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

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. 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 Bilyeu'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 on a collision course with death. But what I want to talk about is what from a lifestyle perspective should people be doing if they really want to optimize their health? Well, I think there's a lot of different factors, you know, 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 a healthy a 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 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 is a doctor of cause. Typically where I come from, someone has coronary artery disease, we'll 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 Paleo Cardiologist, um 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 100 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 um 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° and actually in the sun it was it was very nice. it with your 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? Cuz 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 to these people and 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 and 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? So, 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 uh is you know, coursing through the skin is something called 7-dehydroxycholesterol. 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 than 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, whatever, just get the 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've 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 uh meaning anything like sunshine, but there are times not to do it. So, um 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 sunrise, we saw the sunrise, 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 lat you know, in the extreme 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 summertime. And and really you know, unfo- 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? Um 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 islander in Hawaii, then your foods would have been different. But, you know, back to again about this vitamin D thing in the wintertime, 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, uh I I do want to keep it easier on people cuz 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 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, uh you know, that I that I really put into it. All right. So, now let's go to the simple approach. So, um what are the things that I'm going to want to do for optimal living? So, we've got sun exposure. Um there's going to be some element, I'm sure, of exercise. Uh what are some really prescriptive things that you have on nutrition? And um I've heard you talk a lot about organic, obviously paleo. Um give us that in terms of what should be in my fridge and 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 uh hunter-gatherer ancestral diet, 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 10,000 years. So, my book is called The Paleo Cardiologist, 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 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 fibrillation. Easy for you to say. Yeah, good. Uh 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 heart rhythm. Okay. And the irregular heart rhythm, so instead of the heart going boom, boom, boom, it goes boom badum badum badum boom, and it races. And people feel lousy when they have it. It's actually pretty common in athletes. Uh 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, uh it's a problem as well. The noise generates stress, and stress leads to inflammation. Just stress alone turns on inflammation genes, yeah. Yeah. Human survivors, people that survived over the over the a million years were 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, um gluten, for example. Gluten, uh wheat. Um 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 leaky brain. I don't know if that was also something that you coined, but 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, cuz it really is a 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, yeah, you develop autoimmune disease of the brain, you develop dementia, 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 Alzheimer's as being basically type 3 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 hypotheses? Yeah, you know, that whole type 3 of the brain, I think is a bogus term. I don't like it. It's still type 2. So, type 1 is where someone has autoimmune disease of the pancreas, they no longer make insulin. The type 2s 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 aren't 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 um a lot of people having a gluten intolerance and things like that, um are there vegetables for instance, I think would meet your sort of bill of health. Um how do we begin to discern between carbohydrates, things that we can eat, things that we want to avoid, things that trigger the um elevation of blood glucose, the things that trigger the inflammation in the brain and elsewhere, um 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 Bilyeu'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? But you know, I am you know, 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, 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 you know, to 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, 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, that are like this and they've pretty much giant sized everything. 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 it 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. I 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, 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 be, 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 Tom is it when 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 of nutrition." Walk me through 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 at 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 it. 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. that though. That's perfect cuz I think so many people align with that. No, I and I totally agree. So the night before we go to bed we go to bed typically at around 8:00 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. It study after study and the and common sense tells us go to sleep with the sun down awake with the sunrise. Nobody does that. I mean before the sunrise. I mean watch the sunrise. 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 3:00 in the morning." She's 83. I said, "What are you doing until 3:00 in the morning?" And she said she's on her tech. All right. So I wake up. Um I do have a 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? Um 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." Um anyways, so I wake up um and and then I just I start getting ready for the day as far as the kids lunches. My my two older ones do go to a 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 farmers market, we'll go to a farmers 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 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, anytime 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, 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 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 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. I think there's probably value to that but you know as they get older and more of you know but essentially what what happens in our house is that if we are basically done with dinner by 5:30 6:00 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 on water water in the morning, noon time, evening and then you wake up Monday morning and have an avocado or greens drink so that'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 probably know 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 that'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. Mhm. Yeah, it's interesting. So, in doing um keto, which would be fun to talk about, um but in doing keto and doing it for long periods of time and taking my carbs down, in having a um 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. Um you hear a lot of people talk about that with keto. For me, it definitely was not instantaneous. It was just a a whole lot of years of living a low-carb lifestyle, um largely to manage my weight because I put on fat incredibly easily. Um but after doing that for a long time, yeah, I just sort of didn't think about it. And then 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 um anything other than just whole food, meats, greens, et cetera. 