How to lower your risk of heart disease without drugs

Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman and welcome back. Now, I want you to know that preventing heart disease has very little to do with lowering cholesterol with statin drugs. It can be helpful for some people but it's not the answer for everybody and they're way overused. Today, I'm actually going to tell you how to lower your cholesterol and correct all the other risk factors like inflammation and sugar problems and high homocysteine using a comprehensive dietary and lifestyle approach. So let's go through it. What do I say that you should do to lower your risk of heart disease through your diet? The first step is really a healthy diet. So I want you to increase your consumption of whole foods rich in phytonutrients. these are plant molecules that give your body the nutrients it needs. And here are some practical tips on how to do that. Number one, avoid the blood sugar imbalances that increase your risk of heart disease. And you can do that by eating protein with every meal, by eating breakfast every day, and this will help you avoid the sudden increases in your blood sugar. Number two, I want you to eat lean animal protein if you're not a vegetarian. Things like fish, turkey, chicken, lean cuts of lamb, and even vegetable proteins such as nuts and beans and tofu. Stay away from all processed meats or other fatty meats. I want you to combine protein, fat and carbohydrates in every meal. Never eat your carbohydrates alone. And also for the same reasons, stay away from white flour and white sugar. They're the white menace that's going to put you in your grave. I want you to eat high fiber foods. This is whole beans, grains, nuts, vegetables, seeds, fruit, all contain fiber. Also get rid of all the junk food and processed food including sodas, liquid sugars and drinks and juices, all of which adversely affect your sugar metabolism. And eat good fats. So what kind of fats can you eat? Well, you should increase your omega-3 fats by eating cold water, wild salmon, sardines, herring, flax seeds, even seaweed has omega-3 fats. Also reduce saturated fat and use more grass or organic beef or animal products, which contains less saturated fat. Now make sure you also get rid of all hydrogenated fat, which is trans fat, margarine shortening, processed oils and many of these things are found in baked goods. Use the good healthy oils which you can use still like olive oil and you can use sesame oil and other nut oils. Avoid alcohol or reduce it dramatically because this increases triglycerides and fat in the liver and creates blood sugar imbalances. Next, don't allow yourself to get hungry. I mean, I want you to graze. Don't gorge yourself by eating every two to three hours or maybe even three or four hours to keep your blood sugar and insulin normal. Make sure you don't eat before bed, that's the Sumo Wrestler diet if you do that. Make sure you have a good protein breakfast every day. Add flax seeds to your diet, drink green tea, use soy foods, eat at least eight to ten servings of colorful fruits and vegetables a day. All this helps to lower your cholesterol and reduce your risk of heart disease and improve your blood sugar. Now I also recommend supplements and they're very important and they may have a big impact in working together with your diet and exercise program to dramatically reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. So here are the things I found most useful. in my practice to lower cholesterol. First is a multivitamin. Second is fish oil. And there are some special supplements that even can lower cholesterol specifically, policosanol, red rice yeast, and a few other things like plant sterols which come from plant soy protein, flax seeds, fiber supplements, glucomannan, these are all these things that I outline in the blog to help you understand the ways that you can use supplements and nutritional therapies to help lower your cholesterol. You're not going to like this but I do Advocate exercise at least 30 to 45 minutes a day and at least five or six times a week. Interval training is great. I talk about all this in Ultra Metabolism. It's a great resource for you to help understand how to improve your overall health and reduce your risk. Stress. Okay, now stress alone can cause a heart attack. And it's often the trigger that leads to this whole cascade of events that causes the final heart attack. And all the way it creates inflammation, it causes blood sugar problem, even race car drivers after the race have higher cholesterol just from the stress of driving a race. And it lasts for weeks afterwards. So learning how to do stress reduction is very important. And occasionally, occasionally depending on someone's genetics and their prepositions, if they're trying to swim upstream genetically, I might use medications. I might use other sources of treatment that are available. But David Jenkins from the University of Toronto compared statin treatment, which is the number one cholesterol medication, to a diet high in fiber, almonds, soy foods, and plant sterols, and they were actually equal in benefits. So I find that using my approach, I can lower cholesterol 100 points using a comprehensive program I outlined here without even using medications. But if I need to, I'll use low doses of statins, I'll use niacin, I'll use things like Zetia, which helps block cholesterol absorption, but I rarely, rarely need these. There's also a few other drugs, but remember, it's very important to realize that you have the power to lower your cholesterol simply by making some lifestyle changes, by taking certain nutritional supplements, by exercising and dealing with stress reduction. So I hope you have found this helpful and focus on this instead of just relying on medications to treat a problem that only deals with the symptom and not the cause. Thank you.