How Patrick Theut REVERSED His Coronary Artery Disease

Patrick Theut reversed severe coronary artery disease by targeting his gut microbiome and specific nutrient deficiencies: vitamin K, vitamin D, magnesium, and thyroid function. His calcium scores improved across multiple scans, and he developed a combined K supplement based on testing for markers like uncarboxylated osteocalcin and PIVKA2.
Questions this video answers
377
28
25 mg MK‑4, 5 mg K (phylloquinone/K1), 1.5 mg MK‑7, and 2 mg microencapsulated astaxanthin
60–100 ng/mL
Approximately 2:1 (watch out if near 1:1)
Chapters
One of the things that was sidebar that came out of this was if you take enough vitamin K, it'll boost your endurance if you're an athlete. So if you take a high amount of MK7, you bind up your peroxides. When you bind up your peroxides, guess what? You don't get tired. And 24, 2017, North Texas State did a great study on MK7 and athletic performance. And how would you, being a triathlete, how would you like to have your endurance boosted by 12%.
Foreign?
I've done several podcasts lately about heart health.
It's a topic near and dear to my. You knew I was gonna do a pun there. Near and dear to my heart plaque, high calcium scores, coronary artery disease, and other heart concerns. And in this journey in which I've been kind of looking into a lot of the people out there, a lot of the therapies, a lot of the research, I've come across a biochemist and engineer who managed to reverse his coronary artery disease. And he did so using some pretty novel methods and detailed it all in what he calls his Cardiac Manifesto.
He invested over 16,000 hours of study.
Into the cause of heart disease and has developed specific theories and protocols on how the disease develops and how to stop it from progressing and protocols to even reverse things like plaque. I've been so intrigued with this Cardiac Manifesto that I decided I want to get the author on the podcast. His name is Patrick Hoyt. I'm going to let him fill you in on his background and his story, but as you listen in, I will link to everything that we talk about. If you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com forward slash vitamin K podcast BenGreenfieldLife.com vitamin K podcast the reason being, as you'll learn during this show, Vitamin K definitely plays a key role here. So, Patrick, welcome to the show, and I would just love to hear your story about what happened to you and your heart to get you interested in this in the first place.
Well, it all happened by accident in 2001 when I was getting my Tier 1 MBA at the University of Minnesota Carlson School. One of my classmates was the.
Vice Chair of Psychology and Psychiatry at the Mayo Clinic. The class in front of us had the head of cardiology and the three of us got to talking and they convinced me to get what's called an executive physical. And it's a 3D physical now. Mind you, at that time I was 48 years old. I mean, 5Ks, 10Ks, still playing ice hockey, you know, doing I'M doing fine. Yeah, well, I. One thing leads to another. They controlled me and teased me and all that. So I went there for a 3D physical. Honest a frick. It got three days. Why? That was something. So at the. And I passed everything with flying colors, as I pretty much assumed I would. But what was really crazy was my last afternoon, well, my last morning there, my attending personal care physician said, is there any other test that you would like, run? And I had heard about these calcium score tests while driving through Chicago almost six, eight months earlier. And I said, hey, do you have something to do with calcium test or calcium score? They said, yes, we do, but we don't recommend it. I said, why? I said, because you passed all your tests without a problem. I said, okay, but don't you have to give me what I asked for? Oh, yeah, we do. I says, okay, I want one. Well, she reluctantly gave me one at like 11 o' clock in the morning. That took like five minutes. It was an EDT scan. You're very, very accurate. So then I go to lunch and.
That'S what it all freaking changed. I, I had pot roast, potatoes, gravy, some green beans and a sheep rib beer. I'll never forget. That was kind of my last meal before I was going to say, were.
You trying to game the test?
My accent, interviews with all the attending physicians. And I want to say one thing. If it wasn't for the Mayo Clinic, I'd be dead. So hats off to them. They did a great job. They really did. So I go into the 1:30 meeting and there's my two friends and the other 10 physicians. Based on my various things like the kidney guy was there and the heart guy was there and the this, that and the other thing. I sat down, I said, boy, it looks like somebody just died.
He goes, pat, well, you really don't underestimate things or understate things. So they put on my calcium score in the flat screen. So they're going through the sagittal sections of my heart and they get to my left main and it's glowing like a rib.
And I went, that don't look good.
Oh, and by the way, just to interject here, you know, I had a somewhat similar experience. I'm getting a little bit of deja vu because, you know, I, with stellar scores on the EKG, the VO2, the, the flow scan score, pretty much every single test for my heart, even my lipid panel was pristine and my LVA had 8% blockage. When I did my, I didn't do the calcium scan. I did the. A more advanced version of it called the Clearly CT angiography, but pretty much similar idea, right? Walking around, everybody telling me my heart was great. And this was about a year ago now and. Same thing. When I actually went in and did diagnostic imaging, it was an entirely different story.
Yep, I can relate. So one thing leads to another and they say, well, we want to see you next week to do some more detailed testing. I said, as an engineer, good idea. That's just how bad is. So that score is a 377 only. And all in my left main. My left main was completely calcified from the wall of the heart to the branch. Good lord. But my background, I was a pre med and back in another life. So I knew all human physiology, human anatomy and all that stuff. I'm pretty good at it. So I go back the following week, they do a big workup and they said 10% of the people who have calcium build up in arteries. Their arteries expand rather than contract. And that's what we think is going to happen to you. Based on the genetics of my mother's side of the family, because they all do. They all died of arterial blowouts, every one of them.
Wow.
Well, he says, lieutenant cardiologist, great guy. I, I still keep in touch with him every now and then. And he said, you've got four years to live.