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. And when you think about being an ancestor, part of what worked for them was they couldn't get a hold of it. Cuz 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, you know, I'm uh you know, I 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, 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 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, you know, 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 you know, distance races, there was one there was one time where the 20-mi 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's inflamed and AFib is one of the issues but those people can get hypertension. You look at people and like oh that they look so healthy how do they possibly have a heart attack like Bob Harper from America's Biggest Loser. How did 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 8:00 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 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 a 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 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 are their activity was running after food or trying to avoid being someone else's food or hand-to-hand combat building shed 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 in the street? Like what is that one thing that comes as close to perfect as we're going to 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 specifically? Uh because if you're in a pool, you're in a chlorine soup, and you're breathing in the chlorine, and the chlorine's in the skin, and chlorine just destroys everything, uh including kids. So, um as much as I grew up in a chlorine pool, uh I I sorry to throw uh throw water on that parade, but so I mean if you can get a 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, do open water swimming, I think that's the best. Also like tennis. I think tennis is a great game. Uh perfect example of kind of burst activity, chasing the you know, the ball back and forth a little bit, and 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 worry about the head trauma of heading balls. My my 11-year-old uh he in in his league, they do not allow the use of the head on the ball. And I think I That's what I'm thinking about. I think as when they become 12 or 13, and it's really once they get into the 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. And 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 to head the ball at the same time and they collide, that's pretty catastrophic. 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. Uh I do love the outdoor activities. I love just going for a bike ride, going for a walk. I love hiking, stand-up paddleboarding, kayaking. Uh 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, 6 7 hours later. No one's going to do that now. But uh get them outside. Yeah, no one's going to 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 4 to 5 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. Uh love the idea of getting outside, walking barefoot. Our ancestors were outside. 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 the tendons. Uh 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, cuz the heart is innervated by the autonomic 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? Uh 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 I think that's an awesome question because, you know, you we we can all talk uh 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 we 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 uh the immune system activity, you can look at intracellular nutrients. Like, one of my favorite nutrients to order is uh vitamin K. So, there's companies that can test what's called your micronutrients, so your vitamins and minerals. for this? Inside of 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 someone with atrial fibrillation or hypertension or whatever it may be, 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 one to answer. As I was saying, that got complicated real fast. there's but there's a lot there's a lot that but that 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 is certainly is the buzzword and 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. being billed as addressing inflammation specifically? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I know, no, no, no, no, definitely. So, uh 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 want to, you know, to lower my risk from 7% to 6%. That's what the statin data shows. Wow. I want 0%. 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 I became a a father, you know, the third time when I was 47 years old. I got a 1-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 and 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. Mm, 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 uh aluminum for example. Aluminum and a lot of these metals can be in your cookware. So, your cookware is a main 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 going to 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 so, where do you get good cookware? cuz my wife eats the most bone broth? Uh our cookware is a Saladmaster. So, Saladmaster, it's been around for 75 years. It's surgical stainless steel cookware that is titanium coated. So, it's the same utensil 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, um uh 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. Uh I tell people not to eat uh uh tuna, um uh 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 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 to 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. Uh so, once again, to uh 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. Mhm. 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 embracing 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 environments, and yeah, they get they go to sleep with the sun down and awake with the sunrise, get tons of sunshine. They've done studies where they 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, and it really is, once again, it really is kind of all those different things. So, I hate when people, you know, put me on on the spot to say one thing, cuz it really should be that whole tram route, 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, cuz I don't drink coffee, but fair enough. All right, tell people where they can find your book, where they can learn more about you. So, our website is the doctorswolfson.com, and doctors is abbreviated drs. You can buy the book on my website. 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 and social media. Some of my opinions are pretty controversial, so I don't know if I'll always be on Facebook and on places like that, but 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. Take care. 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.