Transcript of Episode 114: The Truth About Statin Drugs and Cholesterol
With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and special guest Dr. Jack Wolfson.
Meredith:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Cellular Healing TV. This is Episode Number 114. I’m your host, Meredith Dykstra. We have Dr. Pompa on the line, of course, and today we have special guest Dr. Jack Wolfson, who is known as The Paleo Cardiologist. Before I introduce Dr. Wolfson, I’m going to tell you a little bit about him. Here’s his bio. Jack Wolfson, D., FACC. is a board-certified cardiologist who uses nutrition and supplements to prevent and treat disease. After ten years performing angiograms, pacemakers, and other cardiac procedures, Dr. Wolfson started Wolfson Integrative Cardiology in 2012 to offer patients the ultimate in holistic heart care.
Raised in Chicago, he attended Midwestern University for his DO degree and completed a three-year Internal Medicine residency and three-year cardiology fellowship. He was selected as the chief fellow of his class. Together with his wife, Dr. Heather Wolfson, D.C., they are The Drs. Wolfson. Their website TheDrsWolfson.com is an excellent resource for holistic health and lifestyle information. The Drs. Wolfson have two beautiful boys who were born at home, nursed for over three years, and they are still co-sleeping. Amazon best-seller “The Paleo Cardiologist” is the first book by Dr. Wolfson. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV, Dr. Wolfson. So glad to have you on the show.
Dr. Wolfson:
Thanks so much, Meredith. It’s a pleasure to talk to you and Dr. Pompa, of course. Very excited to share this information with the rest of the world.
Dr. Pompa:
Thank you. I said go run and get that book; hold that book up, The Paleo Cardiologist. It says ardiologist there because your finger is on the C, but it sure says cardiologist. We’re going to turn you into an ardiologist.
Dr. Wolfson:
Yeah, I’m such a bad promoter, but there you go. There’s a beautiful-looking buffalo on the cover, and it’s been fantastic. Chapter 14 of the book is called “The Wonders of Chiropractic;” the book is not all about paleo. A couple of chapters are on paleo, but Chapter 14 is “The Wonders of Chiropractic.” There I share evidence-based medicine about chiropractic and how I refer all my patients out for chiropractic, and there’s a couple different stories about my wife in there.
My wife gets on me a little bit. She said, “The chapter on chiropractic, it’s only eight pages long. You’ve got to include this, and you’ve got to include that,” and I said, “No, that’s what the professionals, the chiropractors, are for. They can really explain their message well.” My point of saying it is that everybody in my practice has to see a chiropractor as part of heart health, but I’m not going to dive deeply into the science, although I do have a nice depiction on there with the brain, and the spinal cord, and the whole autonomic nervous system, which supplies every organ in the body, including the heart and the blood vessels, what’s near and dear to me. I really illustrate that to patients, and it’s been fantastic.
Dr. Pompa:
It brings me to the first question I have for you. I was at a conference with you, and you told a story. I love when I get these MDs like yourself—and I just interviewed one of the leading stem cell biologists, Dr. Bruce Lipton, before this interview, and I asked him the same question. Man, how did you get here from there, cardiologist to this guy that writes a book like that without a chapter about the benefits of chiropractic? How did you get there from here? Tell that story.
Dr. Wolfson:
I was in practice for two and a half years out here in Arizona doing angiograms and pacemakers, like Meredith was saying, staying up all night on call and all that fun stuff, and I was definitely getting frustrated with what was going on in medicine. You’d see people that are on three, four, or five blood pressure drugs and yet their blood pressure is still sky-high, and you’re like, “Why are we not fixing this person? Why are they not normal?” You’d be working in the hospital, somebody would come in with congestive heart failure, and you’d tune them up with pharmaceuticals and send them out, and three weeks later, they would come back in with the exact same thing. It’s a revolving door.
Around that time, also, I tell the story in the book extensively about my father. My father was a cardiologist. He was a DO like myself. He was a brilliant man. All his friends were DOs. I went to osteopathic school because he was the head of cardiology at the school. In his mid-50's, he starts getting sick with a Parkinson’s-like diagnosis, and then he dies from it at the age of 63. I’m frustrated with the patients, and I see what happens to my father, and the medical doctors at Mayo Clinic just say, “Nothing we can do.”
