Podcast 545: Clogged Arteries: Why Cholesterol Isn't the Real Villain

SCOTT: If you’ve been told clogged arteries are a life sentence or that medication is your only option, this episode is for you. We’re going to be diving into how arteries become clogged, what causes the damage, and what you can do to reverse it naturally. Right after this. 

Welcome everybody. This is the Life Enthusiast Health Shots podcast. Restoring vitality to you and the planet. I’m your host Scott Paton. Joining us as usual, health engineer Martin Pytela and George. Hi George. Hi Martin.

MARTIN: Yes, George especially. George probably knows a lot about clogged arteries or at least how to unclog them because that guy is just so educated.

SCOTT: Yes, he’s full of knowledge. Makes us really happy to see him every week. All right, so make sure you like, subscribe, do all that good stuff. It helps. Share with all your friends and let’s talk about, let’s talk about our arteries. And I think where we need to start is the main difference between our philosophy and the big pharma philosophy which is, we don’t believe, if you have a symptom you need to do something, if you’re in pain and everything else, but you also need to look at the root cause. So, I think oftentimes what happens is people mistake no pain for no problem. Particularly when no pain is because of something that they’re sticking in their mouth that comes from big pharma. So let’s talk a little bit,

MARTIN: Said the man falling out of the 100th-floor window going just past the floor number 50. So far it’s going pretty good.

SCOTT: That’s right. That’s right. So let’s talk a little bit about the root cause. Let’s give everybody a little education on our arteries. We clog them up. Obviously that happens a lot. There’s lots of surgeries, stents, and all that stuff that’s being done to people, and that usually means quality of life is going to be really crappy.

MARTIN: We have been really betrayed by the industry and the lobbyists because back when, somewhere in the 60s it started when Kellogg, Mr. Kellogg, after whom Kellogg’s Flakes are named, and Mr. Kraft after whom Kraft macaroni and cheese are named, were doing their thing. They were lobbying the US government to let them have their way with what we tell people they should eat. And one of the people that they hired was some Harvard people. I forget their names. May they die in shame. They signed a report that tells us that sugar’s fine and that starch causes no problem. And they started blaming fat and connecting it to cholesterol. And they associated eating cholesterol with high circulating cholesterol. And from about 1970, we have been promoting the heck out of “eat starch.” Eat low fat. That’s how they put it. Low fat. That was the word of the day, right?

SCOTT: Because eating fat made you fat.

MARTIN: Yeah. And also gave you cholesterol, right? 

SCOTT: Right. 

MARTIN: Cholesterol in the egg yolk is that which will give you high cholesterol. And eating egg yolks was tantamount to heart disease, right? 

SCOTT: All connected and not necessarily the full picture, right? 

MARTIN: Remember people making egg white omelets?

SCOTT: I did.

MARTIN: Tastes like crap.

SCOTT: Oh, so just to interrupt you for a second, Martin, there has been a change in the health authorities in the United States, and they made a change to the food pyramid. So instead of having just a little bit at the top of good stuff, they’ve now flipped it over, and all the good stuff is on the top, but it’s wide. So eating natural foods, unprocessed foods, not eating seed oils, it’s all come along. So we’re making progress whether he listens to us or not.

MARTIN: Certainly agree that this flip of the food pyramid is actually a very good suggestion. We should be eating raw, unprocessed, unboxed items that are one or two ingredients to it rather than the long list of preservatives and colorings and emulsifiers and who knows what else that stabilizes it for a long shelf life, right?

SCOTT: Okay. So, let’s talk a little bit about the role of inflammation and plaque in our artery health.

MARTIN: So, that’s the point. So we start with starch. Which is three strings of glucose molecules hooked together. Starch comes to us from white rice, white potato, sweet potato, grains, especially wheat, and all of them. That starch put into our diet is decomposed into glucose and is expressed in the glycemic index. You can see a glycemic index of 100. That’s pure glucose, and that’s what starch does. And so when you eat that, it instantly, well, not instantly, but very quickly, turns into pure glucose and hits you in the bloodstream. And as soon as it’s in the bloodstream, that’s tantamount to being in fight or flight mode. Highly stressed, prepared for heavy expenditure of physical energy. Fight or flight.

