This Is Terrifying: The True Cause of Heart Disease | Dr. Jack Wolfson on Health Theory

you want to live until 100 what's the most important thing is it nutrition is it being physically active is it sunshine is it sleep is it modifying our stress and lowering our stress or is it lowering our pollution and chemical burden we can't say that any one of those is any more important than the other and the literature the medical literature just explodes with information about how damaging pollution is i see a lot of people with atrial fibrillation i tell them it's a pollution story your body we know inflammation is going on inflammation is coming from pollution and back to the organic thing the pesticides the chemicals are part of that pollution if you go into the grocery store and you're walking around the grocery store think if you were walking with a caveman think if you were walking with tom billy who's you know ancestors from 20 000 years ago what would he or she recognize in that store they would recognize the green leafy vegetables they would recognize animal products they would recognize eggs but everything else in the center of the store they wouldn't so our ancestors never ate wheat they never ate gluten why would we expect that we can eat that now everybody welcome to another episode of health theory today's guest is dr jack wolfson he's a best-selling author and board-certified cardiologist he's also the founder of the wolfson integrative cardiology clinic a keynote speaker and the creator of the doctors wolfson line of supplements his radical and at times controversial views have been featured on cnn abc usa today and many many others and where i want to start today is all about lifestyle so i have an obsession with i want to live forever that's the the god's honest truth um i know that right now i'm in a collision course with death but what i want to talk about is what from a lifestyle perspective should people be doing they really want to optimize our health well i think there's a lot of different factors that go into it and that's what anyone's goal is of course right we want to live a long life and we want to live a a healthy long life at that where where mainstream medicine really fails is that we keep people alive seemingly forever but they're sick or they're demented and the quality of life is absolutely terrible so what we don't learn in medical school they don't teach us about lifestyle they don't tell us about nutrition they don't tell us about anything except for pharmaceuticals and therefore we really know nothing about cause and that's what i've become really is a doctor of cause typically where i come from someone has coronary artery disease will say it's genetics it's a pharmaceutical deficiency it's a procedure deficiency it's something like that but i've become a doctor of cause and causation of trying to figure out why someone has cause of disease and lifestyle is a big part of it all right so the book the paleocardiologist if if i were going to ask you to describe that without being able to use the word paleo how would you describe that so it's not just about the the diet or nutrition it's about like you said it's about the lifestyle living the lifestyle of our ancestors in the 21st century and i think that's going to give us our best health outcomes so if we think about things like sunshine and the importance of sleep and just being physically active outdoors and avoiding all the pollutants and chemicals that's what it's really about if you do want to achieve that hundred-year lifestyle one thing that i think about as somebody of roughly northern european descent is that [ __ ] is cold so the idea of people being of of that descent spending a lot of time naked in the sun because i love sunshine what you talk about with vitamin d and cholesterol which i've never actually heard somebody talk about before i thought was really really interesting you just moved to um colorado and i was imagining you out in the snow bucket ass naked like how do people in colder climates get enough sunshine live that one element anyway of the lifestyle well for one we did actually get outside naked in the sun and it was 25 degrees and actually in the sun it was it was very nice you did like very family my entire family outside naked and of course the baby too we want the baby to get all the health aspects is there a cold exposure element to that that's useful because that seems like if if i if i were a hunter-gatherer and i'm not thinking oh i'm trying to live forever i'm just thinking it's cold my gut instinct is historically people in that kind of environment would be pretty wrapped up no no i mean they certainly would i wouldn't recommend it for long periods of time but the whole point is we want to get that sun exposure while we can because the sun does an infinite number of things to help heal us it is fantastic for heart it's anti-cancer it's great for your brain i mean just so many different things anti-autoimmune so the sun is an amazing thing which unfortunately the talking heads on television tell us to avoid so we're listening these people say avoid the sun get sunscreen why would we want to avoid the sun it's been around for billions of years it was here before man was here in every story of how we came onto this planet the sun was always here first we should embrace the sun but to your point it has to be smart sun so we want to we don't want it to be like we were on spring break and we were in college and we went somewhere and got our skin fried we don't want that we want to do smart sun and that's what we practice that's what we teach our patients as well you know a few minutes here and there and then slowly building up so you're right if you're of northern european descent although we all came from the equator we all came from the middle east we all came from northern africa and then dispersed if we do have lighter skin like you and i do we need to be smart about it you know we could talk science about it all day long about what it does like you said for cholesterol we're all concerned about cholesterol what if high cholesterol is a sunshine deficiency syndrome yeah that's really that's super interesting to me but um you're talking about that that the interaction of the sun and the cholesterol