At the rate of progression and how bad your left mean is, and it's the bang pipe. And I said, well, can't you just fix it right now? And they said, no, can't do that. A stint ain't gonna work because your pipe's already large.
So you're just. The wall's gonna get thinner and thinner and thinner and it's gonna burst. That's it. And this exact quote that I said to him, my body got me into this mess. My body can get me out of this mess. And. And he said that to my two friends. And they said. And he said to my friends, this guy's in denial, I should move. Told him in the first place. And my two friends says, oh, we talked to Pat when he left and he's got that look in his eye. He'll figure this out. And so I got back to home. Well, this. Well, first time I got back home, I started really digging through the Internet back then in the early, late, early 2000s, it was all geeky stuff. And I've got a biochemistry background of chemistry, physiology, all that background engineering, so I could read all that geeky stuff and I could read it pretty quick and I started diving into it and diving into it and diving into it and diving into it. And by the middle of January of 2003, now remember this is about eight weeks after all this stuff happened. I wrote a found in Tibon, California. Now remember this is January of 2003 and they said heart disease. I gut bacteria problem.
And I've got a background in anaerobic bacteria and I kind of know how those little critters work. And I said given, given what's, what happens to people, it's got to be a gut bacteria problem. And said oh wow. He said what else? Yeah. I says vitamin D plays a big role. Every middle of February, Thyroid Free T3 has a huge role in your heart disease. So by April I had a game plan. I basically had a game plan that I'm going to fix this. This is how I'm going to fix it.
And by, by fix it you mean specifically going after gut bacteria, vitamin D and thyroid?
Yeah, that Ed. Magnesium.
Quick question though, just to backpedal briefly. The gut bacteria piece is interesting. As a matter of fact, in a couple hours I'm flying down to Phoenix to meet with my dentist, Dr. Aniko Loud down there who does, among other things for my oral health, an oral microbiome test to determine risk for plaque accumulation and cardiovascular disease based on the oral biome which is tied to heart disease. But what's the link between the gut bacteria and heart disease?
Well your body is always talking to your gut bacteria.
Case. As an example, women who are pregnant, they have these religious to eat certain foods. That's the gut bacteria telling the brain by the way of the vagus nerve, we need some nutrition that has to be just like this to feed the baby. The older you get, the less findings you have. Case in point, premenopausal women typically don't have coronary disease. Post menopausal women do. Why? Because their gut bacteria express themselves different because the hormones are expressed differently.
So.
Not getting enough sunlight, a few other things. Then vitamin D is basically a hormone. Your gut bacteria start expressing themselves a certain, very certain way and that sets the clock in motion to basically I call it the salmon effect. After about three years, salmon just up and die because of body's change. So your gut bacteria are constantly talking with your body and your oral gut bacteria, your oral bacteria. Most of those bad boys end up in your gut. And in working with holistic dentists, when you have dk, Mag and C together, your oral bacteria are really, really happy and you don't get cavities. I haven't brushed my teeth in 12 years.
Yeah, I mean, I mean what you're saying is a little bit reminiscent of Dr. Weston A. Price's initial research on the so called, you know, mysterious CO factor that he identified amongst a host of people who had really great bones and jaws and teeth and turned out to be vitamin K. But for the, for the gut bacteria, I'm guessing that if someone were to go out and do like a stool analysis and they were to find just general dysbiosis, that that's what you'd be looking for, essentially. Bacterial imbalances in the gut.
That's correct. One of the things that induces it is Taeklocipara, which is a common antibiotic. Snippo selectively kills the gut bacteria that liberate the K out of your diet or make the K that you need from your diet.
Oh, okay, so, so what we're talking about here with dysbiosis is specifically poor absorption or bioavailability of vitamin K based on bacterial imbalances in the gut.
Absolutely correct. The window. That's exactly, that's exactly it in a nutshell. So let's say you eat.
A.
I'll just call it say tartrate cherries. So what makes tartary cherries cherry colored is a benzene group attached to a long string of chemical stuff. Your gut bacteria would make K out of that. They know how to do it. But if you kill the bacteria that do that, now of a sudden you don't have kids.
It'll also liberate the K from the food that you eat. For instance, in the mitochondria of all cells is MK4. So if you eat, I'll just call it a carnivore diet, you're bathing your gut bacteria with CoQ10 and MK4. CoQ10 can be rejiggered into MK4, MK13, MK9, MK6. But if you don't have the bacteria that are able to do it, you're spooked.
Yeah. That's interesting. By the way, I should throw in here. I interviewed Dr. Barry Tan three weeks ago. Turns out that Annatto, the tocotrienols from annatto can act very similarly to the CoQ10 that you just described. Arguably, based on his research, possibly better. While simultaneously for people taking statins, keep levels of CoQ10 and statin associated muscle soreness.
Balanced based on the tocotrienol and the the elements of the Annatto plant. So I'll link to that interview with Dr. Barry Tan in the shownotes, if people want to hear that. But, but you also mentioned, just to make sure we establish terms here for people listening in MK4 now there's a few different forms of vitamin K, right?
There's K1 which is phylloquinone, which is basically what you find in broccoli. And then you have the various MKs called Menaquinones with numbers 4 through 13. They're common places for MK4s is in red meat, the sheet. And MK7 is in sauerkraut. And surprisingly enough, the research from Tufts University is old world sausages that have been hanging in the butcher shop for a month or so. They're loaded with various mks because gut bacteria will convert that stuff into mks.
This is interesting. Do you know by the way, on average for life expectancy, what the longest livid country in the world is?
I have no clue.
