186: Natural Heart Attack Prevention

Transcript of Episode 186: Natural Heart Attack Prevention

With Dr. Daniel Pompa, Meredith Dykstra and Dr. Steve Sinatra

Meredith:
Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I'm your host, Meredith Dykstra, and this is Episode number 186. We have our resident cellular healing specialist, Dr. Dan Pompa, on the line. Today we welcome a very special guest, Dr. Stephen Sinatra. We have a very fun topic for you guys today.

Dr. Sinatra is a cardiologist and expert in heart health, among many other things. We have some fun topics to dig into around that subject, and it's going to be a fun conversation. Before we started, let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Sinatra. Dr. Stephen T. Sinatra is a board certified cardiologist and an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington, Connecticut.

Certified as a bioenergetic psychotherapist and nutrition and anti-aging specialist, Dr. Sinatra integrates psychological, nutraceutical, and electroceutical therapies in the matrix of healing. He's the founder of HeartMDInstitute.com, an informational website dedicated to promoting public awareness of integrative medicine as well as Vervana.com. Dr. Sinatra is a fellow in the American College of Cardiology and the American College of Nutrition. Dr. Sinatra's latest book, co-authored with Tommy Rosa, is Health Revelations from Heaven and Earth. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV, Dr. Sinatra. We're so excited to have you on.

Dr. Sinatra:
Thanks, Meredith. It's good to be here.

Dr. Pompa:
I just couldn't wait for this interview. I'm just probably going to call him Sinatra. Meredith, you know my love for Frank Sinatra. Sinatra has been a mantra in my house for years, and there is a relationship there, by the way. I don't know if I could state anything before or after it.

I'll call you Steve right now, but I fell in love with you. We had dinner, we were at a seminar. I fell in love with you and Jen, your wife. No doubt, we had a lot in common including the food we love, including the topics we discuss. I call you lovingly the cardiologist of the stars.

I remember years ago, it was one of the major networks, NBC, FOX or something. They had you on talking about cardiology. I think back then it was cholesterol, which should be one of our topics and some of the myths about cholesterol. You recently did a cooking Facebook Live with Suzanne Somers that I thought was amazing. That shrimp pasta, I tried to duplicate it already.

As a matter of fact, let's start right there. Where can people find that? Give your website because you've got to watch this, folks. It's good stuff. The guy can cook too.

Dr. Sinatra:
If people want to see that, they can go to HeartMDInstitute.com. It's on Suzanne Somer's website as well. That was kind of fun because Suzanne and I are both 70. One of my lectures on high vibrational living, I always say that 70 is the new 50. Suzanne and I were born within 24 hours of one another.

Think about that, Dan. Do you know anybody in your entire lifetime that's born within one day of you? We have the same astrological chart. My two sisters look almost like her. It's kind of scary. I sent her a picture of my two sisters, and it's kind of cool.

I had a good time cooking in the kitchen that day. We cook a lot of healthy food. That shrimp marinara was really awesome because one of the hottest nutrients today is astaxanthin. I lectured to Dan about it ten years ago. I got introduced to astaxanthin, and I said this is one carotenoid that really glitters. It puts beta-carotene and lycopene, good carotenoids, but it puts them to shame compared to what astaxanthin does.

That's why I cooked the tomato sauce with the shrimp because shrimp contains astaxanthin. Also, this whole thing about nitric oxide is really blooming. If you look at somebody's nitric oxide containing foods, shrimp is one of them because of the arginine combination, and so are migratory salmon with the arginine, nitric oxide combination and the CoQ10. There's lots of good stuff that really occurs with these nutritional ingredients.

Dr. Pompa:
Unlike so much seafood, obviously shellfish, shrimp is really low in mercury and other contaminants. However, I don't like shrimp from Asia. What about you?

Dr. Sinatra:
I'm glad you brought that up. I worry about preservatives in shrimp like the formaldehydes and stuff like that. If I'm going to order shrimp in a restaurant, my question is where do you get your shrimp from? If it comes from the Gulf of Mexico, despite the fact that they had that oil spill, that was cleaned up. It's a huge body of water. I've got to tell you, wild shrimp is the way to go.

Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. Let me tell you about the Gulf of Mexico. Here's a funny little truth. The Gulf thing was horrible and everyone worried. Something amazing happened. This is how the balance of our ecosystems are amazing. What happens is in the gulf, in the ocean, you have oil that constantly comes up, a certain amount. There's microorganisms that actually learn to feed on the oil.

What happened in the oil spill, these microorganisms went crazy. The shrimp and the seafood population went crazy. Right now, they're saying the Gulf is as clean as it's ever been, and it's because of the dang oil spill because these microorganisms fed on it. It fed the dang ecosystem, go figure on that.

Dr. Sinatra:
It's like injecting a gazillion pounds of yogurt into the Gulf of Mexico.

Dr. Pompa:
That's what happened. Oil is natural. They spilled it, and the microorganisms ate it.

Dr. Sinatra:
What a great reframe. That's really good.

Dr. Pompa:
It is a total reframe. That's the thing I love about you. You were the head of surgery at one point, right? What hospital?

