The Heart Disease Lie: It’s Not Genetic & Cholesterol Isn’t the Enemy | Dr. Jack Wolfson, DO

No one is healthy who has a heart attack. If they have a heart attack, they weren't healthy. If they had cancer, if they developed cancer, they weren't healthy. Because heart disease and cancer and brain disease only occur in people who are unhealthy. In your own practice, do you prescribe statins? Never. Is the need for statins built on lies? I think it's the most egregious thing that's ever been committed on the worldwide populace. Doctors are the biggest bullies in the world. The truth is out. The truth is winning. And people of your generation, they saw the sickness. They don't want that. Wait, cholesterol is good for you? Bacon is good for me It's not a question, it's official Everything we were taught about heart disease, saturated fat and statins is trash and unscientific. And it's this bad science and advice that is making heart disease worse, not better. Today I'm joined by Dr. Jack Wolfson, board certified cardiologist, founder of Natural Heart Doctor, and author of best-selling book The Paleo Cardiologist. After spending over a decade inside one of Arizona's largest hospital cardiology groups, Dr. Wolfson walked away from conventional medicine to expose what's really driving heart disease. We're talking butter versus statins, why heart-healthy labels are a joke, the trillion-dollar cholesterol industry, seed oils, energy drinks, and how to heal a fried nervous system. Are you living and breathing? Then you should leave a five-star review for this show on Apple or Spotify. Please welcome the founder of natural heart doctor, cardiologist Jack Wolfson, to Culture Apothecary. As a cardiologist, you believe that the lies Americans have been told about heart disease was the catalyst for all of the piss poor health advice and nutrition advice that Americans have been given for the last 100 years. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, the information that was given based on the government and the government promoting, for example, all these different processed foods, talking about fat is bad, carbs are good, sugar is not a problem, artificial is the way to go, all these different artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners, they were all catastrophic as it relates to heart disease. And heart disease is the number one killer in the world. We had all these foods, all these recommendations for all these years, and we've totally missed the mark. So undoubtedly, the information that really came from the food companies, right? So you're talking about Kellogg's, Nabisco, Quaker Oats, these big box food producers of just pure processed poison just led to a whole generation of just sickness and death. Heart disease is now the leading cause of death in America, but it wasn't always that way. So did something happen to us or did we bring this upon ourselves? Well, heart disease has been the biggest killer when we talk about heart attacks, strokes, cardiomyopathy, congestive heart failure. That has been true for probably 75 years. Before that, the leading cause would have been trauma, maybe infections. I would say that ultimately you're talking about 100 years ago, you have people who live in big cities. And they don't have access to clean water, to clean food, to the outdoors, to sunshine, sanitation. It was just so many people lived in these big cities where sickness was able to flourish. People are now immunocompromised and therefore infections, whether it's viruses, bacteria, parasites, that stuff would easily spread. Fast forward, now you have kind of cleaned up sanitation, and now people ultimately are living longer because of that. And heart disease has really come to the forefront since then. But heart disease is 100% preventable. It's not genetic. People don't have the genetic risk for heart attacks and strokes. People have perfect genes. Whoever built us, call that person God, call that evolution. However we got here, we're built perfectly. We can run and jump and see and feel and make babies and do incredible things. So we don't have a genetic program to heart attacks. We can say 100 million Americans have high blood pressure. Do they all have bad genetics? I mean, that's a joke. So the medical doctors like to blame genetics because that implies, hey, there's nothing you could do about it, Alex. You got to take these pills. It's all in your genetics. and that is just a lie. It's just not true. So does it matter when a doctor in an appointment says, you know, do you have a history of heart disease in your family? Do you have a history of stroke or is that useless? It's pretty useless information because what happens is, is that family history is true because we eat, live and think like our family members did. We sat inside, we watched TV, we ate bowls of ice cream. We weren't very active. We lived in a toxic, polluted, poisonous environment just like our family members did. So therefore, we suffer the same things. For decades, Americans have been told red meat is bad, butter is bad, eggs are killing you. Was that story ever actually true? No, the story is not true. But I'll give a caveat that whatever you and I are talking, of course, we're talking about free range, grass fed, ethically raised. I know you've had Joel Salatin, who I'm a big fan of. These are the ways that our ancestors ate the food. They were hunters and they were gatherers. and that throughout the history of humans, these are the foods that we ate. We hunted animals and we gathered eggs and avocados and coconuts and fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds. So it really shouldn't be any debate whether or not meat is healthy or not. It's just, it's human food and humans ate it and humans do eat it. The nutritional value of eating meat and really of eating seafood, these are nature's most perfect, complete foods. But they were vilified. They were vilified because we were told lies. We were fed lies about not eating these saturated fats. We were told lies about not eating cholesterol. And those are just the penultimate nutritious foods that are easily bioavailable, easy to assimilate, and ultimately feed health. Why would they lie about that? Number one, there's a lot of money to be made in all the processed foods. So those big box things, they stay on the shelves. They're cheap to produce. For example, you vilify coconut oil and say that's very high in saturated fat, so you don't want to do that. And then enter in partially hydrogenated soybean oil, which is very cheap. Coconut oil was very expensive, and soybean oil is very cheap. So you vilify a lot of these foods in order for profit. And then the flip side of the profit is now you have a population who's very sick. And sick people are really good customers for everything we want to sell them. Psych meds, chemotherapy drugs, heart drugs. So it really works in perfect symbiosis for the people who are in control. If butter and steak aren't driving heart disease, what is? What drives heart disease, I'll kind of paint this in a big umbrella, is the same thing that drives all disease. And it's real. It's two things. Two things cause all disease. It's real simple. Too much bad stuff, not enough good stuff. So when you look at cancer, you look at heart attacks, strokes, autoimmune, skin issues, gut issues, brain issues, dementia, Parkinson's, too much bad stuff, not enough good stuff. So what's all the bad stuff? The bad stuff is, you know, thousands and thousands of chemicals. It is living in a home with water damage, mold, and bacteria. It is electromagnetic fields. It is heavy metals. It is root canals. It is plastic. Like you and I can have an hour-long discussion on the dangers of plastic as it relates to heart disease just on that. So it's also the bad food. And it's the artificial, the processed, the pesticide-riddled foods, the hormone foods, the GMO foods. It's everything. So you put all these things together. And then of course, other bad things, not moving, not being physically active, not getting enough sunshine. They told us sun was bad. Like they told us the sun was bad. How stupid would we have to be to believe that? But, and I was guilty of it too, you know, for all those years, uh, sleep, the importance of, so again, it's too much bad stuff is what's happening and then not enough good stuff. So what do we do? We flip the script, get a lot more good stuff, a lot less bad stuff in a world that is poisonous, that is predicated on making us sick. And we do the best to survive. And that's the that's the strategy. Did you look at the new dietary guidelines that were released? I have seen some of the pictures of the guidelines. Yes. Did you read what they wrote about saturated fat? I really didn't. And