Tiny little country between Italy and Spain. I Learned this from Dr. Steven Gundry called Andorra. Average life expectancy There is about 88 years old and they eat a diet that is primarily comprised of fermented meats and fermented sausages.
Yeah, I believe it. I believe it. All of my relatives lived to be in their 80s and 90s. They granted they died of arterial blowouts, but my great grandfather used to have a 55 gallon drummos of sauerkraut in the backyard. He made his own sausages and he loved to be in his mid-80s and you know, and on and on and on. But anyway, so getting back to my story. So I dive into this and I come up with a whole laundry list of all the things that make a difference in your heart disease. So I tackled it and within two and a half years I cleaned out my entire left knee completely. Completely cleared it out.
You mean based on a follow up calcium scan score?
Yes. I've, to date I've had 28 of those little bad boys.
Wow.
In one day I did two calcium scans within two hours of each other. One was an EBT scan and the other one was a normal CT scanner. I just want to say I've heard all stories about what's more accurate. We'll test them both and.
Okay, so at that point when you saw those effects, that was primarily achieved by focusing on gut bacteria, sauerkraut and other fermented sources. Magnesium, vitamin D and thyroid tear.
I, I, I made sure my iodine levels were normal. My iodine's levels were low, but I got them, got them to the normal level like just taking eat more iodized salt.
Okay.
But yeah, that's. And I lost about 30 pounds.
And were you doing any, Were you doing anything else for the thyroid besides iodized salt?
Not a thing.
Okay.
That, that would, you know, my free T3 was like 3.8, 3.9, which is fine.
Yeah.
And then now I'm not an anti vaxxer to within reason. While I was also taking high dose vitamin C at the same time, I was finally kind of doing the.
Polling protocol and everything was going fine. My blood pressure was fine, I lost my weight. Scans are looking good, I'm feeling great. So I'm going to Russia.
With my son Eric so we could train with the Russian Olympic team between the stressful sophomore year of high school, which. Track and field.
Track and field.
Okay, Track and field.
And so before I left, my personal care physician, good guy, not a problem. He says, and he said, pat, you, why don't you get an mmr? I said, why? He says, well, you know, go out to what could be possibly called a third world country. Why don't you just sue this to be in the safe side? At that time I didn't know any better. I, I said, fine. So I got it. Well, I get back. My insulin was now just a fuzz of 50. My glucose, my sugar was in the high two hundreds.
Oh wow.
My HD Williams C was like eight or nine. And I was doctoring with Dr. Bill Davis at the time. Great guy. The stuff that Bill Davis has done is just fantastic.
He's been on the podcast three times already. He's the first guy I talked to about the calcium scan score. Dr. William Davis. Yeah.
East speed guy. Top, top track. So Bill, Bill, Bill says to me, looked at my blood work. He said, have you been idling on a cruise ship for the last three months? My God, what's wrong with you? Well, I, I went home and I again, I. My calcium score just went from basically 20 to 800.
Oh man. Wow.
And it's like, what the heck? So my aunt Phyllis and I, at the time, she was in her late 70s, early 80s. She says, did you do something really stupid? She was a third grade teacher. So you know, you know what you do. I said, I didn't change a thing. I'm an engineer. I do everything by the book. And she says, you don't inject yourself with anything. I said, well, I got a MMR vaccination, but what's that? Well, she says, why don't you research that now that you're researching things. So I started, oh my God.
Really?
Talk about a Pandora's box. Well, make a long story short, the MMR shut off my thyroid because my TSH went to like, 7.
Oh, wow.
My insulin was off the charts. My heart disease went right through the fricking roof. And.
More research, the more I realize some vaccines have the propensity of inducing your immune system to attack your gut bacteria.
Okay, lovely. So now I had to get my pancreas fixed. And at the time, God love him, Dr. Bill Davis was right there standing with me to help me. It just.
And. And you. And you had to get your. You had to get your pancreas fixed due to insulin dysregulation that could have been a result of thyroid dysregulation or was the insulin dysregulation separate from that?
They're both separate. What had happened? Upon further investigation up to that point, before I got the NMR, I was at 15 grams of vitamin C a day. Always like 20,000. I use a D on my immune system the way it was described to me, my immune system. And I saw that in my blood work, my vitamin. Just before I went to Russia. My. My white blood cell count was on godly low. And another personal care physician said, are you okay? I says, I'm fine because I've got the chemistry killing critters. It doesn't. That doesn't mean that I need to get my immune system amped up. Well, the way it was described to me was your immune system was like lying on a chaise lounge next to the right. Right on the beach in St. Thomas or Saint Kitts, and somebody walked up and poured out a bucket of ice water on it. So my immune system panicked, in so many words, and just started attacking things. It went, you know, because your body is designed to take viruses and bacteria, moles and funguses and yeast, either through your lungs or through, like, say, cuts and bruises and stuff like that. It's not designed to be injected with stuff, especially if your immune system is sleepy. Well, I started researching on how to fix my pancreas. It takes about three years for your.
Body to regenerate itself. All of your organs are regenerated in three to five years.
And you're specifically in this case, talking about pancreatic beta cell regeneration.
Yep, exactly. So I did have some. My pancreas was working at a very low level, so I knew I have some stuff that I could make grow, which is great. Okay. So I put myself. And I'm not recommending this to your listeners, because this is really out there, but I was desperate. My calcium scrolls we had going through the frick enough.
So I put myself on a diet of.
While chelated vanadium.
Because vanadium used to be what people were given if they had diabetes 80, 90 years earlier.
Well, I know this by the way, vanadium and secondarily chromium, because that's actually I own a supplements company and we have a blood sugar control product. And two of the primary ingredients are, well, three of them are vanadium, chromium and bitter melon extract. For the reasons you're stating.
