, especially when it came to cholesterol medication. A lot of studies showing it was good for you, then all these people started getting sore, and diabetes, and all these different things. A ton of side effects. Then research coming out saying, "Oh, maybe it's not the best indicator of heart disease." Then, "Maybe it's a terrible indicator of heart disease, but it doesn't matter, it's [00:03:00] still prescribed." If you are over 45-ish and you go to your doctor and you get a blood test, and it comes back you got elevated cholesterol, they will talk to you about statin drugs. That's a fact.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It's still in the standard of care today.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, and you think of it nutritionally. I have to deal with it every day, every day in a clinical setting, is that when I tell people to, for example, to eat more eggs because I want to get more protein in [00:03:30] their diet. "Well, doc, what about cholesterol?" So it's in their craw, right, it's in peoples' craw. I mean, think of the marketing that had to take place for people to get-
Dr. Martin Jr.: At every level.
Dr. Martin Sr.: At every level, like from the physician to the nutritionist-
Dr. Martin Jr.: To the government-
Dr. Martin Sr.: To the government. When you think of, like it's just something that is almost beyond your imagination, but in and this is I mean, it's almost, you can [00:04:00] almost believe it could never be true if this wasn't well-documented, but that the government in England, the United Kingdom, actually had a vote in the Parliament, as to whether to put cholesterol medication, listen to this, in the drinking water. Because they said, "Well, it's so preventative."
Dr. Martin Jr.: Can you imagine the boardroom at a cholesterol medication company, sitting there listening or waiting for the results of the vote to put the drug [00:04:30] that they make into water supply. I mean, that's just stuff you see in Bond movies, by the way.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Like that's just stuff that the Joker would do in Batman would poison the water supply, but that's what they were doing.
Dr. Martin Sr.: But it was so pervasive, that think about where you ... Now it didn't pass. Thank God, but can you imagine how, I hate to use the word duped, but do you imagine how unbelievable those [00:05:00] marketing people were to get it through. People are still today scared to eat eggs because of cholesterol. Like ask them, ask anybody on the street, and nine out of 10 said, "Yeah, maybe I should cut my eggs down," right.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Saturated fat-
Dr. Martin Sr.: It's the boogeyman.
Dr. Martin Jr.: The connotation that the images that come into your brain when you hear the word saturated fat has been planted there by lots of marketing, and now there's nothing you can do about [00:05:30] that for a whole generation. The next generation, hopefully doesn't get indoctrinated to think-
Dr. Martin Sr.: They're smart. They're looking-
Dr. Martin Jr.: But it doesn't matter. I mean, saturated fat, whenever you hear the word saturated fat, you think of artery-clogging because forever, it's almost like that word was sponsored, right. The word saturated is sponsored by the company artery-clogging, so it just, no matter what, saturated fat makes you think of artery-clogging, right.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And it's terrible-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, you got to go and buy [00:06:00] lean meat, and lean this, and lean that.
Dr. Martin Jr.: At the end of the day, here we are, we're recording this episode of July of 2019, and cholesterol is still discussed, it's still tested, it's still over-prescribed anti-cholesterol lowering medication. It's insane. So in the last episode, we talked about the four culprits. And they were homocystine, which is a toxic byproduct of amino acid metabolism. We talked about [00:06:30] endothelial dysfunction, your endothelium is a Teflon-like inner layer of your blood vessels, and when that's healthy, your blood vessels are healthy. When that's not healthy, things get stuck to the walls. That's when you start running into problems.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Then we talked about nitric oxide, which is a gas molecule that you make in your body, and when that gas molecule is released, blood vessels dilate, they open up and that allows better blood flow. [00:07:00] Your heart, brain need it for health. As we talked about in the last episode, so do your bones. And then the fourth thing we talked about was inflammation. And we talked about how CRP, which is C-Reactive Protein-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Is a marker-
Dr. Martin Jr.: Is a marker of inflammation, so that was in the last episode. Today what we want to talk about is two things. One, how do those four things become a problem? And then, we'll end by talking about each of those four things, what you could [00:07:30] take naturally to help with those four things. So we got a lot to go through today, but it's a good episode and we're excited to share this information. And again, we've written a report that will be available, if it isn't already, very shortly, on this. We wrote a Heart Health Report. We did a fair amount of work-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Excellent report, by the way.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, we-
Dr. Martin Sr.: I give you credit. You know how to do reports.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And we wanted to because we just kind of got frustrated with all this cholesterol talk-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Well, again, and we always come [00:08:00] at it, too, like from just, if you wonder where we're coming from, we're just coming from a practical clinical application, right. Because sometimes, people that are in research are, and there's nothing wrong with that, they're doing their job. They're doing research, but we have real people on a daily basis for years and years. The Martin Clinic is 19, established in 1911, and we've been going on for years and years.