SCOTT: So, if you have damage of some sort, let’s just say to your arteries because that’s our focus today, and you’re in fight and flight mode, you’re not going to be repairing anything.

MARTIN: That’s a fact. In fact, you’re trying to preserve your mere existence, right? For the next 5 to 10 minutes, all we care about is that you survive the next 10 minutes. 

SCOTT: And if that causes you not to repair something and that repeats over and over and over, eventually you have a heart problem.

MARTIN: Okay. So, ingest the glucose. If there’s too much circulating glucose, the next thing that happens, insulin arrives to try and get rid of it, and then it turns into triglycerides, and triglycerides turn into visceral fat, belly fat.

SCOTT: Right.

MARTIN: But while all of this is taking place, this circulating inflammation is etching, eating at the interior of the arterial walls. Essentially sandblasting the inside of your circulatory system.

SCOTT: So instead of having a smooth surface for the blood, it’s a rough surface.

MARTIN: Yeah. And on that rough surface, the caulking material that the body uses to smooth it out is cholesterol. So the cholesterol is the repair tool to try and make it less rough.

SCOTT: So I had an analogy that popped into my head as you were talking, and let’s see if this works. It goes like this. You have just built a brand new house. The painters have come in, and the person before them has drywalled the house. Now they have painted it. It’s a beautiful smooth surface. It looks great. But you get mad, and you take a hammer, and you bang three or four times and make holes in the wall. Then the handyman comes by, sees this mess you’ve made, and he’s going to fix it. So he starts taking this cocking material, plops it on, but then he’s interrupted. Someone calls out “Fire!” and he runs out of the building to see what’s going on and forgets to come back. So now you have this beautiful new wall shiny and everything with these blobs of caulking that hasn’t been fixed.

MARTIN: That’s it. This is essentially you have done the putty without sanding it off.

SCOTT: Putty without sanding. That’s right.

MARTIN: Yeah. Okay. So that’s pretty good. That’s about the analogy. And so here we have the sign. Okay. So if you have high LDL cholesterol, the LDL cholesterol is the transport tool for moving things around. The HDL is the repair mechanism. So anyway, if you have too much LDL, it’s a sign that there’s inflammation galore. If you have triglycerides, that is exactly telling you that you are overeating carbohydrates, too much starch in your food. And the final effect is this damage in your arteries. 

SCOTT: And we call it damage. So damage in the arteries, and then the stuff that gets there, the plaque that everyone says is bad, is actually trying to repair that damage. 

MARTIN: Right. So the reason we are afraid of plaque is because it can dislodge. It can come off. You end up with a thrombus, a clot. And this blood clot is a traveling speck of something like well, whatever speck traveling through the system. Now, if it hits an intersection that’s fairly tiny and blocks it, the tissue that’s behind the clot is starved of blood, starved of oxygen, and will die. If it hits your heart, a piece of your heart muscle will be either temporarily or permanently starved of oxygen. If it hits your brain, the same thing happens. So, you can either have a stroke, as in a heart attack or brain stroke. Those are the consequences of a clot. We worry about that because high cholesterol could form into clots, right? But what’s interesting is that the correlation between heart attacks and high cholesterol is highly imperfect. There’s no guarantee people die of a heart attack who have zero cholesterol to worry about, right? Because,

SCOTT: It’s the boogeyman. Whereas really we need to be concerned about the clots.

MARTIN: Well, no, the clot is a problem, and we don’t want the clots.

SCOTT: That’s what I said. We need to be worried about the clots.

MARTIN: But we also need to be worried about the heart itself because it can quit without even the cholesterol ever being high.

SCOTT: Right.

