Cardiovascular Clarity: Dr. Kim Williams Unravels Nutrition Myths

if you're inspired and motivated by this conversation we're starting our happy heart course on March the 4th it's a four-week approach of adopting a whole food plant-based diet to prevent and reverse heart disease it's food and lifestyle based and there's Live support sessions there's workshops and it's with a cardiologist with over 30 years of experience and who is plant-based himself so it's deeply rooted in science four weeks to prevent and reverse heart disease starting March the 4th you'll find Details in the show notes of this podcast or you can go to our website the happy pair. and find out more about it well let's be honest the medical knowledge uh doubles every 73 days every 73 days yeah exactly so you know reading for pleasure reading for knowledge reading for personal growth that's kind of like on the back shelf uh or front shelf in this [Laughter] case but I'm I'm hoping to get to it to the point you know get to the point where I can actually do that at some point but uh keeping up with the literature is that's a full-time job well so literally every two months like just over every two months it doubles like the actual medical literature and the information doubles in terms of health and well-being that's right and and you can carve out your little sector like Cardiology or nutrition but it's still rapidly growing and uh and you know and obviously particularly in the United States you're responsible for more than it you're responsible for everyone else's specialty when you're seeing a patient uh you know morally ethically and uh if not legally but you know it's it's important to to be able to impact particularly when you're do something like we do which is lifestyle medicine uh it affects all the organs that can't just be a cardiologist so those were the fun days yeah well it's it's a bit like um like every or you know the way to to see the human body in isolation is kind of naive because it's one holistic system and whether it's the heart or the gut or the mind they're all intrinsically linked could you talk on that for a sec um so you know we we got a full dose of that I mean I think Cardiology sort of rejected it and people would say that anxiety causes a heart hearted disease and you know the person who you know finds out that their family member has had a car accident and you know was fatal and they you know grab their chest and fall over and die and it's kind of like you know everybody had heard all that but nobody really believed that that was a mechanism then many years ago um there was a a recognition that there is so-called stressinduced cardiomyopathy meaning that someone tells you something horrible and I I and I have to admit that I saw most of it when I was Chief Cardiology at Wayne State you'd have four people uh getting a government check and going to the um casinos and an 85y old lady gambles away her food and rent trying to make more money uh through gambling and they would would literally get that stress induced cardiomyopathy it looks for all the world like a heart attack it's it's a heart attack induced by the brain uh and the stress that's happening uh and uh it's got a fancy name takubo cardiopathy the takubo is uh if you look it up it's actually the octopus trap that they use in Japan and um because that's exactly the shape of the heart after it's had that kind of damage so anyway after takasu came out we kind of got start to realize that these brain heart connections are real uh and then people start to pay attention to uh stress in people's lives and how it can you know with you know things that we should have known cortisol levels kolam Mees that's adrenaline uh raise your blood pressure damage your blood vessels more Strokes more heart attacks and so um now there have to tell you that there have been some people particularly in the vegan world who knew this the whole time like Dean ornish you know and in fact Dean ornish had this down to a tea you know you stop smoking you exercise get yourself in a loving environment um good social connections and you change to a whole food plant-based diet and all of your you know cardiac stuff and all your risk factors dramatically improve um and you know he was always saying that that the mindfulness part of it and stress reduction were as important as everything else and and it's actually very true yeah but it's the same for good health that you know I think they say that 70% of IBS is typically stress induced so it seems like it's it's not surprising in that sense um but one one place I'd love to to talk to you we were just discussing there earlier was about um that the biggest killer of cardiologists is heart attacks yeah which sounds very ironic in a sense um but not surprising also when you look at the wider population at large still the number one killer is number one killer in the US but not in other countries and I wonder if you could talk about that cuz that seems or or is there a change in that over your career because you've been a cardiologist for 30 years or approximately at this stage yeah I started academic Cardiology if you include my first rotation at gradia this is my 45th yearing Cardiology so um yeah let's talk about the last part first uh you know sort of the world distribution of heart dises uh number one uh globally for a long time uh then a lot of the uh advances in treatment of heart disease uh have improved it to the point where the survival of patients with heart disease is pretty high so pretty much every Advanced or high income HIC High income country actually has uh heart disease Fallen to number two because we're so good at managing it detecting it you know scan people stress tests stent them bypass everything's working so why is there one high income country in the world that's the United States of America where heart disease is still the number one killer um and you can understand why outside of high-income countries it is the number one killer in all the other countries but only one high-income country and that's because our risk is so high and our habits and there's not enough folks paying attention to your podcasts and changing their diet and trying to get um uh healthier from um from the inside out and so we can do all the mopping up the floor with the most fancy mops but it's never going to be as good as turning off the faucet that's such a good one you said the risk there you said the risk is like how come the risk is higher in the US is that purely Dent to lifestyle based or is p purely lifestyle so if you if you have a country where um the things that people enjoy become very prominent and that's you know sitting watching television and uh as you know as a former professional tennis player I can tell you that uh pickle ball taking over tennis courts just greats on you because courts are just going away and then you realize wait a minute these are Americans getting out of their living room off of the couch and going and playing a sport that pretty much anyone can play as opposed to tennis you kind of have to be an athlete to play tennis but pickle ball everybody's doing it so I'm you know things like that uh can change this Dynamic that I've been talking about this risk uh and of course exercise whatever I say about exercise you multiply it by a back factor of I don't know s eight