#411: Rethinking Heart Health: Surrender, Sunlight, and Structured Water With Dr. Stephen Hussey

Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Nidom. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all from new technology and ancestral health practices, to personalize interventions, and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bio-regulators. Enjoy the show. Hey, welcome back. I'm Natalie Nidom, your host. Heart disease is still the number one killer in the world. And today's yes, thanks. We've been asking the wrong questions about it. Dr. Stephen Hussey is a clinician and author who survived a widow-maker heart attack 34, despite normal labs and a zero calcium score. In this episode, we talk about why cholesterol may be a distraction, has stress and nervous system signaling affect the heart, and why the heart may function more like a vortex than a pump. It's a conversation that challenges a lot of assumptions in a go-d way. 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It acts as a signal, encouraging your body to increase its own antioxidant production, support immune balance, and improve cellular communication. And because it's delivered through the gut, you're supporting the system where immunity, detoxification, and energy regulation all begin. If you're looking for a smarter, more practical way to support resilience at the cellular level, you can learn more about Oracle at wizard sciences dot com. And make sure to use code NAT 15 for 15% off your purchase. Welcome to the show, Dr. Stephen Hussey. It is a pleasure to have you here today. And I am really excited to share your stories. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. Yeah. So we're going to blow up some preconceptions myths and whatnot. I listen to you speak in Copenhagen. And when you put your book up on the screen, I was like, wait, I have that book. It had been sent to me by, I don't know, maybe your PR agency or someone. And I had it in my pile of things I want to read. And then when I listened to your talk at the conference, I was just like, yeah, we need to get on this. And so we're going to wade into this world of cardiovascular disease and what the drivers may or may not be, what some of the myths are. And we're going to start with your story because you have a, you know, you're coming from a place. And I love the opening of the book, which was when you had your event, which I'm going to let you talk about, you were pretty much at the point where you're going to write a book. And it completely put this huge kind of, you know, you all well, suddenly you're like, well, if this can happen, I have no business writing a book. But now 180 degrees turn later, you know more, I just, I just really excited to share this conversation because I do think this whole, the whole conversation around cholesterol and the cause of cardiovascular disease, the way you describe the movement of blood and what drives it is so fascinating and so important for people to understand. So on that, let's start with you. Type one diabetes early on in the game and take it away, please. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, the reason that I've been interested in health and disease for my entire adult life is because, as a child, I had a lot of chronic inflammatory conditions, ultimately ending up in type one diabetes at age nine, which I very quickly learned, you know, just because of going to doctors that heavily predisposed me to heart disease, being a type one diabetic. And I was never really told why or anything, but so then as I, you know, majored in health and wellness in college, and then one went on to get my chiropractic degree and then a master's degree in human nutrition and functional medicine, and I would always like my ears would perk up when I'd hear about heart disease because I've been told that I'm so predisposed to it. And I'm happy to say that, you know, through lifestyle interventions, I was able to control most of those chronic diseases that had as a kid and get rid of most of them aside from the type one diabetes kind of collateral damage from that inflammation. And so, so yeah, I thought it interesting that no doctor ever told me that I could do those things. And so I kind of gained this skepticism, Western medicine, and kind of went into the health route. And, you know, mainly controlled my health or tried to achieve a healthy lifestyle through diet and exercise, mainly what I did. Those are things I control. Even when I was a poor student, I can control those things, you know. And what did your diet look like at that time? Like what was, what was, what was your version of a healthy diet as a type one diabetic? Well, I mean, early, I mean, as a kid, it was just standard American diet, which made it a good one. I was incredible. I'm insulin. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of insulin. I thought that told me as a type one, they just don't worry about the carbohydrate, processed foods, just give yourself insulin for it. Right. And so, but yeah, I learned I could change my diet. And it eventually went to just whole foods. And then I discovered low carb, maybe 12 years ago now. And that made a huge difference as far as my ability to control blood sugars. And I just thought it was interesting. I was never told that by any position that you can't diet and influence my ability to control these blood sugars, use less insulin, that kind of stuff. And so, so yeah, it went from like processed food diet to whole foods diet to more paleo to then low carb. I tried carnivore for a while, but now I'm kind of back on low carb, still incorporating plants and things like that, eating seasonally. But yeah, so I was always using diet to kind of move the lever for me. And then exercise. I always play sports, exercise was fun for me. I always, I always been a big camper and hiker and things like that. So that's what I was doing. And it gave me relatively good levels of health. And then sorry, before you go on, just I'm going to cut in here just before you go on. I'm, this is something that people don't fully understand. And I'd love you to explain to the audience a little bit why is just using insulin a problem? Like insulin comes, it comes with a whole host of issues of its own when there's too much of it around for too long. And we hear about type 1 diabetics just like being told exactly what you were told. And they're just pounding the insulin to manage the blood sugar spikes. But what is it about insulin that you as a type 1 diabetic wanted to mitigate so that you weren't using as much? And then the other thing was many people who are diabetic would hear low carb and would flip up. They'd be like, well, wait, you know, what if I go into ketoacidosis? So maybe we could just kind of pierce those two bubbles and then keep going on your story. Yeah, definitely. So I guess necessarily for like a, in the context of type 2 diabetes, which is where my body is making insulin, I'm not responding to it. You're going to get high levels of insulin in that situation because your body doesn't think there's any around. It can't, it's lost the ability to respond to it. So your body doesn't think there's any, so it just keeps making more. Right. You insulin resistant and your body has high levels of insulin. And in that situation, like, you know, people talk a lot about how high insulin is indicative of all these different issues in the body. And in and of the self, like that can cause some issues. But the real issues are the, are how you got to that high level of insulin. The fact that you're not responding to it. And the poor metabolic health you've created to get to that point, those are the things that are really causing the damage. And then the high blood sugars that eventually happen from that because you could have high insulin levels well before you have high blood sugar levels. And so that's something that is, is an issue in medicine because they're tracking the blood sugar. But by the time it's affecting blood sugar, it's been an issue for a very long time. Your insulin levels have been high for a very long time. Whereas in type one, I've lost the ability to make insulin. So I am administering insulin myself, which is an art form because sometimes it doesn't absorb as well as other times when I inject it. And, and there's things that can affect but I'm trying to be a pancreas with exogenous insulin, which is a difficult thing to do. Like, even I've just exercised that makes a blood sugar go up. Or if I go on stage and I'm going to have a stress response, like blood sugar goes up, you know, there's all these different things. So, so in that sense, like, I guess having more, using more insulin as a type one diabetic is not as bad as having high insulin levels as a type two because of you as a type two, you've gone through the situations where you've gotten to high levels of insulin pathologically. Whereas for me, it's still not a great idea as a type one to be using so much insulin because A, that means you're probably eating a less quality diet, one that's very high in processed carbohydrates and things like that. And also it, it can desensitize your body to the insulin. And it's the number one like fat storing hormone. And we're just not really well equipped to handle that much insulin. But that's exactly what I was told as a kid. Like, I was literally given a booklet that listed every single fast food item available at the time from all the different restaurants and told, eat these food just here's the amount of carbohydrates in it. It's listed in this book. Just give yourself insulin for those carbohydrates. That's all that mattered, you know. Yeah, I would also imagine that high, chronically high levels of insulin are, is it, it's more catabolic, right? Like the presence of insulin blocks the release of growth hormone. So it would be pretty hard. If your insulin is chronically elevated all the time, even as an athlete, it would be hard to recover. Sure. Yeah. I mean, all those different things are our issues with just high levels of the hormone itself. And it's like that at hormone that I'm injecting. So like, I don't know, there's, there's things I have concerns about that, but I have no option at this point. I have to use that. Yeah. But what you're doing is reducing that delta, right? So when I, I mean, less of it around, because you're not needing more of it around. Right. Then I do that mainly through diet and lifestyle. Like, like with lifestyle, like being active, tremendously increases insulin sensitivity. So I am, you know, increasing the, I guess the value of the insulin I am giving by being active, right? Yeah. So yeah, there's lots of things I do lifestyle wise that help me minimize the amount of insulin I need to create the bloodshed in 12 that I want. Okay. Okay. So then let's talk about low carb and, and diabetic people in general. And let's talk about type 1 diabetes right now. Like, type 2 diabetes is kind of a different animal. It's a, it's a metabolic dys, dysregulation, if you will. It can be corrected through lifestyle and diet in most cases. So we're going to move that off to the side, because I think the type 1 diabetes is very central to your story. In the sense that it put you at very high risk for certain issues that came to pass in spite of all your good efforts. So, but just let's just quietly walk this little elephant out of the room, the low carb diet for a person who's diabetic, which people could be very freaked out about. Yeah. And the reason they freaked out when I understand it from a perspective of what I was told when I was a kid, you're told that ketones or this state of ketoacidosis is a bad thing and you're meant to fear it. And so then, and that's what you do, the reason, the way that you test for if you're in ketoacidosis, which really only happens if you have a wildly uncontrolled type 1 or type 2 diabetic, right? They're uncontrolled. And their blood sugars are so high, they're not getting any insulin. And their body is like, well, we have to make another