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Joel Fuhrman, MD is a board-certified family physician and nutritional researcher who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. He is the president of the Nutritional Research Foundation and author of seven New York Times bestsellers: Eat For Life, Eat to Live, The End of Diabetes,... Read More
Kristi Funk, MD is a board-certified breast cancer surgeon & physician, bestselling author, international keynote speaker and women’s health advocate. After graduating with distinction from Stanford University in 1991, Dr. Funk received her medical degree from the UC Davis, School of Medicine, and completed her surgical residency in Seattle, WA,... Read More
- Identify the four major risk factors that heighten the chances of developing both breast cancer and heart disease
- Learn how to spot the signs of heart disease in women, which often differ from men’s symptoms
- Discover how to reduce loneliness and stress, which are critical to preventing these diseases in women
- This video is part of the Reversing Heart Disease Naturally Summit 2.0
Related Topics
Anxiety, Cancer, Depression, Exercise, Heart, Lifestyle, Mental Health, Nutrition, Stress, Womens HealthJoel Fuhrman, MD
Welcome, everybody, and thanks for joining us on this Heart Disease Reversal Summit. We are having a great time doing this, and I hope you are getting tremendous benefits from this as well. Today, we are grateful to have here Dr. Kristi Funk, a physician specializing in women’s health and particularly breast health, with a long history of having done tremendous work in this field. Let me tell you a little bit about her. She is a Board-Certified Breast Cancer Surgeon and Physician, bestselling author, keynote speaker, and women’s health advocate. For decades, she has practiced as a surgical breast specialist at the Pink Lotus Breast Center in Los Angeles, as an expert in minimally invasive diagnostic and treatment methods for all types of breast disease. She has helped thousands of women through breast cancer treatments, including well-known celebrities like Sheryl Crow and Angelina Jolie.
We have turned to her for her surgical expertise, but Dr. Funk operates the Pink Lotus Breast Center in Beverly Hills, providing state-of-the-art screening, genetic testing, diagnosis, surgical treatments, holistic care, preventive strategies, and compassionate care all under one roof. It is unique and what is unique about breast care specialists today. We are going to talk to Dr. Funk about heart health, the relationship between heart health and breast cancer, and the relationship between heart health and women in general. To give us some more insight into how this differs from women to men and some opportunity for you to take charge of your health, particularly if you are a woman or a man, but particularly if you are a woman, you have some more insight and know what to do and what to look for. Welcome. Happy New Year!
Kristi Funk, MD
Thank you. I am excited to be here with you and everyone else.
Joel Fuhrman, MD
Great. All right. Let us start with: As a breast cancer specialist, how does women’s health care in general and preventing and treating breast cancer interact with women’s heart health? How have you seen those risk factors overlap?
Kristi Funk, MD
This is a tremendous opportunity for women to control their health. For both, the number one killer of all of us women is heart disease, and the number one cancer killer of all of us women is breast cancer. The overlap is beautiful because all of the dietary and lifestyle interventions that you would employ to maximally reduce your risk of ever getting breast cancer, or if you already are afraid of having it recur or cause your death, are the very same dietary changes and behaviors you would employ to maximally reduce all of your risk factors for the numero uno killer heart disease. Namely, when we are thinking about these risk factors, there is a scale when it comes to breasts, and there are four boulders on the scale. If you have one of them, the rest of them are pebbles, and they matter, and they can certainly tip and even scale, but the boulders need to get removed. They are the very same boulders that tip us toward heart disease and heart disease risk factors like high blood pressure, high LDL, smoking, drinking alcohol, high body mass index being overweight, high insulin, and high blood sugar being diabetic. All of these highs that go along with the big risk factors for getting heart disease will naturally disappear without medications or intervention if you just get rid of the boulders.