nine or 10 and that's nutrition and I'm sorry to report uh if you guys put my name in Google or you know the international Journal of disease reversal you'll see a recent article that we published on physician nutrition the title is uh what's on our plate uh and it's where we sort of made the uh observation with my research team that I know this going to sound strange but that people who were plant-based we all knew the people who were plant-based were having less problem with covid question that we were asking was if you're plant-based did you have less problem with covid vaccine that is less of the you know fever chills all the stuff that people can get for a day or two after a vaccine uh and our preliminary sort of working group it was absolutely true those who were eating animals would you know they take a day off of work or they'd be you know sore the you know the rest of us who were plant-based we got a sore deltoid muscle that's about it and everything else you felt perfectly fine so we thought we would pursue this and a bunch of people who were reliable um that is Physicians and knowledgeable and um my research uh assistant Michelle ikram had actually moved over um because of some program issues had moved over to lyola and I was at rush and so we did lyola University and Russ University in Chicago and we sent out the survey to Physicians we divided it you know uh the the typical dietary patterns out of 274 doctors there was one plant-based wow was that you and uh no I didn't take the survey because I was part of the of course yeah and so and uh that one person out of 274 the rest were eating things that have medical literature demonstrating very clearly that it's increasing their death rate that included you know fish ovol lacto vegetarian uh you know Pesco Polo vegetarian and then the vast majority were omnivores and it was so disturbing um that you know this is why the with the leading cause of death is that we as Physicians have learned how to treat heart disease and we haven't focused on on prevention at some point that has to change and that's what you know I'm sort dedicating the rest of my career to doing and you know because if we can capture Physicians we can capture uh Community groups capture people who are out in front uh have more people on social media haha thank you very much for doing this we we can actually change that Dynamic and get people to realize that they are what they eat and that's a a popular Netflix I don't know if brilliant yeah really with the twins yeah and then in terms of many many people can fall back with the Mantra that it's genetics you know oh my my family has it what percentage roughly does genetics account to in terms of heart disease or heart issues we never ever thought we'd become Health ambassadors as 21 year olds we were meat eating Point selling Burger munching jocks and lo and behold a year later age 22 we adopted a plant-based diet gave up alcohol started into yoga and swimmed in the sea and that's been 20 years now in terms of physical health we think it starts at your feet we've been wearing Vivo barefoot shoes for about seven years and I love them they're the only type of shoes I wear I feel more myself I feel I get more feedback from the environment my kids wear them um they got a huge different variety of ranges and they're the only shoe I would wear H Vivo offered you our wonderful listeners 15% discount when you use the code happy PA 15 at checkout and right now they're offering free access with every purchase to the ultimate resource for Natural Health which is a course curated showcasing our human potential with some of the best and most Progressive leaders in the health and wellness space check out the link in the show notes to find out more and Avail of your discount with the code happy pa5 checkout that's viob barefoot.com Happy PA 15 for 15% so obviously it's 100% because we're human or we're mamalian and I'm a very um wonderful plant-based journal editor I think I think there were only two of us in the world um I'm sure that there must be some more I just don't know them uh Will William Roberts he died uh after I think it's about 95 years old he ran the American Journal of Cardiology for almost 50 years and he used to always say that unless you have claws and fangs you are not supposed to eat animal products okay well actually checked up on Bill's uh uh uh assertion there and it turns out that if you have claws in fangs and you eat animal products your life expectancy isn't that long lions live about 25 years elephants can and elephants can live a 100 years uh and so mammals that eat animals don't do as well in fact if you you know want to create a um a model of heart disease all you have to do is you know take take uh cruy take AB rabbits put them in a cage and feed them animal products they develop heart disease so we have this data and yet people really don't want to change their habits and I I have to admit to you that when I struggle I don't usually talk about any brand thing of anything but uh artific so I won't say which brand I'll just say artificial intelligence right um when I uh once that article what's on our plate got published it's kind of hit me that how badly we were doing at saving ourselves uh and so I actually went to my nearby subscription for um artificial intelligence and I asked the question if changing to a plant-based diet can save the planet avoid animal cruelty reduce health care costs reduce chronic illness and reduce death rate why isn't everybody doing it and the answers it gave me actually were pretty good answers there were like uh affordability education um you know culture habit family and peer pressure and went on and on with all the the things that we face but be underlying all of that was the fact that my Preamble question is something that's not understood by most people and most Physicians they don't realize that we're spending $4 trillion on Health Care in the United States for illnesses that could be completely wiped out or at least mitigated by a whole food plant-based diet and so that's our job to get that information out there as much as we can so thanks for putting on a progam on the AI thing um I put into chat GPT I said what's the best diet to reverse heart disease and it's a whole food plant-based diet and it gave me a whole reasons why so it's like if AI who is non-biased and doesn't have food preferences said that the best diet to reverse heart disease was a plant-based diet well then you go well that's kind of you know this is a machine telling me this why why are cardiologists why is there only one out of 274 doctors not plant why aren't there more of them were are plant-based and I know in the UK there's a great group there's the you know there's the plant-based doctors group um which is amazing it's a really good we we met you at plb medical professionals yeah plant-based medical professionals and it's amazing we we met you at when you were speaking when you were over at Wimbledon there a number of years ago um and we heard you speaking it was wonderful it really really was and uh is there something similar in this the United States where there is groups of plantbased doctors yes yes there are groups and and I have to do a shout out to I just got back from the Australian Open uh where we put to got together with the doctors for nutrition over