I know the people who produced it. I know the people who were behind it, as a lot of us do, who are in this industry. I believe that our ancestors ate a certain way, and that's the way that we should be eating. But any commentary about saturated fat, there's saturated fat in everything. People in the South Pacific, they live on coconuts, which, again, it was this kind of poster child of saturated fat. That's what we learned in medical school. It's like one of the few dietary things that we ever talked about was, well, don't eat coconuts because they're high in saturated fat. Yet the islanders, the Pacific Islanders, they live on coconuts. They use tons of coconut oil. They're just loaded with saturated fat. They live a long time despite the fact that they all smoke cigarettes. So the American military in the Second World War, they dropped off all the cigarettes and along with other bad habits, but they still maintain the coconuts and the coconuts are just wonderful. So saturated fats is never the problem. It's always part of a healthy diet. where, you know, we're loaded with saturated fat, us as humans, and we've got saturated fat all over in our cells. So we need to embrace it. This is the other important distinction I think we need to make for the audience, too, when it comes to red meat, is red meat from a fast food hamburger is very different than the grass fed, grass finished beef, like what you were talking about. Can you talk about what ultra processed meats are made of, why it's carcinogenic, why that fuels heart disease and not a grass-fed, grass-finished steak. And the organs as well, because we got to remember that our ancestors really prized things like liver, heart, kidney. The doctors for thousands of years knew that if you wanted a healthy heart, you would eat animal heart. The concept of like helps to repair like. The processor or CAFO or conventionally raised meats, they are fed grain. They're fed grains that are very high in omega-6 fatty acids as opposed to omega-3. A cow that eats free-range grass-fed, not only the outside, they're getting all the benefits of the sun. They're getting all the benefits from walking and presumably a much healthier, happier lifestyle. Or we recommend eating bison and elk and the more ancestral heirloom varieties of animals that have been around for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. eating it that way, which is going to be better than an animal that was raised on pesticides, on corn. Cows don't eat corn. Cows will eat whatever you put in front of their face if they're starving, but cows eat grass. And that's going to lead to the healthiest thing for you. It's often been said, and Michael Pollan was famous for this as well, you know, it's what the animal you eat ate. So if they're eating healthy, then we're going to get healthy benefits. And ultimately, too, just from a conscientious standpoint about what it means to cherish an animal, to raise an animal the right way, let the animal have its best and most blessed life, maybe with its family, with its friends. And then the animal is sacrificed for our benefit. We honor, we pray over those animals, and we get the nutritional value from it. There seems to be a lot of conflicting science on seed oils. What is the truth? Seed oils are not part of my diet. It's really not part of a hunter-gatherer diet, so I don't eat them often. Yet, if you and I were going out for a burger and fries, and they're serving free-range grass-fed meat, and they've got fries that are cooked in organic sunflower oil, I don't think that's the big problem. I think the big problem comes in where we're talking about genetically modified canola oils, soybean oils, heavily sprayed and pesticide riddled sunflower, safflower and the like. But I think there's a lot bigger problems than the oils. And candidly, the medical literature that's out there, some of it is pro seed oil. Some of it is anti seed oil. That's why people are so confused. Going organic and as clean as possible is the ultimate strategy. Cooking with saturated fats cooking with butter, ghee, tallow from natural best sources, that is going to be the best thing for us to do. Olive oil, you know, we look at the Mediterranean diet, those people, you know, suck down, you know, olive oil like a kid would eat M&Ms. I mean, like, you know, they, olive oil is obviously very nutritious. It was, we talked about before the benefits of coconut oil, big fan of that, but I'm not overly concerned about seed oils. I'm a little bit concerned that people focus on that, but they're missing other things. Like how about the fact the seed oil came in a plastic bottle? That is infinitely worse. Sitting on a hot truck for days, traveling across the country, nasty. Same with bottled water in the summer. And all those things too. I mean, the problem with the oils is that, yeah, they can become oxidized and now you're taking something that's damaged and you're ingesting it. So that's one of the beauties of saturated fat is that it does have natural protection in the fact that it biochemically and from an organic chemistry standpoint, it is this saturated fat, which makes it very stable and resistant to oxidation and oxidative stress. If we take an oil and we consume it and it's already damaged, it's really inhibiting our ability to live a healthy lifestyle. I think for people that get overwhelmed and nervous, like, how am I supposed to know if there's a seed oil in something? If you focus on exactly what you're saying, if you focus on eating real food, whole food, it's just going to be easier to naturally avoid seed oils if that's what you're focusing on. We have to just stop with, well, I eat healthy at home, but when I'm out, I don't really care. Or, you know, these 80-20 rule type of people. I'm not that person. 80-20 is so fake, drives me nuts. It's impossible in America to truly be 80-20. And it's just not healthy. And it's just we're giving people this kind of this hall pass to go out and do whatever you want to do. Like as we talk right now, Alex, I know you don't care, but somebody might. I'm wearing organic cotton underwear. We take the lifestyle very, very seriously. I've never had a guest tell me that. And the company is called Wear Pact. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so Pact Organics, they're great. And there's other companies, but that's the point is that the more that we do that, the more people are producing it in that way. Yeah. I don't always, and people always ask these tips. I don't always seek out and only eat at Cetal-free restaurants. I like to try, but I never go to fast food, that's for sure. But at any restaurant I'm at, I will ask because typically it's a nicer restaurant. And so they will cook your food in whatever you ask them to. So I will say, hey, I have an allergy. Can you only cook my steak or my salmon in olive oil or butter? You know, I say something like that. And they've never told me no. Well, let me say this, you know, because I have been told no. And usually, you know, we call ahead. And my wife, you know, for example, if we travel and we get to a city and I don't have food ready for her, like she's a little thing, you know, like you. And she's just angry. She gets very hangry if we don't have food ready. So I call the cities ahead of time when we travel. And, hey, you know, where are the local, you know, free range grass fed farm to table restaurants? Where are the natural grocery stores? And that's what we do. But for all the young entrepreneurs that are listening to us right now, open up some organic restaurants. Open up an organic free range grass fed burger place. Open up more organic coffee shops. Open up places that where you have organic fries that are cooked in bison tallow. Do it and charge more for it because people. Oh, well, you know who's going to pay that? People will pay that. We do. Because we know that we take our money and we pay ourselves first and we eat healthy. And that's more important than anything. The place that we live in, the car that we drive, you know, who cuts our hair, which I don't have that problem. You know, and this time we make everybody healthier and everybody happier. And I selfishly, I want more food options. I want to know there are more places for myself and my family to go. I know couples who've been trying to get pregnant for years. They're told everything looks normal. 