Yeah, yeah. Ran out of money. That's the way to do it. So I basically got on vanadium for three years, shut my pancreas off basically, and I let my pancreas regrow itself.
I. I got on my thyroid because my thyroid was shot. No doctor would prescribe it for me. So I eventually found some on the web ordered up there and basically I was in a hollowing pattern. And my calcium score is growing at about 5% per year.
And by July of 2010, I'll be very blunt, I was pretty depressed. I'm not depressed, just plain bummed out, you know, it's like, Jesus, what more can happen? So I locked myself into my house for a week.
And all I did was re go over my blood work and re go over all of the research papers that I had read up until that point. I went through everything. I think I got about three, four hours of sleep every night. And unbelievably, two things happened. I looked at some blood work done by my personal care physician out of traverse City, Michigan, Dr. Catherine Roth for not aniroctor. And she as an oh by the way, did a K1 test on me.
At that point, I wasn't really taking K. You know, I'm trying to minimize my variables. My K laundry is really low. I mean dangerously low.
And that's a simple blood test, right?
K1, that's a simple blood test. That's okay. So I looked at my K1 and then it struck me, something that Dr. Bill Davis told me in 2004 when his mother was from Japan. And people from certain areas of Japan have all vitamin K in their diet because they ate natto. And it's like, what's that?
When I used to race triathlons in Japan, I'd have for breakfast every morning a giant heap of natto with rice wrapped up in a seaweed wrap. I love that stuff.
There you go. So since I have kind of. I've been accused of having a didactic member I cannot. Well, I'll be damned. Well, then I got on the web and started looking up K1 or phylloquinone. What did I find? A 1999.
Podcast, YouTube video, whatever, from Dr. Bukola, talking about how K1 is implicated in heart disease. I said, well, I'll be damned. So that's what got me really diving into kids. I was desperate.
This thing is still growing, and I gotta stop it. I gotta stop it somehow. So that's when I first started really doing the K thing. So I looked at the research and realized how much K I needed. Looked at what was available on the Internet at the time, and there wasn't any. So I figured out what I needed to get, and then I needed to find out where to get it. And that's when I learned about Supply side West, which is a big vitamin show in Las Vegas. I go there to store a key of K1, a key of MK4, and a key of MK7, and score a couple of keys of magnesium and a couple of keys of D. And I take that on, based on the literature, making my own little pills to save my life. And what I did was if this is right, and now that this is how an engineer looks at things. My. I. I deliberately took Crestor. Deliberately took it and drove my ldl down to 70, which is dangerous, really, but I drove it down there. And then if the. If the chemistry is correct and the statement was your body loves K, and since K is carried on the ldl, the HDL, and the VLDL particles.
If you take K while you're on Crestor, that's the theory. You should see your LDL and HDL go up. And with the LDL go up, even though you're taking Crestor.
And the mechanism of action for that, again, would be what?
The mechanism is simple. The liver loves K. The liver will take K that comes through the hepatic product from the small intestine or the small intestine. It will attach it to the ldl, it will attach it to the hdl, it will attach it to the VLDL and send it out into your system after it makes sure your clotting. And I have clotting factors that are. Okay, that's. Can you. There.
Okay, so. So basically, by increasing the number of passengers necessary to be on the boats, you are. You are initiating an increase in the number of boats in the bloodstream.
Precisely. That was the logic.
Well, guess what? Three months, that's exactly what happened. My LDL doubled. Went from 70 to 140. My HDL went up about 20% and my VLDL went up 20%. And so the next step was, okay, now what? Cut out the crestor and see what happens. So I cut out the crestor and if everything is correct, my LDL will stabilize. And it did to this day.
Meaning it would quit elevating.
That's right. It stayed right there. And then being we.
Good lab rat that I have, what happens if you double your gay when you then double your ldl? Hdl? In theory, that answer is no. Because your LDL HDL is a function of hormonal demands in your body and also the demands of your brain. As an example, for K1 to make the sheathing material for your brain and the sheathing material for, you know, your nerves and all that other stuff. So I doubled my K for three months. Nothing happened.
LDL and HDL did not increase. When you doubled your K, everything stabilized.
It's just rock solid.
Based on. Based on endocrine system regulation of your lipids.
Correct. Because your body makes a hormone called pregnenolone. That's the grandmother hormone. All our hormones are made from pregnenolone. When your pregnenoline level stabilized and you have a demand for, let's say, testosterone or estradiol or whatever, it's made out of LDL using pregnenolone, which happens in the kidneys. Okay, my pregnenolone level stabilized. My hormone levels all stabilized. It was like, well, wow. Now get your R scan. I got my R scan welled off. Didn't change. Yes, I think I figured this out. So then on top of all of that, now I'm going in the right direction.
I've been divorced at that point for three years. And I run into a lady I started dating. She's a PhD clinical psychologist, and she says, I found something for you. I said, what? There is a vitamin K conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. This is June of 2011. I said, really? She says, let's go make the experts. I said, sounds good to me. He said, I've got steel under soda and I need the top K experts in the world. It was great because I'm a perpetual learn a holic. I love to realize how much I don't know because it keeps me humble.
I can tell.
And that allows me to share with people how I learn things and so help out other people. So I got to make sugars and the various and setties and boost and Soto and so I started asking them if we were going to make a capsule of this Stuff because I'm trying to do it for myself. What's enough?
And while they all said, you can't take too much of it, okay, they.
All said vitamin K in any form.
Any form, any form. They said it's contraindicated with people on Warfarin or.