Dr. Sinatra:
I was Chief of Cardiology at my institution for eight years.

Dr. Pompa:
You get locked into a certain mindset. Lecturing with you and hearing you talk, I'm thinking how did he come from that to this? How did that happen?

Dr. Sinatra:
I think my training in psychotherapy really opened up my mind. When I was a fellow in cardiology, I was in my fifth year of training. I entered a Gestalt psychotherapy program right in Hartford, Connecticut. I was studying with certified Gestalt therapists who trained under Fritz Perls out in California.

Dr. Pompa:
What is Gestalt therapy?

Dr. Sinatra:
Gestalt therapy is like living in the here and now, so to speak, and looking at what is instead of how your mind fragments it or distorts it or whatever it is. Fritz Perls was very popular in the 60s in California. I worked with some of his disciples. The incredible thing is I did two years of Gestalt psychotherapy, and I realized how inadequately I was prepared as a physician because the mind/body is really essential in any illness. Have you ever had the flu and felt terrible? People have gotten depressed after illnesses.

The mind/body is very, very important. Following my five years of training in medicine and two years of Gestalt, one of the reading lists on the bibliography for a Gestalt therapist was Bioenergetics by Alexander Lowen. I've got to tell you, when I read this book, I said wow, this is a guy I've got to meet. I ended up going to a workshop in New York City. There were only five Americans in the workshop. Most of them were from South America, Australia, or Europe.
Then I did a ten-year psychotherapy training program in bioenergetic psychotherapy. I emerged as a psychotherapist in addition to being a board certified cardiologist. To my knowledge, I think I'm the only certified bioenergetic therapist and certified cardiologist in the world. I don't think anybody else has done that.

Dr. Pompa:
That's interesting because I think you'll share more just how that really applies. It sure does, and it's amazing you're the only one. When you start to understand bioenergetics and our connection with the Earth, you say the heart runs on electricity for goodness sake. It's actually remarkable. How many books do you have? That might be your next book.

Dr. Sinatra:
I just gave a lecture in Montreal last week. I think I gave a third of it on high vibrational living, the strategic plan for optimum health. That's going to be my next book. I gave the full lecture in Montreal. It was an hour and a half.

I was shocked over the amount of accolades I got for it. I was very humbled and touched. These people came up to me and said that was the best lecture I ever heard. That lecture is sort of my 40 plus years of being a cardiologist. I start the lecture out showing our descent to the moon. It was back in 1969. Think about what you were doing back in 1969.

Dr. Pompa:
Let's see, I was four years old.

Dr. Sinatra:
You weren't born then. I don't know. You look like you're a young guy.

Dr. Pompa:
I was four years old in 1969. I was laying somewhere doing nothing. I was eating or sucking something, who knows.

Dr. Sinatra:
I was 22. We put a man on the moon. I saw that moon shot with Neil Armstrong. One of the slides is basically that moon shot, and I have to tell you, my 40 plus years of medicine after that, some of the things in medicine that we did 40 years ago was barbaric.

Can you imagine that I scrubbed a surgery when we had people with ulcers from stress or whatever, but we used to cut ulcers out. We used to cut the vagus nerve to a Billroth I or a Billroth II procedure. This is 40 years ago, and then 20 years ago we realized that ulcers are caused by a parasite, H. pylori. Some of the things we did in medicine decades ago in my mind now are kind of barbaric.

Dr. Pompa:
Here's the thing. Things we're doing right now, we're going to look back 20 years from now and go can you believe people had statins? We thought cholesterol was killing people. There's a small group that's seeing that vision as not true, you being one of them. Come on, think about that.

Dr. Sinatra:
You're absolutely right. The way we treat illness is a pharmaceutical agenda. We have a symptom, we treat the symptom with a drug. I'll tell you, Dan, the biogenome project came out in 1993, and 3 guys won a Nobel prize on it. Now it's about 20 years, but look at all this genetic testing we can do. We can do a buccal smear and find out our genetic weaknesses.

Now the doctors of the future are going to say wait a minute, instead of going through this differential diagnosis, ordering all these lab tests, doing this, this, and this, we're just going to go to your genetic profile, find out where you need help, and we're going to put a finger in the dike and treat that genetic defect. That's the future of medicine. I really believe there are doctors coming out now that are going to get right to the table. Forget about a lot of this pharmaceutical agenda, unless it's a pharmaceutical agenda that demonstrates that you need a drug to circumnavigate that situation of being dealt a bad set of genes.

Dr. Pompa:
There's a time and a place for everything. I think so many people are lured into this statin thing, and they're throwing on statins regardless if their cholesterol is over 200. Give me your opinion on that. When I watched you lecture at that conference, I think it was ten, maybe it was five things. You gave these ten things are what we need today to avoid a heart attack. By the way, statistics for heart attacks, this is still one of the top killers in America.

Dr. Sinatra:
You're absolutely right. You know what worries me, it's not men anymore. Now it's women. Women are getting heart disease more than men. The graphs have crossed. In my training, the youngest woman to have a heart attack was 18.