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What do people not understand about cholesterol's essential role in hormone production and brain health and cell membranes and even immune function? Cholesterol has been so demonized over the years and only because of selling pharmaceuticals and to sell us food to lower cholesterol like our friends over at Quaker Oats. And friends is obviously, you know, joke. Tell us the scandalous thing about Quaker Oats. Well, Quaker Oats, if you're a big box manufacturer like Quaker Oats, you want to promote oatmeal. It's cheap. It stores on a shelf forever. Heart healthy. And therefore, you solicit the government to get these claims that it's heart healthy. And oatmeal is a tremendous source of mold mycotoxins. Oatmeal contains a lot of anti-nutrients. But our distant ancestors as hunter-gatherers, you don't hunt and gather oatmeal. You don't go after the oat seeds and process them and cook them. And of course, in order to make oatmeal palatable, you got to add a lot of stuff to it because otherwise it tastes terrible. Does oatmeal lower cholesterol? I would say that that's not a good thing, but oatmeal can lower that because oatmeal binds cholesterol in the gut and then you poop it out the other side. I would also say you could eat the box of oatmeal that it comes in, the actual physical cardboard, and that will also bind up cholesterol in your gut and then you can poop it out the other side. But if you were gonna eat oatmeal, wouldn't it be the best thing to do organic sprouted oats? Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. I mean, there's definitely different levels. There's pesticide oatmeal, just like there's pesticide anything. So the best versions. But the other thing, too, is that why would you eat oatmeal when you can eat eggs? The nutritional value of eggs is infinitely higher than oatmeal. Like it's not even close. And try and feed an oatmeal to your dog, to your cat, to a lion. They won't even come anywhere close. So anything that eats meat that is truly omnivorous, they will go after the animal products first. So cholesterol, as you mentioned, is this miracle molecule, which every animal species on earth has. So we should embrace the importance of cholesterol. So when I say cholesterol, you don't think heart attack, stroke, blockage. You think about all the benefits that you mentioned. So cholesterol is made by the body from the food we consume. it serves a purpose to become a precursor as you mentioned to vitamin d to our digestion our bile salts our bile acids all of our hormones all of our sex hormones come from cholesterol cholesterol gets converted into these different molecules and cholesterol as you mentioned is part of the cell membrane the cell membrane is the fence that keeps things in the cell that belong outside the cell that don't belong. Our brain is heavily made up of cholesterol. So we can't live without it. And again, it's been vilified. It's been drugged and pharmaceuticalized to death. And it's been a major problem. And so many people have suffered because of it. So how did we get to this place where doctors start saying that cholesterol is toxic when it's something that our body literally cannot survive without? Well, doctors are just victims of the brainwashing by the pharmaceutical industry. It's sad, but I was part of it tremendously. From the day one of medical school, we learned nothing about nutrition, nothing about lifestyle. You know, we talk about sunshine and sleep and, oh yeah, go to the gym and exercise, that kind of stuff. We learned nothing about environmental toxins. We only learned about pharmaceuticals. So you left conventional medicine to become a holistic cardiologist. Yes, I was part of the biggest group in the state of Arizona for 10 years. I was a hospital-based cardiologist, 2011, one of Phoenix, Arizona's top doctors in Phoenix Magazine by my peers. Do you still have any friends that are doing that or have they all denounced you? Yeah, I don't have too many friends in that industry that are left, but more of them are waking up. And a lot of times the doctors wake up when they're sick and conventional medicine can't help them. In my case, it was not me personally, but it was the fact that conventional medicine couldn't help my father when my father was sick. And my wife is a doctor of chiropractic. She would open me up, you know, open up my eyes to the truth about health and wellness and talking about food, nutrition, lifestyle, and all these things that are so important. So what we really want to do is we want to give the body what it needs, take away what it doesn't. That's going to be that ultimate strategy. But back to what happens is to every doctor, it's just since 1910, the Rockefellers, the Flexner Report. People can go read about it and then judge how it all happened. But somehow the pharmaceutical industry took control of the medical training. So all of the medical schools are owned by pharmaceutical companies in one way or another based on their donations and stuff like that. Is it true that Rockefeller was scared of chiropractors and thought they really know what they're talking about. We need to make sure the public thinks that they're quacks. So what Rockefeller did is he was, of course, an oil baron. And at the time, there's other competitions that are coming out against oil. So things that were making him nervous about his billion, multi-billion dollar empire. So he was looking to diversify. So he was able to diversify and use these petrochemicals and to use them in different places. And one would have been the agriculture industry, fertilizers, et cetera. One would have been, you know, war in the munitions industry, and the other, of course, would have been the pharmaceutical industry. So you take these different pharmaceuticals that are all petrochemical-based, and now you've got the basis of chemotherapy, heart drugs, and so on and so forth. It was a pure money play, and he was very successful at it, because here we are now, and so many years later, where the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, on and on and on, everybody's influenced by pharmaceuticals. The number one marketing arm in the entire world is the pharmaceutical industry. You can just turn on any TV and you see how we're marketed to 24-7. Statins are the most profitable drug class in history. Pfizer's Lipitor alone pulled in over $130 billion since its creation. Is the need for statins built on lies? The need for statins is totally built on lies. And I think it's probably the most egregious thing that's ever been committed on the worldwide populace is the idea of taking statin drugs as a health measure. Statin drugs are probably the number one killer pharmaceutical of all time. Now, where would I get that from? Because I would say that statin drugs, not only do they not work in the sense that we would think they work, because they work to lower numbers down, that's for sure. But they don't really reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke, and dying to meaningful levels. They've got a tremendous amount of side effects. And because they don't work as well as you would think they would, they provide a false sense of security. I can just take a statin drug and I'll be fine, because that's what the doctors make people think. and people die because they're not addressing the root cause. We always have to go after the root cause of all disease. And as I mentioned before, the root cause is too much bad stuff, not enough good stuff, and statin drugs would fall under the too much bad stuff category. But we talked about the benefits of cholesterol. So statin drugs inhibit the production and the transportation of cholesterol. And in doing so, we also have lower levels of CoQ10, which is part of our mitochondria and cellular energy, the way that mitochondria work. Statin drugs, by interfering with that, also interfere with our hormones. They interfere with our vitamin K utilization, so we have a higher risk of osteoporosis. They interfere with the production of vitamin D, because if you don't make cholesterol, how do you make vitamin D? The sun hits the skin, turns cholesterol into vitamin D. One of the things that I noticed after my father had passed was that when he was on a statin drug, statin drugs also interfere with the production of something called dolichol, D-O-L-I-C-H-O-L. And dolichol is a molecule that is produced in the brain, in the substantia nigra of the midbrain, which if you reduce those levels, you're going to have Parkinsonian disorders. And there is data on statins and Parkinson's. My father died of similar. Whoa. Okay. This is a big bombshell because I knew, I mean, we're hearing all this stuff about pesticides and living near golf courses with Parkinson's, but that's an interesting connection. There are multiple studies that do show an increased risk of Parkinson's in statin users. There's other studies that would maybe claim that there's no association, but I can only tell you that it's not the only factor. It's just when you stack up so much of the bad stuff and not enough of the good stuff, you