fuel source, and that is ketones. And it's so pathologic in that state that you make too many ketones. And you get to the state of being acidic because of the amount of ketones that are present. And that's, but that's very different than ketosis. So that's ketoacidosis, right? And so, but as a type 1, you're testing ketones, and you find any ketones in your urine, and you're like, this is the bad thing, you're taught that. Right. Right. So then you get this diet that comes along that's going to help your body become more metabolic, flexible, and make ketones when it needs to. And you think you probably think because you've been told, oh, that's a bad thing. I don't need to do that, right? But so, the difference is the amount of ketones that are present. So in that pathologic state, your body is going to keep making them to the point where it gets to like levels of like nine or 10, like if you measured it in the blood, millimoles. And whereas ketosis is technically like, you know, optimal ketosis here at like 1.5 to 3 millimoles. Right. So very different levels of ketones. And that reflects more metabolic health. Having ketones present at all reflects there's metabolic health. So if you eat an amount of carbohydrates, say like the night before, and then you fast through the night and you wake up with ketones present, that shows metabolic flexibility. You were able to burn through the carbohydrates and immediately go back to making ketones. And so that's like a healthy state. Um-hmm. You do acidosis, very different thing. Pathologic state where your body thinks that needs to keep making ketones because it doesn't have a fuel source. Right. At that point. Because there's no insulin or insulin signaling. Right. So it's all about holding the balance, which is more work, which is why I think probably most people are not guided to this path. So anyway, so you're going along, you're managing your, you know, you're mitigating it, you're not using too much insulin, you're using what you need, you're managing your, your blood sugar through insulin, but also through lifestyle and diet. So you're using three different levers where most people are only using one, then what? Yes, I just kind of, you know, we're practicing as a chiropractor for, I mean, I practice eventually for 13 years until I stopped, but yeah, just practicing as a chiropractor, diet and exercise, you know, just always been interested in health and reading lots of things. But I, I was doing a lot of research on the heart and heart disease just out of curiosity because I've been told that I was predisposed. So I already had like a good amount of information about the heart, um, and heart disease as far as like a function of the heart perspective, like what the actual function of the heart and the body is, not so much about atherosclerosis heart attacks yet. Then yes, um, at the age of 34, I actually suffered a will-maker heart attack out of the room. There was like my testing looked great according to the authorities, you know, um, you know, technically they would tell me that my cholesterol was a little high, but my CAC score six months prior to the heart attack was a perfect score of zero, which puts me at like less than one from percent risk of having a heart attack. Wow. And they would have told me, yeah, you're doing fine, and then six months later, I had a heart attack. And so, yeah, this story can get long, but um, so, so yeah, you know, I get to the hospital and, and obviously they, they intervene, which is one of the, what Western medicine is good at, they're in good at intervening in an emergency. The reason I'm still here today, I could argue that the reasons they think I'm still here today, what they did, maybe different, um, and what actually is going on, which was one of the, the, the, um, themes of my talk, I gave him Copenhagen. But yeah, so they found a hundred percent blockage of the LAD, right? The left interior descending already, the widowmaker heart attack is what they found. Uh, and they placed a stint. And again, there's nuances, I said, I think to what actually saved me that day. Uh, but that's what, that's what happens. Like, and this is why blockages and, and, and stenosis or narrowing of an artery are blamed for heart attacks is because someone starts having the symptoms of a heart attack. They go in and they find this thing. But this thing that's blocking an artery, right? But we have no idea if that was there beforehand. We're not, right? So there could have been, there's entirely different mechanism of heart attacks, which sounds like a very bold and crazy claim for me to make, but there's lots and lots of, this work that I've done and, and then I should have looked at to suggest that. And I want to, I want to jump in here and just encourage people to get their hands on your book, because you, you, we don't know how, you know, this would be a three hour marathon if we got into the nitty gritty, um, which I'd be happy to do. But I don't think people don't come to me for three hour. We've neither of us has blocked the time. But in the book, you do such a good job of explaining this. So just encouraging the audience guys, like, check out the book. But in the meantime, listen to this story because I just think it's so fascinating, like the treatment that you got in the hospital, the way that you were stonewalled by the medical profession. And then the fact that you actually had to wear with all to stick to your guns, dig in a little deeper and make some really interesting discoveries. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, thank goodness I had that, that previous knowledge of the heart and heart disease. So I had enough knowledge to kind of doubt what I was hearing in the hospital. And what were you hearing? Like, what were they telling you? Yeah. So I would, so at that point, I was just like, okay, guys, I got something wrong. Like, tell me your opinion. Let me know what happened. And it was just a broken record. Cluster all causes heart disease. Cluster all is your cholesterol is high. And it wasn't at that point. It wasn't even as high as it is now. High according to them. We can talk about what high actually means. And, and so yeah, they were just like, yeah, and here's five medications. You got to take the rest of your life. That was pretty much it. And so then I am inquisitive person. I wasn't being argumentative at the time. I was just kind of like asking questions because they want to be on these blood thinners. And I was just like, well, I understand that there's a stint in there now. I kind of get that. But what about magnesium is a blood thinner? And I literally said, magnesium is not a blood thinner. And I was like, well, I know that's not true. I understand that they don't have a protocol in the hospital to use magnesium and replace in replacing a blood thinner. So they can't actually do that. But there was no curiosity. And everything from, you know, the food they gave me, which was terrible process food. The food they told me that I should eat after I left was basically, you know, low fat, full of processed foods, things that were on that list were fig newtons, animal crackers, that were things that I should be eating as part of a healthy diet. So yeah, that didn't make sense to me. The fact that there was no conversation about, there was no openness to conversation. It was a shutdown of conversation that was the biggest problem. I knew the philosophy was going to be different. I knew that my philosophy and their philosophy was going to be different. I knew that coming in, but it was a shutdown of conversation that bothered me the most because I would ask questions and they didn't even want to have the conversation. And in my chart notes, I later found that I was branded as non-compliant. And so any new physician that came in would just get that perception and then not want to talk to me about it, even if I was asking them. So yeah, it was, it was, it was a problem. And, you know, the solution was you're going to be on these five medications rest of your life, which were a statin, two blood pressure medications, a blood thinner and a baby aspirin. That's what they wanted me on. And just as like an example, like I tell the story often is that my blood pressure, usually hovered around one, 12 over 70. So you're in love with me on two blood pressure medications. And the reason they want me on those things is because they think that, you know, I mean, it's very well established that, you know, when someone has a heart attack that they're predisposed to developing heart failure. So they're trying to take pressure off my heart. So they want the, especially the beta blocker. And so I, I understand that. However, in the context of me at one, 12 over 70, two blood pressure medications is not a good idea. So I took one for one night. And then a meal of the night, they woke me up to check your vitals, which they do three times a night or whatever. And I looked over and it said 90 over 50. And I was like, well, that's pretty low. I am asleep right now. I'm just laying out, but that's still fairly low. And so then I sat up from the bed once they left the room. And I didn't get up fast because I had all these wires hooked to me. So I got up pretty slow. And then I stood up and almost passed out just to turn down the thermostat in the room is what I was trying to do. And so I was like, okay, well, I'm not doing that anymore. But it's just cookie cutter recipe that wasn't applied to the individual. And it didn't, maybe, it didn't give me confidence that they were really looking at me as a person and recommending what I needed. Or was more appropriate for me. It was just this is what you get. This is the recipe for people who have had heart attacks. Here you go. And so once I got out of there, I did not take any of their medications aside from the blood thinner for six months because there was a stint in there. And even that took a lesser dose than they recommended. These are just my decisions, not medical advice or recommendations. But just what I decided to do. And I did my own heart health healing routine. And over the next two years, I was able to heal my heart as far as prevent heart failure, ejection fraction returns normal conductivity of the heart tissue return to normal. I also developed a 75 to 99 percent blockage of plaque in my leg because of the procedure they did to place the stint. And so I was able to they told me that that would be that way for the rest of my life. And you couldn't reverse that, especially as a type one diabetic. And over two years, I reversed that completely without medications. And I've gotten imaging of the coronary arteries in my heart. I did that earlier this year. It's been almost a year now in their clean. My heart arteries are clean. So the stint is patent. There's a small amount of plaque in the right coronary artery that was there at the time of the heart attack. So that hasn't progressed and everything is everything else is clean and open. And this is with cholesterol levels astronomically higher than what they say they should be because I can explain why that is, too, because of the way that I'm eating, because I'm low carb, there's a phenomenon that happens that can raise it. If you consider that raised, so we have to define the parameters of what cholesterol should be. So I was able to do things that they told me were impossible that I wouldn't be able to do. And I would argue that they feel they're impossible because within the walls of what they do, they don't see that stuff happen. You're something different. I got a different result. So why do you think you had a heart attack? So I think, and this maybe goes into a different part of the conversation because you talk about the heart. Maybe it's not a pump. You know, like you bring forward a lot of really interesting discussions. And what you don't know is on my way home from Copenhagen, I ran into a guy at the airport who struck up a conversation with me because our flight was delayed because you know, that's what happens. And it turns out that he's a dude that's just invented an artificial heart. And it's the first artificial heart that it's based on Tesla's work, or it uses Tesla concept, if you will. And he started telling me that the heart's not a pump. He started talking about how it's the way this, the way this pump works is through rotation. Fortexing, yeah. For vortex. Coral feels pretty much. Yeah. Right. Which I was like, a type thing to talk about. Yeah. Exactly. So I was like, I'd just come out of Copenhagen. I just heard you speak. I was starting to look through the book. And I was like, okay, the universe is kind of telling you something. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, why I had a heart attack, I don't know that that has much to do with what I think the true function of the heart is. Well, it does a little bit. Which we can get into. But yes, I don't believe the heart's the main role of the heart in the body is to like, act like a pressure repulsion pump to move the blood. Matter of fact, there's there's really no evidence for that. And it's kind of impossible to think of a heart that size being able to forcefully move the blood throughout the entire body. Yet, that's what medicine thinks. And so if you don't understand the actual function of the heart, how are you supposed to understand how to make it better when something goes wrong with it? And that's that's a huge issue, especially with heart failure and arrhythmias and things like that, not understanding the true function of the heart is a problem. And it's why they're they struggle with conditions like that. So understand how to truly make it work. And so it's very interesting that something like and there's people, they're scientists back in the 1800s who were trying to build a system like replica of the system of the cardiovascular setup with pressure propulsion pumps and they couldn't get it to work. Because they couldn't they couldn't generate enough pressure to send the blood. They couldn't they couldn't get to work because if you make it act like a pressure propulsion pump, that's not how the vascular system works. It's it has to do with hydraulics and pressure changes and the heart is a vortex. And so the pressure changes are really or they're a drive like like something like the pulse and things like that. But what drives blood flow in the periphery is actually structured water on the lining of the arteries. That's the main driver of blood flow, which we can get into as well. But there is no question was why I had a heart attack. And there are two different mechanisms of heart attacks. One is acute clotting situations where you can get a blockage. But it doesn't have it's not because of the stenosis of an artery. Like it's not because there's a gradual narrowing of an artery that eventually blocks it or some of that plaque ruptures off and causes a blockage. ruptures happen all the time. But there's lots of literature to suggest that they don't cause heart attacks. It's very rare that a rupture causes a heart attack. What happens is you get a clotting response in blood. Now that clotting response can be more likely to happen if you have stenosis of plaque in the artery already because it disrupts blood flow and disrupted blood flow becomes stagnant and and and stagnant blood likes to clot more. And so that's one one issue there. But then the other mechanism of heart attacks has to do completely with the autonomic nervous system signaling to the heart. Which is when we think about nervous system we think about stress right and the stress signal. So putting that together you understand like it's very well known in medicine and conventional wisdom that heart attacks are associated with more stressful days of the year. They're associated with Mondays. They're straight associated with major holidays and sporting events where people are betting too much money and losing and that kind of stuff or even daylight savings when we shift the time. Yeah it's a huge task. Stressful to our nervous system that is we get lots of heart attacks and again that's very well known in medicine. So it makes sense that there's this mechanism of heart attacks that when we get in balance signaling to the heart tissue itself it causes a cascative events that can cause heart tissue death. And so there's this work of this scientist named George Euberaldi who I've yet to meet a cardiologist who's aware of his work which just fascinates me that nobody's aware of his work even though he basically flipped the field of cardiology on his head. Maybe that's why they're not aware of it. But basically he showed that anytime an artery gets to about 60 or 70% narrowed the body builds collaterals around it. And cardiologists are very aware of collaterals. They understand that happens but I've been told by many cardiologists that some people haven't some people don't. Well based on Veraldi's work and he autopsy thousands of heart steering his career everybody builds collaterals. So you're talking about alternate route like you read vessels make up for the blockage. The body builds new blood vessels to make up for the blood flow and they've shown in animal models that these that these blood vessels can form as fast as four days that influence heart rate the heart with blood. Yeah it's very quickly because people say it could take years for collaterals to form as I'm not based on those animal studies. It can be very very fast. Your body can figure things out. So a big theme here is that what medicine is doing is treating the solution to the problem that the body has. The solution to the problem is plaque and collaterals and they're trying to treat that. They're trying to treat the plaque but when in doing that they're ignoring the actual cause of the heart disease which are clotting pretty much acute clotting that can happen at a low grade level meaning plaque over time and that happens in the artery wall not on the lining of artery itself or acute clotting that happens fast enough that it can block a whole artery instantaneously which could have been the case with me right also because they found a blockage there. Also I was going through a lot of stress at the time. COVID was happening. There were things happening and COVID I didn't agree with. I let myself get caught up into it. There was some relationship stress. I found out various gestural news about a close family member a day and a half before I had the heart attack. That was probably the most stressful and it wasn't just the news. It was the inability of me or anybody in my family to help this person. We couldn't get to them. They were in another country. It was COVID. We couldn't get to them. So we're just waiting to see if it would be okay. And I was also pretty dehydrated at the time which is not good for blood flow. I had convinced myself to only drink water when I was thirsty and I was on this low carb diet and that was dehydrating me a little bit. I was suffering from some constipation. I was getting ready to do something about it. My body was giving me the signals, hey, this is not okay. Change it. I was getting ready to do something. I just hadn't yet. Then I woke up Tuesday morning a day and a half after I got that news and did a hit workout. I sprinted up a hill, dropped a new push-ups to failure, lunges to failure, that kind of thing. I did that five times. Then 20 minutes later, I'm having a heart attack. It could have been that whole situation causing a good blockage to form. That's what they found. They found the blockage of the LAD. I don't know if that was there before the heart attack happened. It could have been. They'll go in sometimes and they'll just for a heart calf to check on somebody and they find 100% blockage. This person is not having any symptoms. That doesn't mean that that was the cause of my heart attack. It could have been this stress thing and then I did this workout and that was a straw that brought the camel's back. Then I started having the stress response going to the heart that triggered the details of the cascaded events that happened during that is in my book that can cause tissue death. Now, they placed a stint. When they placed a stint, my symptoms went away. They also gave me morphine at the same time. Did the stint open up the artery, restore blood flow, and cause my symptoms go away or did the morphine calm my stress response and cause the symptoms to stop. I don't know. I probably never know. The solution to preventing both of those types of situations, whether it was the blockage or the stress response are the same things. I just get to do those things. That's what gives me the confidence. It's not going to happen again because I figured out those two mechanisms how they could have happened to me and now I know how to prevent them. They involved way, way more than diet and exercise. One of my big missions in life now is to educate people about how heart disease and heart attacks are not, to my opinion, have very little to do with diet. A processed food diet can be a contributor because it's inflammatory. You can allow toxins, you're creating contributing to insulin resistance, which are things. But this whole conversation about plants versus animals, saturated versus unsaturated fat, all this stuff is a big distraction, I think, from the actual causes of heart disease. The succession with cholesterol is also a giant distraction from the actual causes of heart disease. We have been treating people for cholesterol through trying to control cholesterol through diet and drugs for the last 50 years. How disease is still the number one killer in the world. The incidence is still the same. The deaths have come down and they would argue that statins and lower in cholesterol is why we have a decreased risk or decreased death rate from heart disease, but that's not the case. The reason we have a decreased death rate is because at the very around the very same time we introduce statins, we also emit the procedures that save people from dying from heart attacks. That's why we have less death heart attacks. We have stint procedures, we have interventions like I went through. That's why we have less deaths, but the incidence is still the same in rising. It's not about those things. Those were a giant distraction. When I found out the actual causes that make more sense to me, I implemented those in my life. I didn't know that we were going to work. When I did them, but I came up with these theories and did them and they did work very beautifully. Then I figured out why. Now I share that with people. We're going to get to that. I want to get to that. I'm curious you were a car-practor, but then you went ahead and did that thing that a lot of... This is an area of knowledge that is so lacking in conventional medicine. You actually went and got a master's in nutrition in addition to functional medicine. Where do you think those two things came together to really form the basis for what you do now and your knowledge? How did those... Yeah. I actually... I say this, and it's probably not entirely true, but I say like, I don't use much of what I learned in my degrees at all at this point. As far as my car-practed degree or my functional medicine degree, I don't know. I feel like it was all useful to learn this basic understanding of how we think the body works. But as I delve farther further into things in different science and look at it from biopsychus perspective, I'm just like, I think that we got it all wrong. I mean, not all wrong, but it's so incomplete. Well, and to challenge the heart as a pump is a pretty... It's a pretty bold statement. Now, you're not alone, but you are one of the latter voices, and a lot of the people who did claim that are dead. Now, we've got my man, Billy, who's well-inned up on the podcast, but he also poofood me when I asked him about a lot of people think about the heart as a nervous center. Like, the heart is a very important emotional stress, and he kind of went, yeah, whatever. It's your dream-alous releasing cortisol. It has nothing to do with your