At the time, I meet the woman who would become my wife, and she starts whispering all these different things in my ear like, “You’re not going after the cause of people’s problems. Your father got sick because of poor nutrition and environmental pollutants. He never did get chiropractic care. He was around radiation as a cardiologist. The hospital is the sickest, most toxic place in the entire world, and that’s where this man lived for 40 years of his life.” After meeting Heather, I opened up my eyes very quickly because so many medical doctors will shut out on that. They won’t even listen to another opinion besides what they’ve been brainwashed to believe.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s exactly right. That’s where it started. Then you told another story. Something happened at the wedding.
Dr. Wolfson:
As far as chiropractic is concerned, I used to run marathons and triathlons. I had my share of back pain, and I’ve seen D.O.’s before. When I was in medical school, I was having some headaches, nothing real serious, and one of the quality osteopathic manipulators grabbed ahold of my cervical spine and adjusted me. I did fantastic after that. Then with the back pain, I went and saw a chiropractor, this old-timer in the suburbs of Chicago—Robert Bonahoom was his name—in the late 90s, and I got better very quickly. My back was great.
Meeting Heather and seeing her adjust children with ear infections that are on their way to ear tube surgery or strep throat, or whatever the complaint was, my wife’s answer was always chiropractic. It made such a huge difference in the children that were coming to our house or in her office. They’re almost listless, and she would adjust them, and now the kids are running around the office or our house with our children, and it was just this miraculous recovery.
We’re at our wedding, and the ceremony happens. Now it’s the cocktail hour. We’re enjoying ourselves, talking to friends, and someone comes running up and says, “Grandpa David passed out,” so we run over to Heather’s grandfather. He’s 86 years old. He’s laying on the ground. I get down on my knees and check his pulse, and he’s got a pulse. It’s slow, but he’s breathing. It looks like he had a common faint, which I had seen hundreds in my career.
While I’m checking his pulse and making sure he’s breathing, I’m not actually doing anything, right? There is my wife, Dr. Heather, in her wedding gown that cost me an arm and a leg, she’s on the grass in her wedding gown, and she’s at his head holding his cervical spine and then just goes bang. It’s the first time he’s ever been adjusted in 86 years, and he quickly opens up his eyes. Then he’s sitting up, and then he’s standing within a couple minutes and he’s back at the wedding. I’ve seen, like I said, hundreds of people pass out, and here’s a guy who recovers so quickly. Most people, sometimes they feel lousy for hours, days, even up to a week, where they are not fully recovered. This is an 86-year-old guy who is back at the wedding, and that is the power of chiropractic.
Dr. Pompa:
That is a game-changer in anyone’s life, seeing that, right? It’s like, “What are you doing?” So what does your practice look like now? The average person comes in with heart condition, and now your approach is obviously a lot different. There’s a time and a place for medications, but what are you doing day in and day out?
Dr. Wolfson:
Obviously, there is a time and a place for pharmaceuticals and for emergency procedures, and that’s just that; it’s for emergency situations. For prevention, the medical doctors offer nothing. They have nothing when it comes to prevention. They’ve got some statin drugs and blood pressure drugs that barely have efficacy according to their data. What my practice is all about is not about how do we reduce someone’s risk of a heart attack, stroke, or dying in the next five years from 7% down to 6%. We’re talking about how do get them down to 0%. That’s what I want to offer my patients, so I do a long intake with people, 1 hour and 15 minutes, getting their history, their examination, finding out about their sleep, and about their diet, and about their physical activity. I hate to push the point here, but also talking about chiropractic care, why it works and why every one of my patients has to be under chiropractic care.
Dr. Pompa:
They must look at you like, “Really?” You must get some odd looks from the patients when you talk about that.
Dr. Wolfson:
For ten years, I was in a practice. I was a senior partner at that practice up until 2012, and there I certainly got a lot of looks. I got a lot of complaints from patients directly at the practice from other referring doctors who would say, “Why is Wolfson referring my patients out to chiropractors? Why is Wolfson referring my patients out to naturopaths? Why is he taking my patient off drugs? Why is he talking about these crazy paleo diets?”
In 2012, I left that practice to open up my own practice, Wolfson Integrative Cardiology. Here, the patients know what they’re in for. They know when they come to me what they’re going to be getting. Some of them are extremely well-educated. They’ve been into the natural world, Dan, since before you and I were born in some cases. They are, like I said, very knowledgeable, so they have their expectations.
