Dr. Martin continues his review of a recent 30-year comprehensive Framingham study looking at early mortality rates.
Medicine continues to see cholesterol as the boogeyman. Patients are put on statin drugs to lower their cholesterol, which goes against everything we've ever been taught. If you want to die young, continue hammering your cholesterol down.
Join Dr. Martin as he teaches on what you need to be doing to prolong your life, not shorten it!
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, hope you're having a great start to your day, having some vitamin C. So yesterday we started a two part series, on mortality. Hate to be negative, but early mortality. And this was brought to you by a study, a 30-year study, just looking at hundreds and hundreds of other studies, and coming to some conclusions about what were the causes of early death. We talked about a few of them yesterday, and I want to talk about a few more today.
Yesterday, we talked about, if you want to die young, hammer your cholesterol down. And that goes against everything that we've ever been taught. You want to die young, have low cholesterol. Ladies, especially for you. Especially for you, because your hormones, horrormones at times, you need cholesterol to transport them. So you want to die young. These are just statistics, then lower your cholesterol.
And I tried to make the point in the last several years that cholesterol is not the boogeyman, 85% of your cholesterol comes out of your liver. God makes cholesterol for you, because he doesn't trust you enough to eat enough from the animal kingdom, where you're going to get 15% that you need in cholesterol. So cholesterol has been vilified, it's not true. It never was true. Having high cholesterol is a good thing, not a bad thing.
But you're going to have to go against the grain, and I hope I've convinced you that avoiding fat in your diet is a silly thing. It's a silly thing. Eating low fat is a silly thing. You will die young. Now, look, let me put a little asterisks, a disclaimer. You can be the healthiest person on the planet and walk across the street and get hit by a bus. There's no guarantees, but we have a responsibility, I believe that. I think one of the things that we have lost in the last 18 months... I mean it, I don't hear anybody talking about it, certainly not politicians and virologists and our public officer of health. I mean they're public officers of health, health, public officers of health, but they're not talking health, they're talking about hammering down a virus. Guys, news flash there'll always be viruses.
And this idea, in my opinion, of social distancing and washing your hands and all that, I'm not against that temporary or whatever, I'm not against it. But the best thing you can do is have a good immune system, have a good immune system. Why is nobody talking about that? And big part of your immune system is what you eat every day. And vitamin D, it's not fake news. As our Minister of Health, the former Minister of Health in Canada, it's not fake news guys. And I know I'm preaching to you guys. You guys know better, but I'm telling you, it frustrates me to no end.
Anyway, so early mortality, we touched on a few yesterday, low cholesterol, low vitamin D. You want to die young, have low vitamin D. And guess what? The majority of people have low vitamin D. You can hardly get it tested, in a routine test, doctors that are not thinking outside the box, they see your vitamin D levels as osteoporosis. That's it, and that's all. And I have been preaching for 40 something years, almost 50, vitamin D, [viderma 00:05:08].
So we talked about that yesterday. And we sort of hit on, if you want to die young, have high triglycerides, and we talked about this in the context of cholesterol. High triglycerides, and if you have high triglycerides, remember what we talked about, the teeter-totter effect. If your triglycerides are high, your HDL generally will be low. If your triglycerides are low, your HDL will be high, it's the way your body operates. I use that example of the teeter-totter. And, guys, triglycerides, let me just explain this, triglycerides is food, because triglycerides are made in the liver.
And I mentioned this yesterday, but just a little repetition. The reset is to fix your insulin, which will empty your liver. I'm not concerned primarily with obesity. I'm not. Obesity, guys, is high circulating insulin. You have to get at the cause, it's insulin, baby. And insulin resistance comes from sugar and crappy carbs. And insulin's job is to take sugar. It runs around your body, insulin, and once it takes sugar, it says to your cells, "Open up, open up, open up, open up, open up. I got to get rid of the sugar. I can't leave it in your bloodstream." And then, if your cells resist it, and you don't use it as energy, immediately, sugar is stored. So when you eat a piece of bread, it turns to sugar.