heart. That'll be a different conversation. But I would say that he's on point with you in terms of challenging this idea of the heart as a pump versus the heart as a vortex. How do you explain that? How do we help people to think about it? What is it and why does it matter? Yeah, first I'll tell people, like before I go into this, I'll tell people that I describe this in my book in Chapter 6 is where I talk about the heart and the evidence for the heart not being a pressure propulsion pump as we think of it as pressure propulsion pump. And, like you said, I'm not alone in this. There are other people that talk about this. And if people want the most comprehensive with tons and tons of literature cited to support this claim, Dr. Branco first book called The Heart and Circulation is probably the most comprehensive. It reads like a 200 page research paper that I'm just mourning you. This is not the use of your most. Yeah, it's not like a fun read. It's not a narrative read, you know. But the evidence is all there. And there's tons and tons of literature. This is not just some crazy thing, but it's also logical. Think about it. Like there's studies that they look at the efficiency of the heart. If you look at as a pressure propulsion pump, the amount of energy the heart uses in the amount of work, quote unquote, that it does, it's about 15 to 30 percent efficient, which whether you believe we were created or we were involved, that's not an efficient way to do something. Right. If you're using that much energy and getting that little input from it, that's not efficient. So it makes me think that we're looking at it wrong. We have the wrong frame. Merck of what we're looking at it as. And so so yeah, like the heart, when you see it contracting, it's logical to think, oh yeah, that's it's pumping, right? When a reality is contracting. But it's it's twisting, right? Like the fibers are circular almost. Right. So I think the first thing we should talk about is if the heart is not moving the blood, what is moving the blood? So just real briefly, the heart does do a very small amount of moving of blood, but it's just enough to get the blood through the chambers of the heart itself, right? Other than that, once it gets out into periphery, the blood moves in a different way. And that is the structured water formation on the lining of the blood vessels. And so what structured water is is this gel-like form of water. Most of the water in the body is in this gel-like state, which is why I feel like a gel, like the water in my cells as a gel. Yeah, like I can take with it from my form and it bounces right back like gel. And so what makes structured water form is when we have water that's toxin-free mineral rich and we have energy to that water. Energy for that water comes from the sun from infrared light. And so that makes sense. We live on a water planet charged by the sun. That's what we do. And we are made of primarily water and we're supposed to be charged by the sun. So we get the structured water, but there's liquid water in the body too, like in the blood and in the lymphatic system, and the cerebral spinal fluid. But some of this liquid water, when it gets next to a biological surface, a water loving surface, it will form itself in the structured water. In structured water, there's this layer of structured water. There's supposed to be a layer of structured water on the lining of the arteries. And if you go into the literature and you type in self-free layer, you'll see that they found it because the structure water, where the structure water is, red blood cells can't get through it. So they call it the self-free layer. Interesting. And so in Dr. Pollock's lab, they prove that this happens in chicken brios, in the arteries of chicken brios. And when structured water forms, because of the way that it forms, it creates an energy gradient. So the detail, without getting into the detailed structured water, becomes very electronegatively charged because of the chemistry of how it forms. And next to it is very positively charged space, because there's a concentration of hydrogens in there and a positive next to a negative is a battery. So when we form structured water in the body, we're basically creating batteries, energy storage forms of batteries, which is the main energy storage form of the body. It's not ATP, it's structured water, it should be. Anyways, in a situation that energy graded that's formed, does the work of moving fluid. And they've shown this over and over again in Dr. Pollock's lab. You can take a tube made of a hydrophilic or water loving surface, put it in a vat and water, shine infrared light on it and provide energy to the system, structured water forms on the lining of the tube and the water starts moving through the tube with no pump acting on it whatsoever. They've done that over and over again in his lab. They've shown that that's what happens in tree roots. That's how water gets from the trees ground all the way up to the leaves, right? Through this mechanism. Because there's no other way of how else would it get there? So that's how water is moving. That's how blood is moving in our system for the most part. And so then it becomes curious to think, why do we have this thing, this heart that's contracting and it's placed in the middle of the vascular system? Like if I was going to pump water up a hill, like from my feet up to my head, where would I put the pump at the bottom up to the top? And that's not where the heart is placed. It's placed in the middle of this flow of blood through these two sides of the vascular system. Why? The reason why is twofold. One is that when you look at the heart, you look at the orientation of the muscle fibers and the heart. It's actually one big band of muscle that's wrapped up on itself. And as a scientist named Francisco Torrent Quas from Spain who figured this out, he did these blunt dissections of the heart and he found this out. So when the contraction, when the signal for contraction comes through the heart, it comes through in a spiral like that because the heart's wrapped up on itself. So the heart is doing this. It's vortexing. It's vortexing. Yeah. And so, but also water is vortexing and kind of disrupted so to speak as it moves through the chambers of the heart. It flows in. It kind of flows in like you put one of those quarters and the thing and it flows around like this and then it goes down to the thing. Yeah. The blood flows in the heart chambers like that. It flows in and does this when it leaves the valves, it eddies on either side. You know, there's all this vortexing that's happening and then when the heart contracts, it's also vortexing it as well. And so the purpose of that is because that's what nature is doing to water. Water on this planet is not sitting still. It's moving. It's flowing in rivers. It's crashing on the beach. It's ocean title currents evaporates in precipitation. Water is moving. And if you get a bunch of water in laminar tubes, it's not being squished around and moved like it is in a river or crashing on the beach, that kind of stuff. And so what do we need? We need something that can mix up water, can vortex switch, swish water around because that's what energize it. Because Dr. Pollock's lab, they found one of the one of the ways you can also energize water, aside from infrared light, is to vortex it, swish it around in the presence of oxygen. Well, it's no mistake that there's oxygen, present, and blood. And now we're vortexing in around as it moves through the heart. So that's the purpose of the heart is to get a higher water. Yeah, so it's charging the water to move, which is ultimately have blood moves. Right. So in a way, the heart is responsible for the movement of blood and to a sense, in a sense, because it's vortexing the blood, energizing it. So when it gets into the periphery, the water can perform structure water. But I don't think the heart can do that itself, which is why we're supposed to be in the right environment to create structure water too, which means outside in contact with the earth and under the sunlight. Because those are the things that charge the body. And when you charge the body, you build structure water, which creates blood movement. Now, the second aspect of why the heart is there is because it's actually there to slow the flow of blood during exertion. Right. And there's some eloquent studies done in endurance athletes and soccer players that show this, that the reason like, and people in endurance athletes, you know, their heart gets this, this, it gets bigger. This hypertrophy is a hard, yeah. And that's not because it's better at forcefully moving blood in those people. It's because it's better at stopping blood because those people are creating an onslaught of blood flow because of how active they are. And so it's kind of like the heart becomes a bigger catcher's mid. Right. And then it can catch the blood and then, and then vortex it and then move it through the chambers of the heart. And so that's why it becomes bigger. So, but the thing is, is that if I was to go for a run, the tissue demand for oxygen and nutrients would be so great that all the blood would rush over to the arterial side trying to deliver those nutrients. And if the heart wasn't there to slow the flow of blood during exertion, like these endurance athletes, then all the blood would go over to the arterial side, the venous type of collapse, and we would die. Which is why those scientists who were doing this experience back in 1800s were trying to create a system like this that maintains profusion pressure in both sides. And they couldn't with the pressure of propulsion pump because that's not what the heart is. It's actually there to slow the flow of blood. Right. And one of the most fascinating things I heard is there's a there's a cardiovascular surgeon who read my book and he said, I learned why when we profuse the blood away from the heart during heart surgery, the pulse goes away. And it's because with the pressure of propulsion pump, you don't there's no changes in pressure, right? With a with a with the way the heart works and the vortexing heart, it builds up pressure in a ventricle and then a valve opens and pressure goes out. Right. And that creates a pulse. But if you don't have those changes in pressure and the in the constant changes throughout like the pump actually acts more like a hydraulic ramp, which is very based on flow and pressure. So we actually have two hydraulic rams next to each other, the right and left side. And so when he read that, he was just like, Oh, that's why when we take a profusion away from the heart and we use a pressure propulsion pump to keep the blood moving, the pulse goes away, right? Because the heart doesn't function like that. Yeah. So yeah. And then the third the third reason the heart is there. The third role of the heart is it, it is a sensory organ in its senses, our emotional state. And it does that because it has a giant electromagnetic field that's bigger than any electromagnetic field of any organ in the body, which you'd think the brain to be bigger because it's so electrical and it's just amount just the same amount of mitochondria in the brain, but the heart's as bigger because it's vortexing. Again, it goes back to the vortexing. When you vortex and take take a create a spiral inside an electromagnetic field, it amplifies the field significantly. And we've shown that in science before. So like that's what's happening. And so the heart is a sensory organ, electrmindetically sensing our environment and our emotional state, which is why we say we associate this organ with emotions, right? I love you with all my heart. You know, you feel emotional, you feel pain and my heart ache, you know, like that's there's a reason we say that. That's not a coincidence. That's face it. You can't change your biology, but you can support it intelligently. 