I do the most in-depth cardiovascular testing. I’m a DO, but I wanted to be a cardiologist like my father right from the beginning. I do now adjust friends and family. I’m pretty good with cervical stuff, but I leave the patients for the professionals. Once again, I have to use the blood test. I have to use some ancillary things, and I do very in-depth stuff to give people the answers. “You’re taking these supplements. Are they working?” That’s what we look for.
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about some of the testing, and then we’ll talk about some of the things that you do. Obviously, the diet, right? I love the picture on your book of the buffalo because at my last seminar I was just talking about the American Indians. Now they have all the diabetes and heart disease. Well, the buffalo is the mainstay of their diet. The most fatty portions of that buffalo were cherished. They ate the whole buffalo, organs included.
We look at that. We look at how these people ate and then we look at a modern diet, and we wonder why there is so much diabetes and heart disease. We’re seeing that throughout every culture, so we’ll get there. I think that if we asked our audience, maybe not just this audience, they all have great fear with cholesterol. I always say, “Hey, look, I’m looking at the evidence, and total cholesterol doesn’t really matter. It shows that more people have heart attacks with low cholesterol or normal cholesterol.” What type of cholesterol test do you like, and what other tests do you like?
Dr. Wolfson:
I think you bring a very good point when it comes to cholesterol. We do know there’s plenty of data that say the higher your serum cholesterol is, the lower your risk of dementia.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.
Dr. Wolfson:
The higher the cholesterol, the higher the risk of cancer. Most people that have very low cholesterol levels, that’s a sign that cancer is lurking. When I say total cholesterol, you’re right, the correlation is trivial at best. What really matters is taking a deep dive, looking at the lipid particles, apoB, apoA, LpA, all these different markers of inflammation that tell us so much. Then, of course, we can look at genetics. We can look at serum levels of omega-3, and intracellular nutrients, and heavy metals. The medical doctors are typically just doing the 1970's blood test, the total cholesterol, total LDL, total APL, and those are very poorly correlated with outcomes.
Dr. Pompa:
You took my favorite test right out there. We look at CRPs. I want to know HGBA1C. I want to know glucose values and insulin values which cause oxidation of the particles of cholesterol. That’s the tests that we do. The NMR test, if you’re looking at a lab like LabCorp, it looks at the particle number and the size of the particles. That’s what oxidizes. We are on the same page, doc. It’s amazing that modern medicine hasn’t caught up with that yet.
My clients and the people watching this will go to their doctors and they will say, “I want this test,” and they have no idea of that test. They’re still running good old cholesterol levels, which I agree with you, I agree the higher values actually show a healthier person. The lower values scare me to death. It’s opposite. What about the statins? I can’t even leave that conversation with statins. People are afraid to death to come off statins because the doctor said that they can’t. I’m looking at research going, “Statins cause dementia. Statins cause liver failure, joint problems, type 2 diabetes.” Why aren’t they looking at these studies, doc?
Dr. Wolfson:
I think, first off, when it comes to what is happening with the typical medical doctors, they don’t have time. They don’t have time because they see patients every ten minutes. I know that because I used to do the same thing. “Hey, Mr. Smith, great to see you. Here’s your statin drug. Here’s your blood pressure drug. Get a stress test on the way out. Bye.” Then when they check the blood test, a lot of doctors don’t even check the blood test anymore. They feel that everybody should be on statin drugs. There’s a faction within cardiology that says, “Don’t even check the lipid numbers. Don’t even waste your breath. You’re going to put them on a maximum dose of statins anyway, so why even bother?” I think that’s why patients are frustrated.
We offer people so much more. There was a recent study that came out from the Cleveland Clinic and was quoted on by Steve Nissen, who is one of the most famous cardiologists in the world, where he said that there is a true rate of myalgias, muscle aches and pains, that is triple what we thought it was by the original studies. These patients are clearly suffering and get bypassed by the doctors that say, “Oh, well, that’s fibromyalgia. It’s got nothing to do with statins. Just tough it out and stay on it.” Who wants to live like that, especially when we’re talking about trivial benefit on the statin drugs?