Dr. Pompa:
All the people on statins, the statistics aren't changing. Let's start with your opinion of statins.

Dr. Sinatra:
Statins do some good things, and they do some very, very bad things. It's my belief that the good things statins do is that they're powerful antioxidants. Statins thin the blood. It's almost like grounding like when you put your bare feet on the ground, you're taking that -inaudible-  energy. It thins the blood.

Thin blood is really the essence of good cardiovascular optimum health. Once you have red ketchup blood as opposed to your blood being like red wine, the more stasis in your blood, the more inflammation in your blood. You can get a stroke up here or a heart attack here. It behooves us to keep our blood thin. One thing that statins do bring to the table is that they do create blood thinning. It was shown in the West of Scotland study about 25 years ago.

Dr. Pompa:
By the way, those two things explain the small improvement that we see, but it's small. The risks, I don't know.

Dr. Sinatra:
The risks, especially in women and the elderly, is huge. Do I give women with heart cholesterol or heart attacks statins? No. Maybe 1 or 2% of women. Will I give a male under the age of 75 a statin with proven coronary artery disease, had a heart attack, he's had stents, he's had bypass? Then I will. I think 75 is young.

That statin because of its pleiotropic effects, not because of its cholesterol lowering effect, but I'm talking about the blood thinning, the antioxidant activity, the antifungal activity, all those aspects that statins do, as long as you give that same person CoQ10 and other targeted nutritional supplements and you fortify that person. Remember, statins are incredible cholesterol killers, but they also knock out the pathway for CoQ10. CoQ10 shares the same biochemical pathway. I've written about 40 or 50 papers on CoQ10, I've published books on CoQ10, I've done research on multiple animal models including the human model on CoQ10. I really feel comfortable with CoQ10, but if you do take a statin, you must take CoQ10 as a chaser at the same time.

Dr. Pompa:
Why didn't they put it in? Before the first drug was launched, they knew that this depleted CoQ10 and could even lead to congestive heart failure. Why didn't they put it in when they did the first statin?

Dr. Sinatra:
That's an excellent question because Merck Pharmaceuticals had a patent on ubiquinone and CoQ10, and I believe it expired in 1999. I think there was a second one in the year 2000. They should have used it because as a pioneer and as an antagonist to this situation, it would have been the right thing to do. When the drug companies are making millions and millions of dollars, why change anything?

Then the negative research started to come out on the statins when Dr. de Lorgeril in France wrote this paper about some of the “fraudulent” or some of the slippery studies that were done on statins. It came out after the Vioxx disaster in the year 2005. Remember Vioxx when people were getting sudden from this analgesic? Merck was put under a microscope by the FDA because there were so many complications with Vioxx that now the statin studies were put under the microscope. Since 2005, which is 12 years ago, there's been very few positive studies on statins as opposed to the research before 2005 when the FDA finally did its job and really put the pharmaceutical companies under close scrutiny.

Dr. Pompa:
I read so many things on the studies and dementia. We know that cholesterol is so needed in the brain and in diabetes as well. Cholesterol is needed in the cell membranes and the receptors. What's your feeling on that?

Dr. Sinatra:
You're absolutely right. Some of the papers on statins that was published in the archives of neurology showed that some people can get Alzheimer's disease 15 years before its onset if they use the statin. Then there were other papers that came out that showed that statins “protected you from Alzheimer's disease.”

Dr. Pompa:
I remember that.

Dr. Sinatra:
It's the medical literature. When I was a young doctor, we used to wave papers around and say I've got five papers to support this. Somebody else across the room would wave up five papers against your argument. One thing about the medical literature, there's always to and fro. In other words, there's always voices for you and against you.

Every doctor needs to be their own scientist. In other words, you've got to read the stuff yourself. You have to look at these crazy words, what the statistics are. You can do mental gymnastics with statistics and make a small, insignificant piece look like a big piece in the paper, relative and all that stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
It's deceiving too because with more studies coming out on not the total cholesterol that even matters, it's the particles and size of the particles, what role do statins play in there? I think you're right. I think some of the positive is there is that anti-inflammatory effect that we see. When you look at the studies on statins and lowering the particles and the small particles, it's not very good. There's so many natural things you could take without the risk. Let's talk about some of those.

Dr. Sinatra:
What you're raising a question on is LPa. It's a very small cholesterol particle that has a disulfide bridge. It's very inflammatory, and it's thrombotic at the same time. In other words, not only does it give you inflammation in your blood vessels, but also clots the blood in your blood vessels. There's no drugs that help it, Dan.

The only thing that I know that helps LPa are things like omega-three essential fatty acids, Nattokinase, lumbrokinase that's marketed in Canada under the term Boluoke. I've seen studies that show that it intercepts the toxic effects of LPa. Again, they try drugs on this, and even the statins have been shown to increase LPa in some people. When it comes to very small cholesterol particles, I'm a big believer in LPa. Remember, some people can eradicate it with just niacin. The problem with niacin is -inaudible- and stuff like that.

Dr. Pompa:
I was going to suggest the niacin, right. In the lecture, was it ten things you went through? These ten things were what you felt were significant for everybody to avoid a heart attack. Was it ten or was it five?