actually turns the cholesterol into vitamin d can you walk us through that you just said it right there the you know the skin is you know coursing through the skin is something called 7d hydroxy cholesterol so our body takes all these different paths to make that form of cholesterol and then if the sun hits it it turns it into vitamin d if you don't get sun then it turns into excess cholesterol high cholesterol low d get sun high d low cholesterol and doesn't that sound better than taking a pharmaceutical uh then taking some artificial you know way to lower your numbers down what if sunshine which is free and people ask me they're like you know what do i do i live in minnesota i don't get much sunshine and i say move you know move to southern mexico move to arizona move to somewhere otherwise if you're living in colorado or whatever just get as much sun as you can sun's out guns out what about um cyclical living so one of the things that i find interesting and i have no idea if this is real but you want to talk about something that hits me just sort of intuitively correct it would be that that there are times to do it so if i think about us all meaning anything like sunshine but there are times not to do it so if i think about okay the migration patterns of humans going up through northern africa and then spreading out that as we do that the skin lightens so that we can generate more vitamin d with less sun exposure but are there times of the year where we would have developed to not get sun and is there something in that and and literally this is not something i have like some deep hypothesis um but it's just an interesting question to me are there times where we should be avoiding it well i don't think we should ever be avoiding it in the sense that we went to sleep with the sun down we awoke before the sun rise we saw the sun rise and then we were working in and out of the sun all day long we were hunting and gathering clearly in the in the different la you know in the extreme of latitudes uh you're not going to get as much sun in the cold in the winter and therefore you really need to stock up in the summer time and and really unfor in 21st century we have to really make a concerted effort because we're not having much of a reason to go outside we're not farmers we're not hunters we're not gatherers we don't need to do that so we do need a more concerted effort to do it so coming back to um cyclical stuff so sun certainly cyclical in certain parts of the world and then food certainly cyclical do you when you think about trying to match where our ancestors were in terms of lifestyle do you think about that like eating only things that are in season is that an issue it's definitely an issue and i i definitely i want to keep it as simple as possible for most people to be able to follow i do think clearly that if you are from colder weather climates then you probably were much more dependent on animal foods than you were plants for example eskimos eat only animal foods uh and and you know people at the extremes you know once again they were they were mostly hunters as opposed to the gatherers and then if you were closer to the equator or you were in the south pacific or you were an island or in hawaii then your foods would have been different but you know back to again about this vitamin d thing in the winter time you get vitamin d from eating animal foods as well so that would be your source of vitamin d but again the sun is so much more than just vitamin d but i do want to keep it easier on people because we do get that argument very often well yeah you know the the hunter-gatherer in hawaii was different than the eskimo and that's probably true so do you advise on that like setting the the really simple advice aside for a second do you look at people's genetics do you look at their ancestral path like does any of that play into when you advise people on a regimen well i think we can look at some genetics but when i was going through medical training in the mid 90s everything was about genetics it was going to be the human genome project is coming out we're going to learn all about our dna and all about our genetics and it's going to revolutionize everything well it turns out we learned about the genetics and we learned it's not about the genetics we learned that it's about the epigenetics right it's about how the environment shapes our dna and causes our dna to manufacture certain proteins or not manufacture certain proteins so it's not too much of a genetic thing you know that i that i really put into it all right so now let's go to the simple approach so what are the things that i'm going to want to do for optimal living so we've got sun exposure there's going to be some element i'm sure of exercise what are some really prescriptive things that you have on nutrition and i've heard you talk a lot about organic obviously paleo give us that in terms of what should be in my fridge in my pantry well there's a lot of debate going on as you know right now and i know you've interviewed a lot of different people with a lot of different nutrition opinions but you know paleo and hunter-gatherer ancestral diets that is the that is the original diet like everything else is just a fad every other diet no matter what it is you can say south beach or atkins you know or you know veganism those are all fads the original diet is hunter gatherer and we that should not be up for debate you don't tell or ask a lion hey you know what do you think you should eat today you know the lion instinctually knows what to eat and so should we as humans but we've lost that over the last ten thousand years so my book is called the paleocardiologist but it's not about paleo nutrition it is about the paleo lifestyle and i say no matter what nutrition you follow make it organic because you can have organic cookies and cupcakes and ice cream so you can still have you know these foods that you love but just make them organic so you get the chemicals out of there i think the usda does a fair job of certifying what's organic and what's not they make the the companies actually jump through the hoops to make sure the materials are what they are when it's third party tested by environmental working group and others uh they do determine that pesticide