Once again, I don’t say don’t take statin drugs, although that is how I feel. I don’t say that in the book. In the book, I say here are some studies and here’s what the studies say. The studies show statins work in certain populations by a little bit, but when the person goes to their medical doctor, the conversation goes like this: “Here’s your prescription for Lipitor.” “I don’t want to take Lipitor.” The doctor says, “Do you want to have a heart attack? Do you want to have a stroke? Do you want to die?” The patient says, “No, I don’t want to have a heart attack, stroke, or die.” “Well, then, take your Lipitor.” Those are the scare tactics. It’s not information. That’s not informed consent. That’s not informing the patient; that’s just scaring the patient. That’s, to use a common phrase among what is going on in schools today, bullying. That’s bullying the patient. Tell the patient the truth. When doctors like you and I show the data to the population, they walk out of there and say, “Wow. I don’t want to take this drug. I want an alternative.”
Now, there may be some fool, if I may be so bold and brash as to say fool, or ignorant person who says, “Huh, 7% down to 6%, that’s 1%, but I may be that 1 person who takes drugs every single day for 5 years to get that benefit.” That’s true, Mr. Jones. You may be that one person. If you want to take the drug, go take it. You’re not right for my practice. You can go see the cardiologist down the street. The majority of people, when they’re truly informed, refuse not only drugs, but most cardiology procedures. When you fully inform the patient about the risks, the benefits, and the alternatives to angiograms, bypass surgeries, pacemakers, and defibrillators, a lot of times people, rightfully so, opt for an alternative.
Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Jack, it’s amazing because, like you, I can only give people the information. Here it is; you have to make your own decision. Please, make that decision with your doctor. Let’s educate them here. Take these studies to your doctor. The doctors don’t even take the studies. They won’t take them out of their hands. They say, “Doc, look at this. This is what I found,” and they say, “There’s a lot of studies out there.”
Meanwhile, these are published in medical journals. It’s not like he just found it on the internet, but that’s what they attack. “Oh, there’s all kinds of crap on the internet.” No, no, no. These are published studies from New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, you name it, and they won’t even look at it. How is it possible, Dr. Jack? If someone brings me something, I look at it. If I’m wrong, show me I’m wrong. I want to be right.
Dr. Wolfson:
The purpose of my book was twofold. It’s to educate patients, number one. Number two, it’s to stick in the face of their cardiologists. What I tell them is that if the cardiologist says, “Oh, Wolfson, I’ve heard about him. He’s a crazy cardiologist. He married this girl, and he got brainwashed into her line of thinking. He’s just in love. He’ll say anything that his wife says.” Here’s the references at the end of my book, and these are references from mainstream journals, over 300 of them, that tell us why we do things. If the doctor is insulting me, he’s also insulting the 300 MDs, and PhDs, and other holistic providers at the end of this book who did their research. That’s who they’re insulting.
The research is out there, but like you said, the doctors don’t want to read it. They’ve got no time to read it. The doctors learn from the drug reps who come in to bring them lunch, take them out for dinner, give them their freebies, and take them on trips. I know it because I lived it. The studies are there that say doctors are influenced to prescribe drugs by a pen. A free pen influences a doctor to write a prescription.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s crazy. Here’s the other thing. Let’s say we get beyond the meds and have a more educated person come in and say, “Okay, doc, but what else can I do besides the statins? I want to change my diet.” Of course, most of them will just laugh and say, “Oh, diet has nothing to do with it.” People tell me that. I’m like, “Really? They actually said that?” Let’s say that one says, “Oh, okay, here’s what you can do.” The advice is going to go like this: low-fat, low-calorie, and exercise more. That’s all the advice. What do you think about that advice?
Dr. Wolfson:
What’s even sadder about that, Dan, is that the doctor giving the advice doesn’t follow that diet and doesn’t live that lifestyle. In the practice I left, two-thirds of the doctors, at least, would be classified as overweight or obese. Who’s going to listen to that person? Dan, you are someone who talks the talk and walks the walk; that’s who patients want to listen to. I, of course, live the same way. When it comes to nutrition, we tell people that it’s nutrition and environmental pollutants that are the cause of all disease.
Can you imagine, Dan, on the first day of medical school, I get there and I’m sitting in the big auditorium with 250 other wannabe doctors, and some PhD gets up there and says, “Okay, we’re going to start medical school, but I want to just tell you this: The cause of all disease is poor nutrition and environmental pollutants”? That would’ve just summed up everything. Instead, I’ve got to learn about 30 different skin lesions and 25 different causes of pancreatitis. It would’ve been so simple and put it all in perspective, but of course, the doctors aren’t doing that.