Dr. Sinatra:
It's sort of my Sinatra guidelines for a health heart. The first thing that is obvious is a non inflammatory diet. The best non inflammatory diet, you'll probably sing to this mantra because you believe this whole heartedly; we need higher protein, we need more healthy fat, and we need less carbohydrates. A lot of the American diets, unfortunately, are 60, 70, 80% carbohydrates. All that does is it's pro inflammatory, it elicits an insulin response, we get a lot of sugars.

Remember, insulin is the most pro inflammatory hormone. It accelerates aging. If you look at the diabetic population, why do diabetics die 15 years before their normal counterparts? With the surge of insulin going up and down, it creates enormous inflammation. In that diet, I like all organic, non GMO. I don't want chemicals, insecticides, insecticides, I don't want heavy metals. I just don't want the environmental toxins.

That's why I developed this pasta sauce -inaudible-. I've got to tell you about my olive oil too. I should mention this, Dan. Back in the 1990s when I wrote my first book, Lose to Win, I believed in vitamins and minerals. I used to go to Twin Labs and I used to buy these and I used to take them.

Then I realized, some of these manufacturers had 3 milligrams of copper in a multi-vitamin. You don't need copper, not that dose. Some of these vitamins had iron in it, even what men were taking. This is crazy. Then I realized that I have to make my own vitamins and minerals.

Back in the early 90s after I wrote a couple of my books, I started to get into the vitamin and mineral industry, and I realized that I had to clean things up. It took me another 25 years to realize we've got to do something with food. Our foods are contaminated. It's not just eating organic. You need multiple labels on your food, the non GMOS, the organic. You don't want plastics. You don't want anything in that food — you want a high vibrational food.

It's sounds like the Greeks of yesteryear. You know when the Greeks were running the Olympics 2,000 years ago? One of the best foods that they used was bee pollen. Bee pollen brought a lot to the table for them. It improved their endurance, and they also believed it improved their health. A couple of thousand years ago, this is old history, but I really feel like a healthy, a non inflammatory diet is the really the sine qua non of healing. That's number one.

Dr. Pompa:
Let's just talk about these products right here. I'm a big believer in olive oil, but there's a big problem with olive oil today. Most of the olive oil being consumed is rancid and almost being put in the same category as vegetable oils, which are extremely oxidized, rancid. That's happening to olive oil. That's one of the reasons why you created your own. Talk about this. As a matter of fact, talk about why olive oil is so darn good.

Dr. Sinatra:
Oh, my God. I love it! What Dr. Pompa just did, he did an example of the Predimed study, which was put out by Dr. Gonzales. Dr. Gonzales and I spoke at the American College of Nutrition together a few years ago on the merits of olive oil. He was the lead author of the Predimed study. The Predimed study basically looked at almost 8,000 people.
They divided them up, and a third of them went on a lot of nuts. Nuts are healthy for you, like the Seventh Day Adventists, for example, eat a lot of nuts. They put a third of the people on extra virgin olive oil, and they did what you just did, four tablespoons a day. You just took two tablespoons in that one little dose. Four tablespoons a day is almost 500 calories.

Then the control group was on the American Heart Association diet, what they recommend. They did that for five years. The olive oil group and the nut group were shades apart and had less stroke, less heart attack, less Alzheimer's, less diabetes, less bypass surgery. It was amazing. We looked at this. I researched this at the same time.

I said what is going on with olive oil? Olive oil raises HDL, it lowers LDL. It makes small particle LDL like you were talking about, which is very inflammatory, and makes it a little more fluffier so it doesn't get inside the blood vessel. It does all of these great things. There was a study, and I got the chill on this one. The angels are telling me I'm right on.

I read this study about six years ago showing that extra virgin olive oil changed pro inflammatory genes. In other words, if you have pro inflammatory genes in your body, it makes these pro inflammatory genes less inflammatory, it lowers the profile. When you do that, you age better. Think of this. Why are more 100-year-old people in the Mediterranean basin as opposed to the entire world? Whether they're living in Libya, Egypt, the island of Crete, Italy, Spain, Israel, that whole basin, we see more 100-year-old people.

It's my belief it's because they're eating extra virgin olive oil. However, you said something very important; over the five years, the olive oil has been contaminated by canola oil. That's a problem with some of the European oils. Not all of them, but a good percentage of them have an almost 25% canola oil in there, and the label doesn't disclose that. The label says as long as you're 75% extra virgin — it can be 100% extra virgin.

However, the California Growers Council stipulates it's got to be 100% extra virgin, and that's why I went to California, went to the olive fields, picked my own olives. I was there for the whole day. We did the crush, we did everything. That's why I went with California. I would have loved to have an Italian olive oil, my last name is Sinatra, but I've got to go with California extra virgin.

Dr. Pompa:
When you take this, you feel that -inaudible- right there.

Dr. Sinatra:
It's peppery.

Dr. Pompa:
It is.

Dr. Sinatra:
It'll make you cough.

Dr. Pompa:
Polyphenols, baby.