And if you don't use that as energy immediately, because that's what carbohydrates are for guys, I've taught you the three macros, carbohydrates are for energy. And the problem with carbohydrates is if you don't use it for energy, immediately, it gets stored. And it gets stored as fat. Where are the three Costco parking lots? Your muscles, that's why it's important to have strong muscles. And we talked about one of the cause of death, early mortality yesterday, and that is sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is muscle wasting. People that are not strong. You can be a lean, mean, fighting machine.
So the more muscle you have, the more storage you have. They're bins to store fat, carbohydrates, glycogen. The other spot is your liver. And it's only got so much space and you can stuff it, stuff it, stuff it, and then when your body senses that your liver is stuffed, you know what it does? It makes more compartments around the liver. They're fatty compartments, fatty liver. And when you get fatty liver, your body produces triglycerides. So that fat turns into fat balls, and fat balls are not good for you, unless you have good cholesterol, HDL, to go get it, and hitch its wagon to it and bring it back to liver to metabolize it.
Now, I hope I didn't confuse you too much with that. I try and make that teaching simple. Our triglycerides, what causes heart disease, the primary cause? Triglycerides, not cholesterol, triglycerides. And triglycerides as food folks. Why aren't we talking about food? Because big pharma wants us to talk about medication. In their boardrooms, they're not talking about, "Well, let's tell everybody to change their diet." They don't do that, and they're powerful. One of the problems I have is that they've hijacked the medical schools, and these young, potential doctors, they don't learn anything about this. They're learning about cholesterol being the boogeyman, and they're still doing it. Here we are in 2021 and we know the physiology, and they're still doing it. And there's some pushback, but not much.
Now, we're going to do two things. We're going to talk about, one of the things in this study was, if you're high stressed. Now, let me ask you a question, do you get our emails? If you don't, sign up for our emails because we taught this, this morning. The email that went out today was on cortisol. But let me just give you a little recap on what this study said. If you have high levels of cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone, and that's all right. If someone is scaring you, you want cortisol. You're walking out on a dark night and you're going to the parking lot to get into your car and you're alone, and you hear footsteps behind you. And the hairs on the back of your head are sticking up, and your blood pressure is going through the roof, and your heart is beating and you are going to run or fight, fight or flight.
And it's a wonderful response. It's a wonderful response. Here's what study after study, after study, after study has shown, the problem with that is if it doesn't get turned off, and you get anxiety. Boy, that's a big problem in the world today. It's one of the unintended consequences of this whole shutdown. And here we are again, they're doing it again. Now whether you think that's right or wrong, all I'm telling you is this, is there's unintended consequences of this. People are stressed. Young people are stressed. They're secreting a lot of cortisol. They're getting anxiety, and anxiety, the Bible's very right, written thousands of years ago, it says, "Anxiety in the heart of man leads to depression," Proverbs chapter 12. I think it's verse 25, "Anxiety in the heart of man leads to depression." You see it's the unintended consequences of high cortisol, because it's not normal.
We need each other. And when things are not normal in our lives, we're secreting more cortisol. The evidence of this is incredible. The number one killer in society today is not the virus. I'm talking about young people, it's fentanyl, opioids, suicide. That's how young people die. They die young, because of stress, cortisol, anxiety, depression. All I'm saying is, is what these studies are saying. It's cortisol.
Now let me unpack this a little bit more, even for you, because you got to understand how my little brain works. So I'm going to show you how I chart things in my brain, because I'm always talking about in my mind, I talk to myself. You ever talk to yourself? I talk to myself, because when I see something, I always go, "Why is that? Why is that?" I want to know, in my mind, when I see early death, mortality, and then they just name something, I want to know why is that? So when they put stress as the cause of early death, I want to tell you physiologically why that happens.
Now, a little chart, I just want to show you how I operate in terms of your body. So on this side here I put the three seeds of disease. At the Martin Clinic, we believe there's three main causes of disease. What are they? High circulating insulin or insulin resistance, numero uno. Food, we're carboholics. It's the number one reason people get sick. Food. Imagine, in medicine, they don't even talk about food. And it's the number one killer today, that was why in the book, The Reset, I tried to make it my premise. And then I wanted to go out and convince my readers that my premise is right. The number one problem in health is high circulating insulin, and high circulating insulin is numero uno when it comes to disease today.