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All you have to do to get your hands on some is visit vitaliaskincare.com and use code NAC20 for 20% off. So in your healing journey and in your evolution of thinking here about how we need how people might want to consider ways to adopt a healthier way of being. I mean, it is interesting. It's not so much about the diet. I mean, yes, like clean up your diet, obviously. But really it's about the environment. Really, it's about managing your stress. Really, it's about circadian rhythm. It's about light. Even grounding, structured water plays. How are you convincing people? What does it look like for you? What does it look like for you? I also want to eventually go back to the plot in your leg and how you got rid of that, which I remember you saying in your talk, doctors looking at it going, yeah, well, that's not possible. And you're like, okay, but it is because I did. And they're like, well, and then you got once again, just like when you were in the hospital, it was like, well, I'm not talking to you. Yeah, but don't you aren't you curious? Yeah, that was the line that was given to me. Like when I, at first, it was a 75th and I'm percent blocked to plaque. And then in a year, it went down to 50 or less as what they said based on ultrasound. And they came at the test twice because they didn't believe it. Yeah. And the petition back in there and they did it twice and it got the same result. And he's looking at the results and he said, well, we can't say it's better because we don't see these things get better. And I was like, well, but we just did though. Like why not say what's different about this one? So I can learn, but there was none of that. And then even then I came back a year later and it was completely normal. And I came back here after that, it was still normal. And there was still no inquisition about why? And so what did you do? Like what? And I mean, these conversation stuff, too, right? The lifestyle, the environment and the plaque reversal because that in theory is impossible. So let's. Yeah. So basically, when I went home, my diet stayed the same. It stayed low carb. And because I'm low carb and I'm running more on fats, it means that there's more fat in my blood to be available for energy, providing energy. So that's a lean mass hyper responder type situation. I low carb. My all day, I'll go up, not because it's bad for me or in state of inflammation or anything like that, just because I'm metabolizing more fats. And that's what happens for me. It happens for a lot of people, but always in the context of low metabolic risk. So anyways, I'm a diet, say the same, my exercise stayed the same. I couldn't. It had to change a little bit. My exercise, because my leg situation wouldn't allow me to walk. So I had to, as soon as I figured out I could bike and instead of having to run, it didn't cause pain when I biked, then I could do that instead. Exercise stayed the same. My stress probably got even worse for a few years after the heart attack for various reasons. But it got worse. And so what I changed was I started doing a lot more grounding. I started prioritizing the main thing I did was I prioritized getting infrared light, which was sunlight and I also bought an infrared sauna. So I prioritized that. I set my circadian rhythm. And I took a few supplements for a year. I took some Torine and I took some Arginine and I took some Serapeptase and a supplement called Wabi, which creates a paracetamethetic signaling for the heart. I took those for about a year and then I stopped them. And so the healing continued after that. And so yeah, in a year's time, well, in three months time, I'm using just the sauna. My heart recovered. And they were shocked. They were like, oh, I guess you decided to take your medications. And I was like, actually, I'm just taking that. Not to lecture. But then I got the development of plaque in my leg from the procedure. So that happened because the procedure they did change the blood flow dynamics going down my leg. So I want to illustrate that point. Yeah, talk about that. I did not change. Right. I had no plaque in my leg. The morning of the heart attack, I did that hit work out. My leg was fine. I was getting blood flow down to my leg just fine. And my cholesterol was slightly elevated at that time. And it got even higher after the fact. And so, but what changed was the blood flow dynamics down my leg. And that caused the plaque. Because of the stents. So that there was a relationship. And not the stent. The up. So the place where they went into by growing to go up and place the stent. Oh, okay. That spot there where they intervened. This is it's not like terribly common, but it does happen. And it happened to me. And I've talked to other people that happened to as well. Because of the device they use to close that artery. After they go in here, it changes the blood flow. Because there's a piece of it. Like if here's the artery, there's a piece of it that sits on the inside of it. It changes the blood flow dynamics. And in some people, it changes to the enough that I get stagnant blood in this area of my leg. And it's the most common place to develop preferular disease. And it happened right there. So then it was just drifting blood flow to my lower leg. So if I would even walk fast through the airport trying to catch a flight, like I feel pain in my leg, because I wasn't getting blood to it when I would observe myself. But they decided not to do anything about it because I could do most of the things in my life. I just couldn't, you know, I couldn't exercise the way I wanted to. I can still work place soccer, things like that. But I could generally live my life. So they just said, let's leave it alone. And then I didn't know at the time, but the things I was doing eventually reversed it. And that was soft plaque, I'm guessing, because it was so newly formed. So I reversed the soft plaque in my leg over two years. And which again, they told me we're impossible. They even told me it was impossible when I did it. And so those are the things that I changed, though. And the reason that I think that that had such an impact on the plaque is because plaque is clotting tissue. Right. So clotting tissue forms when we get, we can get poor stagnant blood flow. Well, let's back up. So clotting tissue forms in the artery wall itself. Right. It's not like if here's the lining of the artery and the inside lining. So it's in the wall of the artery. Yeah. So my hands together are the wall of the artery. It forms inside the wall like this and expands the wall on both sides. It's not like what the CIMT looks at. When the CIMT, when people have their CIMT image, it's looking at the thickness of the wall. It's not looking at the inside of the wall. It's not looking at the inside of the media thickness. Yeah. That's the test. Right. Yeah. So yeah, they're looking at the end of the wall. So how does it get in there? Right. People will say that, oh, this cholesterol embeds itself in there and it gets into the end of the wall, which has just never been proven. Right. And if cholesterol does interfere with the endothelial cells and somehow get in there, it's always a downstream effect from the initial things that happen. Right. So what happens is something causes the cells that line the lining of the artery, something causes them to start to grow and proliferate. Right. So there's a few things that could cause that to happen. One is damage. So when you have damage to something, the repair process is a very proliferative one. Right. You make new cells, you and you grow a new tissue and things like that. So inflammation and damage is one thing that could cause that. Another thing is interrupted blood flow. So if we get stagnant blood, your blood vessels try and constrict themselves with the muscles to create less surface areas so that it moves faster. Just like if you have like a faucet and you put like a narrow thing on it, it comes out faster. Right. We put your thumb over the end of a garden hose, it comes out faster. Right. Yeah. So that's what the arteries are trying to do. And one way they try and do that is to constrict the blood vessels with with muscles in the blood vessels. But another way they do it is the the cells lining the arteries start to grow in proliferate and create. Oh, so it's narrow as the opening so it creates more pressure. Right. Yeah. And when you get a growth of endothelial cells, those new cells, they need a blood supply too. And that blood supply does not come from the blood flowing down the middle of the artery. It comes from these small arteries that supply the artery wall with blood that are called the Bayes of Azorum. Right. And so when those so like if you've got here's the outside of the artery wall and here's the inside of it, right? And the inside of you got these cells growing. These proliferative cells are growing in. And so the Bayes of Azorum here have to grow in and make new arteries to supply these new cells that are growing inside here, right? And when you grow new blood vessels, you get there's a process. There's a there's a time period where they're frustrated. They're they have holes in them because they're incomplete. It's kind of like you're building a house and there's no windows and doors on it yet. There's that time period where there's no where there's no there's holes, right? And when there's holes in a blood vessel, blood leaks, right? And when blood leaks, guess where it leaks, right? Into the end of a layer. And it's not flowing. It's just sitting there. Yeah. And then once it leaves the blood vessels, now there's nothing making it flow. It's just stagnant blood sitting there. And you get stagnant blood clots. And the reason that type two diabetes is such an in or such a risk factor for more plaque and arteries is because if you're trying to grow new arteries, you need insulin signaling to do that. If you're insulin resistant, those arteries stay finished, it didn't holy for longer. So more blood leaks, you get more amounts of plaque, right? So then you get this clotting that happens in the middle of the artery. It starts expanding like this. And again, it's both sides. So it's not like it just grows on the inside portion of it, right? It's both sides. And when you look at like clearly analysis or heart flow analysis, you see it. It's happening on it's expanding the artery this way. Now once you get that in there, now you've got blood trying to flow past this bump, right? And that's where clotting tissue can form on the outside of this here on the inside. Because now if blood flows past you've ever seen a rock or a water flow pass a rock and a river, it eddies on the other side. Yeah, it creates little swirls. It creates the stagnant blood. And so if you've got blood that's hyperviscus or sticking together too much because you don't have enough structured water in your arteries, which we can talk about, or you've got poor stagnant blood flow, or you've got these bumps in the arteries now that blood's having to try to make its way around and curling the increased clotting risk. So the reason that plaque increases the risk of a heart attack is not because the plaque causes the heart attack or slowly blocks it or plaque pieces of that ruptures because the piece of that could rupture, but the evidence shows that that doesn't cause a heart attack. It just makes more plaque. It builds more plaque on it, right? The reason we have heart attacks or the reason it's a noses or nearing a man artery increases the risk of heart attacks is because it disrupts blood flow. And if people who are inflamed and have viscous blood, that's more likely to happen. And that's exactly what we see. And this is where dehydration comes in as well, right? Like, tonic dehydration must be made through the puzzle here and so many people are crying. Yeah, and the other thing is that so we talked about structured water, light in the artery, and that's what keeps blood moving. So it's more important to have that if you've got these bumps in there that the blood's having to find its way around. The other thing is that structured water because of the