wind up with Parkinson's. But there's a reason for it. We're not genetically programmed to get Parkinson's. There's no Parkinson's gene. It is all environmental and therefore it's all preventable to the best of our ability in a totally polluted, toxic world. So why are we seeing some young people who are perfectly healthy, have zero symptoms, being prescribed statins preventatively? It's all the doctors know how to do. But why would you even give somebody that has no symptoms or anything a statin? Well, when you think that you're a hammer and everything's a nail, that's all you can do. People go to the medical doctors and the medical doctor perceives them as wanting something done. So they do it. But this whole mantra right now, which is from the American Heart Association, is lower for longer. Let's just give statin drugs as early as possible, and then we'll get the benefits in the long term. But I would say this. It's not about how do we reduce your heart attack risk from 2% to 1.84% annually. And that's the data based on the Journal of the American Medical Association 2022 meta-analysis, like a fraction of a point reduction. and people aren't getting the message that we don't want to reduce your risk from 2% to 1.84%. Who offers people a 0% risk of heart attack, stroke, and dying? And that's what we do in the natural world by going after root cause. You also said perfectly healthy. People are perfectly healthy. Like for example, if I take a history on someone, I'll tell you if they're perfectly healthy. Don't tell me, oh, they eat well and they exercise. They were perfectly healthy. No. No one is healthy who has a heart attack. If they have a heart attack, they weren't healthy. If they had cancer, if they develop cancer, they weren't healthy because heart disease and cancer and brain disease only occur in people who are unhealthy. So, yes, it is very important to maintain your health. That's going to sting, but that's important for people to hear. It's important. In your own practice, do you prescribe statins? Never. If you're a heart patient listening currently on statins, is it possible to get off? 100% of the time. So what do you have them take instead? What do they do? We stop the statins. And of course, the caveat here is, right, we're not telling anyone to stop their pharmaceuticals, talk to their doctor. The problem is when you talk to your doctor, they're the ones who prescribed it. So they're going to give you the same rhetoric. You know, Alex, take your statins. Well, I heard some bad things about it. You know, oh, do you want to die? No, I don't want to die. Then take the statin. Doctors are the biggest bullies in the world, the biggest bully class in the world. So what do I do is, is that I come in and I want to give people information. I want to give people the truth and pretend that I'm the attorney for the holistic side and I'll present my case. And then the other cardiologist is the attorney for the pharmaceutical side and they'll present their case. And you're the judge. You're the jury. You're a free human. you decide what's right for you. All I want to do is have my time to be able to present my side of the case, but they don't want that. They admonish that. They try and restrict people like me. They file board complaints against people like me, but the truth is out. The truth is winning and people of your generation, they saw the sickness. They don't want that. They want to make a difference. Okay. So for those of us who have parents that are on statins and we're hearing this, we're like, okay, I really want to convince them to get off. What's the spiel that we can cause so we can cosplay you, copy you, and tell it to our parents. Okay. So the spiel is that heart disease is not from a statin drug deficiency. Heart disease is from violations of eat well, live well, think well. Too much bad stuff, not enough good stuff. So here's what we do. We get more of the good stuff. We eat free-range grass-fed meats. We eat wild seafood. We eat eggs and avocados and coconuts and fruits and vegetables. And we do everything organically. And we get high-quality sleep. We get high quality sunshine. We move. We stay away from all these environmental chemicals and toxins and pollutants to the best of our ability. We get under chiropractic care and we see a holistic dentist. And then the third component is mindset. We find our happy. If you're not happy, you better find your happy because unhappy people die more quickly. So you got to find your happy. good relationships, good spirituality, good community, things that they took away from us over the last few years when they isolated us. It led to extreme sickness and illness. So we eat well, we live well, we think well, and then we test. We do the most advanced testing in the world, blood, urine, stool testing, to check our status, our metrics. So we look at all these advanced lab markers, just like you would look at your gas tank light, your check engine oil light, your bank account. Those are all metrics to see how you're doing. So you track your metrics. If your metrics look good, your lab markers look good, you're on track. And then we can use evidence-based supplements. And then we can use biohacking strategies and maybe that sauna, red light, ozone, Eboo, hyperbaric, I mean, you know, tissue plasma. We can do a lot of different things that we're doing, but the foundation is how we eat, live, and think. Okay, so let me pretend to be the mom, okay, or the dad. That sounds very expensive. It is more expensive in certain facets. So you and I are talking about, okay, if we go out for a grass-fed burger, that's going to be more expensive than going for a fast food burger. That's true. And yes, it will be more expensive in the long run, of course, when you have sickness and more expensive in the fact that you're back and forth at the doctor's office. You can't work productively. You can't work in a quality way because you're sick. You're not a productive member of society when you're sick. The other thing is, though, is that we mentioned sunshine and being outdoors. That's free. So I talk to people all over the world and they live in Buffalo, New York, and my hometown of Chicago, and they're like, oh, what do I do about sun? I'm like, move, move, get out of there. Come down to Arizona. It's sunny in Arizona, 400 days a year, right? Come down to Arizona, move to Costa Rica, do all these different things that people can do. Sleep, totally free. Getting outside and going for a walk, a hike, bike ride, all these things, they are free. Yes, if you go to see a holistic practitioner, you're gonna pay cash. Yes, if you want the most advanced testing in the world, it's an investment in your health. But we can also take a look at ourselves and say, do we need this particular car that we drive? Do we need the house that we live in? Can we get in more modest accommodations? Do we need to get our hair done, our nails done? Do we need to do all these different aesthetic things? Do we need to have our crappa frappuccino, you know, sugar bomb? So it's kind of hashtag no excuses. We can do better. I'm so obsessed with you. He says all the things that I say. You guys get mad, but you can't get mad when the doctor says it. Okay. Well, I, speaking of, you know, I live in a, in the Midwest or whatever, and I can't get sun and you're like, well, move. So my mom's in Indianapolis. She's my only living parent left. So, you know, I'm like, really? I had her go get a prenuvo scan. They're not a sponsor. I had her go get a full biomarkers tested this year. I'm like, now I'm all in on health. You know, we've had a year after my dad. So I'm like, okay, mom, it's your turn now. So I did order her red light therapy stuff that's being sent to her. so she can have that at least in the winter months. So that's an option, you know, when it is winter. It has literally never been easier to be hot. I'm serious. You wake up, you pour a glass of whole A2 or raw milk, you add one scoop of strawberry cowboy colostrum, shake it up, and suddenly you're drinking the most refreshing, elite, most cutest Valentine's Day beverage imaginable. And it's growing your hair. It's strengthening your nails, glowing your skin, and boosting your immune system. I love wearing pink, and now I like to drink it. The strawberry cowboy colostrum has real strawberries, not the artificial lab coat strawberry crap that's fake. Cowboy colostrum is sourced from first milking colostrum collected just four to six hours after birth from grass-fed U.S.-raised dairy cows. 