MARTIN: So the big myth is high cholesterol in your food will cause high cholesterol in your circulation. It will not because cholesterol is made in your liver to build steroidal hormones, such as in estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, anything that has the ‘ster’  in the name are steroidal hormones that are made from cholesterol. S-t-e-r-o-l, okay, that is the same stuff. So if you end up with a cholesterol lowering drug, the first thing that happens to you is that your inflammation level will go unchecked. You will have less cholesterol but not less inflammation. So you will start hurting in your muscles and joints, and you will start losing your brain processing power.

SCOTT: That’s a problem because we have drugs that look after pain. Just take some of those, right?

MARTIN: Well, that’s a different problem. The statin drug doesn’t take care of your pain. It just takes care of your cholesterol in response to your stupid diet.

SCOTT: Right. All right.  So, let’s talk a little bit about the role of nitric oxide.

MARTIN: Oh, that’s a cool thing. So, expansion of the artery. Every time your heart squeezes, it ejects about 100 milliliters, 3 and a half ounces of blood. Every heartbeat, which when resting is somewhere around 60 a minute, one per second. So 3 ounces, 3 ounces, 3 ounces, squish! By the way, right? Within one minute, the entire gallon of blood that you have within your body will be through your heart. Every minute. 

SCOTT: That’s amazing when you think about it.

MARTIN: But it also only takes about a minute for you to exsanguinate if you cut a major artery, right? So anyway, so if you could see the heart and then there’s the aorta, it looks like this upside down. So the aorta and then it branches out into these other branches up to the head, down to the arms, down to the body, down to the legs, right? These are the branches. So then the pipes, the arteries, they’re not passive. They’re made of smooth muscle. And it’s like a snake swallowing a mouse. When you squirt that 3 ounces of blood out into the system, it travels through the pipe, and it’s being in a wave-style promoted or moved along the length of the pipe.

SCOTT: So if we just depended on our heart to pump and that piece of blood to get any distance.

MARTIN: The heart would have to be about ‘yay’ big and have to have a horsepower of god knows what.

SCOTT: There’s more to move in the blood than just the heart. That’s interesting because it wasn’t something I had ever considered before.

MARTIN: Right. So now comes the nitric oxide. The nitric oxide is associated and correlated with your ability to expand and contract these smooth muscle vessels. 

SCOTT: Okay.

MARTIN: The flexibility. So now visualize the garden hose, or maybe not. Visualize an air pump that you’re pumping your flat tire on your automobile. And every time you push down the pump, a blob of air goes through that thing, and it just expands and contracts as you push that air through. Well, if that hose is stiff, the only way for the air to get through is to raise the pressure because you either expand to allow the pressure to travel, or if the expansion doesn’t happen, the pressure goes up, right? That’s where we get stiffening of the arteries from lack of flexibility of the missing nitric oxide, and the blood pressure goes up in response to the volume still needs to go through.

SCOTT: Right. So what role does nitric oxide play in this?

MARTIN: Facilitates the expansion and contraction. 

SCOTT: Oh, okay.

MARTIN: So it’s the blood pressure management if you will. There’s another role in it. Nitric oxide is what the famous blue pill gives you a rise in. Because in order for your blood vessels in your spongy tissues in your penis to allow for the blood to flood in and to increase the size of that tiny little organ to something that’s useful. You need to put a lot of blood in there. And nitric oxide is the agent that facilitates the expansion of those little blood vessels for it to blow up into the size it needs to be for performance.

SCOTT: So it’s important we have the right amount of nitric oxide in our bodies. What are some ways that we can do that naturally?

MARTIN: Some algae-type things. I remember Ecklonia Cava being the most famous for that. You probably have some notes on that that I don’t remember exactly. I know the amino acids, citrulline, arginine, whatever they’re in, they’ll do it.

SCOTT: Would being out in the sun help?

MARTIN: Well, that you get more vitamin D3, probably.

SCOTT: Okay. And one of the other things that they were talking about was Magnesium.

MARTIN: Okay. Well, so now Magnesium is of course, the flexibility mineral, right? Calcium makes you more stiff, Magnesium more flexible. So to facilitate flexibility, you want to have Magnesium on board. I just don’t remember what you need to eat to have more nitric oxide in your diet. I think the main idea here would be the magnesium-calcium balance. [Note: I should have thought of red beets, and to mention that stevia lowers it.]