Dr. Martin Sr.: So we just have so information [00:08:30] that we see clinically that these things are practical, and we're just trying to get ... I always tell my patients, "Look, you pump my tires more than I pump your tires." Because when you learn these things, and we're just trying to give you information, and you take that information. You make changes in your lifestyle, and this, and that to help yourself. I mean, that's what we're here for. We're just, our skin in the game is we want you to feel good. We [00:09:00] want you to be healthy. We try and be healthy, ourselves, right. We're just trying to share what we see clinically, and we don't want you to go down these paths of these markers that we see-
Dr. Martin Jr.: Well, especially considering that statistically, heart disease is the number one killer, so most people in North America, that's going to affect the most people.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Oh, absolutely.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Men and women. Men and women, the number one killer. All right, so let's talk about how these four culprits come [00:09:30] to be, and then we'll deal with each one specifically again, as we mentioned how to fight each and every one of them. Now in a video that we did a while ago, we did a webinar on leaky gut. The reason why we talk so much about leaky gut is because if you reverse engineer all the top killers, and we're talking about heart disease, which is the top killer, but if you look at Alzheimer's-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Cancer.
Dr. Martin Jr.: All these things, cancer, all the top killer-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Diabetes.
Dr. Martin Jr.: If you were to [00:10:00] reverse engineer them, you would find along the way that inflammation is present in all disease. Inflammation, as we've mentioned before, is found in all disease. But inflammation doesn't just-
Dr. Martin Sr.: It's not a Houdini.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, it doesn't just magically show up.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Nope.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It doesn't, that's not how it works. So something has to cause that inflammation, that then leads to these diseases. So what causes [00:10:30] that? And you and I like to talk about the 80/20 Rule. So if you took 80 people out of a 100, and you said, and these 80 people had one of these top killers. They had heart disease, they had cancer, or Alzheimer, whatever it was. 80 of the 100 would come from these three areas. So these three things affected or caused inflammation that eventually led to these diseases.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It's a long process. It could take a long time.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And what are those three things? First, which is what we talked [00:11:00] about in that leaky gut webinar, is leaky gut syndrome.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And here's the thing, a majority of people that have leaky gut syndrome have no digestive symptoms whatsoever.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, that gets people because they still, as soon as you mention gut, they think, "Well, I don't have any digestive issues. I got a pretty good gut." That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about what goes on that gut-
Dr. Martin Jr.: Well, the gut is the connection between what you eat and how it gets into your system, your blood. I mean, you eat food, it gets broken [00:11:30] down, it goes through the various stages of digestion. It gets broken down to its tiniest components and then it gets absorbed through the intestinal tract into your blood, and your blood brings those nutrients throughout your body.
Dr. Martin Jr.: So the connection between a closed system, which is your blood, it's closed system to the food that you eat is your digestive tract. That's how important it is, and the health of your digestive tract, aside from allowing things to pass through, [00:12:00] it's selective. Other things, it doesn't let get through because there are things that get into your digestive system that shouldn't get in. Bacteria, candida, viruses-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, toxins.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Toxins, undigested food that doesn't get broken down fast enough. So your lining of your gut does not let those things pass, but when the lining of your gut gets irritated, and it gets inflamed, and then all of a sudden those holes get bigger [00:12:30] or not as selective, junk starts to pass through and that's what leaky gut is.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And there's a lot of things that cause leaky gut, which is why if you get a chance, go to our website martinclinic.com, go to the start here portion of our thing, look at leaky gut. Sign up, watch that free video-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, it's great.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And we talk about all the causes, which is why a majority of people have some form of leaky gut syndrome and a lot of people don't even know it. But leaky gut syndrome is a major [00:13:00] cause of systemic inflammation.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Major cause of systemic inflammation.