levels may not be zero in organic but certainly much lower organic wines for example from california still have pesticides unfortunately but much lower amounts so we can only do the best we can obviously the air is polluted the water is polluted the soil is not what it was broccoli from asia is not the same as broccoli from california so if we were to talk about what's the most important thing for health you want to live till 100 what's the most important thing is it nutrition is it being physically active is it sunshine is it sleep is it modifying our stress and lowering our stress or is it lowering our pollution and chemical burden we can't say that any one of those is any more important than the other and the literature the medical literature just explodes with information about how damaging pollution is i see a lot of people with atrial fibrillation i tell them it's a pollution story your body we know inflammation is going on inflammation is coming from pollution and back to the organic thing the pesticides the chemicals are part of that pollution so well let's break that one down so atrial fibril fibrillation easy for you to say right what what exactly is it and why is it a pollution issue okay so atrial fibrillation is a total pain point for people because we can talk about oh what are some natural ways to deal with blood pressure cholesterol whatever it may be but atrial fibrillation is an irregular hurt rhythm and the irregular heart rhythm so instead of the heart going boom boom boom it goes and it races and people feel lousy when they have it it's actually pretty common in athletes what's called the athlete's heart so i see professional cyclists professional basketball players people that even while they're playing young people come down with this condition the heart is inflamed leading to this abnormal heart rhythm so what is the cause of the inflammation and that's what we need to find out once again nutrition and lifestyle that's what it is all right so let's get to some really specific ones so you first said that that was a toxin issue what are some common toxins that would lead to the inflammation of the heart oh common toxins i you know once again just air pollution we know from air pollution increased risk of everything obviously cancer lung cancer but cardiovascular disease brain disease there's literature that says noise pollution so if you live near an airport or a busy road it's a problem as well the noise generates stress and stress leads to inflammation just like stress alone turns on inflammation genes yeah yeah human survivors people that survived over the over a million years where the people that under stress they would be quick to become inflamed because your immune system would therefore be stronger like i feel stress coming on and therefore now i'm ready to fight the animal or repair the wound well now that doesn't happen to us and that's why chronic stress is so bad and chronic stress leads to that chronic inflammation response and inflammation is just your body's just saying i'm under attack and we need to figure out why okay so those are some of the the toxins what are some dietary things that are going to cause that kind of inflammation specifically around the heart just to keep it specific yeah well gluten for example gluten wheat i'm proud to say that i coined the term leaky heart syndrome so a lot of people talk about leaky gut well the leaky gut allows things to get into the body that don't belong so now the barrier of the heart opens up as well what we call leaky heart so now the immune system and all these different things that don't belong in the heart tissue are there immune system comes in immune cells die plaque forms plaque ruptures and now someone's 55 year old father is dead i mean that's how it goes yeah i heard you talk about that that and um leaky brain i don't know if that was also something that you coined but um that's super interesting to me i'd never heard anybody talk about that now in the gut i'm aware of the lining of the gut which is a single cell thick if i'm not mistaken is there something similar in the heart exactly the same it's called the endothelial lining so the gut is the epithelial lining because it really is continuation of the skin and then of course the lining of the brain is the blood brain barrier so when you do have that leaky blood-brain barrier from a lot of different things uh yeah you develop autoimmune disease of the brain you develop dementia uh you name it so is this all that's really interesting so let's let's go deeper really fast on the brain so you've got people talking about um alzheimer's is being um basically type three diabetes which is interesting i never thought of it as being an inflammation problem is is that to you sort of one and the same or those competing hypothesis yeah you know um that whole type three of the brain i think is a bogus uh term i don't like it it's still type two so type one is where someone has autoimmune disease of their pancreas they no longer make insulin the type twos still make insulin it just doesn't work and that's the same process that leads to brain issues cognitive issues and for all those different reasons because essentially the immune system is attacking the brain tissue and all these poisons and things that do not belong in the brain are getting through through that compromised blood-brain barrier and so just going back to i get what you're saying about it's not type 3 it's type 2 but do you think that there's a causal relationship between elevated glucose in the bloodstream and the breakdown of the blood-brain barrier that's allowing things to get into the brain that are meant to be there which is what triggers the autoimmune response which creates this sort of ever escalating inflammation is is is that basically what's happening in dementia and possibly stroke or is there something else so what happens is when when glucose is high one of the things that happens is that glucose glycates or changes the proteins of the body of the brain of the blood-brain barrier so now those proteins are dysfunctional so when those proteins and enzymes no longer work as well as they should yeah you know leakage happens immune cells are activated uh you know getting getting rid of the cellular garbage