there and uh they I I actually uh gave a mini Symposium on you know what's on our plate and I said you know here's chat gpts 10 answers and what do you guys think and uh you know there was some a lot of thoughtful discussion and um then they wanted to do sort of a a breakfast download and we sort of brainstorming and it hit me that uh you're absolutely right you have you know you have the doctors in London uh you have uh many groups in the United States but one of the things that I hadn't seen us try before was reaching out to the other people that is we're all talking about nutrition but what about the animal rights people what about uh the plet sustainability people why don't we get meetings of all of us together and see if we can't leverage each other's strengths there should be you know a vegan person at every you know car uh you know methane gas polluting our syst there we should be interdigitating I think and together we would be stronger uh so they actually you know threw together that meeting um right before the women's finals they uh we had a little uh online Symposium that every body was able to get on and it's about 10 organizations and it could they could do more but you could do it in Ireland we could do it in the United States I'm hoping that everybody takes it up and sort of band together because every time um so I actually uh I had my in March I had my 20th vegan anniversary from you know 2003 where I had found out that my cholesterol was elevated sought what to do it about it and went wholefully plant-based at that point um and there is a website that tell you your impact 20 years of plant-based nutrition it was massive numbers I don't remember what they are but the amount of it wasn't just that animal lives but the amount of water that I had saved the planet and the amount of of uh of air quality improvement uh I'm hoping that everyone realizes it and I it seems to me that the answer is social media yeah it's it's a it's such like it's such a big question there because it's like we've been the same we've been plant-based for 20 years and our whole business the happy pair has been a bit empowering people and we use the metaphor we use the Expression eat more veg because we find it's a good Gateway into it rather than thou shalt become vegan we find it to track people in Via really tasty food and that's that's our business you know we've got cookbooks and recipes and cafes and farms and food products and they're all to get people to eat more veg because just like you we realize that it's you know you've dedicated your life the last since 2003 to kind of to preventing heart disease rather than actually just you know um operating on it and putting stance in or whatnot whereas you know it's it's it's frustrating in one sense but um I guess it is just it is the way it is it it really is and and you're pointing out how uh difficult it is um to get the two sides to work together that is we have a bunch of um plant-based doctors who have told people not to do stance and bypasses and uh to avoid Statin which is is probably our number one drug in in uh in cardiology and I a joke not a joke that statens are have ruined the uh Medicare system in the United States why because people aren't dead kept so many people alive yeah exactly and so you know what does is it helps reduce one's cholesterol or keeps it down lower so that there's less LOLOL but it also reduces inflammation David Jenkins actually showed that whole food plant-based diet I'm throwing that in there Whole Food plant-based diet and EST Statin were did both the same thing dropping LDL cholesterol and dropping C-reactive protein that is the in the risk outside of cholesterol is inflammation and that c reactive protein will tell you how much risk you're at your inflammatory risk you have and statins and a plant-based diet lower both why wouldn't you put them together but instead I have a bunch of doctors eating bad stuff not focusing on diet giving statins and then I have the plant-based doctor saying don't take statins there you know if a person doesn't have disease and doesn't have rist of course they don't need a Statin but if you uh in all of our guidelines American College of Cardiology American Heart associate guidelines say lifestyle first for prevention and then you use statins if it's not working for whatever reason and that's the part to answer your question that's the part how much of it's genetic it's 100% because we're all human uh we're all mammals and uh heart disease will be induced if we eat those things but what you're really asking me is how much is unavoidable and you know uh the UK has done a better job than the United States everybody says that familial hyper lipidemia which is the one that we are are fear where there's a handful of genes that will code for extremely high LDL cholesterol uh triglycerides on occasion but LDL cholesterol and uh I don't know if you're familiar with the Cascade testing that they do in the UK it's actually highly successful last time I was there Scotland was the one that was kind of dragging their feet but every pediatrician is supposed to uh during infancy during those well baby visits supped to check the cholesterol wow and finding those ele with elevated cholesterol in infancy or or early childhood they can actually go back and find the parents who were in their 20s and 30s sometimes 40s and you can find the grandparents and you can retro uh generationally find every single person in the UK who has that Gene wow so that's a a program that we really need in the United States and I guess because it's somewhere between one and uh 250 uh to 1 in 500 that have familial hyper lipidemia and you know if you have one of the genes you get premature heart disease and in your 40s or 50s if you have two of the genes you're getting it in your 20s or 30s and so uh there is a genetic component that can lead to early heart disease regardless of what you do with diet not completely regardless but uh because even the people with familial hyper lipidemia that FH Gene can improve with diet but recognizing that they have it that's the most important thing and and you know as close as we come to the United States as the American Academy of pediatrist asking people at ad to do a cholesterol test at adolescence we're not there where where the UK is yet wow yeah because I guess like the fact that uh heart disease builds over our lifesty starting with say as you said those pediatric TR tests where they could show that young kids were born with with with high cholesterol levels like it was only through the Vietnam War and the Korean War when they showed with you know dead veterans that they young 20-year olds had the buildup of plaque and heart disease in their arteries as 20-y olds whereas most of us when we think of heart disease we think oh well it's 50 it's 60 it's 70 year olds that's when heart disease happens but really it builds over a lifestyle over a lifetime um because of one's habits and one's health habits and I know yourself as a tennis player like if you play lots of tennis there's supposedly a risk you know you tennis players on average live something like five years longer because the correlation between moving your body and typically being slim and adopting healthy habits typically lives that you live longer and less likely to die from heart disease and I wonder