SCOTT: And not eating garbage, right? If your general health is good and you’re drinking good water, structured water, then your body is going to be able to handle all of that.

MARTIN: I would go with that. I want to eat things that are rich in Magnesium. So that would be all the green things. Chlorophyll is the most magnesium you can get. So wheat grass, barley grass, chlorella, those types of things, right? Chocolate. Chocolate is famously rich in magnesium, if you can believe it.

SCOTT: I haven’t had a chocolate chip cookie, but I’ve been really good at not eating chocolate bars and chocolate for the last, let me say “bad chocolate,” like milk chocolate and all those things. And I haven’t missed it at all. It’s really weird. I think when I did my nicotine thing, it just totally rewired me on certain foods because before I was like, “Oh, I got to find chocolate. Looking for, opening up all the drawers looking for chocolate.” 

MARTIN: You were really up to chocolate.

SCOTT: Yeah. 

MARTIN: I do enjoy chocolate. I like bitter chocolate.

SCOTT: Well, then I think to be better, right, if I’m going to have chocolate, then I need to have 80 to 90% chocolate, dark chocolate so that I get the bioflavins, all the good stuff. That was what I told myself.

MARTIN: Polyphenols, right?

SCOTT: Polyphenols. Yes, that’s right. So, you can use your health knowledge to support you in eating some bad things.

MARTIN: I can justify just about any stupid thing I want.

SCOTT: That’s right.

MARTIN: But honestly, I want to tell you that I do enjoy chocolate. It’s just that I try to maintain some level of sanity, right? So maybe this much chocolate as opposed to this much chocolate. Like not the whole bunny, please.

MARTIN: Right. So George added beets and cloves.

MARTIN: All right, I’ll take your word for it, George. Don’t have the search engine going to answer the question. So, beets, especially red beets, are famous for supporting liver health.

SCOTT: Oh, okay. I didn’t realize that. Although I always try to have beet juice and pickled beets.

MARTIN: Those are very healthy.

SCOTT: All right. So, now we understand how our arteries get clogged. We get this plaque and cholesterol and stuff trying to repair, but we don’t let our body repair. So, how can we reverse these clogged arteries? And I specifically want to talk about the reverse cholesterol transport, we have a built-in recycling system, right?

MARTIN: Well, we do sell an enzyme tool. It’s called Lipicept, which you can find on our website that lowers your cholesterol by 20 to 30 points. If you must. But the quickest way to reverse your cholesterol in your circulation, in your body, in your blood is to switch your diet. Lower the temperature of the burning within your body, which you will accomplish by switching to more fat, less starch.

SCOTT: Right. I have a list of about six things. Let’s just quickly go through it because I know time is flying. One way to support this natural process of reversing cholesterol is niacin, right? And then boosting the HDL cholesterol because you talked about that earlier. And then, oh, this is one that we just hate. Exercise.

MARTIN: What do we hate about that?

SCOTT: We’re all sitting in front of a computer for 12 hours a day.

MARTIN: I know. 

SCOTT: I was being a bit facetious, but cardio is good. 

MARTIN: Anything that’s not used will atrophy. So, better use it.

SCOTT: And then fasting. So giving up,

MARTIN: Okay, now that’s an interesting thing, right? You will create this artificial stress on the body either by exercise rather than physical work, you just move heavy things or walk carrying stuff, or this business about not eating where you will take a 16-hour or 24-hour break from food and force your body to start consuming fat reserves.

SCOTT: And I’ve been trying to have a full day fast and I’ve been totally unsuccessful. 