Dr. Martin Sr.: And it can attack your brain because of that. There's a huge connection. It can attack your heart, can attack your blood vessels, it can attack. So this is why we talk about it so much. Again, it's not digestion, although it could be.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It could be, for sure.
Dr. Martin Sr.: And you might not even be digesting properly and you have no symptoms of your not digesting properly.
Dr. Martin Jr.: But I would argue, they probably do-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Oh, they probably do, [00:13:30] and they might not know it, right.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah. Because there's a lot of digestive symptoms that they wouldn't even know they have because I consider weak nails for a lot of people a digestive symptom.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Exactly, yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Which it sounds strange, but the health of your nails, the health of your hair, aside from thyroid, skin-
Dr. Martin Sr.: We talked about a lot of that.
Dr. Martin Jr.: A lot of these things are digestive symptoms.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: But they have nothing in their head to do with digestion. So that's why traditional digestive symptoms. [00:14:00] Now not everybody who has heart disease was caused by leaky gut because there's two other, we call them Three-C's of Disease. The second big cause is free radical damage.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, oxidative damage.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Oxidative damage, right. You use the analogy all the time. You cut an apple, leave it on the counter for a while, come back. It turns brown pretty quickly.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: That is caused by oxygen, the very same thing that gives us life slowly rusts us out.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Slowly [00:14:30] takes it away. Free radicals, it's funny, right, because it's like you think of free radical damage. Free radicals are mutant molecules that are missing-
Dr. Martin Sr.: They're teenagers.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, they're missing a part, and they're going to go steal it. They're going to try to get that from everywhere in your body-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, the Kamikaze pilot.
Dr. Martin Jr.: They go in, they steal it, and they destroy whatever cell they take it from. And that's called free radical damage, that's what rusting is. So our cells are rusting out, and we naturally [00:15:00] make antioxidants that fight and we take antioxidants that fight free radical damage-
Dr. Martin Sr.: And think of an antioxidant in the apple analogy. Put a little bit of lemon juice on one side of the apple, cut an apple in half, put a little bit of lemon juice on the one side of it. What are you doing? What is lemon juice? Well, it's an antioxidant, right. It's got some vitamin C in it. And so what does it do? It protects that one side of the apple. Now it'll still rust out, [00:15:30] but not going to rust out very quickly, not like the side that's not treated with antioxidants, right.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And all those things that, think of all the things that can cause an increase in free radical damage in the body from chemicals, pollutions, toxins, stress, the environment that we live in can, we are being bombarded by free radicals. If we don't have enough antioxidants to fight those things off, then we're rusting faster than we should. And this leads to inflammation. [00:16:00] This leads to all of the four culprits that we talked about, free radical damage can cause any of them.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It can damage your endothelium, it causes inflammation, it affects your body's ability-
Dr. Martin Sr.: It ages, it ages the body.
Dr. Martin Jr.: That's right.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Prematurely ages at the cellular level.