if you could talk about the lifestyle component which is that's a massive question in terms of heart disease but for everyone listening who's going okay well heart disease like it's it's something which I care about like what would be your kind of top tips for anyone in terms of heart disease and reducing the risk or reversing it so so you said so many things that I need to respond to first of all British medical journal I got a short sh short shrift tennis or ret Sports British medical journal a few years ago said it was a 17-year life expectancy difference now as 17 years years tennis for those who play tennis those who don't for tennis and plant-based diet is only supposed to be 15 but hopefully they're additive okay and so there you go now interesting part about that is that I you know I'm looking at the the data carefully I don't see how there not confounded that is uh just like the data that says kids raised vegan have a 16o higher IQ well it's probably because they have smarter parents uh for for tennis players uh to play your entire life and not get frustrated and give up or put it on the back burner you have to be a good player you have to enjoy it you have to have more endorphins than frustration from it and to do that you have to be a strategic thinker you actually have to have decent economics uh there so there's so many other factors but I think you did point out the the important one that you know to place successfully you have to be in a fit and you have to train I can't I don't Train by playing tennis I train for playing tennis uh so which is a higher burden if if you want to be successful so this really complicated but then you also mention um switching quickly you mentioned uh early plaque and the Mantra that we were all supposed to be adopting which I I was really hoping that everyone in the world would understand this about heart disease is lifelong exposure to LDL cholesterol that is what is the area under the the curve how high is it and how long have you had it and so that's really what you're talking about and uh yes those uh uh unfortunate War casualty is showing 18year olds with plaque has now been extended in the United States to three-year-olds and eight-year-olds type 2 diabetes uh that was soall when I was in school that was adult onset diabetes they had to change the name uh because uh kids are getting it and that's be and and then change the name of the disease it's not just diabetes it's diabesity uh because of the Obesity epidemic and so it's all about nutrition and I'm hoping that uh we will go forward so so what do I recommend for everybody um Whole Food plant-based diet and um the the hardest part uh is I could sort of go tangential just the hair uh is making sure that it's a healthy diet uh I'm actually still in the middle of uh the analysis I think we're shutting down the database uh all over the world every place that I've gone whether it's tennis or lecturing um I use one of those apps that tell me where their plant-based restaurants near my phone I love to name I I wasn't I don't say friend well that's a free resource it's a great resource it is a good one indeed indeed um and so um as it turns out um I do this wherever I go and um I try my best and I'm sure you guys are are into this uh to evaluate the the healthiness of the food because just because it's plant-based uh doesn't mean it's good and I know so many of my planted sustainabilities and my animal rights colleagues they really like the vegan ice cream and the vegan beignet and the re vegan red cup red velvet cupcakes and I say you know those are really good for the planet because refined grains increase mortality so it's good for the planet because it gets rid of humans which ultimately needs more kind of fossil fuels at some stage you know so what so so getting uh so so far the preim preliminary analysis uh of our data it's about over 360 restaurants about half are omnivore restaurants that claim to have vegan veget Arian options and the other half are vegan vegetarian restaurants and the vegan vegetarian restaurants do offer a slightly healthier um more numerous healthier uh Entre but they're all replete with white rice uh white flour and the refined grains according to the pure trial and Saleem Yousef has been doing these trials all over the all over the world and uh loads of Publications and one of his Publications said that saturated fat was better than carbohydrates well why is that Sim I'm telling you why it's because you included refined grains refined grains are set up a fuel of fire they raise your LDL cholesterol they may be worse than eating animals it's certainly worse than eating saturated fat coming from animals and so uh Saleem took me seriously when and you'll see another publication from his pure trial group saying whoa It's refined grain whole grains are good refined grains not good wow hard to get that message out I guess haven't worked in food system ourselves we just see the prevalence and how disconnected we all are there was a time when you know you knew where your potatoes came from you knew you knew the grower we were very connect we were much more agrarian focused and as Society has become increasingly more complex our foods are coming from further and further and further away and you know there's just this huge disconnect and as a result we don't know our food and I was also going to add to that there's like as like we've had a Cafe restaurant for 20 years and it's the constant balance between health and uh taste and you're constantly finding the right balance because if you tip off to healthy your customers who are omnivores who are used to the standard diet don't aren't attracted into it so you have to find this balance between as healthy as you can while also tasting really good and on the menu you have to kind of have a smattering of you know healthy really healthy middle healthy and entry into the you know movement or whatnot so it's it it yeah you say that very well and I you know this was not going to be I wasn't going to publish it um because I thought it was too sensitive but uh I did notice that you know when I I used to call him uh you know my uh vegan runs you know trying to preserve my uh this is before I got the hip replacement that tennis injury um that uh Andy Murray ended up with once when he got it I said oh and he comes back then I said I'm I'm getting that surgery and so so I'm playing Full Tilt as if nothing ever happened but before that I would have to limit my runs to about three miles so uh I would go from the hotel where you know we're you know I'm in Jakarta or or Panama City anything within 1.5 miles so I could run there get the food and then come back and it let be less than three miles um those restaurants when I started listing them because I had lists of every place I had gone the number of plant-based restaurants that closed was tremendously high and so I know what you're saying that is if you are trying to feed people completely uh healthy healthily and the people are not interested in being completely healthy it's hard to do that as a business so kudos to you for doing this for 20 years and keeping this healthy as you can that easy yeah yeah but but I guess it's like that's that's the challenge like it really is because you're you're you're up it almost feels like you're we're Up Against the Machine