like nothing works well when everything is just kind of gummed up and glued and that all comes from elevated glucose okay so when i think about things that you're warning against like a lot of people having a gluten intolerance and things like that are there vegetables for instance i think would meet your sort of bill of health how do we begin to discern between carbohydrates things that we can eat things that we want to avoid things that trigger the elevation of blood glucose the things that trigger the inflammation in the brain and elsewhere and things that are helpful well i think that if you if you you know if you go into the grocery store and you're walking around the grocery store think if you were walking with a caveman think if you were walking with tom bill to use you know ancestors from 20 000 years ago what would he or she recognize in that store they would recognize the green leafy vegetables they would recognize animal products they would recognize eggs but everything else in the center of the store they wouldn't so our ancestors never ate wheat they never ate gluten why would we expect that we can eat that now but you know i am familiar with a lot of kind of contrary opinions regarding some of the vegetables and are there lectins in the vegetables and things like that maybe you were alluding to some of the lectin stuff uh personally if i if i if i was in the wild and i saw cucumbers and tomatoes i would eat them if i have followed a really good diet so if i followed a pretty strict paleo diet or hunter-gatherer diet and i still had some health issues then maybe i would dig a little bit deeper into some of these lectin can you know containing items but i think the lectin containing vegetables i don't think are really much of a problem for 98 of people and then maybe we'll come into the fruit thing so clearly fruit was different back then than it is now back then it was crab apples and wild berries now it's a little bit different when i really take a step back and i look at all of the things that we're doing to influence our environment and things that we take as sort of natural or the way that it's always been whether it's you know raising wheat which is what 10 000 years old which is relatively recent in the grand scheme of things we've been selectively breeding plants that would have i'm guessing a higher glucose content which makes them taste sweeter for a very long time but when you say that fruit used to be different like if you had to give me constituent parts is it just that it's higher in sugar like what is the fundamental difference yeah no i well first of all it there is obviously the size factor so like i said a crab apple you know from back in the day was you know much smaller than your fist now you're getting apples you know they're like this and they've pretty much giant sized everything uh you know but even the nutritional content is is clearly different whether it's from vitamins and minerals but back to you said you know to the sugar level so the fructose of of the the current fruits that are out there is just sky high the amount of caloric density that's in there compared to the vitamins and minerals has totally shifted so now it's really just super sweet and like you said it's not like genetically modified foods but it is hybridized and has been selected out 100 years ago which apple tree had the sweetest apples and then they just kept planting those seeds over and over and over again and now we're in the situation we're in so you know these people that are like they're fruit addicts because of the sugar and they think it's being healthy and it's clearly not it was going to ask i obviously have an intuitive guess as to what you're going to say but do you treat fruits and vegetables like most people group those together like they're the same thing do you think of them as as very distinct items or should we be eating five servings of fruits and vegetables every day yeah i think they're totally different they're totally totally different one is super high in sugar uh the other obviously most you know green leafy vegetables you know broccoli kale chard dandelion greens those are all totally different um you know i think the healthiest people are best to keep their fruit intake a little more on the restricted side i'm not saying don't have it but maybe you know kind of be seasonal about you know about it too maybe at this time of year maybe more on the citrus side in the summertime more of the plums and the stone fruits and what i like to do is thomas when when the season comes in per se and it's stone fruit season i'll indulge for for a week or two and then i'll kind of back off and say okay it's time to get back to to a lower sugar lower fructose you know semblance of nutrition walk me through a a super typical day for you and i i never want to put people into like one day because i'm sure that there are sort of variations for you but i want to know everything what time in fact we'll start it the night before what time you went to bed what time you woke up do you work out what do you eat where did you get what you eat like all of that so people can really understand what your lifestyle looks like wow i'm getting like anxiety thinking about i've got three i've got three i've got three children one of which is a one-year-old my life is total chaos i love that though that's perfect because i think so many people align with that no i and i totally agree so the night before we go to bed uh we go to bed typically at around 8 8 30. this time of year so so essentially when the sun goes down we're pretty close to getting into bed that is the best for us study after study and and common sense tells us go to sleep with the sun down awake with the sunrise nobody does that i mean before the sunrise and we watch the summers nobody does that i mean the average time people go to sleep is midnight but that's why there's so much sickness because everybody's staring at their cell phone their ipad their ipod and i'm not telling you i i would i would ask people not to do that and if they want answers why they're sick that's why now it's up to them but no one ever told them that like no one ever i taught 83 year old woman from from south korea and she's like no one ever told me that it was bad to stare at