Dr. Sinatra:
That's right. Olive oil is loaded with hydroxytyrosol, polyphenols, squalene. It has all these ingredients that delay the onset of aging. By the way, I put so much extra olive oil in this sauce, I added more garlic, more parsley — I didn't add sugar. I used organic carrots instead. I just wanted to make this sauce so bullet proof. I have the last name Sinatra. Unfortunately, I eat pasta two or three times a week, but I eat the higher protein pasta. I sent you the higher protein pasta, didn't I?

Dr. Pompa:
You did. I loved it.

Dr. Sinatra:
Fifteen grams of protein per serving. For a protein addict like yourself, you probably really resonated with that. That's like having two and a half to three ounces of sirloin steak. Instead of eating an animal, you're eating a nice vegetarian dish.

Dr. Pompa:
You actually started your own products, food line, that are non GMO. Tell them where they can pick up this olive oil and that sauce, which I'm going to tell about because that sauce is outstanding. It reminds me of my mother's.

We were talking about the benefits of the good sauce. You said I'm having it tested because even though it's in a glass bottle, what you learned was when they ship the tomatoes, it can be in containers that are plastic or have plastic around them. Then they're put in glass, but they're high in BPA. You had it tested so you could get the results.

Dr. Sinatra:
You're raising a good point. The tomatoes are non GMO tomatoes. They come from Italy. However, they come in cans, and when I went to the factory where they were making the sauce, I looked inside the can. I was looking for the lining. Maybe I didn't give it enough scrutiny, but when I left I said if that has that BPA lining, there could be BPA in the tomato sauce. I had it tested, and thank God it came out BPA free.

I went to the health food show in New York a few weeks ago, and you can buy tuna fish now that's BPA free, mercury free. In other words, they're really testing these. I love it. I think with the health millennials coming up and foods of the future, I think people are going to demand high quality, high vibrational food.

We don't want food laced with chemicals. It's bad enough right now with the GMO situation. The more we get away from this and as a physician and you as a PhD, we're both coming together to really get our people to eat healthier. Hippocrates was right. You are what you eat. There's no doubt about it.

Dr. Pompa:
That's the thing. People are buying tomato in glass because they don't want it in cans because of the BPA. Meanwhile, what they don't know is the tomatoes were shipped in plastic and put in there, and then it has BPA.

Dr. Sinatra:
Maybe in aluminum cans that were not lined.

Dr. Pompa:
The fact that you tested it, just for that reason I want to buy the sauce. Tell people how to get this stuff. You definitely want this olive oil and the sauce. Love them both and the pasta. How do they get it?

Dr. Sinatra:
I'm working on three pastas. I'm working on a chickpea pasta and a red lentil pasta. I like the red lentil pasta the best. They find new traces of gluten in it because some of the pastas are made in factories that contain wheat, but remember the wheat from Italy is a much better wheat than the wheat from the United States. There's no doubt about that.

Having said that, I like pastas whether it's chickpea or whether it's peas or the red lentil because they have higher protein. Remember this, for our viewers, the higher protein you take in, the less insulin response. In other words, protein and fats require a minimal if no insulin response at all.

If you mix your foods with higher proteins and higher healthy fats, you won't get the insulin response. That's what protects you from cardiovascular disease. Remember, insulin is the most pro inflammatory hormone. If we cut back on insulin, better. Like you, I'm sort of a modified vegetarian. I don't eat a lot of meat, but basically if you can get your protein from vegetarian sources, I'm all in on that.

Dr. Pompa:
When I eat meat, it's clean. -inaudible-

Dr. Sinatra:
Organic meat, organic bison, that's good stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
It has to be grass fed. I eat a lot of vegetables in my diet, but I'm more higher fat and moderate in that department, the meat or protein department, but quality fats and low carbs. I vary my diet. I go different times of the year. You still haven't answered the question, where do you get this stuff?

Dr. Sinatra:
It's Vervana.com. That's our website. I've been building this website for five years. At first it was HeartMDInstitute.com, which was pure information. We have hundreds of pages out there. When I came out with my negative comments on cell phones ten years ago, people were calling me a quack. Now on the news, this big news now that male testosterone is going down and sterility in males is a big problem.

Guess what? We've known this over the last ten years. Now it's coming out. If a typical male takes a cell phone and puts it in his pocket right here, that's only a few inches away from his testicles. Cell phones emit a radiation continously. I really worry about male infertility right now. When I was in medical school, it wasn't the males, it was the females. Now it's the males, 50% of males.

Dr. Pompa:
My son sitting at his computer all day, he works on websites, etc. He was getting testicular pain. I went out where he lives and brought my device to measure. I don't have it right now to show because I gave it to him to retest. The levels coming out from his desk right where his testicles are were a hundred, maybe two hundred times what would be considered safe. It was pulsing.

Dr. Sinatra:
Pulsing is the worst.

Dr. Pompa:
It is the worst. No wonder he's getting testicular pain. The next step was cancer. I gave him a website and said this stuff can easily be shielded for pennies.