Now the second one I put over here, was leaky gut, LG. And we've talked about that a million times. Leaky gut. Leaky gut. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, had it right 2000 years ago, "All disease starts in the gut." Well, he was pretty sharp, way ahead of even the modern physician, the gut. Hormones, microbiome, the gut. There isn't an autoimmune disease that doesn't start in the gut, that's number two.
Number three is oxidative damage, we're rusting out. Those are the three main causes of disease. Now, those three things, if you go to my next little graph, creates inflammation. Remember inflammation is not Houdini. Inflammation doesn't come out of nowhere. And I'm not talking about inflammation when you get a fever. Let's say you got COVID, you would get a fever. That's your body's response. What I'm talking about is your body's chronic response. Inflammation without a fever. So when you have high circulating insulin, you get a response of inflammation, leaky gut, inflammation, oxidative damage, double-edged sword, inflammation. Problem with inflammation is it's very destructive, when it's left unattended.
Now I want to show you where cortisol comes in, because I put a little thing. And again, you might not have pre so much because I flunked art, and I flunk graphics. See that? This is cortisol backwards. Cortisol, what does it do to inflammation? Cortisol is like adding gasoline to a fire. You got a little fire, add gasoline. That's cortisol. You see, the problem with stress, left to its own, if it's not fixed, cortisol, that uptightness that fight or flight, it just pours gasoline on inflammation. And this is why, in the 30-year study, it says, "If you are stressed over a period of time, chronic stress, you are in deep doo-doo.
Why? Because it pours gasoline on the fire of inflammation, and it destroys blood vessels. It destroys your immune system. You see, this is why I've talked about this so often. Ladies, especially, these are general statements, so just general statement. When a woman is stressed over a long period of time, she becomes very, very, very susceptible to breast cancer. In any book I've written in the last 20 years, I've always talked about stress, and in women, breast cancer. There's something that stress does to the immune system. And it targets breast tissue in women. I've seen very few exceptions to it. If a woman gets breast cancer, she has high circulating insulin, she has high estrogen, and, three, there's chronic cortisol, chronic stress, generally, very few exceptions.
Now men, I'm going to tell what stress does to you. Cortisol left unabated, over a period of time, men, is very dangerous to your heart. See women cancer, especially breast, and men, heart disease, that pouring the gasoline on inflammation destroys your blood vessels more in a man than it doesn't in a woman. Why me? I don't know, we're from another planet. No, it's just the way it is. And I've commented on this for a long time. Where men, they get a heart attack and the doctor sort of shakes his head and goes, "I don't even know why you got it, your lipid profile was pretty good." Yeah, but there was a lot of stress there, man, and that poured gasoline on the fire.
And inflammation, one of the first places that it destroys are blood vessels, it affects the endothelial. The Teflon like layer in blood vessel. Now, I'm not saying it can't happen in women, I'm just saying it's much more prevalent in men. Just the way it is. And heart disease, guys, heart disease is still the number one killer in society. Very close second is cancer. But heart disease is huge.
And when men, I'm not saying men, if they're bad carboholics and everything else, and they got high triglycerides, of course, of course. But what stress does, stress adds fuel to the fire, and it's silent in a sense that it can kill you. Now, one of the biggest things in cortisol and we write about this, this morning in that email, is sleep. One of the first things that gets affected is by sleep. And guess what is in this list of dying young, early mortality, stress, sleep, and you're meant to sleep. What do they say mean now? It's almost, are you kidding me? 70% of the population have trouble sleeping, once, twice, three times, sometimes seven times a week. They just don't sleep.
And a little aside, if you're taking sleeping pills to sleep, you're not sleeping, you're sedated. That's a different thing altogether, because your body's not regenerating. You see when you go to sleep, the night shift works. Your body detoxes your liver and your kidneys. You produce much more glutathione at night to detox. The cleaning staff comes in. Your battery is in airplane mode, no data coming in, but the cleaning stuff. And I've talked to you about what happens in your brain at night, when you're sleeping. The night shift comes in the brain and takes all that debris out. It's got its own lymphatic system in the brain, called your glymphatic system. It's amazing. It's amazing.