because you know we produce a lot of products we have 80 products like pesos and granolas and you know snack bars which are available in supermarkets in Ireland and it's the challenge cuz you're competing with a lot of Cheaper foods which are made of refined flour refined sugar refined oils in various different proportions which are very long shelf lives and they kind of tend to be quite addictive and they release dopamine in the brain but they're not good for People's Health so it's it's it's almost like it' be better if you didn't know this stuff because then you could just your business could is more likely to be you know a Smash Hit but once you know the ethics it's hard and you know the kind of consequences if we're producing food that's not healthy we're not ultimately helping people at large and as a business you want to try to do it all to run a business that's profitable that's good for the planet that's good for People's Health and it's a nice place to work and that's a challenge in today's um field of capitalism which is um not really set up for that well I'm glad you're taking on that challenge and uh uh hoping that you'll continue to be successful because it it really is a correlation between uh how unhealthy you are and how much money you can make yeah yeah true one thing I want to go straight into in terms of Cardiology Kim um is cholesterol um many people are there can be misguided re Awareness on cholesterol like cholesterol is a massive predicator once one is elevated cholesterol they're increasing the risk of cardio cardiovascular disease significantly and typically it's LDL isn't it HDL is the deemed the healthier one or less important nowadays that was that was before canart and the Copenhagen trials showed that we had it wrong for 60 years IH HDL increases death rate and um and heart attacks and to go back and tell all the people who I had told oh you're protected because you have an HDL of 100 you got to let them know that's that's just not true anymore it never was true so HDL is a U-shaped curve if it's really low we were right about that that's bad for you um but two more points if it's really high that's bad just as bad for you and the really important one after tetrab anacetrapib dalcetrapib nasin um fibrates I just go on and on with drugs where we tried to increase HDL and they either did no good or a slight increase in death rate and we didn't catch on and so I I hope everyone's heard it by now because the Copenhagen and canart trials came out you know like three years ago um that HDL is not really good for you so what do you do about HDL um if it's really low if you're doing saturated fat and no exercise you know you probably ought to stop doing those things okay because sometimes it's a marker for those that kind of thing but uh HDL itself we probably shouldn't spend a lot of time talking about it LDL on the other hand you have these LDL deniers out there and they's looking at this massive amount of data that says that they're wrong so um uh LDL is really important and you can get plaque to go away by removing LDL by any means necessary we're talking hook you up to you know intravenously and do a plasmapheresis which is a a treatment that you could do for um uh the people with familial hyperlipidemia that I was talking about before yeah uh but stattin injectables the this pcsk9 molecule it it an observation many years ago that there some people have an LDL of seven or 10 uh when you know normal the normal people are running around about 90 or 100 um and that you know we used to think that if your had LDL was less than 25 your brain wouldn't work well it turns out that's not true um you know babies have an LDL of 10 you know New Zealand white rabbits have an LDL of 10 people grow fine without a lot of extra cholesterol in their bloodstream but it turns out that um the they that low cholest ol can actually pull plaque out of your arteries and so that pcsk9 molecule you find some people with an LDL of seven or 10 or 14 because that one molecule is not working and so what they now try to do is simulate that and we have several medications that are injectable that can stop that molecule from working and they dramatically lower LDL cholesterol uh what do that molecule do by the way don't nobody wants to do lipid lipidology 101 on a podcast but there is a molecule called pcsk9 that tells your LDL receptors to quit and recycles them and if you don't have that molecule the LDL receptors just keep taking the the LDL out of the bloodstream and that's a a big advantage to those people genetically who have who are mutants uh and anyone who takes one of these drugs that can stop that little molecule from working um so we and but what we've learned over the time is that uh the pcsk9 Inhibitors have data the statins two of them only two of them uh the strongest ones uh Ruba Statin and a torbo Statin the esselon diet Whole Food plant-based diet no oil and the ornish diet uh whole food plant-based diet he had uh from his first trials he had some low-fat Dairy but that's gone now all five of those will actually reduce plaque because they get the LDL down so low and so people saying that LDL is not caused causing heart disease I mean obviously getting plaque to go away is one thing but as plaque goes down as LDL goes down events go down so they really are related and I'm hoping that everyone will recognize how important that is but it's not the only thing the other candidates are um tmao this is Cleveland Clinic talking the trimethylamine in oxide which dramatically goes down when you stop eating red meat animal protein is dangerous but different animal proteins are are different eggs would be you know pretty decent animal protein if it was didn't have that yellow middle which was so full of cholesterol okay but red meat um giving you you know creatine B beta bosole choline and choline turns out those fancy sounding chemicals get into your GI tract and what's in your GI tract when you're eating red meat people don't realize that when they're eating red meat that they're eating actual decaying flesh hard to imagine that you're actually eating the decaying carcass and that that's decaying because they're are bacteria in it that are making the meat Decay and then they populate your gut and so vegans have a completely that uh very few things that are not affected and one of the ways it affects it is making this tmao or trimethylamine which then your liver converts to Tri to tmao and you know Cleveland Clinic might not be right that that causes everything but it's sure at least as a marker for all kinds of bad stuff and uh people end up with less the less of that you have in your bloodstream the less heart attack stroke death diabetes and renal failure it wasn't for those five things you could have all the TMA you you want um and then uh have to shout out to Harbert uh with Paul riter talking about inflammatory risk and talked about uh C reactive protein because it is dramatically improved by uh a whole food plant-based diet as I mentioned um but people don't realize it if you just treat your LDL and you leave your inflammatory risk still there people don't do well and the heart attack rate goes up by more than double if you lower the LDL but the inflammatory risk is still there so um so it's not all LDL and people who say you know that we're wrong about LDL being the culprit uh the literature does not agree with that but they are making a point that there are other things and I was would point to at least those two so out of you know what do we do the one thing there's only one thing that lowers tmao LDL and C reative protein and that's a whole food plant-based diet wow so so really just just to recap what you said there is HDL now it's a risk factor as same as LDL you know um C reactor protein is inflammation and then you talked about tmao and those are all some of the major kind of um risk factors for heart disease and a whole food plant-based oid is number one in our Arsenal in terms of reversing them is that the case reversing them preventing it absolutely wow and a Healy plant by St in our experience can be cheaper than a standard diet in that you're kind of eating peasant food really you know you're eating vegetables and beans and legumes and whole grains and it's it's a that's that's the reality rather than it's just a habit it's just that our society is not set up for and people have to learn to cook which almost seems like like it's a an old fashioned thing to do an old fashioned thing to do to cook oh my God we can reheat stuff and we can cook basic simple things but to arm people with the capacity to cook healthy heal Foods you've got it like it starts in the kitchen ready so I wonder like you've been at this for 45 years you've been a cardiologist for 45 years you've been plant-based for 23 years like what do you see is how do we how do we change this like you're coming towards the you know the the later years in your career and you must be going where are the big levers like where like if if you in cardiology you know you you're at the top of your field within it and you see there's cardiologists there isn't that many cardiologists are plant-based and you've got this expression which is all over the Internet there's two types of cardiologists there's those who are vegan and there's those who haven't read the literature yet so like where do you see is the big massive levers in terms of trying to make people move more in this direction well I'd like to say that you know there's going to be some cataclysmic event it probably would be the planet uh and uh having studies I believe that medical literature can save lives and you know if you look at the history uh of uh you know epidemics and I actually got into this because of healthc care disparities looking at uh African-Americans in the United States having so much more heart disease than the than other populations uh and I started looking at other times when there were healthc Care disparities and guess what it turns out that uh in the uh 18th century 17th hundreds there was smallpox and smallpox was so much worse in the black population uh that it was uh in the whites but everybody was dying it's just that it was worse and it turns out that there was an African slave in Boston uh who when he was a kid he had seen a small uh pots outbreak and saw that they uh would take some of the pules and inject them into people who hadn't gotten yet sick yet and a few of those would get sick and die but most of them became completely immune to the disease there so vaccination inoculation and it took many many years for that to take over once he started that but once he did small pox was essentially eliminated and uh it you know waxing and waning until we had really good vaccines uh it happened again with a lot of black sing in Panama and you know the can spend a lot of time talking about it but very quickly the French were really trying to connect you know Chinese Goods to Europe without having to go around South America and that's the Panama Canal and they you know scoped out exactly where it should be done and how it should be done and started Excavating and there's water and guess what a lot of uh ex this is 1890s a lot of uh uh Western Hemisphere ex-slaves came to try to you know feed their families and the French were paying well it everything was going good Until That Dying started and the dying was because all that standing water led to um mosquitoes and They Carried yellow fever and so uh when so the French gave up by the way um meanwhile 1895 the United States was fighting a war with Spain where more soldiers died from yellow fever than they did from shooting each other and so the United States Army figured this thing out and that's why we went back 10 years later and did the Panama Canal um without people dying they figured out Mosquito Abatement so anyway this goes on and on through history loads of healthc care disparities it doesn't have to be black white it could be rich poor loads of healthcare disparities how do you fix it you come up with a solution you promate that solution and you make sure that it gets applied so now we have heart disease that we know exactly how it happens we know how to treat it to say thank you having a podcast and talking about this and hopefully one person will send it to the next and folks will start to understand that they're in control and you know when I said at at uh when I took over as president of the American College of Cardiology I'm giving my introduction spe and I was very honest I said you know we're in a specialty that should be eliminated the next couple generations and I'm hoping that it that it's not going to take you know 40 50 years uh from from the time I said that in 2015 I'm hoping that it's going to happen sooner because of things like artificial intelligence you're absolutely right I mean why did uh chat GPT since you Ed the term why did it come up with that answer because it's a large language model that actually read all the literature all of a sudden and answered the question and there is no question and anyone who so what what's basically happening is that statement that was so controversial those there are those who read the data and haven't figured out how to apply it to themselves and their patients so I if I had to make that statement again I would say there's a you know we've got to leave room for people who are just struggling uh to make that change but you know hopefully that'll happen and hopefully it won't take 50 years yeah amazing that you can actually hope that your field will one day become redundant due to people becoming healthier and literally that or well hopefully hopefully it doesn't become redundant because we're all dead no you know because that seems like at the moment that seems like more of a probability that we become extinct you know than we you know just at the moment but maybe we're at the halfway point of the move and we haven't reached the climax where we're all going to save the world and you know maybe become more conscious of our food choices and have the impact our own health and the planet and theal and you know I know this not probably the show to talk about it but uh I have become more sensitive to you know animal rights issues and you know trying to uh you know take be kinder to sensient beings and you know growing them in places that uh um produce a lot of um you know greenhouse gases that can't be the solution and you know we we do have to take care of uh things other than just human health but if if we could partner with everybody to try to get uh uh the the planet and the Animals taken care of then uh you know we I'm looking forward to Cardiology in involuting uh there's still be some Cardiology there's people are born with rhythm disturbances uh but I would I would think it's probably somewhere around five or 10% of what we do now um the rest be gone amazing and one thing I was thinking of that in terms of like you've got a large faculty at Rush University how have you like do you try to you know Inspire some of that faculty to become more plant-based or the more plant curious cardiologists on your faculty or how does that or is there a lot of opposition going oh Kim and his veg Kim because I I remember you saying when you first became the president of the American College of Cardiology you were the American president and you know it was the first time it was going to be a black president what a big deal but you were labeled as the first vegan card you know head of the American card center for Cardiology rather than the black on so it was because that was more of a deal to be vegan than black indeed uh but and you're absolutely right and when I was at rush so I've been gone from rush for almost two years now okay didn't know that yeah I'm actually U moved from Cardiology to a chair of medicine wow and so uh I have a wonderful Cardiology division it's you know it's uh uh very productive very prevention minded which is tremendous uh and I think the I I have more plant-based Physicians here in University of Louisville than I did at rush and you know Rush was wonderful um high quality clinical care for anybody who's in that area um prevention was not as big on the radar as clinical quality and that's just that's not a criticism that's what rush is good at and so you know you'd have people at fancy other universities but if their parent got sick they took him to rush okay so that's that's what it's for um but that's that's management and um you know you know making sure that people are get the best outcome that they can that's what that place was for uh as opposed to Louisville the University of Louisville really was affected I think becoming from the outside um Everybody heard the name George Floyd and most heard Brianna Taylor there it's tragic things that happened you know early on during Co well Brianna Taylor was a University of Louisville um nursing assistant and that um you know uh polic related tragedy really galvanized uh the community but also the university and the president at the time president Bund deali actually went public saying they wanted to be the anti-racist university for the uh Community uh for the country um and so here I come a couple years later when they're asking for a new chair and I you know didn't have all that much design I loved being a chief of Cardiology but in talking to them it became clear that what I wanted to do was Health Equity as I talked a lot about that from smallpox to polio to heart disease um and prevention and they were really interested in that because they thought that that is anti-racist thing to do is to try to relieve the burden of disease in the community that we have and and I have to tell you that Louisville is a a bit different than Chicago and Detroit there's poverty and uh and on one side of the city more than the other it's less racial than it is economic so we're actually are Health Equity screenings PE uh screening for heart disease risk factors all of that the stuff that we do down here early detection get people in uh get people to help us pay for their care uh get the state to help us which they really do um it's a it's a very different environment and yes uh we have a a chapter of walk with the doc uh where people can come and just do exercise and get advice just walking in a park and and yes we do uh screenings for everywhere if you have a June celebration with 2,000 people in a park we're going to be there with our booths to check their cholesterol and their blood pressure and tell them what their 10-year risk is from the little calculator uh so a lot more uh community activities and a lot more interest in prevention than any place I've been in the past so uh good out shout out to you know people know about Louisville Cardinals because of like basketball and and now football no this is really a place where there's a caring for the community uh that's unmatched around the country that's very very encouraging to hear really really is and okay final question is just in terms of that you said there's a bigger risk factor in terms of you know black Americans versus white Americans in terms of heart disease and is that like obviously there is there's inequity thing in terms of um money and finances and resources and all this type of thing is there a genetic predisposition or is it just purely Dent to Lifestyle and EC or access to resources or what is your understanding of that a lot of understanding of it and the only genetic thing you could argue and people have argued that there's more hypertension in the black community uh because of salt sensitivity being uh us all being descendants of people who were brought here in the slave boats with very little access to water and those who were who did not dehydrate and die became our gene pool that's been argued back and forth but uh are African-Americans seem to be more salt sensitive You could argue that we are okay fine uh but nobody white or black or any or Asian should be doing a lot of sodium okay and so uh if you leave that little genetic thing out is a lot of habit and culture there's a wonderful cardiologist African-American um Columbus batist he's over at Kaiser I think he's running the cardiovascular service line you've probably heard of him and heard of his exactly he's got a show called the slave food so what what that's about is that you know it sounds terrible but the fact of the matter is U the African-American slaves would subsist on whatever was being thrown out so organ meets things that the people in the big house did not actually want to eat and so the going Whole Hog meant that you would eat all different parts of the pig and they became sort of African-American you know Delights and Specialties in figuring out how to cook you know chins which is basically you know the the small bow uh as an example you know fat back and and neckbones and the like and so this was called out Years Ago by University of Alabama Birmingham in the regards study showing that all of the risk and the mortality of the American diet is whole out is magnified by the African-American or soul food um way of eating that's more organ Meats uh more sugar sweeten beverages yams are great candied yams where you put a bunch of sugar in it not so great and so we've we have had data for quite a while that our risk has to do with our diet and when African-Americans do a whole food plant-based diet that risk is lifted and that's what we're hoping to do but it's not just a you know and I'm going to say it's it's not just heart disease and it's not just African-American uh if you look now that I'm in Kentucky and a little bit broader knowledge Eastern Kentucky the so-called uh Appalachia we all pronounced it wrong calling it Appalachia those uh uh Appalachian or Appalachians whites have higher degrees of heart disease than blacks do and it's the same dietary patterns and the same kind of uh lack of Health Care La access and uh lack of prevention and so I what I've learned by moving out of the southside of Chicago and west side of Chicago and inner city Detroit what I've learned is that a lot of this is what you were saying it's economic it's not just racial it's not genetic it's economic uh and we need to do better as a country in making sure that people who are underserved are you know distinguishing underserved and undeserved okay is something that we don't do well enough okay and if we get um our screening programs and detect uh who's got coronary heart disease and get them in and get them managed and get their lifestyle changed we can really make a difference um you know I would say that uh the last comment that when I I I said it's not just blacks and it's not just uh heart disease one of the biggest issues for the heart is when the kidneys go bad so I've had to become a kind of a cardio nephologist and the rec nition is uh is just daunting that African-Americans or 12% of the population with 35% of the dialysis patients and if anyone would go to their I don't knew brand name so any go to their search engine and put in red meat dialysis you will see this massive literature come up saying that all of the chronic kidney disease and progression to inst stage renal disease that needs dialysis is due to animal protein and asking everyone who had to is treating people who have chronic kidney disease when it's stage two before it gets to stage five to put them on a plant-based diet and the number of nephrologists outside of University of Louisville and University of San Diego or or California San Diego very few people very few kidney doctors are paying attention to the whole food plant-based solution for their patients uh so we need we need a lot more uh of the data getting out to people it it's not just cardiologists uh who are you know vegan or not reading the data it's now nephology it's neurology it's a massive amount of Medical Specialties there are very few diseases you can look up and say I okay I've got this disease what happens with a vegan diet and everything from lupus to anxiety and depression all of them have a literature for Whole Food plant-based diet making it better it sounds like we need in in the medical team we need a lot more people who can support people in making these shifts because it's it's a whole lifestyle and behavioral change things change societal change it needs to be like government leads it needs to be supported it needs to be food systems like certain companies are giv are tax because they're selling unhealthy Foods certain ones that are like it's it's a full system change if if we're going to celebrate human health as opposed to profit you got me there U so I would tell you that uh um the current uh administrator in the White House put it together a uh a nutrition health and hunger conference uh September of 2022 first time in over 50 years Richard Nixon had done it u in the late 60s and the fact the matter is that um a lot of us were asked to give recommendations and I was making those kind of recommendations and to hear uh the president get up and say most of the things that I was saying uh along with recommendations of a lot of other people was was really great the question is can you really do it so some of those things the one that I was we published on uh uh if you Google my name and the the article title is marketing mortality showing television commercials with unhealthy food particularly to children and to minorities because their poorer population tends to watch more television than the people who were making a lot of money working it turns out that uh the unhealthiness of the food is actually you know changing the buying habits and the eating habits of the population so why not change that we did it for cigarettes uh you can't have cigarette advertisement on television um but that was the one that no one touched but all the rest of them like uh we have a uh food uh program for the poor called the snap uh and increasing the amount of healthy food that you can buy with SNAP privileges that's great how about um labeling red yellow and green in the grocery store that is if processed meat is a World Health Organization group one carcinogen there ought to be a label on that saying this is red if you want to eat it you can but you probably should be doing this once or twice a year uh and then there's yellow stuff which is got maybe it's not optimal but it's not immediately harmful and then you've got green because this is healthy this will actually make your diseases get better and Etc that's been tried in a few countries uh never in UK or Ireland uh and not in the United States that I've seen um I'm hoping uh that that one actually gets executed even if it's just a pilot program because when it was done in Austria and done in France it changed behavior and we could make people healthy just by labeling the food the FDA wants to label the fluid better uh they're getting a lot of push back um but talking to Rob kff about this he wants to flip the uh sodium content saturated fat cholesterol content to the front instead of being on the back um and that would have some uh a big help I I I was amazed even in terms of label reading because label reading is such an important part of this and in the in Europe it's it's a bit easier to read labels but in the US it's very confusing in terms of pack size and nutritional data per pack size and it's five servings in the pack like it was just it wasn't set up for the consumer to understand is this a healthy product or not it was set up to kind of almost be confusing right yeah yeah it's yeah if and and the more unhealthy you are uh the more sodium you have you want to make that portion size really small knowing that people are going to eat the whole bag but but uh if you make the portion size small then it looks reasonable and I guess that's marketing but that's you know the the the healthfulness of marketing is something that's sorely lacking yeah yeah okay we've covered it all here today we really have you are as well as being a huge inspiration it's been absolutely G to talk to you're a you have a lovely presence about you it was really nice to to to I felt like I was really hanging out with you it was lovely I I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation well I appreciate you're having me and hopefully you'll continue doing what you're doing and you know get the larger following and get everyone to uh really uh change and just think through the connection between nutrition and health uh we're all going to be better off yeah you're wonderful Kim I look forward to seeing you again at some stage when you're over at some tennis event okay absolutely hoping to uh haven't haven't made any Wimbledon plans yet but uh definitely uh uh looking forward to the next event brilliant well thanks M for your time Kim you're wonderful keep flying the flag all right absolutely have a great day bye bye all the US cheers all right bye bye well we have you once a week we Rite a newsletter it's called happier it's got simple tried and tested practices to make your life better we include recipes and practices that you can apply on a daily basis to make your life happier we've had lots 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Channel: The Happy Pear Podcast

Views: 1,090

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Id: PuM3YXYzaJQ

Length: 64min 40sec (3880 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024