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Use code Alex for 25 off That CowboyColostrum Code Alex for 25 off So I buy a brand new pair of ballet flats very chic I wear them for 12 minutes and my heel looks like it lost a knife fight Full blister, raw, bleeding, incredible. And people are like, just put Neosporin on it. Absolutely not. I would rather perish because Neosporin is basically petroleum jelly mixed with antibiotics that you do not need, which can actually slow healing, wreck your skin barrier, and contribute to antibiotic resistance. Ugh. It is sticky. It traps bacteria. It smells like a CVS aisle that hasn't been updated since 1997. Hard pass. I only use Active Skin Repair. Active Skin Repair is a skin health company that helps your body heal using natural, non-toxic, medical-grade ingredients. The magic is a molecule called hypochlorous acid, which sounds weird, but it's something that your own immune system already makes. 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You do not want something to happen to you. And then you're like, what do I put on this? Burn, scrape, cut, whatever. You want to have this on hand. So even if you do not have a wound right now, get it. What do you think about coronary artery CT scans? Yeah, a lot of people go for that, and I don't like it. It's radiation-based. Radiation causes heart disease, cancer, and ultimately dementia as well. So radiation is bad. And then I would say, what do we do with the information? Anytime you get a test, how is that going to influence what you do? Well, coronary artery calcification leads a lot of people into statin drugs. I'm anti-statin. And it's not a good test to monitor or to track. There's much better markers in blood and urine stool. So I never order a coronary CT scan. Here's a hypothetical example. Let's say someone is a young, extremely fit, ultra healthy guy with eight pack abs and he loves butter. And his LDL cholesterol is really high. What do you say to him and others in that scenario? So LDL has a purpose, which is why every single animal on earth has it. Fish have LDL. Frogs have LDL. Everything with a spine has LDL. So LDL has been vilified in order to sell pharmaceuticals, statin drugs, injectables like PCSK9 inhibitors, other pharmaceuticals in this multi-trillion dollar sickness industry. So LDL has a purpose, HDL has a purpose, and we want to check our LDLs and HDLs. Ideally, we look at particle numbers, particle sizes, things like ApoB, ApoA, but also more importantly, markers of inflammation and oxidative stress. If the markers of inflammation and ox stress look good, then there's really not much of a concern. There is a dangerous lipid particle called LP little a. We should all take a look at LP little a and make sure that that's under control. But if someone has an LDL, for example, of 200 and it's a lot of these large, buoyant, fluffy particles, again, looking at these more advanced metrics, that'll give us a better idea of status. But not every person who's got hot, quote unquote, high LDL should be on statin drugs. Nobody should be on statin drugs. What are the most common heart issues for women 25 to 35 years old? So women oftentimes, what I see a lot of women for are palpitations. Women who come in and they have complaints of skips and flips and racing heart feelings. And the medical doctor either. Usually when they see Jacob Elordi on screen. I have no clue who that is. Thank you. So who's that? Just some hot, young actor. And I guess that would be root cause, right? So if someone has root cause for that, then the answer, of course, is not to take a pharmaceutical to get rid of the palpitations, flips and skips. There's a root cause. Don't watch this guy on whatever TV show he's on. But the doctors kind of diminish it and they're like, oh, don't worry about it, Alex, not a big deal. You know, you're not going to die from it. But a lot of women feel like they're going to die from it. They don't like the way they feel. It's ruining a lot of lives. It causes a lot of anxiety and stress. So it's ultimately we want to get to the root cause of why people have these symptoms. Oftentimes it's PACs, PVCs, premature ventricular complexes, atrial complexes, these abnormal electrical, you know, rhythms that they're having. And it's important to figure it because down the road, it will lead to something worse. Because whatever's causing it, if it remains, it'll lead to something worse down the road. So that's one factor is helping young women a lot of times with palpitation. They're coming to me for a second opinion. And I've got other doctors who work for me in the office. We see people virtually. And I've got a lot of information blogs and stuff like that. But a couple other scary diagnoses since you asked. One is spontaneous coronary artery dissection, where a woman is just seemingly healthy, and then maybe a stressful event, tips are over the edge, maybe sometimes pregnancy tips are over in this scenario, and it leads to a shearing of the blood vessel wall, and we get what's called a dissection, where the artery basically tears. And that is very catastrophic to those women who suffer it, and many die from it. The other is called broken heart syndrome. The medical diagnosis is what's called Takasubo cardiomyopathy. And that is a stressful situation. 40-year-old woman gets into a fight with her spouse, her boss, and suffers a massive heart attack. Not because they've got coronary artery disease, but they had a coronary artery spasm that led to significant damage. So the intention here is to help people live their best, healthiest life, to minimize stress as much as possible, but to optimize your body for when the inevitable stress comes so you don't suffer the negative consequences. We've always been told that cardio is king for heart health, but strength training, weight training is really exploding. Did we get that wrong? Is strength training better? It's definitely better. And it's more ancestral. So if we think about our paleo ancestors, our hunter-gatherer ancestors, They are hunting, they're gathering, they're carrying water, they're carrying their children, they're building shelter. Those are all muscle building activities. They never went inside of a gym with the artificial lights and all the electronic, you know, all the electromagnetic fields. They never sat inside on the treadmill all day long and they were outside. Yeah, I don't think our ancestors were really running unless they were running from like a tiger being eaten or something. Exactly. So, you know, a couple of things, you know, again, it's like just be active outside, which is totally free. Recent data talked about how just going for a walk after a meal is so beneficial regarding blood sugar control, you know, post meal. It's about having fun. It's about getting, you know, getting outside when you live in these beautiful communities, when you live in Arizona, when you live in these towns where you can be outside really, you know, every single day of the year. And even when you're from the Midwest, and I tend to bash on these locations, I see a lot of people that come in from Portland and Seattle or New York, and they're like, you know, what do we do? The weather's horrible. There's no such thing as bad weather in that scenario, just bad clothes. Just get outside and do it. The more time you spend outside, the longer you live. Is coffee problematic? Coffee is a health superfood when done correctly. So we want to consume organic coffee. We want to consume mold, mycotoxin-free coffee, ethically sourced coffee, because then coffee can be truly medicine. We know from the medical literature, coffee drinkers do live longer. They have less brain disease, less cancer, and yes, less heart attacks, strokes, atrial fibrillation, and more. So if we're drinking the good stuff, we're going to get some really, really good results. Coffee is very high in magnesium. It's got other polyphenols, which are great antioxidants. And our bodies generate all these free radicals. They generate all this waste products. so we can either accumulate the waste or we can take out the waste. We can combat the waste. And that's what coffee is part of the team that does that. I like coffee three to four cups every morning before noon. Literature from a year ago shows that people who drink four cups of coffee before noon, they have the lowest risk of dying. So coffee is definitely heart healthy. Obviously, you don't want to add sugar to it. You don't want to add artificial sweeteners and creamers and stuff like that. My favorite thing to add to it, typically on my third or fourth cup is raw cream would be my strategy. As a heart doctor, what should people who are obsessed with Celsius, Olani, and Red Bull energy drinks know? Well, I think that there's clean versions of everything and the cleaner you go with those things, the better. All cans are lined with plastic. So we need to be very careful about how we're drinking