We’re not talking about nutrition. The nutrition guidelines are a joke. The low-fat diet is a joke. It was based on a faulty study from the 1960's by Ancel Keys and others. There were plenty of other people that were shouting differently, but the difference was people like Ancel Keys were all funded by the cereal makers, the bread makers, Kellogg, Nabisco, and Quaker Oats. Those of us in the grass-fed animal camp and eating our organic vegetables, and nuts, and seeds, and eggs, and avocados, and coconuts were left behind, and the world suffered for it. Diabetes exploded. Heart disease exploded. Dementia exploded. Cancer exploded. You name it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Ancel Keys, for those watching who don’t know who he is, he really did. He was pictured on Time magazine and all the big magazines like this guy had the answer. He hand-picked certain countries that looked like a trend in the lower fat, the longer they lived, the less heart disease, but it was the exact opposite. When you put in all the numbers and all the data, it showed the opposite. That’s what people don’t understand. Countries eating more of a diet that was higher in fat and lower in carbohydrates actually had the lowest heart disease rates. People don’t understand that.
Yet here’s the thing: You can’t flip the television on in the day and not hear about a low-fat, low-calorie recipe that doesn’t cause heart disease, and it’s low in cholesterol and will lower your cholesterol. It is the market. We buy Cheerios off of other brands because it is said to lower cholesterol three or four points. This is what people are exposed to, doc. Where’s the sense in it? How many books can we write? How many years of studies can we say, “This is wrong”? The American Heart Association still backs a low-fat diet. Where do we go from here?
Dr. Wolfson:
I think they’ve got mud in their eyes, cake on their face, or whatever the metaphor is. They’ll be very slow to reverse what their recommendations are for the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology. Although, they are starting to come around. The word of you, and I, and other doctors is getting out there. I’m speaking at an event called Paleo Effects at the end of May, and there are going to be 4,000 paleo people there in Austin, Texas, so I think people are really gravitating towards that. I know you’re a big ketogenic guy, and the evidence-based that ketogenic involves, and I think things are definitely moving in that direction, but the powers on the other side are obviously tremendous. They’re not going to give up easy from Quaker Oats, Kellogg’s, and Nabisco.
I just read a study yesterday; you’re going to flip when you hear this if you didn’t see it. They compared lipid numbers in a group of people that got corn oil versus olive oil. Wouldn’t you know it, the corn oil group did better. If you look at the bottom of the paper, the sponsor of the study is the company that makes Mazola corn oil. Can you imagine that? Personally, I think when it comes to oils, there’s a lot of disparity. There’s a lot of different factors that go into it. I think some people with APOE 34 and 44 genes really have to watch their added oil intake. Shoot, if you look at the Mediterranean diet, where they’re given liters of olive oil to use on a weekly basis, they have incredible outcomes. I try and tell patients to eat tons of olives because the nutrients, and the phytonutrients, and the phenolic compounds, and the healthy fats that are inside the actual olive is just tremendous.
Dr. Pompa:
Hey, doc, I’m for keto diets. I’m for paleo diets. I wrote an article called Diet Variation, and I teach it. I think when we look at our ancient ancestors in these cultures, the Hunza people, the Tibetans, the American Indians, you name it, you can go down the list of these very healthy people, and they have diet variation and are all low in carb. However, when you look at, say, the Hunza people or the American Indians, in the winter they would go into a very high-fat, very higher-protein diet. Then in the spring, they all fasted because they didn’t have access to the foods and the harvest yet. In the summer, they went into more of a vegetarian diet—still low carb, by the way, but it was definitely a higher carb for what they would normally eat. The diet would shift.
We were forced to do dietary changes in the past. Today, we’re not. Everybody eats the same eight foods. I’m a believer in diet variation, but I think, in common, we understand that today’s carbohydrates, even in studies, they consider low-carb diet; to me, it’s still a high-carb diet. They call 180 carbs a day a low-carb diet in some of the studies, and I chuckle. I have trouble getting in 180 grams of carbs a day. They’re calling that a low-carb diet, for goodness’ sake. I think we resonate on the fact that today, no matter what, people are heating too high in carbohydrates, and it’s driving inflammation. It’s driving glucose. It drives oxidation of fats, and cell membranes, and those things. We’re on the same page. It has to be changed, the way people up and down are looking at diet.