Coumadin, but that's all. Another sidebar we can talk about. But they said, this is what you do. Silo said, I stock with silo, Mr. Osteoporosis from Japan for three hours talking about this stuff so I could learn from him.
Used the Yoda of osteoporosis. And his studies, he says, passed. But he was Mr. Vitamin K Ron. He was Mr. Phyla Quino. So Eastern Madison, Wisconsin. He loved talking to a, you know, he shot the breeze route and, and he explained to me all the stuff that was never published and the stuff that through his research was so intuitive, but we never followed up on it. And then I told them what I'd been doing with, with what I've been doing, and they thought that was great, that somebody has got the guts to, you know, be the doctor here, like a modern day doctor Error, like to say, hey, let's, let's see what works. So then I talked to the sugars and Vermeers about MK7 and they told me all about that stuff. Great guys, really knowledgeable people. So when I got back, I started making my own little concoction.
And one of the things that was sidebar that came out of this was if you take enough vitamin K, it'll boost your endurance if you're an athlete. So if you take a high amount of MK7, you bind up your peroxides. When you bind up your peroxides, guess what? You don't get tired. And 24, 2017, North Texas State did a great study on MK7 and athletic performance. And now being a triathlete, how would you like to have your endurance boosted by 12%?
Yeah, it's like a negative feedback loop. Peroxide buildup will reduce the shuttling of electrons on the electron transport chain because you don't want to build up more peroxides. So you're essentially sweeping up the garbage more quickly so that you can produce ATP without having the mitochondria, in a word, become exhausted more quickly.
Precisely, man. So if you, if you're binding up the reactive oxygen species, what's going to happen? You can go for it. You can go for it a lot, for a lot than anybody else can. And it only turns out it's like less than a milligram less than a milligram of MK Salin will do that. And so you would say, well, okay, what's the objective evidence? Well, I was speaking nutrition coach for pole vaulter named Jeremy Scott. He's now finishing up his orthopedic deficiency. And Jeremy ignited him on a concoction of the case, the D and the magnesium and the.
Citrulline and lysine. And he realized now his undergraduate degrees in biophysics. So this guy was a smart dude. He found that he could train instead of like Monday, Wednesday and Friday, take the weekends off, he could train every day at the same level. In 2010 he was considered an also, I don't want to say also ran, but he wasn't in the top 10 in the world.
In fact, he was not given a shot to even make the UST for 2012. Well, he didn't. And he made it to London because he could train every day.
I wonder how much, how much of that was the peroxide mitigation versus how much of that might have been an increase in testosterone or endocrine system function due to more pregnenolone around because vitamin K was being replenished. Could be both.
What he did was he experimented with the K. So he'd pluck it and then he would get off it for. Well, he tried to get off it for a week and he found that after about three days he just couldn't train. And he just couldn't train at the level he was training at. Then he takes a K again, a two or three day run. In one he's right back to where he needed to be. So you could say, well, okay, that was Jeremy. Well, there's another pole alter getting ready for Paris, Austin Miller. And Austin's doing the same thing with the same results. You can train every day.
That's weird after three days because I thought vitamin K was a fat soluble vitamin so you'd have more than that stored in your system.
Well, that's a, that frame is just a misnomer. Vitamin K stays in your system at the most, five days at the very most. And fast soluble means it rise in your ldl, HDL and vldl.
Okay, got it.
That's, you know, it's really, really a misnomer. You can't take too much of it. So it's kind of like that. So anyway, I started taking a K and then in 2012 a number of people said, you should start marketing this stuff. And I said, I don't want to. I'm just having too much Fun. Just kind of helping out my athletic buddies at that.
At that point. What was in it? Like what was the amount and the different forms of K that you were taking?
Following the advice of the Experts, it had 25 milligrams of MK4, 5 milligrams of K, 1 1/2amilligram of MK7 and 2 milligrams of astaxanthin. But it's microencapsulated astaxanthin. It's microencapsulated so it makes it through your gut, through your stomach juices, so it can be bioavailable in your small intestine.
Yeah, that's important. By the way, that's azanthin. If you are going to take microencapsulated, take it with a meal that contains fats.
That's right. Well, that's really.
We launched the business in May of 2015 and my girlfriend and I, and we've been curating our site for just all the peer reviewed literature and K. And you've been there. There's really no real market. It's all geeky stuff. People complain. It's too geeky enough for me.
It's good, it's good. The name of the product, by the way, that's the, that's the concentrated K. Concentrated spelled with K. Right.
Y.
Okay. And that is the MK1, MK4, MK7 and astaxanthin.
Yes.
Okay, got it. MK or K1. By the way, that's phylloquinone. Right? Phylloquinone, Right, okay, got it.
Now phylloquinone. Most people don't. When you ask a doctor and say, if I magically took all the K out of your body, what would happen to your body? Fish with every doctor would say, oh my God, you bleed out, you clot up.
Yeah, that's why you're not supposed to take it with blood thinners like warfarin or Coumadin. Right.
Well, well, as it turns out, with the warfarin and Coumadin, the latest, I'll just say anecdotal researchers out there.
People are taking 100 to 300 micrograms and divided doses of MK7 to stabilize their INR. Because people on warfarin and Coumadin, they die of hardening of the arteries.
What's the inr?
The international normalized ratio is clotting factors. You have postronic time.
So what they're finding is instead of having your INR doing one of these things, they found that this is anecdotal by the way. But, but the feedback I've gotten works 100 micrograms in the morning, 100 at lunch and 100 at dinner. And your INR just tastes, just steady. And also it incrementally, from what I've been told, slows down the progression of your heart disease.