it. Preferably you're getting some of these energy-driven drinks out of a glass bottle, I would venture towards getting kombucha in a glass bottle, for example, versus one of these energy drinks, if you will. There was a recent study that I've talked about that was for ginger kombucha. So people with high blood pressure were randomized to drinking ginger kombucha or a placebo, and they found that ginger kombucha consumption equivalent to like a bottle a day led to a blood pressure reduction of 16 over 10, which is monumental. It's as good as any pharmaceutical. Of course, tastes better than pharmaceuticals. And what's the secret sauce in there? Well, ginger, of course, is very good. Lots of thousands of studies on ginger. And kombucha is very high in good microbes that help to nourish our gut microbiome, which is critically important. So those fermented foods like kombucha, eating fermented foods, priceless, priceless strategy. So are energy drinks overall, you wouldn't think they're that bad for you? Well, I think, you know, if they contain anything artificial, I don't recommend them. I don't like to drink anything out of cans. I don't even know what else is in energy drinks outside of things that could be high sugar. I would be against that. Some of the, you know, taurine and things like that that are added to it. They're all synthetically made. So I guess to maybe answer your question, I don't recommend energy drinks. There was a recent study that linked heavy screen exposure in kids and teens to higher cardiometabolic risk. How does an iPad cause heart issues? And are we quietly raising a generation with the heart health of middle-aged adults? Yeah. So the use of technology and especially, you know, myself and my wife as parents to children in this world. How do you navigate that? And ultimately, I will, of course, make the case that the technology is bad. The cell phones, the iPads are bad. The wireless earbuds, I think, are just monumentally disastrous. And unfortunately, there's even a lot of people in the health space who wear those things. Not me. Yeah, I know you don't. Chords all the way. How could you wear some kind of EMF device on your brain? and one earbud connects to the other earbud and in between is your brain. And then people will say, well, there's really no evidence that that's dangerous. And are you gonna wait for evidence to show that, oh, I guess the cancer was from that? Like who would ever wait for that? So to your point, I think that I'm realistic. We live in a very tech-driven world and technology makes life a lot easier. But these kids where you go out for dinner and the kids are wearing headphones And I don't want to be truly judgmental of people, but I do. I'm in the judgment business. I do. And that's what we do. I mean, you and it's really it's all about making people better. We're not doing this just to be mean or to be evil. We're doing it to say, I care about you. I care. I certainly care about your children because they're defenseless. Well, what I think this study was getting at is you are you are training your kids for a sedentary lifestyle. And so that's why they're linking heavy screen use, iPad use with children to heart issues. No, I mean, I mean, it's just quite obvious. I mean, that if you say, well, physical activity and movement is critical and all of our ancestors did that. And kids who are in hunter gatherer cultures ran around all day long outdoors. And you're going to say my child sits inside of a four wall building under artificial lights and they're on tech. and then they come home and they're sitting on tech and we go out for dinner and they're on tech. Is that a poisonous lifestyle? I mean, that's child abuse. I'm not trying to say that all forms of child abuse are equal, but we need to wake up. And for the parents who know this is bad, yet they still do it out of convenience. They need to make a change. I understand. I mean, we've got four kids and we homeschool and we unschool them and life can be more difficult that way for sure. And I can certainly sympathize with a mother who's like, I cannot get my laundry done. I can't make the dinner. It's a sad situation we're in as a society, but our kids have very little tech exposure. Our eight and five-year-old girls have essentially zero tech exposure. Our 18 and 13-year-old boys, they get more. And we just, and we also try and educate them and say, hey, you know, this is why it's bad. And they get that. If you've got teenagers in your house, you already know the truth. They don't smell great. It's like onions, gym socks, and rebellion had a baby in your hallway. You want to light a candle, but then you remember most candles are basically toxic waste with a wick. Paraffin, synthetic fragrances, hormone-disrupting chemicals. Congratulations, you've masked the smell and poisoned your family. That's why I use natural sloth beeswax candles. Real beeswax burns clean. Not like those chemical candles that turn your whole living room into a low-grade lab experiment. Natural Sloth candles are made safe certified, meaning they're tested and proven free from harmful toxins. No endocrine disruptors, no fake fragrance, no mystery ingredients. They're made with pure beeswax, wooden wicks that crackle like a tiny fireplace, and they're scented only with real essential oils. So the house smells clean and calm, not like a mall store from 2007. Everything is handmade in Texas in small batches by a veteran-owned business that's completely transparent about what goes into their products. And it's not just candles. Natural Sloth also makes soaps and room sprays, all organic, all non-toxic, all safe for families and sensitive people. So when you're a teenager, still smell your house. Use code Alex for 15 percent off at natural sloth dot com and light something that doesn't slowly destroy your endocrine system. That's natural sloth dot com code Alex. Black and white, no gray area. That's exactly how health and ingredient labels should be. 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Another topic that you're super passionate about is healing a sick nervous system. What is life like when your nervous system is working smoothly versus fried? Your nervous system is critically important. It comes down from the brain, comes in through the spinal cord. the autonomic nervous system, parasympathetic, sympathetic, we're all in sympathetic overdrive, fight or flight. Go, go, go, go, go. We spend very little time in parasympathetic, rest and digest. When we're glued to technology, when we're glued to the latest crisis, when we're victims to that, all it does is just lead to this high sympathetic tone, higher blood pressure, higher heart rate, and the inability of the body to clean itself, to detox itself naturally. So we want to really engage the parasympathetic nervous system. This is where prayer, meditation, yoga, tai chi, hum, sing, gargle, just relaxing, just going somewhere and having a cup of coffee. But you can go have a cup of coffee and not be scrolling on your phone the whole time. Just let your brain relax. And that's critically important. Well, one of my best friends, we did a little spa day together. And the massage therapist was working on her back. And my friend was like, hey, I've got two really tender spots you should know about. I think it was like shoulder and then low back or something like that. And the massage therapist was like, wow, OK, yeah, this these exact two spots, both having pain together. This is your nervous system. I've never heard that before. Have you? We can all equate it back to the nervous system and say again that, you know, that it's all tied in together. And that's all it's all true. It is impacted by all the environmental toxins, all of the EMF. if we are concerned about EMF, how is it impacting us? You know, how does a cell phone, how does a Wi-Fi router, how does satellites in the sky that make our lives infinitely more convenient? And I get that, but it's, we just need to kind of unplug once in a while. We do need to be like Thoreau and go off into, you know, Walden Pond and go off into the woods and do that. So EMFs hurt your nervous system. What else? Again, it's all comes down to too much bad, not enough good. So if we're not getting the good food, our autonomic nervous system is going to be damaged. From a chiropractic standpoint, these vertebral subluxations, which really help to address the immobility, because if we're sitting and we're on tech and our entire lifestyle or even trauma is a big factor and our spine is just locked. Do you think regular chiropractic visits help with your nervous system? A thousand percent That exactly what it does And that exactly what chiropractic was for Chiropractic was not meant for neck pain back pain