Dr. Wolfson:
I think that’s also true when you’re talking about that seasonal variation because everybody these days, when it comes to fruits, they’re having fruit for breakfast, fruit after lunch, and fruit after dinner, and the fruit smoothies. When our Paleolithic ancestors ate fruit seasonally, in the Northern Hemisphere, it would be when things ripen in August, September, or October. The fruit back then was wild berries and crabapples, as opposed to today, it’s super sweet, modified, hybridized fruit. Even back then, when they did wrap up on that carb intake, it was in preparation for the wintertime when they needed to store all that fuel in their body as fat, just like you said. I totally agree with you there.
Dr. Pompa:
Here’s the thing: We got to healthy conferences, you and I. We get invited to lecture at healthy conferences, and most of the people are eating these fruits, the apples and the bananas. You see them gravitate to it. They’re healthy, but they’re still gravitating to the sugar foods that are considered healthy. Is a banana even really a banana today? Eat a banana, and see what happens to your glucose. It soars. They’re doing it day in and day out. Healthy people eat bananas almost every day.
Dr. Wolfson:
I tell people a piece of fruit a day max, but if you’re trying to lose weight or you’re trying to control blood sugar, get rid of it. It’s definitely not necessary. All the antioxidants we need, you can find in the vegetables. You can find it in the nuts and seeds. You can find it in the avocados, and the coconuts, and the aforementioned olives.
Dr. Pompa:
I like to limit them even to the berry family when they have challenges with blood glucose or inflammation. It’s a more primitive fruit, less altered, and less glucose rising. Again, arguably, it’s the fruit that our ancestors really gravitated to. I didn’t see them grabbing bananas the way bananas are today, that’s for sure.
Dr. Wolfson:
Most certainly. Another issue with fruit, too, is it does continue to stoke that sugar craving. They may start off the day with berries or
with another piece of fruit, then invariably they want more sugar later on. They want a bigger high from it because it’s so addictive, and that’s when they’re going to be reaching for cookies, cupcakes, and ice cream.
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s have the grain conversation a little bit. Obviously, gains are not the grains of our ancestors, but what’s the thought of humans and grain anyway? Were humans really ever meant to eat grains? What’s your feeling?
Dr. Wolfson:
One of the first books I read when going natural and holistic was Weston A. Price. I know you’ve read Weston A. Price and his book. He’s a dentist and traveled around the world in the 1920s by boat with his wife. It is a phenomenal read. The people of the modern-day West in Price’s society are all about eating grains, but they’re soaked grains and sprouted. They’re specially prepared. They try and go for the ancient grains and the whole grains, but I don’t see where that’s necessary in the modern diet.
I’m not saying I’m perfect paleo. What I am is always organic, always gluten-free, and always soy-free. You may catch me having dark chocolate-covered almonds sometimes. You may catch us at a birthday party eating Straus free-range, grass-fed ice cream. For the majority of the time, I am perfect paleo, and that does not include grains. They have to be prepared, and 10,000 years ago, 25,000 years ago, and 500,000 years ago, we had no ability to prepare them. We were hunter-gatherers.
One thing I will say is a knock on paleo is when people say that the foundation of the paleo pyramid they come up with online is meat. Our pyramid is not meat; the foundation is vegetables. Vegetables in the morning, vegetables with your lunch, vegetables with you dinner, that’s the foundation. I do try to get across the point that everybody has to eat some meat and/or seafood because that’s what every ancestor did. You get in these arguments with people who are vegan, and it’s just not natural. It’s not what our ancestors did for millions of years.
Dr. Pompa:
I think even our genetics do play a role in how much protein, how much carbs, hot much fat, and who succeeds more on one diet versus another. Some people do better on higher fats. Some people do better with higher protein. One thing we can see for sure is that too many people are eating too many carbohydrates. There is no doubt about it. I went zero-grain when I was sick and getting my life back, doc. For four or five years, I didn’t eat one.
Today, I’ll eat a little bit of the ancient grains. Typically, I do that maybe once a week, but that’s it. I don’t think that we need grains. I could live my whole life without one bite of grain. To me, it’s a pleasure food. I could live without it. I don’t need it, but you have to understand that most people don’t believe that. They believe that we need it. You could live life without a carbohydrate, by the way, truth be told. You would live. You couldn’t live without protein. You couldn’t live without fat. To show you where the hierarchy of macronutrients goes, I would argue it’s somewhere in that order.