Interesting. Yeah. So a couple questions for you for slowing down the progression of heart disease. In addition to this formula that you've described, would you still advise taking magnesium, vitamin D and vitamin C and, and also of course paying attention to thyroid micronutrients like iodine and selenium.
You have to.
A little sidebar. I'm a biochemical engineer, founded a pulp and paper industry where I was for 48 years. My sub specialty is really the biochemistry of making pulp and paper. But my sub, sub specialty is instrumentation and control systems. I was the kind of guy that if you wanted to design say the cruise control or the anti light braking system for your car, I'd be the guy you tap on the shoulder. Could you do this? So I, I think in systems and I think in feedback loops and feed forward loops. That's just how I think my son Eric can do the same thing my other three kids can't. But Eric, Eric can't. It's just something you're either born with or you're not. So.
Thinking about the systems, that's why the stuff I sent you is called reverse calcium transport. The first thing that has to happen is your free T3 has to be right. That in turn activates some enzymes, which in turn activates the un carboxylated osteocalcin, which in turn activates the vitamin D, which in turn activates this blah blah blah blah blah. And there's what you do. So I've had many people say what is the minimum I can do? Because a lot of people call me up and say, well I'm a senior citizen, I don't have any money. What's the minimum? Well, you should make DC bright red blood cell magnesium. Get at the high end of the range, get your vitamin D right somewhere between 60 and 100 nanograms per milliliter. You don't need to go over 120, but you don't need to go below 60 either.
You got to get your free T3 right. That's either taking sufficient selenium and sufficient iodine or take a supplement.
Okay.
Really get your killer on and your C, because that, that's part of what's called autoschis, which is a system that's designed to kill form Cells, the whole concept of foam cells. To kill a foam cell, the beta HDL goes in there and sucks the fat out of the foam cell. When it's fed.
The apoa run attaches to the beta hdl, and that goes back to your liver and sucks the life out of the foam cell. Also, the killer run through the injection, basically, of messenger rna where we heard that before, kills the foam cell. If you don't have enough K run, the cell don't get killed. If you don't have sufficient c, the various. I'll just say bacterial and viral and fungal insults to your arteries continue. You got to kill this stuff. So, like I said, it's the system. Now, there's one part of the system a lot of people don't talk about. It's called phetoin A. Now, What's FETOIN A? FATO1A is a carrier protein for calcium. It's made in liver. So it's interesting that you can get the feta in a test as Eliza kit. So it's not like it's some magical thing.
Right. So is that a blood. Blood spot or a blood draw?
It's a blood draw.
Okay.
And you should just inspect a photometer. It's a straightforward test.
And that's phetoin. Is that F E?
F e, F e, T U, I N, A fetuin A. And nobody tests for it unless you're a chronic kidney disease patient. But if you're on dialysis, your fetuin A levels drop like a brick and you die. Heart disease.
Interesting. So the mechanism of action of fetuin A would be to limit the amount of calcium in the bloodstream.
No. Your magnesium loosens up the calcium.
The fatu na grabs onto the calcium, takes it back to the liver, takes the bond for processing.
Okay, got it. Interesting.
It's the truck.
Yeah. So probably low fatu NA levels would also be associated with osteopenia or osteoporosis. I would imagine that's the theory.
But if nobody ever tests for it, you'll never know. But when I ask if there's some drug companies trying to make a synthetic fetal na so what's that tell you? They're not doing it for. For giggles. They're doing it because they. They can see a market for it.
If you could do it, how would you normalize Federal. When?
I don't know. Because until I get the blood work and then test, test, test, test, test, and some of the things I would try, I have no idea.
Yeah, I was just curious if there were dietary sources or anything like that, I don't know.
The first thing I would do would be to, let's say for myself, I'd look at myself first. I would take like 2mg of MK7 a day for say 6 months and test my feta and a every week and see what happens. And then go off it for six months and see what happens.
Yeah.
See if that made a difference. I try MK4 and K1 and D and I try a bunch of things.
Got it? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of functional medicine doctors, they'll certainly endorse a protocol similar to what you've just described. Although I would say with not as much emphasis on a full spectrum of vitamin K as, as, as you've noted. But what about the fact that many of them are recommending so called plaque, for lack of a better word, melting compounds, things like nattokinase or pomegranate or pomegranate extract. Have you come across any of that?
The issue with that is.
I'm not going to be a naysayer, but remember I'm a geek. You take a, I'll just, let's just generically say nattokinase. You take mitokinase, it's an enzyme. How'd that get through your stomach acid?
Can somebody explain that to me? Now if the nattokinase busted up, gets through your stomach acid and gets to your gut bacteria or do you have the right gut bacteria? Maybe that gut bacteria could take the, I'll just call it chemical trash of the natto. What's left over of the nattokannase and make your case from that. Maybe. Don't know for sure, but it would make sense because the body's pretty dan tootin creative when it comes to building things. Building blocks. Give me the basics and I can make dinner or anything.
Now if, when people talk about nattokinase, do you test it in the blood.
Do you then do stool samples to see how much goes out with a stool, do you test? And since blood work for your MKS is virtually impossible to do, nobody does it.
You mean you can only test for K1?
That's it. And when you test K1, if you take in other MKs, the K1 test goes through the roof.
So K1 is an appropriate corollary to MK4 and MK7 on a blood test?
In theory, that's correct. Okay, so you gotta start somewhere. Another test would be uncarboxylated osteocalcin, which they're gonna be heart start to do again. Another test is PIVKA2 for bone health by Surrogate Heart Health is capital N, capital T sub X, which is a urine test, which is a measure of basically osteoporosis health. You're slowing osteoporosis down.