headaches It good for that But chiropractic was really founded on the principles of spinal mobility. And if you increase spinal mobility, which therefore activates these nerve receptors in all of the joints and send signals back up to your brain, then your brain sends those signals back to your body to make neuroplastic changes. That's really what chiropractic is. How does prescription medication affect the nervous system? Prescription medication always damages the body and always damages the neurologic system, cardiac system, immunologic system, gastrointestinal system, everything. Every single one of them damages every single time because it interferes with the body's ability to get the job done. It's never root cause. So if you have pain, why would ibuprofen be the answer? The answer is to get rid of what's causing the pain. But people aren't told that. And they're not told ibuprofen is dangerous. They're not told that Tylenol acetaminophen is dangerous. They're not told that acetaminophen reduces glutathione. And glutathione is the body's main master antioxidant. We need to really just kind of embrace really just common sense type stuff. How quickly can nervous system improvements show measurable heart benefits? It can happen very quickly. So if you look at a marker like heart rate variability, that's a great measurement of your autonomic nervous function. And the higher the heart rate variability, the better. It could be changed just really overnight. Just a good night's sleep can make a difference. being outside and getting natural sunlight exposure is critically important. And we can see those changes fast. What is the purpose of our skin? It's not just holding together a bag of bones. Our skin is a solar panel built to collect light. Our eyeballs are solar panels built to collect light. The back of the eye has receptors for UVA and UVB. And we get that from the sun. So if we're walking around with sunglasses, right? Everybody, you know, people like you and I, we move out here to Arizona, we get these fancy sunglasses, everybody's walking around with fancy sunglasses and they're killing themselves because they're blocking the UVA and UVB rays that come into your eye. Those signals, UVA, UVB, they come into the eye, the retina, that is loaded, should be loaded with omega-3 fatty acids from eating seafood. So omega-3 DHA is highly concentrated in the back of the eye, the retina. And when you activate that, then you send these neurologic signals that we're talking about up and down the cervical spine, up into areas of the brain, like the suprachiasmatic nucleus, paraventricular nucleus, and then to the pineal gland to help us make melatonin. And melatonin is that master hormone that controls all the other hormones. And we activate that from getting sunshine during the day to our skin and to our eyeballs. So if we were going to compile a list of all the things that help regulate a nervous system. You talked about all the bad, but if we were going to make a list of all the good, it would be natural light. What else? Sometimes I'll say like all the S words, you know? So it is sleep is foundational. Ancestors went to sleep shortly after sundown. They woke up before the sunrise. They saw the sunrise. They saw the sunset. They spent the day in the sun. They ate dinner earlier. They ate dinner earlier. The average American, you know, they go to sleep after midnight. You know, college kids, young adults, social life, musicians, why there's so much sickness and drug abuse and use and people who are musicians, why they commit suicide. They just basically they go nuts because they're trying to be vampires. They're trying to be night owls and they're not night owls. They're not owls. We're humans. We go to bed when it's dark out and we violate those principles of nature and we're going to die. So sleep, sunshine, seafood is part of it. Let's call it sexercise. So we can throw that other S in there as well. You know, a healthy life is a healthy sex life. You know, that's what it's just ancestral. It's just what our ancestors did. So kind of using that movement into that area of how important those things are, the chiropractic, the toxin avoidance, which is a very long list. We talked a little bit about plastic and the dangers of plastic. Recent study that was done a little over a year ago where they looked at plastic levels in people who underwent a cardiovascular procedure called a carotid endarderectomy. So they hollow out the plaque in people's neck and they looked under a microscope and two thirds of the people had evidence of plastic. One third surprisingly didn't. The group with plastic had tripled the risk of heart attack, stroke and dying over a subsequent period, which makes plastic a bigger risk factor than smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity combined times three. Whoa. Oh. So plastic. And we talked about coffee before. So the people who go to their local coffee vendor and they get their paper cup, which is not paper, hot water, hot coffee will go right through paper. But it won't go through plastic. They're made out of plastic. And it just leads to plastic consumption. Please make your coffee at home in a mug and just bring that in the car with you. Yes. Let's look at your coffee maker. Do a pour-over method, which is what we do. We've got fancy surgical stainless steel pots and pans. So we heat up the high-quality water. Do you have a microwave? No, of course not. I haven't used a microwave in 20 years. And again, I'm telling you this from a standpoint of by the age of – I was 33 when I met the woman who had become my wife. And up until that point, I was a Chicago deep dish pizza, Italian beef, making an omelet in the microwave. Portillo's New Year order. All of it, all of it, all of it, including Portillo's. If I'm able to change, like if me as a kid who grew up of total child of privilege, north suburbs of Chicago, if I can make that change, then truly anybody can. But Alex, I made the change because I don't want to die. My father died at 63. I don't want to be that guy. And I don't want anyone else to be that person. So my father's death won't be in vain. It created the people who we are. These losses created who we are so we can go change the world and share a different message. If you had the opportunity to sit on a board and help medical schools redesign cardiology, what would you do? I don't think that obviously that opportunity is going to come anytime soon. I would certainly talk about my version of nutrition, but we always tend to debate the nutrition side of the story. You know, should we go vegan, vegetarian, paleo, keto, carnivore? I know what our ancestors did, and that's what I would do. And everything was organic. So whatever we do, let's make sure that we all agree on organic food is better. Let's start with that. But then we also need to discuss the sleep part of the story. And we need to discuss the sunshine part of the story and the toxin part of the story, which is monumentally huge. But then the mindset about we need to get back to being happy. We need to get back to community. We need to get back to purpose and passion and spirituality. And none of that is being taught in medical schools. None of this is. All we are teaching in medical school is disease and how to treat disease. What pharmaceuticals are we going to use? What kind of scan? What kind of surgery are we going to use? And ultimately, it's the American populace that suffered. And that's why us as a first world country have the worst mortality amongst these countries. Since 1980, life expectancy of American men and women has gone up by three years. So in 45, 46 plus years with all of the statin drugs and all the bypass surgeries and all the chemotherapies and all the CT scans and all the things that people do, we now live three years longer despite the trillions of dollars. It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing. And we are not built to live towards 73, you know, 76 for the American male or 79 for women. We are built, according to the Bible, to live until we're 120 and then we go night-night. And people are not getting that. They're trusting the medical doctors and they are very sick for the last 10 to 15 years of their life. And then they die. And it shouldn't be that way. Remind everybody with the name of your practices and where you're located. So my company is called Natural Heart Doctor. We are the worldwide leader in cardiovascular health. Mayo, Cleveland, wherever, you know, clinic, they are the worldwide leaders in cardiovascular sickness. So it's myself, my team of cardiologists, naturopathic doctors, nurse practitioners, health coaches. I would sooner send a friend or family member to one of my health coaches for health advice