When people tell me there is no God I go, "Are you kidding me, have you ever studied the human body? And what happens?" You are sleeping, and the night shift comes in. Your heart is resting. You're breathing. Your lungs are having a rest. Your kidneys are having a rest. All your organs are resting. Your liver works the night shift, to clean up. It's amazing. And, guys, your cleaning system will never go on strike if you take care of it. But it always fascinates me, plug yourself in and sleep. Just like recharging your phone. Do you plug it in at night and sleep? Your phone sleeps? No data is coming in. No, but that's what your body needs, guys. You see, that's one of the biggest symptoms of having high cortisol, is you don't sleep.
Because cortisol by the way, and just a little aside too, it helps regulate your circadian rhythm. Meaning that you're on a clock. Your cortisol should be up in the morning. It wakes you up. It gets you going. And then as the day progresses, cortisol goes like this, it goes downwards. Why is that? Well it's starting to wind you down. A lot of people are upside down. Their cortisol is low in the morning and high at night or it's high all the time, and the body can't turn itself off. Do you know how many people over the years, I mean thousands and thousands of peoples over the year, "Doc, I'm exhausted. I fall asleep. I can't stay asleep." You know how many thousands of times I heard that. I had women, I mean it, crying because I told them why. "What?"
I said, "Well, you got high cortisol. It's your adrenal glance. Add renal, on top of kidneys, they're not being turned off. They're never resting. Your body is doing this all day long. And you don't even realize that you're so used to it. And then you're exhausted, because you're not meant to be like that. And you're exhausted, and cortisol, by the way, not only adds gasoline to the fire of inflammation, it messes up your hormones.
I've written more books on chronic fatigue. People that are just exhausted and their adrenals are exhausted. And when your adrenals are exhausted, it's like a three-legged stool type of thing. You ever been on a three-legged stool? They better be all equal, otherwise, you're falling off, Humpty Dumpty. Cortisol messes up your thyroid. It does not allow conversion of T4 to T3, what your thyroid needs to work properly. Cortisol messes that up, one. Two, it robs your progesterone. It robs progesterone. And what happens when your progesterone goes down, your estrogen goes through the roof.
Now, you've got estrogen dominance. And when estrogen dominates, guess what that affects? Estrogen makes things grow. And before you know it, you are getting fatter, because you don't have to eat food, you just have to look at it. Your thyroid slows down and your cortisol, because it's robbing progesterone, it's making more estrogen, and estrogen makes things grow, grow, grow. And that's the connection, by the way, with breast cancer.
Here's another thing it does, cortisol, left unattended, when it's constantly secreting, hammers your blood sugar. It brings it up. And what goes up, must come down. And that's what happens a lot of times in hypoglycemia, like people think hypoglycemia, "Oh doc, I have low blood sugar, therefore, I must eat carbohydrates." No, don't do that. Don't that? Because hypoglycemia, first of all, is hyper insulinemia, it's too much sugar, from cortisol, not necessarily from food. Remember when cortisol is making you do this, your blood sugar's got to go up, because you're getting ready to fight.
You're going to need that energy in your cells. And you want to kill... You're going to run or fight, right? But then what happens is your insulin comes around and says, "Okay, you're way too high. Come here." And it hammers it down. And now you go into hypoglycemia. You know what that does? That makes you crave sugars. You go by Laura Secords and you want to do a swan dive. You know how many women told me that? "Dr. Martin, if I don't have a chocolate, I need my fix." And for a lot of women, by the way, you know what that fix was? Wine. At the end of the day, it turns to sugar in a nanosecond and heads directly to your liver.
Anyways, guys, am I giving you too much information? I don't mind the feedback. I might be going too fast. I don't want to do that, because I respect my audience here. You guys are unreal, how you get it, but I don't want to go too fast and not teaching. But folks, when I see the mortality statistics, what kills people, it don't shock me. It doesn't shock me because I've been saying this for a long time.
Anyways, I just had my workout. Okay, guys, tomorrow, we're going to do another session. Thursday, this week is going to be question and answer, so get your questions in. We're going to do it Thursday. Friday being Christmas Eve, we're not going to do a program. Got it. Thursday is question and answer.
Little housekeeping, if you don't get our emails, sign up, go to martinclinic.com, sign up for our emails. Sign up for the podcast, it's good to review this stuff. Send them to your friends, tell them how they can get onto the podcast. And the other one is our private Facebook group, wonderful group. We appreciate it. You guys are wonderful in that group. Invite your friend and family. So we love you guys. We'll 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!