Dr. Sinatra:
Have him grounded at the same time. He's on the computer, and he can have a grounding pad on his feet. When I'm on the computer, I always have bare feet on a grounding pad. I don't have it right now because I'm in my wife's office. Whenever I'm on a computer doing my work, I'm grounded.

Dr. Pompa:
He's grounded, he's doing it all.

Dr. Sinatra:
That's one of my other pillars of healing. We handled the grounding. If you want me to go on, I'm an exercise enthusiast. I'm a big proponent of exercise. It brings an enormous amount to the table. Mind/body interactions, I'm a big believer in tai chi, big believer in yoga.

I teach at the Yoga Institute in -inaudible- every year. I just feel when you bring mind/body medicine to the table, it really supports heart rate variability. Whenever you do that, you're really healing the body. I'm a big proponent of detoxification.

I don't know if I talked about this at the conference, but if you look at the oldest living profession in the world, classical musicians that are conductors have the longest longevity in the sense that if you look at centenarians or individuals who lived over a hundred years or 90 years old, by far it's the conductors that lead the pack. Why is that? You can say they're into the music. No, what they're doing when they're doing arm motion like this, they're cleansing the thoracic duct. They're moving lymph in their thoracic duct, and it gets distributed eventually to the gut, and it gets expelled out of the body. When you're doing this, you're detoxing.

A lot of eastern monks, for example, will do this exercise where they'll swing their arms in front of their face and back like this. I don't know if you can see this. If they do that 200 times a day, you're also moving lymph through the thoracic ducts. Whenever you're moving lymph in the body and you're getting those toxins out, you're helping the body age more gracefully. That's why detoxification is vitally important in any form of anti-aging medicine.

Dr. Pompa:
That's obviously how I got my life back and what we preach and teach here, keeping those pathways open. Let's go back to the grounding because we went right over that. When we were at the conference, you said you love my shoes. I was like yeah, but they were mostly rubber. There's a little leather around the outside.

Dr. Sinatra:
You mean your shoes?

Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but they were mostly rubber. I said my other ones are all leather.

Dr. Sinatra:
These are my shoes. You hear that leather?

Dr. Pompa:
Explain why that effects your body, your brain, your heart, explain why leather and not rubber.

Dr. Sinatra:
When I did the research on grounding, we actually did two major cardiovascular pieces of research. One was how it supports heart rate variability. Whenever you do that, you can prevent sudden death, you can live longer. That's incredible stuff.

Dr. Pompa:
Explain what that is because some of our viewers know what that is, and some don't.

Dr. Sinatra:
Heart rate variability is literally the heart telling the brain what to do. In other words, a lot of people think the brain is king of the body; it's not. The vagus nerve and the heart are connected. There's a connection between our heart and our brain, but basically when you support heart rate variability, when you put your bare feet on the earth — a lot of us are under stress. We have what we call a stressed out sympathetic nervous system. We call that sympathetic overdrive.

We're putting out adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol. We're putting out these toxic hormones because everybody's under stress. Look what happened in Europe yesterday. That affects everybody. Just thinking about it can affect it. It triggers our hormones.

When you bring measures to get the heart rate variability back into sync, by lowering the sympathetic drive or raising the parasympathetic so it's equal, that's really healing. That's one of the things that grounding does. It has a favorable impact on heart rate variability. I was mortified with my colleagues because I sent this research to eight journals in the world, but they were all cardiovascular journals because I'm a heart specialist. When we realized that by putting your bare feet on the ground thins the blood, makes the blood like red wine as opposed to red ketchup, I said this is the greatest discovery I've ever made in my lifetime.

I spoke to -inaudible-. He was laughing and laughing and saying, “You'll never get that published. You'll be dead and buried. They might give you the Noble prize 40 years from now, but right now, forget about it. People aren't going to believe it.” He agreed with me. He thought it was incredible.

The problem with heart disease and stroke is that we get hypercoagulable blood. Our blood is like red ketchup, and it sticks. If you can make your blood thin, that's what you want to do. The problem with cell phones and cordless phones and computers is they make the blood thick. It makes it hypercoagulable.

It's really important to get back to nature. It's so important to walk barefoot on the beach or bare feet on concrete, not on asphalt. Bare feet in the park is good. You don't want to walk barefoot with bushes this high. You don't want to get ticks, for example. We have to worry about Lyme disease and all that other kind of stuff.

The beach, short grass, concrete, sand, brick is good, and even in your house — you live in Utah, and if you have a concrete floor, put your bare feet on the floor. If you have a fireplace in your house, you can sit on the hearth and put your hands on the brick because it's grounded. Even your faucets in the house, the steel — I remember my son when he was feeling weak, he would always grab a faucet and hold onto the faucet because that would recharge his body. He was a big believer in grounding. He always thought it was one of the big things that got his life back for him.

Dr. Pompa:
Wearing leather grounds you. You could have shoes on as long as they're made of a natural substance as opposed to rubber, which is natural. Rubber will block the grounding.

Dr. Sinatra:
Even when Clint -inaudible- shot his documentary and he went inside an Indian tent in Montana, the woman said to him take your shoes off. They'll make you sick. He had no idea what she was talking about. After he spent 15 years of his life on grounding, he realizes what she meant.