Dr. Wolfson:
Let me ask you this. Obviously, gorillas don’t eat grains, and monkeys don’t eat grains, and baboons don’t eat grains, so why would we as human mammals need to eat grain? We don’t. People think that you need it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s a good argument. We can look at the toxic side of heart disease, and you had mentioned that. I think that’s the hidden thick. I think now we’re getting down the road even narrower. I see clients all over the world with bizarre and unexplainable symptoms and different conditions, and I can say that none of them would ever get their lives back if they didn’t go upstream and remove the cause. In these types of cases, autoimmune and all the bizarre, there’s a toxic source driving inflammation and therefore your illness. I’m pleased to hear you talk about toxins as being a driver for heart disease because if inflammation is the major cause of heart disease, then how are we not dealing with toxins? That’s the big driver.
Dr. Wolfson:
The way that the doctors are dealing with inflammation is to put people on statin drugs. That’s what they’re trying to do. If there’s any benefit to statin drugs, it is probably in the fact that it does have those pleiotropic effects. It does do a lot of different things. Yes, it lowers lipids down, but that may not be where it’s effective. It may be in the fact that it lowers oxidative stress and lowers inflammation. Air pollution is linked to increased cardiovascular risk. We know it’s linked to lung issues, but certainly cardiovascular risk. Air pollution is linked to higher levels of inflammation.
I suggest any doctors that are on this call sell air purifiers out of your practice because air purification systems lower inflammation and normalize blood pressure in these patients that are living in polluted cities. The data is there. Of course, indoor pollutants from the new paint, the new flooring, the new furniture, the new mattress, the television they brought in, everything, is off-gassing. All these chemicals are in your patients’ environments. Tell them they need an air purifier and then sell it to them. You’re their doctor. You’re their healthcare provider. Don’t let them run out to some random store and get some piece of garbage. Sell them a quality product. You’re going to make money, and the patients are healthy and happy. It’s good for everybody.
Air pollution, BPA from plastic, it’s all over the literature, heavy metals, lead, arsenic, cadmium, aluminum. I just did a post on aluminum to Natural News. These are all in the literature. The problem is the cardiologist is taking a look at his medical journal and saying, “Huh, interesting. We’ve got a new drug, a new procedure. This is kind of cool. Oh, here’s an article about lead and heart disease. Who cares?” They’re not interested in lead and heart disease. They’re interested in pills and procedures. That’s why people rush to see doctors like you, and I, and our friends; they want the answers. We measure those things in the blood work. We measure those metals and show them their metal burden. We tell them their metal amalgams, and root canal teeth are a known source of cardiovascular disease for 75, 80, or 90 years. We’ve known it.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Dr. Levy wrote a book called The Roots of Disease some years ago, and he talked about how root canals are causing heart conditions. I’m so proud to hear you say that amalgams and these things are driving conditions like heart disease and other inflammatory conditions. If you don’t remove the cause, there’s never ever healing that is going to truly occur that lasts in the body. People were ignoring these things. Look, indoor air quality is seven times worse than what is outside in the worst cities. I’m so glad to hear you say that. We talk about that.
We have an article that we share—Meredith, you can tell them where it is—and it’s called the Toxic Top 10. So many of them are indoors. There’s five right under your nose, things we’re doing in our bodies, overvaccinations and things like that, all the fillings and root canals, and then five right under your roof. It’s things that are right in our homes that are poisoning us daily, driving cellular inflammation and the diseases, and nobody is dealing with it. Listen, even the alternative doctors aren’t telling people to get rid of this stuff in their lives. It’s the stuff that’s driving cellular inflammation. Then in my cellular detox, doc, the thing there is you’ve got to get upstream to the cellular level and get the cell doing what it is meant to do, and that’s get rid of this stuff. We’re on the same page. Meredith, where do they get that article? You probably have some questions for Dr. Jack, as well.
Meredith:
Unfortunately, I’ve been having some technical issues throughout the broadcast. I haven’t been able to see you guys, and I’ve missed some of the audio. I’m not sure if maybe you’ve covered some of my questions, but as far as the article, head over to drpompa.com, and under the article archive, that article is called Detox Your Life: My Toxic Top 10. You can check that out. Dr. Pompa and I also did a Cellular Healing TV episode on those toxic ten items, as well. That was in the early 100s, so you can find that easily on YouTube. One of my questions, too, Dr. Wolfson, was when you mentioned three meals a day and eating lots of vegetables is the foundation of your diet, I’m wondering what your thoughts are on fasting. That’s a topic that we cover a lot here.