way, because of its properties, it's called exclusions on water too because nothing compensated, right? Only very small hydrated ions of minerals compensated, including the precursor to nitric oxide, which is why nitric oxide can come from the inothelial cells and make it through structured water and come into the blood vessels. But nothing else can. So red blood cells can't, like we're proteins can, if you've got structured water, that protects it. So if you want to prevent an inflammatory clotting response, you want to protect the artery, which means we need structured water on the lining of the artery. Do you think that drinking structured water is helpful? I mean, there's all these different, I mean, I'm about to have a system in in solid in my house, which amongst in addition to removing things I don't want is going to structure the water that so technically you couldn't you can't drink structured water. It's a kind of a it's kind of a semantics thing with naming, right? So structured water is in a gel-like state. Yeah. So if I was trying to drink that, I'm trying to drink gelo, you know, interesting. Because you can talk about vortexing water and energizing the water. Okay. You're giving energy to the water so that it gets next to a biophilological surface, it will structure itself or a water loving surface. It will structure, it'll become that gel-like water. So I'm being an external heart by by energizing the water and then drinking it, it has better energy so it might behave better in my body. Yeah. So you want toxin-free mineral rich energized water and that's what it should be, that's what nature is, right? That's what nature is doing. We have toxin-free, it should be toxin-free water, we're kind of toxifying our water supply and we as mineral rich natural sprayers are full of minerals and they're moving. They're being switched around, they're flushing over rocks and river they're just being they're crashing on. And we're being filtered through sand and whatever. I mean, in a perfect world. Well, that's why it just makes sense to me because this is what nature is doing and our bodies are just trying to maintain that in ourselves and we're doing things to interfere with that. So yeah, but then so then when you drink water, that's more ideal. You can kind of like pre-treat your water so that when it gets into you it becomes structured water. Correct. Okay, got you. Also do things to your body that will structure the water that's already in us. Like the infrared. Yeah. In full light, right? So the main, I mean, and why this makes sense because the sun is infrared light. Anytime the sun is up, it's about 40 to 50% infrared light. All life on the planet is supposed to be outside of that. We are not. We live indoors like the average person lives 93% of the time indoors away from the stimuli, right? So and it's no to me, it's no coincidence that heart disease started to skyrocket in the 50s when we invented for us and light. And then later in the 70s, we invented LED bulbs because before that we had incandescent and candles giving us some infrared. Yeah. And yeah, so yeah, it's just a lot of different things and there's lots of different factors. It's not just light of why we have heart disease, but the third component of this is that structured water also forms, if forms on all biological surfaces that it cludes the elements of blood, like red blood cells, like for proteins, and we have literature that shows that that the red blood cells and like proteins hold this zeta potential around them, or they're supposed to anyways, it's negative charge and that negative charge is structured water. It's structured water is being able to charge. And when when all the elements of blood hold a negative charge, like charges for pellet each other, right? So they don't stick together. So you have more viscosity. Yeah. Yeah. So you have, you have, yeah, it's less viscous when that happens. It's, it's, it's slippery. Yeah. Yeah, more slippery. And that's the other, another property of structured water is it's frictionless. So if you have structured water lining the artery and you have elements of blood that have the structured water, it's just zooming through there like an ice skate on an ice skating rake, you know, and it's just flowing right past us and things are sticking together. I mean, if you ever looked at like live blood analysis and stuff like that, they look at the reloat formation, or they look at the agglutination of the blood. Guess what that is? Lack of structured water in your body, allowing things to clump together. And what better way to predispose your clotting than that. So again, this is all about lack of energy. Is what this is? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or miss anything. What are your thoughts on non-native EMFs? Because there's, there's a lot of talk about, you know, overexposure to non-native EMFs, will, will cause that clumping of blood, those rulos to form, robbing, robbing the red blood cells essentially of that electrical charge that they need to repel each other. Right. So think about it like this. And people tell me I'm good at making it logical or a reason why. Because I could tell you that yes, there's literature that shows it a Wi-Fi router, destroyed structured water. And that there's also literature that shows it an electromagnetic field destroys the zeta potential around a light-brook protein, which if you destroy that zeta, that's this protection, then what do you get oxidized LBL? Small dyns particles. That's what you get. It's inflammation, but the reason that this makes sense is because if you think about life on the planet before humans came along, the only electromagnetic fields that we were exposed to was the light from the sun. Because light, all visible light, is on the same electromagnetic spectrum as radio frequency, or electromagnetic frequency, right, these man-made ones that we've made. And so the ones from the sun, UV through infrared, all of them will structure water. They will provide energy to the body, right? UV does it the least effectively? Infrared does it the most effectively? Yeah. Which is why I recommend infrared, as far as a sauna or whatever. And so those are the spectrum, that's the wavelengths of light on the spectrum that provide energy to the body. Anything outside that is non-native. So it makes sense that those things would do the opposite, right? Or they may not have the effect, at the very least they wouldn't have the effect that the thing you do that for ever, right? Yeah. And so and that's what we find. We have some literature that suggests a Wi-Fi router can break down structured water. And like I told you, the state of potential around our light for protein is broken down with the EMF. That's why it makes sense, because it's not something our bodies are used to. And so it's it also explains why I don't know if you're aware of the studies that show that the wireless radio frequencies opened up calcium-gated channels in the south, and the calcium is flooded. Well, this is a whole new concept. I don't think calcium-gated channels have been proven to be exist. I think that what controls the amount of ionic minerals in and out of a cell is structured water, because the cell is structured water. Okay? So when a cell, we know there's this ion distribution in a cell that there's sodium outside the cell and potassium inside the cell. Well, I mentioned how structured water is an exclusion zone, right? Yeah. There are certain hydrated ions of minerals that can penetrate structured water, and it's anything potassium or smaller. Intuition. So if the cell is structured water, and we have this concentration of potassium in the cell because it can get into structured water and sodium can't, that's the cutoff is right there. We get this distribution like that. So calcium is bigger, hydrated calcium is bigger than hydrated sodium, so it doesn't penetrate it. However, if you get an EMF signal that destroys structured water or cell, guess what influxes into the cell? Calcium, and that's exactly what we're seeing. With EMF exposure, we're seeing calcium get influxes of why, because we're destroying structured water with EMF exposure. So you're destroying the whole function, the whole functional piece of how the body protects itself and controls what gets in, what gets out. Yeah, because structured water is like, it's fascinating, and so Dr. Gerald Pollock is probably the foremost authority on it, but there are many scientists in the past have discovered this gel like form of water and this phenomenon that water does. But Dr. Pollock wrote a book called Gels, or cells, gels, and the engines of life. And he basically shows how how the body controls much of physiology by creating phase transitions, by structured water, going to liquid water and back to structured water. It does these things that moves ions around anybody who studied cellular physiology or medicine may recognize that as an action potential. That's what we learned about what it is. It's this change of polarity in the cell that happens. Why does that happen? Because we get an influx of a certain amount of nutrient and then structured water forms and it's pushed out again, and that's an action potential, and it's all based off of structured water and how it functions in the body. So it's very, very interesting to think about it. It's why I say things like I think that what I learned in school was very incomplete and wrong in a lot of cases, because when you start learning on it from a biophysics perspective, which everything in this universe is energy, that's what the purpose of life is. You start to understand things at a much deeper level, and it's explained a lot of things for me. As far as why this happened to me, why we have these epidemics of disease, it explains a lot. Well, and when you said at the beginning of the podcast, which is borderline, heresy is, well, it's not about ATP, where, you know, to the whole world, it's all about ATP, it's all about mitochondria. And definitely we're not saying ATP is not important. But if you don't have these energy gradients that you're talking about, then the ATP never happens either. Exactly. So, as I see a whole NADNADH, balance in that whole interplay in the cell, again, is part of an energy gradient. Like we're right. Yeah. And so what, but what, what crazed that energy gradient, that division of those in the cell is Starfic Water. I would argue. This is the structured water episode. I thought it was going to be the cardiac episode, but it's really, it's really, it's really, it's really, it's really, it explains so much for you when you look at it from this perspective. And it also leads me forward of what I need to do, right? We're basically just created environments that, that divorce us from our energy sources. And then we're trying to get all our energy from food. And it's not working. We're overwhelming that metabolic pathway of getting energy, which is only supposed to be about a third of our energy, which should be getting it much more from sunlight and grounding and things like that. But yeah, ATP is important. It's, it's definitely an energy storage form in the body and just this, this phosphate bond that holds this energy. But it's role is not to supply the body or cell with energy. It's role is to hold energy to unfold proteins in the cell, right? So when you unfold proteins in the cell, what do you create? More hydrophilic surface area for what? Structured water formation. And structured water formation is what really holds the energy. The reason that cells have this net negative charge is because of full structured water, which is negatively charged. It's not because of big proteins. It's not because of chloride ions in the cell. It's because of structured water. And if a cell loses its voltage, it's having a very hard time maintaining structured water in the cell. And so that's the energy storage form. If we want to get energy to our body, we have to build structured water or it invites first. So so ATP is still very, very