my electronics until three o'clock in the morning she's 83 i said what are you doing until three o'clock in the morning and she said she's on her tech all right so i wake up i do have a couple cups of organic coffee so i grew up in the midwest my father was a coffee drinker i became a coffee drinker as much as i want to vilify coffee when you do it organically there's some pretty darn good benefits of especially organic coffee very high antioxidants why do i want to vilify it it's an addiction it's a crutch um from a cardiology standpoint it can raise blood pressure it can cause palpitations but once again if you're going to do it do it or you know organically and i don't want to piss off everybody here by throwing coffee under the bus so i don't want to say that when i speak from the stage i'm like no one throw coffee at me but no one's going to do that because they're so addicted to coffee they're like i'm not going to waste my coffee throwing it at that guy anyways so i wake up and and then i just i start getting ready for the day as far as the kids lunches my two older ones do go to a uh school and their lunches are paleo lunches so they're different from everybody else they do get lots of vegetables they do typically get some fruit we do a lot of sardines we do wild salmon we'll do chicken and pork and all kinds of meats that are in there as well sometimes just eggs if there's a farmer's market we'll go to a farmer's market we'll try and shop local whenever possible try and get outside in the sun when you think about exercise and when i think about exercise it should be outdoors it should be outside in nature typically with your shirt off or you know just the idea of exercise is not sitting inside on the treadmill with your headphones on your wi-fi on getting blasted with emf electromagnetic fields from the environment that you're in there with all the different cleaning agents and bleaches that you're smelling all the entire time with uh you know in the artificial lights watching some horrible television show that just gives you more stress get outdoors and it's free it's i mean any time of year no matter what the weather is you can bundle up i used to cycle with a group in chicago and the motto was there's no such thing as bad weather just bad clothes so uh that's kind of the day you know spend the time you know with the dog and of course i'm working if i'm not if i'm not seeing patients uh in the office then i'm writing or you know whatever podcasting and so it's do you and i'll ask about your kids do your kids eat typically three meals do they graze like what are your teachings on that one yeah no they they typically eat three meals yeah they'll do a breakfast they'll do a they'll do a lunch at school they'll often get a snack so we pack their snack as well and uh and then dinner is dinner yeah so they get the three meals i haven't brought them into like intermittent fasting or anything else like that uh i think there's probably value to that you know as they get older and more of you know but essentially what happens in our house is that if we are basically done with dinner by 5 30 6 o'clock they're not eating again for another 12 hours so that is somewhat of a fast per se but i'm not into necessarily fasting just for fasting's sake for children i don't think it's really anything that we need to get into as an adult i think it is great for for a cleanse for a detox if someone's looking to lose weight if they've got certain health issues i think it's worth it i like the 36 hour fast so you have a dinner on a saturday night and then you have nothing all day sunday sunday you know once again just water water in the morning noon time evening and then you wake up monday morning and have an avocado or a greens drink so it's a 36 hour fast on a weekly basis i like that so what symptoms would somebody have to be presenting for you to say fasting would be useful here well certainly if they're overweight i think it's a very beneficial if if they've got a lot of food addictions i think one of the best things about fasting is that it breaks food addictions at least temporarily i mean i do obviously i understand all of the biochemical benefits of it but i think there is a lot of mental to it as well that when you are stuck in this rut and all you are doing is eating quickie carbs and you're eating sugar or you're drinking alcohol whatever it may be that if you go into even that 36 hour fast and you really stay determined to do that once again when you wake up 36 hours later you're not craving a piece of chocolate i mean you've probably known this maybe if you've done fasting yourself it's like typically you're not like wow i can use a glass of wine or i'd like a beer or a hot fudge sundae you typically want something healthy and at least it's been my experience personally with my patients as well so once again these these food addictions i think the the fast is a great way to break them yeah it's interesting so in doing um keto which would be fun to talk about but in doing keto and doing it for long periods of time and taking my carbs down in having a an identity around not eating carbohydrates over time and i will say over a fairly long period of time i ended up not being very interested in eating overly sweet things you hear a lot of people talk about that with keto for me it definitely was not instantaneous it was just a whole lot of years of living a low carb lifestyle largely to manage my weight because i put on fat incredibly easily but after doing that for a long time yeah i just sort of didn't think about it and my wife had profound microbiome issues and in trying to unwind some of that we just weren't eating junk food we weren't eating a lot of anything other than just whole food meats greens etc um and so just you do that long enough and you start to break your addiction to that mentally but i will say that like from a um an ancestral path the one thing that i think it's planted in us which we're seeing play out in a horrifyingly negative way right now is you're incentivized as a hunter-gatherer to [ __ ] gorge and when you have food you want to eat as much of that food as you can when you come across sugar which back then would have been pretty rare you want to stuff your little face full of it when you