But there really isn't a test out there that says, I accept, you know, HPLC and stuff like that in some research lab.
Okay, got it. By. By the way, for people listening who are scrambling to write that down, I'll link to these different tests that Patrick's talking about if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com vitamin K podcast. What about this? It's a relatively new test. I don't know if you've heard of it before. It's by a company called Preventia, the HART Panel. It is a blood panel that measures for four different protein markers related to plaque accumulation, with the idea being that in between something like a CT angiography or calcium scan score, you could do a blood panel to at least see if there's any evidence of continued plaque accumulation. Are you familiar with that test at all?
Well, I'm not, but that's a good thing to do. Test, test, test. That's the right thing to do. Yeah, because everybody has to dial in their own body. And the more tests you have, the better fuel you have for your own body.
Do you think there is a case to be made, especially in the presence of elevated calcium or plaque for statins or even a PCSK9 inhibitor?
There is an argument for that. For those people who are APOE 434 and 4. Four, there can be an argument for that. And so from that standpoint, again, get your genetics studies done. Check your.
Folic acid metabolism while you're doing it, along with your vitamin A metabolism, but get your genetics tested. That's a. That's a great, great thing to do. Now. Well, how does that work? Well, when. When you.
Have an LCA4.4.
That only is a problem.
Post menopausal and post andrapausal say, okay, something else is going on. That sma. Yeah. LDR is your truck that hauls. We'll just say for conversation, your KS and your CoQ10s around your system. That truck gets reprocessed in the lever liver every three days. At the end of those three days, that particle, and this is a surface chemistry thing, has a lot of those Ks taken off of there and a lot of coqens taken off of there, but there's still a few left. So then the body reprocesses it, but there's still a few K's. Whatever. Remember we're dealing with biochemical statistics here. So let's say you've got an LDL particle and let's say your brain is making some brain cells. So you make about 400 a day and it sends a signal to the SXR in your artery wall and say, hey, I need some k. I need two 1. See how the LDL particle comes beboping around the sxr grounds the k1 off of it, rejiggers it into mk4 and makes sheathing material for the brain. Well, that means the IL particle is absent to the one. Well, it's like taking chrome off a bumper. What do you think is going to happen? It's going to rust. That's where the oxidized LDL comes in.
Got it.
So now you've got all this stuff and the chrome was taken off the bumper, but not all of it. Now goes back to the liver and we make new LDL and it gets all the stuff reattached to it and off it goes. Well, in the APOE 4 types, your LDL is reprocessed every five to seven days. So now you have a lot of naked LDL floating around and not doing you any good. So statistically it creates a problem. Now I would have loved to see a study done where people are Giving High Dose CoQ 10 High Dose K doesn't matter what kind of with and the double blind study was being with or without the PSK9 and see how much.
Happens to your LDL in terms of how much is still stuck to the ldl. So in that case, if you drop your LDL in theory, that means you have more stuff to stick to it.
More in this case, more stuff being more K.
Right.
Marque Marco Q10.
Right.
As an example.
Right. Interesting.
Has its own vitamin A, has its own carrier protein C, has its own carrier protein D. Has his own carrier protein.
Yeah, well, yeah. In full disclosure, after consulting with Fountain Life and with Next Health, I I got a clearly CT angiography with both of those organizations over the past couple of years and looking at their data that they've accumulated with their patients, I saw pretty impressive results with a low dose statin or rezuvastatin and ezetimide at 5 and 10 milligrams I believe, along with a twice monthly injection of PCSK9. So I've actually adopted that protocol over the past six months. But I'm also taking pretty much almost exactly what you've described. Now I actually, I haven't tried your product. You know, I've been using the Trik from Designs for Health. I've been using the Annatto based on my conversation with Dr. Barry Tan. And then magnesium, vitamin D, vitamin C. And I use a thyroid product called thyroid fixer. T2, iodine, selenium, et cetera. I learned about when I interviewed Dr. Amy Horneman, the thyroid doctor. And I won't due to, you know, the idea that I don't want to be exposed to radiation over and over again on these scans. I won't be doing another scan for another six months. But my APOB has plummeted. My LP has gone down. My LDL has stabilized. My triglyceride to HDL ratio is about one, which is fantastic. It remains to be seen what has happened to the plaque accumulation, but based on what I've seen on clues with the lipids, it seems like it could be effective. What, what I would do after that is I would actually cut out the statin and the PCSK9, stay on everything else and see if it continues to stabilize. That's my plan at least.
You're dialing your body in. That's just the way to do it. What's really important is your APOA 1 to APO B100 ratio. That's more important because you can't remove the form out of a farm cell unless you've got sufficient APO A1. And you get that by having good fat in your diet.
Is that ratio a particular number that you look for?
2 to 1, 2 to 1. 2 to 1, Apoa 1 to Apob.
Like 2 Apoa 1 to Apob. If you're not 1 to 1, watch out.
That would mean your Apao 1 is suppressed relative to FOB excessively.
Right. You typically find that with people with a high amount of junk oils in their diet. Junk food. It's a junk food indicator to test for. Is the neutrophil to HDL ratio is becoming more and more important because neutrophils are typically indicative that you've got a viral or bacterial or mold or fungal insult going down in your pipe somewhere in your system.
So you. And that's just the latest. That that information is only about 12 weeks old.
Well, I'm. I'm getting another blood panel on Saturday that's pretty comprehensive down at Next Health, so I'll be able to look at. I'll have all these values in hand by the end of next week, so it'll be interesting. I just wrote a note to myself that neutrophil to HDL ratio. You looking for anything in particular for that? For a number?
It's still too soon to tell, but if you do a keyword search on it, it'll give you some numbers. But basically what it says is you want high HDL and no neutrophils.