important because if without that unfold the protein, you don't get enough surface area. It kind of like if you ball up a little bit of foil, right? That's very little surface area. You unball it. You create a lot more surface area. So that's what unfolding protein means. You create a lot more surface area for structured water formation, which means more energy held in the system. And energy is how we create order. Yeah, and prevent entropy, which is health and disorder is is lack of energy. So yeah, yeah, I love that. So for someone who feels who sit there going, well, my heart's fine. I'm fine, but I want a future proof, my heart. I want a future proof, my health. I have a feeling I know what you're going to say here, but what are your top three actionable strategies that would go beyond generic diet? Because I think by now, if people have been paying attention, we've we've so moved past diet, right? Like we've we've kind of given you as many diet recommendations as you're going to get and they're pretty simple. But what are the top three actionable strategies you would say to someone? You would give someone right now to future proof themselves. The first two are probably people will probably expect some, what one of the first one is getting more infrared light. I mean, if you think about it, all life on this planet except for humans and our pets are outside named for it all day long. We're missing out on that stimulus. So that's number one. Second is set your circadian rhythm. Because with the energy you gain from infrared light and grounding in things, you need instructions on what to do with it and how to like and hormones are the instructions and what regulates your hormones is the light through your eye. And so with artificial light at the wrong times of day, we're disrupting that cycle of what hormones are supposed to be signaling to the body and that it's like it's like you have it's like you have an orchestra all reading different sheet music, right? That's happening. You're not getting the right signals. All the hormones being made, but they're just now at the right time and not in the right amounts and everything. So set your circadian rhythm, which means sinking your body into the day and night cycle of the sun. Be very conscious about the light exposure, artificial light exposure at the wrong times. And then the third one, which is I'm coming more and more to as more and why learn is, I mean, it comes back to energy again. It's it's resolve stored past trauma. That is coming up. Yeah. If you cannot, if there's stuck energy in your body, whether it's trauma, and it's stored in the body, then there's so many people talking about that. Then your this comes down to the heart again. Your heart is perceiving that stored energy because the heart is monitoring your internal environment and your external environment, relaying that information to the brain, neurologically, intellectually, and genetically, and your brain is telling your body what to do based on that signaling. So if you've got signaling in your body that's stuck energy, not moving, keeping you in this kind of ramped up state all the time, you're not going to you're not going to heal you can't get into that parasympathetic killing state. You can't get into that deep sleep healing state if that's there. And so that can be a hard thing to do. It can be a hard thing to face some of the things you have to face when you're resolving that trauma. But it could be something that like you said, someone feels fine. And lots of times they don't even know that they're stored trauma because it's not something that you know happened to you or because trauma is not necessarily something traumatic to us is not necessarily something that we think, oh, that was traumatic. It's basically your body's ability to deal with the trauma at the time it happens. So it could be a super small trauma that was just as traumatic to you than a bigger trauma for somebody else because of your body's ability to deal with it at the time was impaired. Right? So but there are different therapies that can help people like somatic experiencing is a very good one or biofuel tuning or things like that can help you identify where these traumas are and move it energetically through your body because that's what life is all about and is the movement, the flow of things. It's just like again, the water's flowing all over the planet when you flow of water in a body when you flow of energy through our bodies. That's what creates health and helps us maintain it long-term is when we things are moving. But thanks be a stagnant. It's not good. So those are my top three I think. Nice. Yeah, I would have thought I thought you were going to say, you know, get out and ground. Go see morning light. But I like that you kind of took it up a notch from there. Yeah. So in light of what you teach, how do you think people should evaluate their health care team? Because at the end of the day, everybody's not just going to run around and fire their doctors and say, I'm just going to deal with structured water here. Like I'm you know, so what are the questions they should ask and the red flags they should kind of look for? Or maybe is there someone they should add to the like is there something they need to add? Because like you said at the beginning, very beginning of the podcast, what conventional medicine is really good at right now is intervening when you need an intervention, right? When you have an event like you had, you know, there's no amount of structured water in that moment that would save you. You need a conventional medicine to step in and save the day so that you could move forward and learn what you've learned and teach what you teach. But so for the for the rest of us who are listening to this, you know, what are your thoughts in terms of how do we assess our medical team? And maybe is there are there stopgaps that we can install or there are things that we can do add to it or mitigate some of the built-in shortcomings? I think our limitations maybe. Yeah, I think that it's it's hard to say because every practitioner is so different and but I think that under like you want to we work with people that have a philosophy that it's not just a it's not just a here your blubber says this so take this, you know, whether it's a medication, whether it's a list of supplements, I'm not saying the supplements are bad or anything, they can definitely help us but they supplement the lifestyle, they supplement the environment that we create. So I say this a lot to my clients and in on podcast and various places is that testing doesn't necessarily determine risk, right? It can be helpful in situations, it can help point you in the right direction, but it really can determine risk. And the perfect example of that is my testing looked pretty good and guess what happened to me? You know, I know people who guys testing looks terrible and they've never had a heart attack, never even had heart disease symptoms. So like is this imaging and testing really giving us a picture of what the risk is? What determines risk is your environment behaviors, right? The signals you give your body day in and day out are way more important than a single intervention here, a single intervention there, right? That's the most important thing. And so you want to make sure that a practitioner that you're working with is also coaching you to change those daily habits and those daily environmental exposures. That's the most important thing. If you're not working with someone who's preaching those things, then that's kind of a red flag for me that they're not that they're a bad person or anything like that, but just that their philosophy is somewhat incomplete, I would say. I wouldn't even say vlogs. I don't like saying that. It's just incomplete. No, it's just incomplete. And that's what you're saying. You're you're adding to, right? So in the work that you do with people, would you say that that work kind of is a great way to accompany what they're already doing? Like nobody's going to go out and fire their primary care physician or their cardiologist necessarily. But I would guess that what you're teaching people in your programs is really helping them to bring back these elements of nature, learn to get that toolkit so that you can improve the structured water in your body so that you can with that. Yeah, your body doesn't want to be sick. So if it's sick, it's just getting the wrong signals and those signals could be stuck in a great like from past Trump, like it would be some deep signals that it's getting. But yeah, it's very focused on bringing people back to the stimuli that express to the body to be to be safe and healthy, right? And that's I mean, no surprise, things that nature give us. That's where we came from. It's what we've kind of divorced ourselves from to an extent. And so yeah, but the thing that I like to highlight for people is that I hear another way to kind of determine a red flag, right? Of a practitioner, right? If you go to a practitioner and they take things in this in your blood work or whatever this testing or they determine something about you and they say, okay, now you have to do this. You have to do this intervention that I'm giving you or you have to take this medication or this supplement, whatever, or you're going to die. Like and they're trying to fear you into doing it. That's a red flag for me. Right? Because I want to empower you. I want to tell you why this is happening. And then explain to you when you when you learn why you understand the movement going forward. And I want to give you knowledge and habits you need to build a life stuff for yourself that gives you confidence and gives you control that's empowering, right? It gives the locust of control in you rather than you looking outside at the next test, the next therapy, the next protocol out here. Like, where's the solution for me? The solution is here when you understand how the body works. Yeah. Right? And so that's a very empowering message. That's what I try and get people when I work with people in my program and things is that message. Because now that takes away their anxiety about this thing. They don't understand it's happening to them. And that's the I thought I was going to help people with heart disease, but it turns out I'm helping them with their peace of mind about their health. And that's that's been a cool realization for me to have. That's pretty cool. So when you wrote understanding the heart, you framed cardiovascular disease as in an evolutionary context. Again, guys read the book. It's a really good book. But if you were writing a sequel and you said when we before off camera before we started, you said you've got now a whole other book to add to this book. So if you were writing a book on longevity, what would the central message be? Oh, the central message. I mean, I guess from a big or how does your vision involved? Basically, I mean, because you know, you've got a whole other book to add to your book. There's there's been an evolution in your thinking and in how you're looking at this or guiding people. Yeah. Just make it somewhat esoteric. I don't know. But it's yeah, the more and more I learn, I'm a very like analytical person. I want to understand something I want the facts and figures and things like that. But I am learning that that is never going to give us the complete answers. Knowing all the facts and figures, the latest research, the best design research is never going to give us the complete answers. Because I think ancient cultures understood that to an extent. And they kind of surrendered to whatever you want to call God, right? It could be the universe. It could be love. It could be prana. It could be whatever you want to call it. The ether, there's a higher power than ourselves is we're not meant to understand all the complexities of life and our physiology, which means our best bet is to put ourselves in environments that signal that are more natural or more familiar to our bodies. We came from nature. We