The big four, Dr. Fuhrman, is a boulder who would be eating animal products. meat, dairy, cheese, eggs, and all meats, including poultry and fish, are going to be boulders. Eating a wholesome plant-based diet and nutrition and diet would be lifting that boulder off. Another one is being overweight or obese. Getting to and then maintaining an ideal body weight would be a list of older people drinking excessive alcohol. Drinking less or no alcohol would lift a boulder off. Then the big final boulder is being sedentary. exercising, busting a move—even if you start slowly, like 5 minutes a day, I will take it. But I do have last year’s goals. If you can carry out a conversation, I want to see you five hours a week. If you are super sweaty and out of breath, two and a half hours a week should be your ultimate exercise goal. Then, once you have perfected your scale, you can start looking at other contributors when it comes to breathing. Smoking is not as strong of a risk factor as it is for heart disease, but it is there, especially if you are younger and before your first full-term pregnancy. Smoking has a big breast impact, but smoking is one of the environmental toxicities that cause emotional stress. These are all going to contribute to your risk for both heart and breast disease.
Joel Fuhrman, MD
Wow, you sound like a lifestyle medicine physician and a breast surgeon.
Kristi Funk, MD
I am getting board-certified in ACL.
Joel Fuhrman, MD
Yes, that is phenomenal. That is great. It is great that you have mixed and married the two together, yes. Let us be comprehensive in our approach. What do you think of these two things? How do we recognize heart disease? How it is presented to a woman may be a different presentation than to a male. A woman makes sure she catches it early. What are some of the signs that she has to take a more aggressive approach immediately and not delay and wait to, like, change her, lose weight, or do it right now because you are in trouble? You better get going right now. What are some of these risks they may have to look for?
Kristi Funk, MD
Yes. Okay, great questions. This is an important answer to listen to and then like change up things because just in 2023, the European Society of Cardiology found that women get this, ladies, we are 3.8 times more likely to die from a heart attack in the first 30 days after having one versus men. We are more than twice as likely to die in the next five years from heart disease. What are the signs and symptoms of this, This could be a heart attack. Maybe I need to get on the phone and call 911 right now. What are the whisperings, that trouble is on the way, but you have solid time to intervene? Men typically present with crushing chest pain, the clutch over the chest, or their hearts. On the left side, they say an elephant was sitting on my chest. That is not usually the way that women present with an ongoing heart attack, angina, or chest pain. Their symptoms are much less obvious and can be attributed more readily to other things than our hearts. Instead of that crushing chest pain, women have a more subtle type of chest pressure or tightness throughout. It could simply be presenting with nausea and vomiting, shortness of breath, or pain in your neck, jaw, throat, or even your shoulders. Upper back between the shoulder blades, upper abdomen—just a pain, a feeling of indigestion or heartburn.
A real big one is extreme fatigue—inexplicably tired like all your limbs are heavy. You may feel dizzy. You could have a fluttering in your chest, which is like palpitations like your heart is just beating too fast or irregularly. Then finally, you could have swelling—pretty sudden swelling of your feet and ankles, your legs, even your abdomen. If you have any of these symptoms and they are sudden in onset and you just feel that you could be having a heart attack, no one is going to wonder or laugh at you for calling 911. If your loved one was having symptoms like a man with crushing chest pain, you would be on that phone or whisking off in the car to the nearest E.R. Do yourself that favor and treat these less common symptoms just as significantly as we would a man with crushing chest pain. That is the first thing that we present differently. We need a high index of suspicion, ladies, for all of these more subtle symptoms that are tied to the same heart attack risk.
Second up, you asked, Dr. Fuhrman. What risk factors we should be aware of so that we can intervene and then lower the chances of dying from that number one killer? The first one is to know your blood pressure. High blood pressure is undoubtedly the single most important contributor to heart disease. Know your blood pressure, and then, with your doctor, work to get it down to a normal range. You want your blood pressure to be under 130 over 80. That is the definition of high blood pressure. The high number is over 130 or the diastolic, the lower number is over 80. Second up, we mentioned in passing having high blood sugar, high insulin, and being type 2 diabetic. This is, in almost all cases, entirely reversible with a whole plant-based diet. On average, it would take 22 weeks to get up crazy amounts of insulin to none. You do not have to be a type 2 diabetic, with a rare exception. It is a choice you are unwittingly making. Every time you listen to your mouth, what you chew and swallow down is truly medicinal, and what you chew and swallow down needs to be anti-inflammatory so that your immune system can do its job and reverse diseases that are present naturally, such as high blood pressure and high blood glucose and high insulin.