Dr. Wolfson:
I don’t have a lot of strong opinions on fasting. I do, obviously, get some of the science when it comes to maybe skipping breakfast or skipping dinner and just eating two meals a day. Therefore, you get an 18-hour fast. I understand how our ancestors did that. I haven’t worked that too much into my lifestyle or into what I advocate to patients. I think that’s probably at a higher-end level where people have really taken all these different steps and now want to go a little bit further.
I’ve had people approach me and talk about water fasts. I’m definitely not into that. I think that you need the nutrients to detoxify. I think a juice fast is appropriate. I tell patients that are overweight just to watch the movie Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead, and watch this guy who loses 150 pounds over 3 months by going on a juice fast/cleanse. I think that’s good a couple times a year to do a juice fast and a shot of olive oil at nighttime. Continue with their supplements and your detox products. I definitely advocate that.
Dr. Pompa:
I interviewed Thomas Seyfried, and he talks about water fasting. I interviewed Dr. Jason Fung a couple episodes ago, and he’s a medical doctor, a kidney specialist out of Toronto. Watch those episodes. You’d be shocked. I just gave a conference for doctors, and the amount of literature that I went over was voluminous on fasting and different things. It was something our ancestors were forced to do. I learned about fasting some years ago, but I think the science has really caught up to what happens during a fast. We do need certain nutrients to detox, but something magical happens to the mitochondria during fasting times. I intermittent fast daily, myself, which has been probably the number one thing I’ve ever done to change my health as a healthy person. My cellular detox got my life back, but as a healthy person, it transformed my life. Watch some of those episodes, doc. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Dr. Wolfson:
Yeah. Once again, my concern, without reading a lot of that literature, is that you need the B vitamins and the Vitamin C in order to appropriately detoxify. They’re so involved and yet they are water-soluble vitamins. If you’re not taking those into the system, how can you truly detox safely and effectively. I would have to read a little bit more about it and see.
Dr. Pompa:
What happens in fasts—and I appreciate your comment—is that the innate intelligence knows these things. First of all, we don’t fast people to detox them. We actually fast them to allow the innate intelligence to do what it does best. The growth hormone rises. The cells become very hormone-sensitive to the point where the innate intelligence knows exactly what to do. It’s remarkable to watch what it does for long periods of times.
I talked a little bit about this, I think, in one of the episodes. One of my clients whose nutrition numbers on blood and all her inflammation markers, everything, were horrendous. Then she goes into a fast. Her doctor who was monitoring the fast measures all of this and goes, “I can’t believe it.” All of her nutrition numbers got better. All her inflammation numbers got better. Everything went normal. The moment she started eating again, they started tailing down again. I would say one fast doesn’t heal anybody; it’s multiple fasts and becoming a different lifestyle, but it’s interesting in fasting that people’s intracellular nutrition actually improves. That’s the power of the innate intelligence. It’s actually remarkable. I think you’ll enjoy it. You’re a seeker of truth. I think you’ll say, “Wow, I had no idea.” The body has stores and has an intelligence to figure it out, and the cells work better. It’s absolutely remarkable.
Listen, doc, we just loved your information today. To hear from a cardiologist with your experience make this shift over here and believe what we believe is absolutely remarkable and outstanding. I just applaud you. I know that you’ve gone through criticism for standing up against the vaccinations. Bravo. You stand for truth, and I just so appreciate that. I know that you have been pushed out of your other world, but there’s another world that loves you and appreciates you for the truth that you are embracing. Thank you so much, Dr. Jack.
Dr. Wolfson:
Thank you so much, Dr. Dan. It was a pleasure to talk to you, and I applaud the work you are doing. Meredith, I definitely want to get some more information about the ten toxins. I want to share that with my people, as well, so I’ll make sure I get that info. That sounds fantastic.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and watch some back episodes. I think that you’ll enjoy them tremendously. Iron sharpens iron, doc, so I learned a lot from you today. That’s for sure. Thank you.
Dr. Wolfson:
Good deal. Thank you so much.
Meredith:
Awesome. Thanks, both of you. This is Meredith signing off for Cellular Healing TV. We’ll see you guys next week. Thanks for tuning in.