than I would any other cardiologist I've ever worked with. Let me say this. I would sooner send any friend or family member to Alex Clark for health advice than any cardiologist who I've ever worked with. That's damning. What does that say? Yes, it's kudos to you for embracing all this, but it's really just castigating these people that are just so brainwashed into the model. Now, if someone's in the midst of a heart attack, I'm probably not going to say stop by Alex Clark's set. I'm going to say go to the emergency room because God bless the men and women who work in emergency rooms and trauma centers. I'm not bashing on them. But when it comes to the prevention, treatment and reversal of chronic disease, the medical doctors have nothing because they were trained that way. So my practice, Natural Heart Doctor, and yes, I'm on social media. And yes, I've got my book out there. And yes, I've got tons of free information. And I've also got very high investment consultation packages to work with me and my other doctors and everything in between. You know, I'm not going to judge somebody, but on how much, you know, because people, I mean, there's a lot of people who are struggling. And certainly, you know, you and I are talking about getting a $20, you know, grass fed, you know, cheeseburger. But I think ultimately, too, is that let's continue to push this message. The more people who are out there, that's how capitalism works. When we create more opportunities, when we have more demand, more supply will be there and the world's going to be a healthier place. Are you taking new patients? I do take new patients. I see a lot of people virtually. I was going to ask that. Do you have to be in person in Scottsdale? You don't have to be in person in Scottsdale. And back in 2012, when I left the biggest group in the state of Arizona, of which I was a senior partner in the group, I was the head of cardiac rehab, chairman of medicine, director of cardiology, yada, yada. Again, as a senior partner in the big group, I started my own practice in 2012, natural heart doctor. So people would fly in from all over the world. I mean, literally, you know, whether it's Canada, Russia, Norway, South Korea, people are coming in, but then afterwards, how would we follow up? So we would follow up back then. It was on Skype and now it's of course become Zoom. And that's the way that I operate. So what's nice is I can be anywhere in the world. I can be on our, you know, on our, on our property in Costa Rica. I can be here in Arizona. I could be tent camping in the middle of nowhere. And we've done that and have these consultations. They're also going to want me to ask you, are you covered by insurance? No. Okay. Explain why that's a good thing. Insurance covers the sickness model. Insurance incentivizes doctors to see a lot of people very quickly prescribe a drug, prescribe a test and then move on. That's just the way that it is. So insurance does not pay doctors to have these long-winded conversations. Let's talk about your food. Let's talk about your lifestyle. Let's talk about your mindset. Let's do the most advanced testing in the world that is not insurance covered. Let's talk about biohacking. Let's talk about evidence-based supplements. Again, it's just not the way that it is. Insurance makes you document a lot of things that are unnecessary. They run you through a lot of red tape. So one of my favorite things is for people to have health savings accounts where you invest your money, where you want to invest it. You want to invest your health in a chiropractor, a naturopathic doctor, you can do so. But a lot of times, you don't even need my particular advice. I mean, if you've got advanced cardiac disease, If you're someone who's out there with congestive heart failure, cardiomyopathy, three heart attacks, seven stents on 12 pharmaceuticals, you need my help. But if you're a young person and maybe you're concerned because you do have a family history and we said that family history is not a genetic problem, our genetics are perfect. But if you're like, hey, you know, my mom had this, my father had that. What is the best way to do it? Read. Just, you know, read books, read websites, watch my videos, watch my social media. Those things are all are all free. You know, one simple test, which I think if people could have one test, which I think is best to determine their status, it's a measure of oxidative stress. And you can do it. It's an at-home urine test of oxidative stress. So if you have evidence of oxidative stress, you got to figure out why. And you get more good stuff, less bad stuff, retest. That's the best way to do it. What's your Instagram? Instagram is natural underscore heart underscore doctor. and the other thing that I think is very interesting because we talked about tech a little bit and tech does have a purpose. So in case people haven't heard, right, there's something called AI, right? There's Gemini and ChatGPT or whatever your favorite source is. So here's what you do. Go on to multiple different sources and confirm it as much as possible. The more you confirm, the better that, you know, you probably shouldn't trust one AI, just like maybe you shouldn't trust one doctor's opinion. Seek out more opinions. You get on a chat GPT, for example, and say, I'm a 55-year-old male. I have a family history of a Parkinson's disorder. What do I need to do in order to be healthy? And we'll see what it spits back. We can also say, are statin drugs good for me? I'm a 55-year-old male. I don't smoke. I don't have high blood pressure. I don't have diabetes. My cholesterol level is X. My inflammation is X. What are the benefits of statin drugs for me? And chat will tell you exactly what it is. If we have cancer, don't just listen to my way or the highway doctor. Don't listen to take this chemo or die. Take this radiation or die. Take the statin drug or die. Get a C-section or die. Get a C-section or die. Not in a true emergency, but like way ahead of time. Yes. Planned. You know, so get that information and you can ask that question in real time in the doctor's office and don't be afraid to do so. Why would your doctor be afraid? Have these conversations. So if a person comes in and says, well, my doctor recommended, you know, statin drugs or my doctor recommended chemotherapy for my breast cancer. Okay, let's get on and let's tell you the numbers. Like I said before, let me present my case to you of natural and let them present the case. And then you decide. You decide what works for you. Because there may be people who are out there that are like, you know what? I'm not going to do that. I understand your ways better, but I'm going to continue to live in an XYZ fashion. That's fine. You're free to do it, but you're going to suffer the consequences. If you could offer one remedy to healistic culture physically, emotionally, or spiritually, what would it be? I would say find your happiness. I was miserable at the end of my career as a conventional cardiologist. And I was miserable because I knew the truth and I wasn't able to fully practice it. And the crime is when you know the truth and you don't follow it. That's the crime. Because there's a lot of doctors out there that are truly oblivious. A quote from a book called The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It's hard to get a man to understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it. These cardiologists are brainwashed and incentivized to do a certain thing. So I wasn't happy. And then ultimately, the head of the group sat me down and said, I believe in what you're doing. I believe in what you're saying. My girlfriend, who's gonna become my third wife, she believes the same way too. But the problem, Jack, is that it's bad for business. So you have to stand down because doctors don't want to refer to us anymore. Doctors don't want to support the practice that you're part of. And I looked at him and I said, I quit. And I found my happy. I found my happy. So there's a lot of different things that, you know, that we've talked about and that people could do. And I suggest you do all those things, but happy people live longer. So people who have their spirituality and faith, people who are in good relationships. There's a lot of people who are not. Fix the relationship or get out. There are people who are not happy on their jobs. And I understand maybe not everybody can leave quite easily because that's how they pay their rent and their mortgage and their food bills. I get that. But when you don't follow your happy, your health is going to suffer. Dr. Wolfson, thank you for coming on Culture Apothecary. Thank you. decisions related to your health or medical care. I'm Alex Clark, and this is Culture Apothecary.