Another one we talked about is LDL cholesterol. You do not want to be one of the participants in the most commonly prescribed medication on the planet, Lipitor. This is also unnecessary because it is entirely controllable, for the most part, through diet and exercise. Know your cholesterol level and see if your doctor can check your hemoglobin A1C for diabetes and read an ideal body weight. Just get on the scale. There is another indicator that maybe we are having a heart attack risk that we can eliminate, and that is just being overweight or obese. Body mass index: Google it, put in the digits of your height and your weight, and see if you are too high. Over 24.9 is too high, and so you are going to lose some weight. You are going to get back to normal risk and stay there. High stress, anxiety, and depression. These things matter because they directly translate into a cellular response. When you are chronically stressed, you have inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein and interleukins flying around, impairing your immune system from doing its job and squelching the big daddy of it all. Oxidative stress. When you have more oxidative stress than you do and antioxidants are running around to squelch that inflammation, a window of opportunity opens for disease to step in. Whether that disease is a huge killer like heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, or the dreaded C cancer, or if the disease is just something that steals your joy and zest for living. It does not kill you. But here it is, ruining every day. It could be depression and anxiety, joint pain, asthma, autoimmune disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, you name it, and diet and lifestyle probably can affect it for better or worse, depending on your daily choices.
There are a couple of other risk factors for heart disease that you want to examine in your own life and choices. Smoking is such a big risk factor; you just really have to take the same steps. I did not say it was stress, anxiety, or depression. You may need to see a mental health expert to help you work through issues. Or maybe you just need to start meditating, deep breathing, being mindful of stressful situations, and then approaching them differently or avoiding them altogether. When it comes to smoking and alcohol use, again, you might need professional help, or you just might need that wake-up call to abstain and find like-minded individuals who support you always in those choices, rather than, Come on, just one drink is not going to hurt. It may hurt you. You may only drink a couple of drinks a week and not be a big deal of a drinker. You may be like, I will take the whole bottle, please.
We need to reexamine how we are interacting with these risky substances. I talked about diet, for sure. You want to look at your diet; it is high. If you have high cholesterol, stop chewing and swallowing down cholesterol. There is a tip: no plant food on the planet contains any cholesterol, not even things you might think of like avocados and olives. Note that they have fat, but they do not have cholesterol. Stop eating cholesterol if you have high cholesterol, for starters. Then what would you plate up with? Fruits and vegetables, legumes, lentils, beans, seeds, nuts, and drinking water for the most part. Some other teas are fabulously antioxidant-laden; even coffee without all the trappings of mocha syrup and whipped cream on top is antioxidant-laden as well. But for the most part, your drink of choice should be water. Finally, I already talked about physical activity aspirations in terms of 5 hours of two and a half hours, but the bust moves. Just get up and go for a walk after dinner, which, by the way, immediately plummets your blood sugar so you do not get that insulin spike no matter what you just ate. Get up and walk for a mere 15 minutes, and you will do a world of good to normalize your blood sugar right after a meal. That is my long answer.
Joel Fuhrman, MD
Great. I am just going to want to clarify. I am sure you agree. I want to make sure that people are really clear with this because you mentioned that if you have high blood pressure, make sure you control it with your doctor and things like that. I want to say, to make this clear, that controlling your blood sugar with doctor care but with medication, your blood pressure with medication, or controlling your blood sugar with medication or controlling your cholesterol with medication does not equate. It is not. It is a hundred times weaker. It is not the same thing as lowering your blood pressure by cutting out the salt and eating whole plant foods, getting rid of all the processed foods from your diet, and getting rid of all the oil from your diet.
In other words, if you could, because 75% of people with high blood pressure have normal blood pressure within four weeks when they change their diet, 75% would knock it out completely. I am saying that if you have any of these risk factors that Dr. Funk just mentioned, get rid of them through aggressive dietary changes. Do not, you might temporarily need some looking at if they are high, but do not think that because your blood pressure or your blood sugar are controlled by medication, you are safe. Do not forget, with all the people going to doctors and getting control of medications, they are still dying of heart disease. The normal cause of death is still heart disease. The drug, so we have got to take charge of this and have normal blood pressure without medication, normal blood sugar without medication, normal cholesterol without medication, and normal body weight without medication. We have got to earn these parameters. I am sure you would agree that earning it is much more effective than drugging them down.