are nature, right? We divorce ourselves from that. We see the problems that happen from that, whether whether it's introducing toxins or frequencies of EMF that aren't compatible with us, whether it's lack of sunlight, whether it's toxic food, whether it's traumas, all these things, right? I mean, at a very core, like traumas are going to happen. They're supposed to happen, but when you interfere with the process of process that you're body processing a trauma to get rid of it, releasing it, which is what we call shock. What does medicine do this? Suppress shock, yeah, which allows trauma to be stored. Like we're interfering at like every single stage of all these things that our bodies are building to just be vibrantly healthy. So and that starts from a young age. So it's like, you can always start no matter what's happened to you in your life. You can always start, you can always improve, right? But that's why the childhood is so important. And like making a proper environment, proper nervous system for our children is so important because that's going to be the nervous system that you're up with. So I guess the main overarching thing. And so I wrote, I've actually written a third book now called Pain Sense, and I get much more into like this idea of some of the physiology and how it's structured water-based and that kind of stuff. And bigger concepts, but as far as the heart stuff, I could add so much to this to my heart understanding the heart book at this point. And I guess an overarching thing would be we need to stop thinking we know what's best, right? And kind of surrender to this wisdom. Again, it's like this knowing and Plato talked about it. This nocy, he called it. This knowing that something is right in doing it because it feels right, not because we analytically know what's right, because we can think we can know that and human research is fundamentally flawed because it's designed by humans. And then we can statistically mess with things. Anyway, we want to make it seem a certain way, but we've lost touch with this knowing, which again brings us back to the heart. And that's the organ that we've seen to sense this knowing from. We know it in our hearts. We say that not because it was because we feel that, right? And I think that's the most important aspect of living going forward as far as creating health is is leading with your heart, knowing with your heart. And when you understand it from that perspective and you understand that nature's giving you the answers, you don't need to understand the exact mechanisms. Even though I like to entertain that and look into it and see if I can figure it out, it's not, I've come to a point where I don't need to know it. And I think that's being the biggest transformation for me is where I don't have to know exactly what's going on. I just trust this. Right. And again, that brings you inside, rather than you searching for the thing outside of you that's the next answer, the next research study, the next practitioner, the next protocol, the next test, whatever it is, those things aren't going to give us the answer. And that's the people come to me. They come to me with that mentality like, well, look at this book. And then I start talking to them and then they put it down, right? And they're like, okay. And they give them this confidence going forward. So, you know, without all the little details that that kind of back up that theory, that's the overarching thing. So we need to get back to that. And I think agent cultures were much more in contact with that. What I also may think is what allowed them to do things like build the pyramids and things like that. They knew more about that stuff. Yeah. And I think that, you know, what you've been talking about all along, which and we see this in all of this, this whole biohacking longevity space, if you really look at what all these technologies are trying to do. And I mean, I've got a little red infrared light panel on my desk that I keep on a lot of the day because I'm sitting here, you know, in front of a blue light screen and the whole nine yards, I think continually, we are trying to re-deliver nature to the body because we've become so so so so distance from it. Grounding sheets on your bed, red and near infrared light, helping people to get out into nature. We know that children who are in schools where they go to parks and they play outside and they get in the dirt, they do better, their nervous system is better regulated. So and because when you do that and when you re-energize the system through access to energized water, for example, so that your body can make, you're letting the body take care of the rest and that feeds into your what you're talking about is you don't need to know all the answers because if you give the body what it needs and remove what it doesn't, those obstacles were putting in, it will take care of itself. And that's such a powerful message, right? Because there is an element of surrender to that. And we're not sitting here saying if somebody has, you know, advanced chronic heart disease, just forget your doctor and go stand in a forest all day, that's not the point. But certainly from a lifestyle from a lifestyle perspective and preventing and living a healthier life, this could put you in a place where you're never, hopefully, you don't end up going there. Yeah, and yeah, and that's that's the perfectly said, like it does take this level of surrender, right? Which means giving up control a little bit, which is hard for us to do. Yeah, hard for a lot of people to do. And when you do that, though, it's very freeing. It's and you just kind of put your trust in this higher power that is whatever you want to call it. Right? You can say it's dangerous nature, right? And yeah, at the same time, it's also well said that you said, like, yeah, like let's let's use Western medicine. You can kind of keep it there to monitor you, but there are certain situations where people get to a point where it becomes a negative experience to go to there. Right. Because it's so frustrating for them. And then is it really helping you that? And so we have to kind of weigh those opinions. And that's that's a personal decision. I can't tell you the right wrong thing to do there. But yeah, use that. And then also, yes, go stay in the woods all day long. You know, if you can, you're trying to recreate that environment as best you can. And that's what we're trying to do. Like you said, with these biohacking things, you have this red light. Why? Because it's creating a little bit more balanced in an environment than looking at blue light all day. You're getting some red in it. Ideally, you'd be in full spectrum sunlight all day. But if that's not possible, let's make it a little bit better and add some red light, right? That's that's that's those are the things we make. It like we can't go stay on the earth all day long. If grounding sheets are a reality for you and you don't have dirty electricity, you filter that out like this makes sense. Yeah, this is something that helps us get closer while while in the confines of our modern way of life. Nobody's saying you have to go live in the woods. If you can, you want to more power to you, but we don't have to, right? We can do the best we can in our modern way of life. And that's the name of the game. And I approve into myself the impact that can have, you know, on on someone. So yeah. Here we are. All right, a couple quick fire questions and I'm, we'll let you go. What is one belief about heart health that you're still personally exploring? Something where the science is emerging and you're still connecting the dots. Is there one thing in particular that stands out to you? Probably there's a bunch, but is there one you can share? That I'm still exploring. I mean, that's emerging. Yeah. All aspects, I think. Man, I guess I'm always exploring this whole lipid thing just because it's so prominent. It's what everybody talks about. And there's all this new literature. And the only reason I'm still exploring is because they keep harping on the same things. We keep trying to study the same things. And so to me, it's just providing more and more evidence of why it's a big distraction. And yeah, it doesn't make sense to me that we're trying to blame the whole disease process on one molecule when it's very, very complex. There's lots of different aspects to it. But I'm always paying attention to that, mostly just because it's everywhere, whatever it likes to talk about. And so I, yeah. Well, it's getting blamed for a lot, right? So it's cholesterol is being, it's central. And so I think it still needs, it needs to be unpacked, like it just needs to be unpacked. Okay, if you could leave our listeners with one message, one, to carry into their movement, light exposure, stress management, and nutrition routines, what would it be? I guess similar to what we've talked about, it's just that surrender, like surrender to those things. Like it'll let go a little bit, which the ability to let go is incredibly powerful thing. Like of the control and put your trust, faith, whatever you want to call it into into the things that that make us healthy, like the signals that make us healthy. Like you look at all the research in the world, it's all leaving you back to that, go to those natural environments. So yeah, it's a work on that. Like if you find you can't do that, it's you can't let go, you can't surrender into that. That means there's some personal work that needs to be done. Yeah, and I think that trauma works really important. I actually, I would, I will tell you this and share with the audience. I recorded and released a podcast earlier this year with a doctor of osteopathy who started off as an orthopedic surgeon. His name is Tudor Marinescu in Sedona and he does really interesting work with neural therapy in releasing points of trauma in the body. And it is incredible. I take people there for retreats a couple times a year and some of the people I've taken have had such massive shifts. It's on the table. It's pretty powerful stuff. We're not going to talk about that now. I'll flip you the episode if you're interested. Now, so now beyond your books and clinical work, what legacy do you hope to create in the field of cardiovascular health and longevity? It's your last question. I mean, I guess my, I've said this to other people for my, my big goal is to change the conversation about heart disease, which is the theme we're talking about. I think it needs to come away from diet and cholesterol being the problem of the thing we talk about and weigh people trying to control it to these other things that I've talked about. I want to change that conversation. I want to shift it whether it happens in medicine or not. I don't care. General, conventional wisdom, I want to help shift that narrative. Yeah. I love it. This has been as interesting and fascinating and conversation as I was hoping it would be. We've been to places I didn't know we were going, but Stephen, it's been fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time and for being here. Why don't we as a parting gift share with people your how to reach you, how to work with you, where to find you, and when your next book is coming out? Sure. My website is resourceyourhealth.com. So most everything people want to find is on there like how to work with me in my books, different things. The very infrequent blog that I post that's on there as well. I'm also on social media. Just Dr. Stephen Hasse, DR Stephen Hasse, people can reach out there as well. I'm posting stuff that I like the new stuff that I find that I want to talk about and things. But yeah, those are the main ways people can contact me and find me. Thank you. Thank you so much. This has been amazing. Thanks again. If folks, just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only, no medical advice, no diagnosing, no treatments suggested here. Before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here, make sure that you check with your medical provider.