The Biggest “Drug” to Reverse or Prevent Heart Disease Isn’t a Medication

Hey everyone, welcome to my weekly house call, your chance to ask me your questions and this week's question is, Hey Dr. Hyman, my father has heart disease. His father did too, and I'm pretty concerned about my own risk for heart disease. So what can I do to prevent heart disease? Well, I understand your concern because people are worried if they have a family history of something, they're going to get it. but genes are not your destiny. You might have a predisposition, but you don't have a predestiny. And genes are not solely and often at the root of why we get heart attacks. It's actually the environment, right, your lifestyle and your diet, working on your genes that determines your risk. In other words, it's the way you eat, it's how much you exercise, it's how you deal with stress, it's the effect of environmental toxins that are the underlying causes of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar. That's what determines your risk of heart disease, not a lack of medication or even your genes. Our current thinking about how to treat and prevent heart disease is at best misguided and at worst harmful. We believe we're treating the causes of heart disease by lowering cholesterol, lowering blood pressure, and lowering blood sugar with medication. But the real question is, what causes high cholesterol, what causes high blood pressure, and what causes high blood sugar in the first place. It's certainly not a medication deficiency. The research clearly shows that changing how we live is a much more powerful intervention for preventing heart disease than any medication. The EPIC study, which is a big study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, studied 23,000 people's adherence to four simple behaviors, not smoking, no surprise, exercising three and a half hours a week, it's about a half an hour a day, and eating healthy diet of fruits and veggies, beans, whole grains, nuts and seeds, and a moderate amount of meat, and maintaining a healthy weight, less than 30 BMI or body mass index, even less than that is better, and those people who adhere to these behaviors, guess what? They could prevent 93% of all diabetes, 81% of all heart attacks, 50% of strokes, and 36% of all cancers. There was another big study called the INTERHEART study, which was published in the Lancet Journal in 2004. They followed 30,000 people, and they found that changing lifestyle could prevent at least 90% of all heart disease. 90%! That's huge, right? These studies are among the large evidence base that documents how lifestyle interventions often far more effective in reducing cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, heart failure, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and deaths from all causes than almost any other medical intervention. Now, it's because lifestyle doesn't only reduce risk factors such as high blood pressure, or high blood sugar, or cholesterol issues, our lifestyle and our environment influence the fundamental causes and the biological mechanisms that lead to disease. Things like changes in your gene expression, which modulate inflammation and free radicals like oxidative stress and your metabolic function. Those are the real reasons we're sick. The good news is that by fixing the problem at its root, it results in great benefits for so many chronic diseases and it makes you feel better, makes you feel more alive and healthy and had no side effects. The first step in preventing heart disease is to eat a healthy whole foods diet. Increase your consumption of whole foods, things that are rich in phytonutrients, those dark colorful plant chemicals, plant molecules that give your body the nutrients it needs. And avoid the blood sugar imbalances that increase your risk of heart disease. So you want to eat protein with every meal. Even at breakfast, eat great fats. This will help you avoid sudden increases in your blood sugar. Combining fat, protein and carbs with every meal is helpful. Never eat carbs alone and don't eat a lot of them. No processed sugars or very little refined carbohydrates. Remember, as I say, sugar is a recreational drug. Also eat high fiber foods. Eat at least 50 grams of fiber per day. That's beans, vegetables, nuts and fruits, whole grain, lots of beneficial fiber in those. And I can't stress this enough. You have to avoid all processed junk foods. No sodas, no juices, no diet drinks, all of which have a bad impact on your sugar and cholesterol metabolism. Also, liquid sugar calories, those are the biggest contributors to obesity and diabetes and heart disease. That's like soda, juices, sports drinks, energy drinks, coffee, sweetened teas, all that stuff that's just a staple in America, it's about 20% of our calories, that just needs to go. I also want you to increase omega-3 fatty acids by eating cold water fish, things like wild salmon, sardines, herring, flax seeds, even seaweed, fat is actually good for your heart. Fat improves the overall quality of your cholesterol profile. It reduces your risk of heart disease by