The American Indians walked on leather, so they were always grounded to Mother Earth. In the tepee, they walked right on the bare surface. There's a lot to grounding. That's one of my seven pillars of healing. The only other pillar I didn't mention that we're both into is vitamin and mineral supplementation.

Dr. Pompa:
Let's go there, yes.

Dr. Sinatra:
Our toxic diet, the herbicides, the insecticides, the GMOs, these are horrific oxidants, and they cause accelerated aging and oxidative stress. You really need antioxidants at the table. Magnesium to me is one of the most important antioxidants. The problem is a lot of the vegetables and fruits we eat have grown in magnesium deficient soils. That's why magnesium is part of my awesome foursome.

I love CoQ10 and I like magnesium and ribose and carnitine because they all support the natural indigenous production of ATP, which is really our chi energy. It's our energy of life. I'm a big believer in targeting nutritional supplements, bringing them to the table. I love the combination of Resveratrol and turmeric. I think that's knockout punch for the brain. I think that will help prevent Alzheimer's or pre-senile dementia in a lot of 70 and 80-year-olds.

If you take omega-three, turmeric, Resveratrol, and CoQ10 and put them together, that's a great remedy for brain health. Right now I'm looking at pure tocotrienols as well, a delta tocotrienol and gamma tocotrienol. I met with Dr. Barry -inaudible- a few weeks ago. He lives in New England with me. I re-taught his factory and I've got to tell you, it was absolutely stunning. Pure tocotrienols have a place in overall optimum health as well.

Remember, you can't take tocotrienols at the same that you take tocopherols. You've got to spread them out a little bit because they can antagonize one another even though they're both Vitamin Es. There's four tocopherols, and there's four tocotrienols. You've got to separate them a little bit. If you do, you'll get maximum protection. You can take them together, but you don't get the protection you get when they're separated. They do a good job.

Dr. Pompa:
What about some other things that thin the blood? You've been talking about how important it is to have the thin blood. Systemic enzymes do that. What else?

Dr. Sinatra:
Whenever I eat something, I always take digestive enzymes. I like enzymes. I was a big believer Wobenzym. Remember years ago the German athletes that won the Olympics? There was a big group of them. I still take a variety of Wobenzym, but I take Nattokinase and lumbrokinase. I interchange them. I'm a big believer in digestive enzymes.

Even people who take a baby aspirin a day, baby aspirin thins the blood, there's no doubt about it. The only problem with higher dose aspirin, let's say Bayer aspirin, people get GI upset from it. There's about 19,000 people a year who get bleeding ulcers from aspirin and can die from aspirin. Aspirin is like a blessing a curse at the same time. We need it, especially in bypass population, people who have had stents and stuff like that.

When it comes to aspirin, it will thin the blood, but I like lower dose aspirin. I love garlic. Garlic was like Russian penicillin. Garlic thins the blood. There's lots of nutrients you can take that can have a blood thinning effect.

Omega-threes will thin the blood, salmon oil, fish oil. I like Calamarine oil because squid live in the oceans -inaudible-. I'm a big believer in anything that helps to thin the blood, and grounding does it. If you use supplements, if you eat healthy foods, at the same time do grounding. You want to have thin blood. Thin blood is really to me the essence of healing.

Dr. Pompa:
I had said there's a gentleman at one of the seminars who had said, “I'm getting these symptoms.” To me it sounded like he was having a stroke. I said, “You need to go get checked immediately. On your way, please stop and get some baby aspirin on the way to the hospital because that actually can make the difference.”

Dr. Sinatra:
I'm so glad you mentioned that, Dan. You're talking like a doctor, an MD. I love it. If people think they're having a heart attack or stroke, they can't form a word, it comes all of a sudden gradually or they lose function of an extremity or they have a massive substernal crushing chest pain, call an ambulance. If you can chew on an aspirin or two, just do it. That can be life saving.

Dr. Pompa:
Statistically it's huge what it can do immediately. There's a point that people who stay on aspirin a long time on a too high dose, the blood gets too thin, and then they're bruising, etc. because of the capillary wall. That's why I do prefer the natural things. In the emergency, the aspirin works right away. Meredith, I hogged Sinatra. I just absolutely hogged him. You're dying to ask some questions, so sorry.

Meredith:
I've been taking notes. This has been an amazing conversation. When I was reading through your bio, Dr. Sinatra, it said that you integrate a nutraceutical and electroceutical therapies as well. Could you talk a little about how you use those and what they are?

Dr. Sinatra:
The nutraceutical therapy, I'm a big believer in vitamin and mineral therapy. I think everybody should be on a standard multi-vitamin with lower dose copper, good B vitamins in them, Vitamin C, some Vitamin E, a little bit of carotenoids, and lots of minerals. We are so mineral deficient as a population. That's why I like sea minerals or any minerals for that matter. We just need it. The other thing is I'm a big believer in Vitamin K2, menaquinone.

Dr. Pompa:
Me too.