Dr. Martin Jr.: So for a lot of people, chronic free radical damage led to inflammation, that led to heart disease.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And the third [00:16:30] one, the third seed of disease, so we've talked about leaky gut, we've talked about free radical damage, the third seed, which is the big one, which is high circulating insulin. Insulin, when it's out of whack, leads to tremendous amount of inflammation, which leads to all the top killers.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Now we've talked, and talked, and talked a lot about insulin over the years because from a clinical standpoint, that's what we see all the time. We see people [00:17:00] that have chronically-elevated insulin levels. And here's the thing, when you start to have chronically-elevated insulin levels, you are heading towards disease on a rocket ship.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It is a direct, it's like taking the Bullet Train over in Japan. You're on that train, you're heading in that direction fast. You got to get off that train, and that's what happens with high insulin because high insulin [00:17:30] in the body can affect the brain, right. A lot of people call Alzheimer's Type 3 Diabetes.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It affects the liver. You start to pack a lot of fat around the liver. And once you start packing a lot of fat around the liver, you're going to be diabetic, you're going to have a lot of other issues, as well.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, and you're very toxic.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Very toxic.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Because that liver is such an important organ, right.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Then you start packing fat around the heart, then it causes inflammation. It affects the way the blood vessels work. [00:18:00] I mean, it's just bad news. So for a lot of people, the starting point for heart disease for them was either high circulating insulin, free radical damage, mix in a little bit of leaky gut, and then it just, they're off. They're on that train to heart disease.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, perfect storm.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yep, they're on that train. And the four culprits that we talked about are caused by those three things, homocysteine, elevated homocysteine caused by, let's talk about that for a second. [00:18:30] So there are some big causes of elevated homocysteine, right. For example, somebody who is chronically low in vitamin B12 cannot clear homocystine out of their body.
Dr. Martin Sr.: See how important B12 is.
Dr. Martin Jr.: That's why we talk so much about vitamin B12. And dietary, listen. We don't care if somebody is a vegetarian, or somebody's a vegan, they better be making sure they're getting B12.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: They better [00:19:00] make an exception either for oysters or they better be taking some form of sublingual B12 because you're going to have a very difficult time getting rid of homocystine. I don't care how you're eating. If you've got chronically low levels of B12, you're going to have a hard time getting rid of the homocysteine that's clogging up those blood vessels. That's the first thing.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: That's one, but you know that low thyroid hormones makes it difficult to get rid of homocysteine, allowing it to accumulate in blood vessels. [00:19:30] When you think about what goes on there, think of all the reasons why somebody has low thyroid. High insulin is one, think of high cortisol as another, messed up estrogen progesterone. We can go on and on.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, estrogen dominance. We see it all the time.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Heart disease a lot of times for people, is a secondary issue that started after they started running into hormonal problems. There are a lot of people that are listening to this episode that have long, chronic thyroid issues, [00:20:00] and it's not the thyroid that's going to get them. It's the heart disease, and it's specifically the elevated homocystine.
Dr. Martin Sr.: It's interesting, too, though, when you talk about heart disease, that it's much more prevalent today than it used to be in women. Like I remember in the '70s or whatever in school, they always talked about heart disease was almost like a man's disease. Like a woman might get a stroke, but later on in life.
Dr. Martin Sr.: But now they're showing that women, it happens much earlier, and it's usually [00:20:30] much more deadly in a woman. Like when they get a heart attack, like they often don't survive a heart attack, but when you think of the connection to hormones, when they were messed up with their estrogen, their thyroid wasn't working properly because we-
Dr. Martin Jr.: High stress cortisol.
Dr. Martin Sr.: And then you add high stress cortisol, and again, you got a bad mixture for a woman, right. And as they, a lot of times, they go through a lot of turbulence through, they get perimenopausal, that their body is changing, their [00:21:00] hormones are shifting, they're doctor is saying their thyroid is normal, and yet they don't feel good, they don't have that energy. But look at how dangerous that can be even for the blood vessels and what it does with homocystine. So anyway, there's a huge connection there.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It's all connected.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Martin Jr.: All right, so those are some of the big things that cause elevated homocystine levels. Now let's look at the second thing, which is endothelial dysfunction. Let's go back to the Three-C's of Disease that cause that. [00:21:30] Again, free radical damage, probably the number one cause of endothelial damage, free radical damage. High circulating insulin, same thing, damages the endothelium. And then the inflammation caused by chronic leaky gut, same thing. So now you have endothelial damage and things start to accumulate. Things start to, so you can see again.