reducing the small, dangerous LDL particles and converting them to light, fluffy, safe LDL particles. We also want to eliminate all hydrogenated fat or trans fat, which is found in margarine, shortening, processed oils, as well as lots of baked goods and processed foods. Instead, I want you to use healthy oils like extra virgin olive oil, cold pressed sesame and other nut oils, avocado oil. Those are all great. It's best to avoid or reduce alcohol, which can increase triglycerides and fatty liver and create blood sugar problems. A little bit is good, but a lot is definitely not. Of course, eat at least eight to ten servings of colorful fruits and vegetables every single day. These contain disease-fighting vitamins, minerals, fiber, phytonutrients, antioxidants, and lots of anti-inflammatory molecules. Because inflammation is so key to stopping heart disease, it's actually what causes heart disease. Supplements are also important, along with a healthy diet and an exercise program. These can dramatically affect and reduce your risk of having heart disease. Take a good multivitamin and mineral, as well as purified fish oil that contains 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams a day of EPA and DHA. More may be necessary for those with low HDL and high triglycerides. Fiber supplements such as PGX or cognac fiber or glucomannan can be helpful to both lower cholesterol and lower the bad cholesterol and balance your blood sugar. Also get out and move. 30 to 45 minutes a day of cardiovascular exercise at least six times a week can be really beneficial. You may try interval training which means you can exercise less time and get more benefit. and that'll help by going faster, smaller, I mean faster, slower, faster, slower, faster, slower. It's like sprinting. I also encourage strength training which helps build muscle and reduce body fat. Exercise is a necessity, it's not a luxury. It's necessary if you want to prevent all chronic disease, everything from heart disease to cancer, from dementia to diabetes, from osteoporosis to osteoarthritis. Exercise is the magic drug. You cannot age successfully without it. It's how we're designed. Sorry folks who don't like exercise, but you got to figure it out. At last but not least, manage your stress. Stress alone can cause a heart attack. It's often the trigger that leads to a cascade of events that causes that final and often fatal heart attack. But all along the way it contributes to heart disease by creating inflammation, by increasing your cholesterol, by raising your blood sugar, causes high blood pressure, even makes your blood more likely to clot. I want you also to find ways to manage stress, to relax, to find the pause button essential for dealing with nearly all chronic health conditions including high cholesterol. So we want you to learn to reduce stress by doing regular relaxation. It's not a passive thing like sitting on the couch with a bunch of Cheetos and a beer and watching TV. It's active relaxation. Things like yoga, tai chi, qigong, meditation, breathing, guided imagery, whatever you like, but you have to do it. And it's powerful to engage the nervous system to relax. And so there's a whole nervous system that's called the relaxation nervous system or parasympathetic nervous system. It's activated when you relax in this way and it lowers cholesterol, it lowers inflammation, it balances blood sugar, it boosts your metabolism and helps with your overall health. Now occasionally, I'm gonna recommend medications if I feel that my patient is swimming upstream genetically or if there's significant heart disease present already. Then I can carefully weigh the risks and the benefits of medications. But it's not for everybody and they're way over prescribed. However, it's really possible to achieve most of the benefits of medications through lifestyle changes. In fact, I get many people off medications by doing lifestyle changes. Dr. David Jenkins from the University of Toronto, he compared statin drugs, the number one cholesterol medication, to a diet high in fiber, almonds, soy, whole soy foods, not processed soy, and plant sterols and were found that they had equal effects on cholesterol, although the diet was more effective, more effective than the statin in reducing inflammation and lowering homocysteine, which has also been linked to heart disease. In fact, I recommend this way of living to everybody, not just people who want to prevent heart disease or who already have heart disease. Preventive medicine is the best form of medicine. If you're interested in kick starting your health, check out my new book, Eat Fat, Get Thin, which lays out a 21 day plan that's simple to follow and is going to kick your healing systems into gear. So now I want to hear from you. Have you improved your heart health with diet and lifestyle changes? What have you found to be effective? Comment below or on my Facebook page and be sure to share this video if you liked it with your friends or your family on Facebook or Twitter. and send your questions to DrHyman.com, and maybe next week I'll make a house call to you.