think about being an ancestor part of what worked for them was they couldn't get a hold of it because i think if you took an ancestor on that shopping trip with me and you took them into the center of the store they'd be [ __ ] stoked they'd go crazy i mean we're literally seeing that play out now which is interesting how do you think about that when you're dealing with a patient you know what they need to do but they're struggling to actually comply well yeah i'm uh you know listen obviously i understand all that uh i do tell them when you're talking about paleo foods there is no set limit so you can eat as much salmon as you want and if you were if you came across a raw salmon you would only eat so much of it your body would say enough now when you cook it and you start adding you know barbecue sauce or dipping it in ketchup as you know uh yeah then there's no more set point you will go until you until you bust you know so that's that's totally true but with patience i mean listen it can be difficult i do think that um if if somebody can get a coach if somebody can get a health coach to keep them on that plan someone who's like a chief accountability officer like much like you and your wife may do it or how my wife and i do it if one of us is kind of going a little bit too crazy and it's typically me then the other one's going to kind of like you know rein you in a little bit and kind of get you back into reality because as you said it's it's a horrible addiction there's no doubt about it yeah for sure i want to go back to something you said earlier about the athlete's heart why do athletes get the um the heart issue that you were describing before where the the beat is like out of rhythm well there's there's several different factors but i think certainly it's linked to inflammation so when the body is inflamed we need to figure out why when the when we exercise we generate a lot of free radicals as we're our mitochondria are spitting out oxygen but they're also spitting out a lot of kind of damaged products well in order to combat those damaged products we need the antioxidants we need those healthy foods but the typical cyclist or endurance athlete they have a you know sugary gatorade for example or they have you know i i remember when i used to do uh you know distance races there was one there was one time where the 20 mile mark they had a krispy kreme donut stand so and and you know if you're constantly feeding yourself kind of foods that are not satisfying and you know the need for the you know the oxidative stress happens you need the antioxidants and if you're not getting those your body is inflamed and afib is one of the issues but those people can get hypertension you look at people like oh they look so healthy how'd they possibly have a heart attack like bob harper from america's biggest loser how'd that guy have a heart attack well i can tell you a million different ways from what i guess i don't know personally you know but the guy's inside of a film studio you know all day lives in new york under constant stress i don't know what his diet you know was totally like i think it was probably pretty good how much sunshine do you get when you live in new york you think that guy was going to sleep at 7 30 8 o'clock at night probably not so with all due respect to him i don't mean to call him out but he's been such a a uh face now for cardiovascular disease and he's been a spokesman for big pharma now um when people need to understand that this guy had a you know cardiac event for a reason had a heart attack for a reason and that's what we need to figure out yeah that's wow it is pretty crazy to think that people that are in that kind of shape are actually creating problems for their heart what do you think about distance like ultra endurance marathons guys that are doing ultra marathons like what is that doing to the heart well you know our ancestors once again they didn't run marathons so i think when a lot of people do that they are are prone to have issues so i'm more of the sprint activity burst activity the high interval you know training our ancestors their activity was running after food or trying to avoid being someone else's food or hand-to-hand combat building shelter getting water from over there and bringing it here that's just what we did but the science is pretty darn clear that that short burst activity raising up the heart rate up and down you know that up the mountain down the mountain activity is better than just plodding along on the treadmill in in the poison for 45 minutes if you had to pick something that's popular whether it's a sport or a style of um exercise what would you say if you were only going to let people do one thing is it wrestling is it football is it tread or not treadmill we know it's not treadmill yeah out running on the street like what is that one thing that comes as close to perfect as we're gonna get i i do like soccer as an activity especially for young kids i think soccer is absolutely fantastic uh i do like open water swimming if you can do open water swimming why open water so physically uh because if you're in a pool you're in a chlorine soup and you're breathing in the chlorine and the chlorines in the skin and chlorine just destroys everything uh including kids so um as much as i grew up in a chlorine pool i started to throw throw water on that parade but so i mean if you can get a different quality pool uh uh there's different you know ozone pools and copper ion pools there's all different things you can do now but uh you know out here in california if you can jump in the ocean you open water swimming i think that's the best i also like tennis i think tennis is a great game uh perfect example of kind of burst activity chasing the you know ball back and forth a little bit then you get to rest so i do like that that's interesting um what do you think about so with soccer i love soccer really enjoyed playing it as a kid but i super worried about the head trauma of heading balls my my 11 year old uh he in his league they did not allow the use of the head on the ball and i think and that's what i'm thinking about i think as when they become 12 or 13 and certainly once they get into high school years then they start allowing them to do it i don't think using your head is the biggest deal in the world obviously when you talk about brain trauma and concussion but i think we need to be aware of it i think i try and tell my you know my son if you need to do it do it don't shy away from it but don't aggressively look to use your head as an object in in sports and i think the other thing is it's one thing to head the ball but if two kids are going ahead the ball at the same time and they collide that's pretty catastrophic are there any sports you wouldn't let your kids play uh wouldn't let them play football yeah that's for sure wouldn't let them play football after that i think we're yeah we're pretty good i do love the outdoor activities i love just going for a bike ride going for a walk i love hiking stand up paddle boarding kayaking just once again just getting outside as much as possible i think they do need to be supervised as opposed to how we grew up and just you know go uh you know go ride your bike and uh you know come back uh you know six seven hours later no one's gonna do that now but uh get them outside yeah no one's gonna do that now i don't have kids for a reason one of the reasons is i don't want to have to answer the question of should you just let them go but my parents would let me ride my bike i mean it had to have been four to five miles away from the house this is at like 11 which now seems insane but in terms of like earthing and getting outside and playing in dirt like what's your take on that yeah i mean listen we all feel better at the beach we all feel better when we're walking barefoot at the beach i love the idea of getting outside walking barefoot our ancestors were outside foot like what's going on uh i mean there's so many different facets of it whether it is that grounding thing where you're connected to the earth and electron transfer you know from the earth up into the body uh i think that's part of it but i think also is that you know our we the way the way that our bodies the way that our spine works my wife is a doctor of chiropractic so the way that we are genetically designed is to be barefoot and once you start altering with that barefoot and putting shoes on now you change the functionality of the bones the muscles the tendons and that leads to so many people with back issues and neck issues and ultimately cardiovascular issues because as you have disease in the spine and the autonomic nervous system that impacts the heart because the heart is innervated by the autonomics parasympathetic sympathetics blood pressure is all related to that atrial fibrillation is related to that cholesterol is related to autonomic function so would you say that if i walk barefoot that would improve my cholesterol i'll say yes really i think all those different factors when you lead the healthy lifestyle you get the great results so i don't want to vilify cholesterol cholesterol makes our you know cholesterol as we said makes vitamin d our brain is full of cholesterol every single cell in our body has cholesterol in the cell in the cell membrane that encases every cell our digestion comes from uh cholesterol our sex hormones testosterone is from cholesterol why would you want to lower the precursor to testosterone if you're a male or estrogen progesterone if you're a female you wouldn't you wouldn't you want to find the perfect level for each one of us that's interesting so what do you think about self-experimentation how do we do it what blood levels should we be checking um yeah how do people begin to get their head around finding that perfect level yeah i think that's an awesome question because you know you you we can all talk theory uh and and theory is great but sometimes it's good to put it to practice as far as okay what are my objective numbers so you're following a diet you're following a lifestyle you're taking a bunch of these vitamins and supplements great are they working and we can test that now you know we didn't have to test it 10 000 years ago because it was perfect now it's not so we do need to test and that's where you can look at markers of inflammation oxidative stress you can look at advanced lipid numbers so you're looking at particle numbers and particle sizes you can look at blood sugar you can look at the immune system activity you can look at intracellular nutrients like one of my favorite nutrients to order is vitamin k so there's companies that can test what's called your micronutrients so your vitamins and minerals inside the cells this red blood cells white blood cells just a simple blood test and these companies have the technology to take a look and tell you what's in there so are you getting enough things into the cells that matter so our typical doctors now they check serum levels for example or blood levels of magnesium but that doesn't matter the action for magnesium happens inside of the cell so you have to know what's going on inside of the cell as a cardiologist and i'm dealing with some with atrial fibrillation or hypertension or whatever it may be a heart failure i want to know what are the nutrients that are getting into the cells and if they're not i need to figure out why and then also try and flood the system with those particular nutrients to get them inside the cells what are some common reasons why somebody would be having a hard time getting nutrients into the cell so common reasons obviously first of all they're not taking it in the food they're not digesting the food they're not absorbing the food once it's in their bloodstream it's not getting where it needs to go it's getting where it needs to go but there is a receptor deficiency so the catcher's mitt for the magnesium or for the vitamin isn't working because either it doesn't exist genetically or autoimmune attack or there's a heavy metal or some kind of plastic environmental pollutant that's blocking it uh but now say it gets into the cell and once again there could be other factors inside the cell that are blocking it as well so yeah that's kind of a long way to say that that got complicated really yeah yeah so there's but there's a lot there's a lot that but we have to look at all those different factors in order to really make someone healthy let's target one for now a lot of what you were describing i think based on other things you've said