Dr. Martin Sr.: And as you were saying, that Teflon isn't so slippery anymore, right. So when [00:22:00] you think of what's happening inside that blood vessel. And you know one of the things that you and I have talked about, I don't know if it's on, it's probably quite a few podcasts ago. But we talked about the, again, it comes to that insulin, it comes to the sugars, is glycation. And glycation is the AGE of-
Dr. Martin Jr.: Whenever you say glycation, I think of because it helps me think of it is caramel.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: My wife would say caramel.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Carmel.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Because for some reason, in the United [00:22:30] States where she's from, they cut out the second A. They just call it caramel.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Carmel.
Dr. Martin Jr.: But-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Caramel.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, I think of caramel. I think of caramelization, right. I think of that, that's what showing up, is caramelizing. You see it in the joints. Glycation causes joints to caramelize-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, and blood vessels, too.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Same thing. Surgeons go in there, orthopaedic surgeons are talking about going into these joints that have high glycation and it looks like caramel in the joints. You think a joint works well? You ever see sticky caramel [00:23:00] how it feels? Joints are not working properly-
Dr. Martin Sr.: That's why, I think that's, and you and I talked about this, and I don't know if many other people talk about it. But we often talk about that high-circulating insulin. And you get, it goes back to food. It goes back to all the sugar that we eat, and it causes this glycation. And not only in the joints, but in the blood vessels. And this is where you get the endothelial, if you can reverse engineer endothelial, it causes free radicals [00:23:30] because even that-
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yes, well, that's why we have it as a triangle.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: So if you, in the training that we did that video, we talked about the Three-C's and high-circulating insulin can lead to free radical damage and lead to leaky gut. And leaky gut can lead to the other ones, and it's all connected. And usually, if you have one, you have all three after a while, and that kind of like goes to that. So we get to endothelial dysfunction, those three seeds can lead to inflammation that causes that. The [00:24:00] third one, nitric oxide. Well, how do you run into low nitric oxide? Well, age is one of them. Age is one.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: But again, free radical damage has ... Free radicals, when they attack your cells, it significantly impacts your ability to make nitric oxide.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: So free radical damage is a big cause.
Dr. Martin Sr.: B12.
Dr. Martin Jr.: B12, low B12, again, big cause, right. So that's the three culprits. The fourth one, inflammation that's what we've been talking about this whole time. [00:24:30] So now you have homocystine, you have endothelial dysfunction, you have nitric oxide, and you have inflammation. We're almost out of time, so let's talk about in our opinion, probably the three best things you could take for those four culprits. We'll talk about that quickly.
Dr. Martin Jr.: First and foremost, we love pine bark extract, right. We use pine bark extract in our [inaudible 00:24:56]. Pine bark extract is a powerful [00:25:00] polyphenol. Most people they don't know, they've never heard of polyphenols, but they've read studies or people post it on Facebook because they love these things, the health benefits of red wine, or dark chocolate, they love that.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Well, the reason why people will say those things are healthy, or olive oil, for example.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Is because of the polyphenol content. Polyphenols are the compounds from plants that make their super powerful antioxidants. So people talk about the antioxidant [00:25:30] effect of like dark chocolate, but it's from the polyphenols, and polyphenols are strong antioxidants.
Dr. Martin Jr.: But not all polyphenols are created the same. There are a lot of different types of polyphenols. A lot of different families. So think of like I always think of polyphenols, think of them like the mafia. There's a lot of families and mafia is a generic term.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: But there's a lot of families, and some families have way more power than the other families. So you have polyphenols, then you have [00:26:00] a family of that called flavonoids, flavonols. And then in that family are what they, are where pine bark comes from, which is OPCs.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, which is probably the most powerful because of the broad spectrum that it has.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It has super, we call them super polyphenols.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, you name it, it's in there.
Dr. Martin Jr.: So pine bark is, I mean, we started using, you started using pine bark-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Well, it's well over 30 years ago now.