What I realize is you have to set things up for success, whatever you’re doing, right? If you want to lift weights, then make sure there are weights nearby that you can go and lift. And it’s the same thing with when you’re fasting. First of all, what are the triggers? Like, “Oh, I watched the news, and I have to eat some popcorn or drink a coke or whatever because I’m so upset.” This is what I notice is when I get stressed out and I don’t realize I’m getting stressed out, it’s like that triggers wanting to eat. And once you realize what your triggers are and what causes you to want to go and eat when you shouldn’t be eating, then you need to remove those things. So my example is very simplistic, right? You watch the news and then there’s a commercial for Big Macs and you go in the fridge and you eat cake. Right.

MARTIN: Scott, give me a space for about one minute explanation.

SCOTT: Yes.

MARTIN: Metabolic typing, endocrine dominance. Three main types. Thyroid, adrenal, and pituitary. The thyroid types, you and I are thyroid types. We are attracted to starchy foods and we are not good at fasting. We are supposed to eat three meals a day, each of them with some protein and some fat because if we go starchy, if you and I start a day with a bowl of cereal or a piece of cake or,

SCOTT: I’m asleep in an hour.

MARTIN: Well, it’s just a disaster. Now the people who are adrenal dominant, they do exceedingly fine on a large dinner and zero breakfast. The pituitary are the other way around. They do well on a large breakfast and zero dinner. So for them, intermittent fasting is just a natural way of being. For a thyroid type, it’s actually highly unnatural.

SCOTT: Thank you for that. I appreciate that. Because it is like the hardest thing, and I don’t want to take a pill that cuts my appetite. But I like the idea of three smaller meals spread out throughout the day and then stop and don’t eat anything after eight or nine at night. Go to bed early so you let your body do your thing. Right. 

MARTIN: There was a popular thing called bulletproof coffee. Dave Asprey popularized. And I invented bulletproof coffee in 1971. I just didn’t know it and didn’t publish it. But what I did is at my girlfriend’s we made what we called the Swedish coffee. We boiled milk, or we brought milk to a boiling temperature, and then we poured it over coffee beans that were ground. We called it Swedish coffee, and it was essentially fat-loaded, made with milk, coffee. So anyway, I drank a mug of it, and I didn’t eat the rest of the day. I was energized, and I needed nothing. Well, what’s the story here? Well, you push in caffeine and fat, and you’re good. Well, the Tibetan monks make fermented tea with yak butter. They live on that. Again, hot water with herbs and a lot of fat.

SCOTT: Right. So, this is interesting. I’m glad you brought all this up because one of the items on the list was, it’s supporting your cholesterol reduction is low carb or keto diets. And we keep talking about this all the time. What’s your metabolic type? Low carb, that’s good, keto diets.

MARTIN: This gets more complicated because there’s the other thing: how do you alkalize and acidify? The oxidizer alkalizes with fats; the autonomic alkalizes with carbs, and we need to watch because if you overalkalize, you become depressed; if you overacidify, you become anxious, nervous, and unpleasant. So we need to watch that. So there are these two vectors. Sometimes they’re in harmony, and in some people they’re not.

SCOTT: Right. And we have three, how are we doing? Okay. We have three nutritional support items that my research had brought up. One you’d already talked about Magnesium. I think polyphenols you’d also mentioned.

MARTIN: Polyphenols are in all of these pigments, right? You’ll find it in olive oil. You’ll find it in cocoa. I should show you we do have some cocoa available.

SCOTT: And actually that’s my next section. The best drink to unclog arteries is cacao powder. High in flavonoids, boosts nitric oxide. I can’t talk. And increases blood flow to places that you want it to increase to. 

MARTIN: Yeah. So, we have had this lovely relationship with a company that’s based in Canada owned by a Peruvian expatriate who brings this lovely stuff from Peru. Criollo Cacao, which is one of the possible versions of cacao. There are different varieties of it, but this Criollo is just nicely exotic tasting, and this is pure as can be and organic and made by people who care and all of that business, right? And now we’re selling off what we have because Canada got stuck with a 30% tariff. No, 35, which is increased by an additional 10 by the people who are administering the collection of the tariff. I could just go wild. Listen, I pay the tariff on the shipment of the thing, and they charge me a 10% management fee of the tariff they collected. It’s such a highway robbery I could just spit. But anyway, it’s all designed to put an end to international trade. I don’t know how intelligent it is for Americans to put a tariff on something that they cannot grow themselves, but yeah.