we could sum up as inflammation yes okay so in fact would you say sitting at sort of the heart of certainly the things that you deal with as a cardiologist is it inflammation is that sort of like the core thing that we want to attack well you know inflammation certainly is the buzzword in every garden variety cardiologist the 40 cardiologist that i left they understand that inflammation is a bad thing but their answer to inflammation is a statin drug is aspirin is some other pharmaceutical statins being billed as addressing inflammation specifically sure yeah interesting yeah no no no definitely so historically it was about cholesterol but clearly they are anti-inflammatory which statins can lower cholesterol statins can lower inflammation but do they dramatically change outcomes so if guys like you and i take statin drugs do they lower our risk of having a heart attack stroke or dying the answer is some studies show say yes by a little bit but we need better than that like that's not good enough for me right i don't wanna you know to lower my risk from seven percent to six percent that's what the statin data shows i want zero percent i don't want to die my father died at 63. i don't want to die i don't i want to be a you know i became a father you know the third time when i was 47 years old i got a one-year-old i'm 48 years old now and i'm laying in bed with my you know with my baby daughter like i want to live um and we're not going to live with pharmaceuticals that's very clear so back to the inflammation we need to find out why the inflammation is there and again it comes from nutrition and it comes from the lifestyle and by lifestyle i mean all the environmental things that are going on in the sleep and the sun you know and and the stress factor we want to know where people are at and we want to address it because we cannot be successful without helping mental issues yeah no question um talk to me about heavy metals really fast where are people getting those in their system uh where do people get heavy metals in their system heavy metals can be coming from the air so air pollution if you live in an air polluted city you can get it from there uh you can get you know let's let's just take aluminum for example aluminum and a lot of these metals can be in your cookware so your cookware is a main source and a lot of these people now for example bone broth has gotten very popular what do you cook your bone broth in you're gonna put your food in some 24 hour 36 hour boil and now you're drinking this down you better have good cookware to get it uh good cookware because my wife eats the most bone broth uh our cookware is a salad master so salad master it's been around for 75 years it's surgical stainless steel cookware that is titanium coated so it's the same utensils it's the same material that they use on surgical equipment so it does not leach any metals into the food um what else uh you know obviously vaccines contain aluminum vaccines contain mercury so you're going to get heavy metals from that different pharmaceuticals seafood can have it so i tell people not to eat big fish tell people not to eat tuna shark swordfish you know things like that tell people to avoid those uh but the small fish wild salmon sardines anchovy shellfish those are all good to go um yeah those are i mean but that's really the thing is that you can also but you can get tested for heavy metals very easily so get tested see where you're high look up where you may be getting that exposure and then number one get rid of the exposure number two now you start having to come up with the detoxification pathways to get those metals and contaminants out of the body so that comes to things like glutathione boosters glutathione is the main antioxidant made in the liver you want a lot of it you can test it you can test intracellular levels of glutathione so once again to and whether that's sauna or or uh uh you know light therapy different ways to once again kind of detox the pollutants out of the body all right if people were going to make only one change that would have the biggest impact on their health what one change would you want them to make it would be to embrace the sun it would be the embrace in the sunshine story so for example there are tribes in africa and the tribes in africa they're they're obviously hunter-gatherers they live outdoors they live in a somewhat you know pollution-free environment and uh yeah they get they go to sleep with the sun down awake with the sunrise get tons of sunshine they've done studies where they've fed those people fast food junk food and it does nothing to them nothing yet if you bring them out of their climate and you put them into our average lifestyle they get sick so the food is a factor but it's not the only thing it really is once again it really is kind of all those different things so i hate when people you know put me on the spot to say one thing because it really should be that whole triumvirate but i will say you know like i said before eating organic i think takes you to a different level because that way whatever your vice is you can do it organically without the pollutants without the pesticides without the contaminants and i'm sure you know drinking organic coffee tastes just as good as any other coffee that's out there i have no idea because i don't drink coffee but all right all right tell people where they can find your book where they can learn more about you uh so our website is thedoctorswolfson.com and doctors is abbreviated drs uh you can buy the book on my website uh i do have a podcast called the healthy heart show and i interview some fantastic people and then we're on you know facebook and social media some of my opinions are pretty controversial so i don't know if i'll always be on uh facebook and uh on places like that but uh uh we'll see there it is all right guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 341,853

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Health theory, health, health show, jack wolfson, wolfson, the drs wolfson, drs wolfson, cardiology, heart health, cardiologist, paleo, paleo cardiologist, paleo diet, inflammation, leaky heart, healthy

Id: 3XkOgO9HbFc

Length: 48min 14sec (2894 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019