Dr. Martin Jr.: When mom got sick, [00:26:30] and that pine bark had a drastic effect on her health, and as the research is coming out on pine bark, it's an amazing antioxidant. It's a strong polyphenol, but those a good antioxidant like a pine bark extract, helps with homocystine, helps boost nitric oxide. It helps with inflammation. I mean, it helps-
Dr. Martin Sr.: And it helps the endothelium.
Dr. Martin Jr.: It helps the endothelia, that's [00:27:00] why we love pine bark.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: We love pine bark extract.
Dr. Martin Sr.: We sure do. There's probably nothing like it in terms of its overall ability to lower all those biomarkers or markers of cardiovascular disease.
Dr. Martin Jr.: We love pine bark extract for that.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Martin Jr.: The second thing is B12 because when you are low in B12, you have a problem with all four culprits. You can't help it because you need B12 to clear out homocystine, you need B12 for nitric oxide production, which then allows your blood vessels, your endothelium [00:27:30] to stay health. So we love it. B12 and then third one, which is fantastic, as well, is DHA.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: We love, DHA is a type of omega-3 fatty acid. We love DHA.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, and your body absolutely needs DHA. Your brain, for brain health-
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah, your brain is 60% fat and it prefers DHA as its form of fuel.
Dr. Martin Sr.: We talk about it, like we kind of funny because mom's Italian, but we tell you, "Like you're better off to be [00:28:00] greasy, to be slidy," right.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Sr.: And lots of olive oil and all these things that lubricate, and DHA, is there anything that lubricates your blood vessels and your brain better than DHA? I mean, it's just fabulous oil. I take it every day-
Dr. Martin Jr.: So we like pine bark, B12, DHA. Is there anything else? I think those three pretty much are the ones that we like for the four culprits. And again-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Well, probably an indirect one, and I'll just say it on the side because you and I are so [00:28:30] constantly talking about it, is vitamin D. And vitamin D because the more they study it, the more they realize how it affects almost every area of your body, right.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Vitamin D, it always kind of reminds me of this. Do you remember the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, right, on Saturday morning?
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And they had the Roadrunner and Wylie Coyote, right.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Oh, yeah. I used to love those guys.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And Wylie Coyote was always trying to catch the Roadrunner, but he never could, right?
Dr. Martin Sr.: Never could.
Dr. Martin Jr.: So he always [00:29:00] like apparently the Roadrunner always ran down the same highway, so Wylie would always build this massive contraption, right, and he would push a button, and then 55 things would happen. And eventually, a boot would come across the highway and kick Wylie, but it never worked until the coyote came and looked at it, and the boot hit him and knocked him off into the, down the Grand Canyon.
Dr. Martin Jr.: But the reason I'm bringing this up is because if you look at all the pieces of that contraption, there's a lot, it's like Mouse Trap, [00:29:30] right. There's a lot of pieces in it, but for a lot of things, if you go back from the boot, to the gears, to everything, it always goes back to vitamin D for a lot of things.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Vitamin D, like you said, it's not directly related, but indirectly, it does so many things that you trace it back to vitamin D, and it's like, "Oh, yeah. Vitamin D helps with that."
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Which is why we talk a lot about optimizing vitamin D levels.
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And the importance [00:30:00] of vitamin D, of course, if you can sit out in the sun, that's the best. That's the best form of vitamin D. But you live where we live, for two-thirds of the year-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Yeah, good luck with the sun.
Dr. Martin Jr.: Good luck, right, so that's why we talk a ton about vitamin D. Anyways, we covered a lot of information over the last two episodes, but we felt it was important because it all stemmed from reading an article about how heart attacks are making a comeback again in 40 year olds. And it's like, "All right, enough's enough." We've been, how much money has been spent on heart disease [00:30:30] over the last 40, 50 years? How many-
Dr. Martin Sr.: Still number one.
Dr. Martin Jr.: And it's still the number one killer, and they're still talking about cholesterol, which is why we wrote this report and we wanted to share that with you over the last two episodes. So again, thank you for listening and have a great day.
Speaker 1: You've reached the end of another Doctor Is In Podcast, with your hosts Dr. Martin Jr. and Sr. Be sure to catch our next episode, and thanks for listening.