SCOTT: Yep. So, anyway, this is a product that can really help. And we have another one that can really help, which I’ll bring up now. Just a second. 

MARTIN: All right, go for it. That’s you with your cacao. And try the other one and go. Aha. That’s the stuff we do make in the United States.

SCOTT: Yes. 

MARTIN: No tariff.

SCOTT: And I’m just going to put this up right here. This is my heart studies month. So, that’s what I’m drinking every day.

MARTIN: That’s great.

SCOTT: Start off the day. 

MARTIN: This stuff needs to be taken on an empty stomach because it’s loaded with amino acids. But it’s also loaded with other things. And one of the things that it’s loaded with are trace minerals, chromium and vanadium. Chromium is called GTF, glucose tolerance factor. It manages or helps your body manage the glucose that you get in your body. But there’s a lot of stuff in it. This stuff deals with the stiffening of the arteries, the clogging of the arteries, the aging issues, the fat processing issues. There are layers upon layers in this product. 

SCOTT: It’s a beautiful product, and we’ll put them both in the links to both in the descriptions. 

MARTIN: Yeah, you want to be taking this maybe steady all the time if you’re one of the people who needs help, or at least now and then every few months do a bottle of this to flush out whatever is accumulating and just give yourself a cleanout.

SCOTT: Cool. There you have it. Anything else we want to talk about?

MARTIN: Heart. With Heart Studies, you will have better sexual performance because your circulatory system will be enhanced. And that goes for boys and girls both. In girls, it’s not as visible that they’re failing. They just simply lose interest or can’t get to a climax. With boys, it becomes so obvious because they can’t even get an erection going. That is one of the tools that you would want to use for improving the situation.

SCOTT: Yes. 

MARTIN: And if you want, take Iridesca. That’s really going to give your body a tuneup. Upgrade. 

SCOTT: Awesome.

SCOTT: All right. And every step you take makes everything easier and better, right? You don’t have to do everything all at once. Just take one step at a time and all of a sudden you’ll find that you're where you want to be as opposed to procrastinating or not doing anything. 

MARTIN: Yup. Great.

SCOTT: Martin, any last words before we head out?

MARTIN: No. Exercise is the basis of it, and then antioxidants are very helpful because they will slow down the aging and the destruction, and they are found in the pigments in the food you eat. So eat colorful foods. It’s the rainbow. More spices, more herbs. The raw is better than cooked. Organic is better than industrial and so on. Layers upon layers.

SCOTT: I saw something interesting. So, this is about eating raw food. And that was, they said a lot of people like they’ll get carrots, right? And they’ll stick it under the water and they’ll just rinse it off or whatever. And I think some people there are certain things that they stick into the water like they’ll soak them to clean them. And this person said, “Don’t use any of that other stuff. Just use baking soda. 

MARTIN: Sure.

SCOTT: So put baking soda in. And he said that it’s basic and it neutralizes the acidity of the pesticides.

MARTIN: Interesting. 

SCOTT: All right. Thank you very much, Martin, for taking time out of your busy day. Really appreciate you and the knowledge that you share with our audience. And thank you, audience, everybody watching live and/or on the replay later. 

MARTIN: Please share this. Please subscribe and share because honestly it makes a huge difference to us because the algorithm wants to know that somebody cared.

SCOTT: Right. And it also makes a huge difference to those people because they may start on a journey to changing their lives. Too many people wait until they go to the doctor and say, “I got a pain in my chest.” And by then all they want to do is cut you open and fix,

MARTIN: Give you stents.

SCOTT: New hearts and all those good things. And you don’t need to do that. So George says he does share and he cares. Thank you George. 

MARTIN: George. You are a care bear, and we appreciate you.

SCOTT: We love you. All right. So this has been the Life Enthusiast health shots podcast restoring vitality to you and the planet. We’ll see you next time, everybody. Bye bye.