Dr. Sinatra:
About 12 years ago when I read the research from the -inaudible- researchers, they happened to be at Yale New Haven. I called them up, -inaudible- and -inaudible-. I remember both their names. I can't believe it. When I called them up, I said, “I'd like to have dinner with you. I read your research.” They were really sweet guys. They said, “An American cardiologist calling us?”

We had dinner, and it was one of the most provocative, interesting dinners I've ever had in my life. We went over the Rotterdam study statistics and stuff like that. I became a big believer in MK-7. I take MK-7 every day. Remember this, Dan, and Meredith, especially you because you're a woman, MK-7 takes calcium out of our blood vessels where it doesn't belong and puts it back into your bones where it does belong. For women suffering from osteoporosis or even men who get it later on in life, I take MK-7 every day.

I take omega-threes every day, I take CoQ10, I take a little carnitine, B vitamins, multi-vitamins, I take Nattokinase, lumbrokinase. I switch them off. I take a red kelp seaweed with astaxanthin because of my experience in Japan when I went there. I saw how important astaxanthin is. Right now I'm working on a product that contains CoQ10 and tocotrienol together because the most recent research brings an enormous amount to the table, especially for the brain and neurons. There's so many antioxidants that it can bring to the table.

My grandson was at my house yesterday. He opened up my cabinet and goes, “Grandpa, you take all those pills?” I go, “Yeah.” He goes, “How many do you take a day?” I go, “About a hundred.” I've got my bottles out there, and I'm sure you do the same thing. If you've been a doctor as long as I have and you've written enough books, you get religion. Your religion is I'm a big believer in antioxidants.

Meredith brought up the electroceuticals. The electroceuticals is the ground energy. In other words, that's Mother Earth energy. For our viewers that don't understand it, when you put your bare feet on the ground, there's a meridian that runs up the body from the feet. We call it the K1. You're an acupuncture guy, you know this stuff.

If I can get my foot up here, the K1 is right here below the big toe. That's a pressure point. When you walk barefoot on the ground, that K1 activates and goes all the way up to the back of the spine, around into the brain. That K1 point, if you're absorbing electrons from Mother Earth from sand, grass, walking in the ocean, all that stuff, you're literally getting gazillions of antioxidants in the body. When you do that, it's like taking handfuls of antioxidants.

Is the -inaudible- electroceutical? Yeah, in a way because you're sweating. Whenever you sweat, sweating is awesome for the body. We're both college athletes. We know how important it is to sweat. The thing is, you get mercury out, you get insecticides. People don't realize that insecticides and pesticides lay in that subcutaneous layer of our fat.

When you're sweating, you're getting mercury out, you're getting chemicals out, you're getting insecticides out. I'm a big believer in nutraceutical/electroceutical situations, whether it's detox, grounding, or whatever it is. I just believe that. It's in my pillars of optimum health.

Dr. Pompa:
That's awesome. I know our viewers and listeners learned a ton, doc. Great stuff, Steve. I just really appreciate you. I really do. Buy his products, folks. They are absolutely phenomenal. People ask me all the time, where can I get a good olive oil and a good sauce? You have more than that there. These are great.

Dr. Sinatra:
Thanks so much, Dan. This was a lot of fun.

Dr. Pompa:
Your contribution over the years, you've saved and changed a lot of lives.

Dr. Sinatra:
By the way, Meredith is a superb associate. I'll tell you, she made this a sleigh ride for everybody. Meredith, thank you. You were great.

Meredith:
Oh, thank you. This has been such an informative episode. Dr. Sinatra, we like to end shows by asking our guest experts for their three key takeaways for our viewers for their best cellular health. What would you say to that question?

Dr. Sinatra:
Are you ready for this?

Dr. Pompa:
Grounding.

Dr. Sinatra:
The first thing is whatever emotion you experience, experience it. In other words, don't deny it. If you feel you have sadness, don't suppress it, cry it out. Crying is the healthiest thing you can bring to the heart. Whenever you cry, you're not only discharging toxins out of the eyes and stuff like that, but the extra breathing from sobbing is absolutely essential. I learned this as a bioenergetic psychotherapist.

Sadness and internalized anger are the Achilles heel for the cardiovascular system. You must rid yourself of these locked in emotions. Have your anger out. Don't hit anybody, don't go into rage. Those are toxic emotions. If you want to have anger, that's fine. Have your sadness, that's number one.

Number two, walk grounded. Sleep grounded, walk grounded, take Mother Earth energy in. Take it in. Number three, eat healthy. That includes taking nutritional supplements, organic foods as much as you can, non GMO foods. In other words, bring targeted nutritional supplements and healthy eating to the table. Try to keep your weight down, discharge yourself of emotional toxicity, and I think you'll put 20 years onto your life. Those are my top three.

Dr. Pompa:
Good advice.

Meredith:
Awesome, love it. Body, mind, and soul. Thank you so much, Dr. Sinatra.

Dr. Sinatra:
Body, mind, and soul. That's right.

Meredith:
Amen. Thanks for bringing your wisdom, amazing episode. Thank you, Dr. Pompa, as always. Thank you to you who are listening and watching. We wouldn't be here without you. Grateful for all of you for this amazing interview. Thanks, everyone. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye.