Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. - How to build an endothelial fortress and much more

when my father started his seminal research back in 1984 38 years ago incredible he had zero zero idea how important his research would become and how he would become one of the leading authorities on how to fight heart disease with your fork and if you haven't read his book prevent and reverse heart disease by dr caldwell b esselstyn jr i highly recommend it essie which is the nickname that he was given as a young adult and as many of us like to call him is a real taskmaster when it comes to counseling his patients and what goes into their mouth and as he says you should never sit down to a meal or go out to eat with the purpose of injuring your endothelium and your endothelial cells and he means it well essie is and has been a huge inspiration for our plant strong food line because we know how challenging it can be to always be prepared with a 100 whole food plant-based oil-free set of lunches and dinners and that's why our ready-to-eat heat and eat chilis and stews for example are the absolute perfect pantry staple to guarantee that you're never more than 90 seconds away from a delicious and nourishing meal at plantstrong we strive to meet and exceed my father's standards every day because his groundbreaking research is what started all of this and for some their life depends on following this lifestyle to fight back against heart disease stroke type 2 diabetes and the constellation of chronic western diseases that are afoot in this country and we take that responsibility very very seriously you can learn more about all of this at plantstrongfoods.com the size of revolution and health that we you see is really not going to come about from a drug or a pill or a stent or bypass surgery but the seismic revolution and health that will come about will be when we in the profession have the will and the grit and the determination to share with the public what is the lifestyle and most specifically what is the nutritional literacy that will empower them to absolutely annihilate chronic illness i'm rob esselstyn and welcome to the plan strong podcast the mission at plantstrom is to further the advancement of all things within the plant-based movement we advocate for the scientifically proven benefits of plant-based living and envision a world that universally understands promotes and prescribes plants as a solution to empowering your health enhancing your performance restoring the environment and becoming better guardians to the animals we share this planet with we welcome you wherever you are on your plan strong journey and i hope that you enjoy the show hello my plan strong pals my name is rick esselstyn i am the host of the plan strong podcast and we have a very special episode that we're going to be teeing up for you today in honor of father's day i am proud to welcome my father dr caldwell b esselstyn jr to answer your questions and boy howdy diddy we talk cholesterol the good and the bad we talk exercise sodium atrial fibrillation the best diagnostic tests and of course all about building an endothelium fortress so all of you understand how you can become heart attack proof the privilege to sit down with my father is not for one second lost on me and believe me when i say that the best father's day gift that i can have is sharing his knowledge with all of you so let's get right into it my q a with essie with a few special appearances from my mother ann hey we're live it's show time hey i am back in cleveland i'm doing an event in pittsburgh and so i thought i'd take a little detour and spend the night in cleveland to be with anna and essie for a night and i also thought this would be a great opportunity to get this guy on the planet strong podcast it's been a while and a lot of you have written in some questions that you'd love for him to answer and so this is the perfect time before you before we hit it off though and say hello i have to say hi to everybody you're so lucky to have what you're gonna get all right um and and this is really a tribute to father's day um and what better way of showing my appreciation to this man than by sharing him with all of you so let's hit it off okay yeah let's do it all right we got a couple here so this first this is from deborah's world change thank you for the question i am whole food plant-based and i've been vegan for 11 years but i have a 250 um 250 cholesterol level i was 285 before quitting oil my weight is fine and blood pressure always is very low and i work out daily doc wants me on statins help me dr esselstyn well it's interesting when you look sort of from a global perspective you ask yourself about those countries where cardiovascular disease is virtually non-existent and you say for instance how many statins do they take in rural china some of central africa the papal highlands in new guinea the taro himara indians in northern mexico no heart disease no statins so the key here i think actually takes us to a a very interesting problem that many people experience that is to say they find that their cholesterol no matter what they do it remains say elevated maybe it's going to be 190 200 for example if i have a thousand patients who perfectly follow our program there might be some with a cholesterol of 102 140 160 180 200 220. now does that mean that all those people who have a cholesterol of 200 or 220 are going to perish from heart disease no because if you are eating a hundred percent without any injury to your endothelial cells you have more or less built an endothelial fortress so even if you have a few extra molecules of cholesterol coursing through your stream bloodstream if you know that your inflammatory tests your tests of blood vessel inflammation if those are all normal you're going to be fine so what are some of those tests well the the test of the inflammatory profile would be something like the f2 isoproteins oxidized ldl asymmetric dimethyl arginine and myeloperoxidase what about tmao is that something absolutely you can if your tmao is how to add that yes okay um well good let's let's move on okay all right so this next question is from karen brenda and her question is what is the best diagnostic test to check to see if your arteries are clogged you know there's been a sort of a toss-up between getting a calcium score or was getting a ct angiogram and i think that probably the weight of evidence is just tilting a little bit more toward a ct angiogram ct angiogram is really uh you just put a little contrast in a vein in your arm then they time it so that when that contrast is going through the arteries to your heart that's when they take the x-ray and then they can see whether you've got blockages or not it's really very very safe and very very effective for giving you some insight as to what the status of your coronary artery is uh is there a reason why you prefer that to to the um the calcium score i just think it shows more the the vessels directly whereas the calcium score just shows you bits and pieces of calcium that are in the various plaques that you've got well i think we might there may be a question later on too that addresses good yeah all right so um this is a question from stefan jedward and it's about sodium i'm interested in the role of high sodium a particular cardiovascular doctor popular on instagram is promoting 3 500 milligrams of salt with water before exercise he says sugar not salt is the enemy also promoting a grass meat-based whole foods diet the data is somewhat confusing or not seeming to be conclusive on salt so i would appreciate this being cleared up i understand that everyone must have salt and it's naturally occurring at least 1200 to 1500 milligrams per day would be my understanding salt is not the ultimate enemy super high salt and processed foods with no exercise would be dangerous we need sodium and electrolytes and the research is mixed regarding the exact safe amount with the other contributing factors so that's why i asked it's almost like he tried to answer his own question there so any any thoughts on salt and salt sure yeah i think uh there's pretty well as a consensus uh from very i think educated physicians that there are numerous studies clearly showing that excess salt will contribute to hypertension and so if somebody does have cardiovascular disease you want to try to keep your daily consumption somewhere close to 1500 milligrams right now there's the other question was about meat yeah graston yeah let me uh comment on that because there was a it was an interesting gentleman a physician by the name of george mann and george mann was a great uh disciple of the fact that if if you wanted to eat meat that was grass-fed you would not be getting into trouble with cardiovascular disease so to his credit he marshaled his resources and went to africa and they looked at the messiah now as you know the messiah herdsmen in africa and they thrive on milk and meat and blood and george man was able to get something like 50 autopsies of the messiah who had died and lo and behold they're loaded with cardiovascular disease so so much for the grass-fed approach right and um but there's so many other things in meat that are troublesome the heme iron the tmao the saturated fat i mean all those things are perilous yeah yeah the cholesterol the the the protein itself absolutely yeah it's it's a long list all right let's move on okay this question is from diana red curt these these are kind of funny names that people put together it's it's their their handles what are the heart health tests someone should have at 50 and are the tests the same if i've been eating a strict esselstyn style diet since 2017. so how many years have they had uh it's not been five years yeah i'm i think you have to be a little bit cautious about uh any test in that situation that carries any degree of of risk and so if you wanted to do something like a stress echo stress test all right there's no radiation there's no contrast to injure your blood vessels all right and yet if you have a let's say that this is a situation where i often find that when i first encounter somebody and they have had a stress test that they have failed we find that if they repeat that a year a year after being on the program it's either markedly improved or it's back to normal we like that we do [Laughter] that's exciting um all right this next question is from heidi cook heidi cook's plants um and we've heard a lot about the this lpa number right so our question is is there a way to improve one's lpa number what dietary changes would you suggest if you're already eating a whole food plant-based diet yeah and first because you back up and tell people what is lpa yeah well lp small a is a sort of a form of cholesterol and when you think about it it's estimated that roughly 20 of americans will have an elevated lp small a but that same figure applies to rural china central africa the papal highlands okinawa the tarahumara indians where is their epidemic of heart disease all right so if they're eating whole food plant-based diet and you're making what we call an endothelial fortress remember the endothelial cells are those that line the inside of the artery if you have an endothelial fortress from eating without any injury to it then even if you have an extra molecule of lp small a coursing through your bloodstream that should not be deleterious or injury so the lp little a is is that a form of ldl or or is this a form of cholesterol yeah okay okay um so again we want to have an endothelial fortress that's it okay a lot of people that jump in eating a whole food plant-based diet it seems like a lot of times they're cluster triglycerides go up a little bit so here's somebody celestia that wants to know the best way to lower triglycerides yeah you want to be careful of simple carbohydrates by that i mean for instance you want to avoid dried fruit all right you want to think about avoiding smoothies which is especially which may have you may have put in the smoothie an apple an orange a banana and when you do that you separate the fructose in the fruit from the fiber so now whereas ordinarily when you're just eating the fruit the absorption would be rather measured and slow and safe when you put it in the smoothie and now you separate the fructose from the fiber it's like a rocket going off in your stomach and suddenly there's an in potential injury to your liver and to your endothelium as well yeah so uh but you want to also avoid uh the processed foods which may have hidden sugar or white white flour those are the things you want to try to avoid it could be alcohol alcohol is notorious yeah i mean i will frequently hear a patient say dr esselstyn my triglycerides are uh having trouble and i said well do you ever drink alcohol i said yeah but i only have three glasses of wine a night just to relax well just one glass will do it yeah i know when i was doing my pilot study for the engine first book engine 2 diet in 2007 2008 i had my pilot study participants 62 of them and i had like three their triglycerides when they first started were fine and then as a celebration right the last night when they were done some had a glass of wine some had one or two beers and their triglycerides were like 200 250. and it was that one glass of wine incredible okay this is from zero waste middle and the question is my husband has a fibrillating heart and may get an ablation soon can food choices do anything for this he used to be very fit and athletic but now um his ability to do sports is much lower yeah fibrillation is probably atrial fibrillation is probably the most common uh arrhythmia that is uh seen the in the in the public and we want to talk a little bit about how that evolves remember that the in the right upper atrium there is a sa node the sino-auricular node that is the master spark plug when we all have a contraction of the heart the the essay knows fires then there's this beautiful rhythmic contraction of the upper chambers to the lower chambers of the heart now what happens in atrial fibrillation is that there seems to develop several of these smaller spark plugs that want to get in on the act so as soon as your sa node fires its usual normal contraction one of these smaller spark plugs will fire instead of getting a nice lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub it'll be it's a very inefficient uh contraction now there are several ways that this is managed one is they are do what they call a conversion where you may have be asleep for two or three seconds then they zap you and your rhythm your normal sinus rhythm will cover back but sometimes that doesn't last for more than half an hour or it may last a day or two so they also will use medication but that really just sort of slows the rate of your heartbeat and makes it and tries to make it more efficient so ablation is increasingly i think picking up speed as those physicians who do ablation become more and more skillful at doing this because there's no question that if you follow a thousand people who are fibrillating and a thousand who have normal sinus rhythm there'll be a higher mortality in those who have the irregular rhythm so i would really encourage those who've had a gutter who've had a stubborn atrial fibrillation that hasn't rapidly converted back to normal with medication or drugs to seriously think about an ablation in the hands of somebody who has a great expertise with this because it can be very effective in resolving the issue you know it's surprising i feel like i i swim with a bunch of masters people and have for 25 years and it seems like a handful of them are now having this atrial fibrillation yeah yeah the other group that seems to be uh developing it are believe it or not some very very fit people who are long-distance runners and it's uh there's a there's a higher incidence of atrial fibrillation that develops in those yeah yeah was there an article that was in the new york times about that it could have been it could have been all right this is from herring family travel my total cholesterol and ldl went up after eating plant-based for three years i follow the no oil no nuts coconut etc does this mean that i potentially have familial hypercholesterolemia and am i doomed to take a cholesterol lowering medication what is his cholesterol you know what this this was not a given that was not included it was not included so but let's say his cholesterol was 270. would you say there was familiar hypercholesterolemia was it his ldl that went up or was it his total cholesterol that went up right now it says both it says both they say both went up but yeah we don't know what exactly they were eating i mean we know that yeah it's it's so hard to really uh answer that with any degree of of insight unless you know you have some sort of a diet diary and you really can follow that along otherwise we're just really sort of treading water but do you in your opinion when you have a total cholesterol or and or an ldl that's above a certain number is that now an indication that you have familial hypercholesterolemia you know actually where you're going to have the breakover point for hypercholesterolemia is really not in my estimation that is not yet really clearly defined and i think the important thing is if somebody does want to clarify whether they're in a safe range or not and let's say they're doing the very best they can from a nutritional standpoint they're not eating anything with cholesterol they don't seem to be eating anything that would stimulate their hepatic production of cholesterol and yet they don't want to commit to getting on a board with a lot of statins and that perhaps the side effects that come with statins they have to know that they can get some reassurance about how their blood vessel is doing if they get a inflammatory panel we've talked about that a little earlier today the inflammatory panel will help them to define whether there's any inflammation and if all those inflammatory indices are normal then you don't have any inflammation in your blood vessels you should be feeling pretty confident yeah i know we've had some i mean i've i i have i have lived with somebody and actually was not many many people who since i started this back 34 years ago they've never been able to get their cholesterol much below 200. they're perfectly fine well i know that we had a family that came to one of our um emer immersion retreats and their before cholesterol the whole family was in the 300s one was in the fourth house oh that then that is right that is familial hyper collection but they can even help well and then they they were able to bring it down yeah into the high 200s right but which is you know but they can it's higher than most yeah but they should also you know check their inflammatory indices yeah um now keep in mind if any of these questions you don't you don't know we can pass on them and we'll just go to the next one this is from terry williams regarding vascular parkinsonism which i'm i'm not familiar with you no that that suggests that suggests that there must be some degree of vascular uh blood vessel problem in the head and i'm not quite sure about that but i can say this we have had multiple occasions where people for instance with a carotid artery going to their brain and even once the artery that is blocked is inside the brain we have seen remarkable examples of disease halting and reversal yeah so that even if that so if that is due to vascular parkinson's is due to disease of the blood vessels that this could certainly have a very positive effect yeah well that's good to know because they go on to say that you know i get the stroke effects that are that are current um and may not be reversed but wondering if it would stop the progression so it sounds like anything that's kind of going on in the brain like that there's there's there's a potential for a lot of help yes yeah um ann pottick wants to know will you talk dr esselstyn about the role of fats particularly avocados nuts and coconut parentheses which is full of saturated fat in a whole food plant-based no oil and minimal salt diet i ask because my total and ldl numbers go up if i don't keep my consumption of these items low which makes sense right yeah saturated fat will stimulate the liver and crank more cholesterol yeah but but she also would love to know if you could expand on it the role of avocados nuts and obviously we know coconut is 92 percent saturated right but what about avocados and nuts and why are you such a task master on that well i guess it's because i hate to see failure in my patients and i i guess when you compare the results that we've been able to achieve and when we compare them with other results i have i have nothing but great admiration and respect for anybody who's trying to be a physician who's committing to this but uh i find i think i find that our program is about as stringent as anybody's and uh so i guess the reason that we succeed perhaps where others fail is that nobody else is as mean as i am and so this gets back to the question you asked about the avocado and the nuts let's take the nuts first now uh if i happen to say that it's okay for somebody to have three walnuts on their cereal in the morning that's not what people will hear they'll hear that they say dr esselstyn said the nuts were okay and they'll be in the glove compartment they'll be in the bathroom the kitchen the bedroom the hallway the living room nuts are highly addicting and they have a lot of saturated fat saturated fat is a real rascal for contributing to heart disease and so this is why i took away the avocado and the nuts and we're not in other words we're completely eliminating any of the building blocks of this disease and i i'm not going to apologize for success what do you think about some of your no that's one other thing but you asked besides nuts that was something else was coconuts well more saturated fat yeah um but some of your colleagues think that it's very important for people to consume some nuts and seeds and and and they're advocating for one ounce one ounce a day you even feel like one ounce is is too much i feel that's what my colleagues want that's not what i want i i i want my patients to succeed yeah so there's no ambiguity around well what we want to do is we i want to see the others studies the dissimilar result and when i then i'll i'll be more open-minded about it so even the wonderful beautiful walnut you're you're not a fan we understand i would say i'll say it but nobody should hear me okay this is just between yeah between us right now it's probably having having a few walnuts on your cereals that mean that's so safe because it's so much lower in in the mischief makers it's lower in saturated fat but i i don't do that because people will immediately transfer that to saying it's okay to have nuts and now we're then we'll be in trouble yeah and where are the where are all the studies of patients seriously with heart disease who have ever halted and reversed their disease with nuts yeah and although and so many of the peer-reviewed scientific articles who do you suppose does the funding for those articles uh the nut companies right always so when there's that conflict blue diamond when there's that conflict we got a you know that raises a red flag what's up anne i can't believe you got him to say that well you need to talk to me [Laughter] um having a bad day okay so this is from somebody return to jehovah i have several questions for dr esselstyn but let's start with this one i've been eating whole food plant-based since november of 2021. is there any reason to think that my blood would need to be artificially thinned by a drug my doctor says i've had a few instances of afib and put me on eliquis i think it gives me headaches and i don't want to take it i'm not eating any animal products and have eliminated oils as much as possible thank you well no the the key thing here is that the patient has said that they were having atrial fibrillation and you cannot be cavalier about atrial fibrillation because remember what is atrial fibrillation there's that irregular beating of the heart and what happens in the left atrium the left atrium has a small extension on it called the appendix the atrial appendix the left atrial appendix because of this irregular heartbeat often the blood just sits in that appendix and when the blood is sitting in that appendix in your left atrium it clots and then what happens from time to time when there is a full contraction of the heart the clot that is in that left atrial appendage now goes out into the left ventricle and then it goes out into your circulation and that is the cause of the clots that are notorious and people who are having atrial fibrillation so if that patient is having regular episodes of atrial fibrillation it is quite reasonable to ask that patient to be anticoagulated to have their blood thinned so that they will not form a clot in that appendix if they're fibrillating right so so it's probably a good idea for this person to be on this right yep yep okay read you loud and clear there this question is from terry eats plants dr esselstyn would you please let me know whether a whole food plant-based diet can impact again here here it is again so familial hypercholesterolemia i feel like yeah i think there certainly can be some benefits from that because when you do that you're going to be making yourself this endothelial fortress which will really work in your behalf and protect you third time we've talked about that fortress um have you ever heard of a something called citrus bergomet to get ldl cholesterol levels i've never heard of it never heard of it okay uh all right well there you go terry eats plants um keep eating whole food plant-based um this is from ti42106 doesn't sound very human does it sounds like a neighbor what are your opinions on different types of cardio exercise sprinting is very popular right now but i have my doubts that it's ideal for longevity related seriously are marathons healthy or harmful to the old ticker what are your thoughts on exercise yeah i think exercise is no question it's a bonus and as a bonus you want to you want to have it be something that you look forward to uh as on a regular basis so uh if i doubt that they're going to be many people who are going to do the extreme exact exercise to exhaustion but you get just as much benefit whether you're regularly walking at a certain distance you may be jogging you may be biking you can be swimming it just seems to be important that you do it on a regular basis and maybe get your heart rate up a little bit but that type of regular exercise plus whole food plant-based nutrition then you're you're you know you're likely to have your vessels be as eternal as someone from central africa or the papua highlands yeah so um speaking of exercise have you exercised yet today are you doing anything i have i went today it was kind of walking so excuse me today it was raining mildly now when it's raining mildly i can't do what i almost regularly do which is by biking because when you bike in the rain you don't see well so i i went ahead and i did some walking today right well also riding in the rain can be slippery and that's not that's not a good cause i'm familiar with that yeah yeah but but but typically you're are you biking every day every day and do you what for how long uh usually it's about 40 minutes uh there's a nice uh driveway into a uh private school over here where they don't seem to object