Okay. Okay, got it. Interesting. I would be remiss not to ask you in a little bit of time that we have left if you've made diet and exercise modifications.
I've always been a jock, so, you know, I Paul Vulture, fun and I'm 71 years old.
So you exercise regularly?
Yeah. Oh yeah.
I'm assuming you're still not doing like the. What was that meal you had right before you went in for your first. Chelsea's cancer, the gravy and everything. Have you changed that up?
I've been eating steak and eggs since the mid-60s. Like tonight I'm going to have a cereal bear size shelled shrimp and a non sugar based, I'll just say sauce. I'll just eat that. That's, that's dinner. I eat once a day.
Are you selective about. Oh, you're doing like, like an omad diet. Interesting. Are you selective about the quality of your food sourcing?
Well, I'm lucky. I live in upper Michigan. If you want grass fed beef, we got it everywhere up here. So I'm lucky that in that regard. So I have a steak every three days. I have an omelet, you know, every five days. But I just kind of just keep to the, to the, to the 60, 30, 10 rule.
What's the 60, 30, 10.
60% fat, 30% protein, 10% complex carbs. Okay, that's the research from Dr. Noakes.
So a typical. So if you're eating one meal a day, you said tonight you're having a bunch of shrimp and what else?
Oh, I make my own hot sauce.
Oh, wow.
So I just kind of get creative. I love cooking, so I'll cook something really cool and I'm. For a treat, I'll make my own ice cream made out of 100% cream and real raspberries and throw them in there and just call it good. And it's delicious.
Interesting.
It is good for you.
So you kind of fall into the category of essentially compressed feeding windows with a low carb, high fat, arguably based on your description, nearly ketogenic approach.
Interesting.
But I've been doing that since the 60s. What we learned playing ice hockey. I never ate a pizza until my senior year of college. But we would observe in a dressing room somebody that would eat pizza. You would perform like dog doo doo the next day and nobody could figure out why, but nobody ate a pizza. Somebody, we ate balls of chili like it was going out of style and balls of stew and stuff like that. We just instinctively knew that's what you needed. And my dad came off the farm, said he was a big steak and eggs kind of guy. So that's what we did.
Yeah, that's interesting. You know, I've been following a little bit more of like a low carb Mediterranean approach. You know, pretty rich in polyphenols and flavanols, herbs and spices, a lot of extra virgin olive oil, dark chocolate. Kind of shifted a little bit more towards fish and omega 3 rich proteins still do. Grass fed, grass finished meat. But I'm, I'm down to about twice a week for that. Have, you know, a really nice pastured pork cut about once a week and then a little bit of poultry, like good pasture poultry. So I, I rotate quite a bit, but I've really been careful to adhere to, you know, not something like a strict carnivore approach, absent of fibers and polyphenols. But you know, I, I do kind of take a little bit more of a Mediterranean approach. And I know some people might be saying, well, you know, Patrick's diet sounds like a heart attack diet, but I mean, you have the blood work, I mean, you have all your data. But believe, correct me if I'm wrong, like, your stuff's published on your website, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, obviously it's anecdotal, it's his genetics, but it seems to be working for you.
Yeah, Like I said, the male gave me four years to live in 2002. Well, I think I've kind of beat that by a bit.
Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
It's again you, you. It's not you. You are the old sunny dose. What you are what you eat. It's not what you eat, it's what you generate in your gut and absorb. That's what you are. So if you get your gut bacteria, a steady diet of run thing all the time at the same time of day, and yet and you don't confuse them, your gut bacteria will be your gut buddies. On and on and on.
Yeah, you are, you eat and you're also. You are what you eat.
8.
That's also important. Hey, one, one, one last thing I'll share with you just because I thought of it, we were talking about fermented meat. I've been geeking out on this one company Paleo Valley. They actually have fermented beef sticks. They have fermented pork as well. They taste fantastic. But it's about the closest thing I could find that's kind of like commercially available that you could order that's similar to what they're eating on that island of Andorra. And so I've been going through a lot of those as well. Apparently the fermentation process also reduces the levels of the new 5 GC sugar that is associated with some level of inflammation in response to high meat intake. So. And they taste great. So there you go. Maybe, maybe if you let me know your address, I'll send you a packet from my pantry. I got a bunch of.
Yeah, I'll email him out back. Yeah, yeah. And I'm here to support. Let me know how your blood work turned out. We just kick it around and come by and I'm a guy that answers the phone and I, I, I talk to people typically three to four to five times a day.
Just wow.
I got a PhD in leadership and was my 57th year coaching, so I'm just coaching people on how to, how to be healthy.
Incredible.
And first of all, relax, you're okay. And then just slowly but surely test, test, test and dial your body in.
I can certainly get behind the data driven approach. And your website's great. I would recommend. If you're listening in and you really want to geek out, read the cardiac manifesto part one and part two on Patrick's website. I'll link to that in the show notes as well as everything else we talked about. Just go to BenGreenfieldLife.com vitamin K podcast. It'll all be there. And Patrick, thanks so much, man.
Yeah. And may one, we're introducing a product for athletes which will have vitamin D in it.
Incredible.
Athletes be as fast as they burn glucose.
Wow.
And most athletes are vitamin D deficient.
Yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. All right, cool. Well, great. This has been a fantastic discussion. Very enlightening. And I'll make sure in the show notes I'll link to other episodes that I've done with Dr. William Davis with the thyroid doctor with my own calcium scan and clearly scan results with Dr. Shaw. So anyways, show notes will be rich and juicy and thank you everyone for listening. Until next time, I'm signing out from.
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