object to my riding with the several hills in it and i get uh usually about three laps uh there and i've gotten into the red zone a little bit but paul straight is up i'm sweating yeah it's it's hit the bonus part no i know that and and do you come up that one hill at all yeah always that's good three loops of that absolutely um okay let's move on this is uh ms dermot path one um she wants to know can your hdl be too high my hdl started off very low um let's see i started off very low 32 about 10 years ago but of my let's hold on a sec let me let me let me read this and we'll we'll scroll um can your hdl be too high why don't we talk about hdl yeah yeah we hold on [Music] okay all right this this is from ms dermapath and she wants to know can your hdl be too high hers used to be 32 it's now 70 which that's quite a jump and her total cholesterol is 162 and she has a family history of cardiovascular disease so she's concerned i think we ought to kind of review the hdl cholesterol now back in the 1970s 80s or maybe even the early 90s and some people who are not informed even today it was felt that a high hdl cholesterol was protected was protective this all began to change for me over about 34 years ago and the very first group of patients that i was studying these are largely men nothing against women but these were men and the accepted low low normal level of hdl cholesterol for men is 40 milligrams per deciliter within about two or three months of starting a study every single one of those men had dropped their hdl cholesterol into the low 30s but at the same time they were losing weight at the same time they were losing symptoms of heart disease and when we carefully studied them they were reversing their disease all with a lower than normal level of hdl cholesterol and ornish was an ornish was noticing the same thing so the next great study that happened was when pfizer invented a drug that was going to end all heart disease it was called torsetrabib it was half of the pill was lipitor which would drop your bad ldl cholesterol the other half was torcetrobin which would take your hdl cholesterol over 100 through the roof and it was interesting that just about the time that pfizer was going to bring this drug out onto the public because it was going to end all heart disease the chairman of pfizer got a phone call from the chairman of the independent monitoring committee mr pfizer chairman we have a problem okay what's that well in the group that was the control group there have been 51 deaths however in the torah september group there were 81 deaths it was killing people so fortunately it never came out then the next thing that came out about hdl was from dan rita raider and his team from the university of pennsylvania they drew blood on 2 000 patients they measured the hdl cholesterol some were high some were medium some were low then they did a fascinating thing they took each of those cholesterols and they measured its capacity to do its job of reverse cholesterol transport yeah and what they found was there was absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the measured blood level of hdl cholesterol and its ability to do its job of reverse cholesterol transport then the next and the final thing that was interesting the very next month as a matter of fact that uh that study that i mentioned about dan rader and his team from the university of pennsylvania that was in the new england journal of medicine in january of 2011. it was the on the 13th of january and it was the very next month in the journal of uh hey anne please be quiet uh cardiovascular review the team from ucla had particularly looked at the apo a1 which is the protein portion the protein moiety of the hdl molecule and they found that when you were eating the western diet you injured that apo a1 and you converted your hdl molecule from normally a strong positive anti-inflammatory molecule when you injure the apoa-1 it becomes a pro-inflammatory molecule so now your hdl is joining with your ldl to injure you so it almost becomes like a rogue a rogue hdl yeah you know what's interesting because i've now looked at probably 2 000 different cholesterol levels hdl ldl women typically seem to always have the those height those high hdls like in the 70s 80s 90s well i had a patient who she still is doing beautifully but when she came to see me she had just had a heart attack and her cholesterol hdl was 120. and her inner cardiologist probably told her oh it was a protective well that was that's been blown out of the water yeah it's a it's interesting because what what what is so important for patients to understand is that when you are eating whole food plant-based nutrition which is so anti-inflammatory that as your body loses its inflammation your liver says i'm going to make less hdl you do not need as much anti-inflammatory molecule of hdl as i was giving you before and this is so profound that when physicians are skeptical about these findings tell them about what is the average hdl level of the tarahumara indians in northern mexico who never have heart disease when bill connor studied them the average hdl was 25 which would drive the unknowing cardiologist absolutely apoplectic right right well i have found that most people after they do our seven day immersion program or take the plant strong challenge their hdl if they're getting their numbers tested typically comes down 10 to 15 percent there you go they have less inflammation in their body they need less hdl right right so i think if you're the the the i think the moral of the story is if you're eating whole food plant-based and your hdl comes down below 40 it's okay absolutely right yeah the endothelial fortress that's the most important thing um yeah all right here we go last question a recent this is from where you wanna go a recent scan revealed mild atherosclerosis i am vegan and have been for eight years but we know that vegan doesn't eat plant-based which foods should be avoided and is the buildup that i have reversible yeah usually a small one one of the things that we found is that when you have an atherosclerotic plaque burden and it's in somebody who is young and that it's interesting that the the plaque is usually made up of inflammation fat and cholesterol which is something the body can handle very well for reversing on the other hand on the other hand when you have somebody who's more senior and they've had this plaque for decades the plaque is more likely to be made up of actually scar fibrosis calcification and it's less likely to go away when you're eating whole food plant-based nutrition however but what you've also found is nevertheless even those patients can get back to full activity of daily living without restriction why because now this is a little bit complicated so hold on okay i'm going to focus because i want to what the arteries that get all the publicity are the right coronary artery the left anterior descending and the circumflex those are the three main vessels and then they branch well where do they go when they branch they all dive where they're supposed to go they dive into the heart muscle and then they interdigitate and connect with each other so that on a slide actually that you gave me you can see these thousands and thousands of intramuscular vessels connecting and really joining and it's really right impressive how thorough the vascularity is of the uh heart so whether it was a time when i did a study of what we call pet scans and a pet scan shows that if it's the heart muscle is orange or yellow it's getting a good blood supply and then there's a patch on the side where it's green it's poor blood supply i counsel the patient but the day he has the pet scan he comes back three weeks later we repeat the pet scan the part that was green is now orange or yellow it's reperfused now wait a minute i said to myself because there's no way yeah that you're going to reverse in three weeks you're not going to reverse this blockage why did this happen so i talked to rodriguez who is the chairman of the cleveland clinic cardiovascular pathology section who does 200 autopsies and looks at a heart through an autopsy perspective uh 200 times a year and i asked rodriguez i said how often when you look at the vessels of this these hearts how often do you ever see atherosclerotic burden once the artery has dived into the heart muscle his answer never now i had the answer because why were we getting all this reperfusion of blood supply because when i first see these patients their endothelial cells are so beaten down they're barely making nitric oxide which is that wonderful vessel dilator and your endothelial cells have now become your enemy they are making two molecules endothelin and thromboxane which are blood vessel constrictors so literally all those intramuscular vessels although they have no blockage inside them they are all crimped and pinched and narrowed because of spasm from these endothelin and thromboxane so what's beautiful to see is suddenly when the patients get it and they've been counseled and they stop eating anything that is going to further injure or impair their endothelial cells the nitric oxide the vessel dilator increases and they totally stop making the endoth endothelial and thromboxane so these all these intramuscular vessels suddenly open up so when all those intramuscular vessels open up that reminds you of process law of flow through the hollow viscous remember in your days in physics translation a tiny increase in diameter an enormous increase in blood flow which is why these patients often especially the ones that have chest pain or angina within six eight or ten days they'll say i don't know what's going on but my pain is going away yeah and then you've got them hooked yeah well it's incredible to me that it can happen that quickly a matter of a week yeah where you can actually notice the difference and and and the um the dilation occurs and the what were the two endothelin and thromboxane yeah yeah those guys those guys go away that'll not be part of your vocabulary yeah no um so i do have a question for you yesterday i actually was talking to a a firefighter from southern california 45 years old and he was concerned his total cholesterol was 243 he had a calcium a calcium score of 104 which at the age of 45 put him in the 90th percent yeah yeah and so he was very concerned and sure and he's going to go back for another calcium score and it's probably going to go up going to go up let's talk about that can you talk about oh yeah i learned about calcium score and some deaths a number of years ago from william costelli bill costelli for 30 years was the director of the world famous framingham heart study outside of boston and casselly said this because telly said if you if a physician orders a calcium score it's going to give you two pieces of information one is that you will see the calcium and you'll know that the patient does have coronary artery disease where some of these smaller plaques on the side of the vessels have gotten calcified he said it also tells you but does not show you that that patient also has therefore a number of non-calcified inflamed plaque which are the ones that are more dangerous and subject to rupture but he said let's take the example of somebody who has a calcium score and it's 440 but they absolutely get it right and the next year they are totally committed to whole food plant-based nutrition then they have another calcium score and it is now 550. but the patient he said is much better off because what has happened during that year that the patient has been consuming this highly anti-inflammatory diet the cat their inflammation is going down and he said it is as though the body would like to get in on the act and it will deposit some calcium in those previously non-calcified inflamed plaque to help hasten along the quelling of that inflammation and that leads us to the fact that so often in patients who are totally committed to improving their well-being with whole food plant-based nutrition what happens is their calcium score will go up and they must not be told that they're getting worse because they're actually getting better why because when you have calcified those previously non-calcified inflamed plaque and they've lost their inflammation they're not going to rupture and hurt you yeah well it sounds like too if you have everything else that is is showing that the inflammation is coming down um your inflammation markers your cholesterol your ldl all those things right then then this this actually it makes it makes a lot of sense but people have to be educated that what's exact what is going on so they don't freak out because a lot of times probably their cardiologist might say hey i'm concerned here so they're not really aware of what costello is that's right do you know if castell is still alive i i'm i'm assuming he is i'm but i don't know i'm sure he must be he well he's right he's a few years older than i am all right well okay so um what you got going on this summer anything exciting you're looking forward to well i think the exciting thing this summer is to be up at the uh up at the farm and it's it's always great to be uh to be at the farm and uh there's a lot going on in the in terms of uh i'd like to do some mowing to keep the farm up up to trim and looking stylish yeah well they've got we may uh get a few project projects involved um whether we'll do a bl to get it this year or not but there's a little red house on the hill that um has when i got married yeah exactly and that's that's taken a few hits over the years and it it really deserves to be restored right yeah some nice projects at the farm i look forward to being there for a couple weeks in july is there anything um professionally that you're sinking your teeth in right now well i think yeah i think the thing that really makes me so passionate about what i see as the the seismic revolution in health is is before us and uh the size of revolution and health that we you see is really not going to come about from a drug or a pill or a stent or bypass surgery but the seismic revolution in health that will come about will be when we in the profession have the will and the grit and the determination to share with the public what is the lifestyle and most specifically what is the nutritional literacy that will empower them to absolutely annihilate chronic illness yeah that that is exciting and it's amazing how far when you think about it how far this movement has come since you initially kind of dug your teeth into this in 1984 and i can't imagine how how pleased you are and the amount of people that are now following your fit your slipstream like the brian asphalls and others it is it is impressive if it works hey ann can you come share with us what's for dinner tonight what's for dinner tonight come on mommy yeah hey thank you that's great yeah come here let everybody know what's for dinner tonight because i know you've been very excited about working on this we will you sit right here we are really excited about dinner tonight because you've got you've got a phone legging neighbors told us about these amazing nori uh sushi stacks so we're having a sushi stack and jane and i are going to do a youtube on it soon and it is so fun and we just i could i've been waiting to have rip try it and then we're having asparagus i can smell it yeah and we're having a fabulous dessert my favorite dessert what is it which is uh blueberry cherry mousse with all kinds of fruit anyway and so doesn't matter the phone's ringing and we just want to talk to you okay all right it's probably jane all right over and out thanks everybody thanks thanks daddy absolutely rip my pleasure bye i want you all to know how much i appreciate you listening to the plan strong podcast i would love it if you would share this episode with anyone that you think will benefit from hearing the good news about plants remember keep your loved ones near build an endothelium fortress and always keep it plant strong the plantstrom podcast team includes carrie barrett lori cordowicz amy mackey patrick gavin and wade clark this season is dedicated to all of those courageous truth seekers who weren't afraid to look through the lens with clear vision and hold firm to a higher truth most notably my parents dr caldwell b esselstyn jr and ann kryl esselstyn thanks for listening

Channel: PLANTSTRONG by Engine 2

Views: 75,440

Keywords:

Id: jRCRV8dAISg

Length: 58min 54sec (3534 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022