Kristi Funk, MD
Absolutely. Goes without saying that this Lipitor explosion in the prescription pad world and even angioplasties and bypasses, do not. They can prolong life for a little bit, but they do not reduce the overall mortality from heart disease. All these pills and procedures are just Band-Aids, giving you a little bit more time when all you had to do was, do it again for the most part. There are always exceptions where it just does not work out the way we intend. But all you had to do was dive into the deep end of this delicious world of plant-based eating and moving and thinking and loving and forgiving and being in this more focused, mindful way of living your life to live it healthfully, and all of those diseases and all of those risk factors just magically go away, and you are enjoying every step of it. It is quite remarkable. Once your eyes are opened, and if it takes that heart attack and that cancer scare to bring you to this crossroads, then embrace that moment as the wake-up call you need to live forever after, healthfully and with the same lifespan and health span. We want them both. This crossroads is a moment of choice. We are here to help you try to make the right, research-driven, scientifically proven choices to achieve the goals that you want.
Joel Fuhrman, MD
That is cool. I could see that what you do is that, because when people are living in fear and taking poor care of their health, then the fear and stress of being sick are risk factors.
Kristi Funk, MD
It is, and, by the way, is not sustainable. A fear-driven behavior change is not sustainable because you cannot stay that heightened in, like, I have cancer. Well, it was two years ago. I cannot believe you are not going to feel that way anymore. That fear is the motivating factor. It needs to be the opposite. It needs to be that you are embracing the love, the joy, and the healthy change that comes, and that is your goal because that is sustainable. Being able to run one mile tomorrow and two miles in a month are beautiful goals.
Joel Fuhrman, MD
That is so cool that you are working with some big women at the center of your website. What do you do to encourage and empower women to work collectively, to support each other, and to achieve these lifestyle goals? Well, hold on, everybody. I was just going to pause for a minute right here, and thanks for joining us. If you found our conversation insightful and engaging, and if you are a summit purchaser, stay tuned because we are about to talk a little bit further with Dr. Funk and then have this interesting discussion. If you are not, you can click on the button below and get access. But if you are just that, you are watching this. Thank you for being a valuable member of this community and joining us here at the summit.
Okay. Hi, guys. Thank you. For those who have joined our community here. Dr. Funk, I know that you have a lot of services and features that you offer women who want to, work together, empower each other, and get support. What do you do to encourage women to have the right emotional outlook and the right mindset to feel good about this aggressive dietary change that you are advocating and I am advocating, so they do not feel lonely, socially isolated, and feel like, this is difficult to be living this way in today’s society. Where people are raised to commit suicide with food. How do they feel good about being different? What services do you have available to them that help women feel like they are doing this as a team with other people supporting them?
Kristi Funk, MD
The way to not feel alone and isolated in this is to find your tribe and dive in and join them daily or as frequently as you wish. One thing we offer online is a free community called Pink Lotus Power Up. You can access it at PinkLotus.com, and you will see on that site that there are three portals you can enter: the breast center proper, the brick-and-mortar, or you can just do virtual consultations with me. I am always happy to consult on any breast issues whatsoever, but the one I am talking about is called Power Up, and in there, you are going to find a world of opportunities to connect with others. Or if you are more of the shy voyeur type, you can just click around into all of the educational tools. We have everything from blogs to how-to screens. If you are at high risk for breast cancer, learn how to eat. I have an online cooking show that I do on Instagram. We do YouTube, and Facebook monthly that teaches you how food is a powerful medicine. My friend, Holistic Nutritionist Chrissy, and I have a Cook Live with Kristi and Dr. Chrissy, and we just teach you how you can approach your kitchen with or without fear and without feeling intimidated. It is really fun. My favorite offering through Power Up is called Breast Buddies. There is a study that showed that in women who have had breast cancer, those reporting low levels of psychosocial support and connectivity have a 57% increase in mortality.
It is very important that if you do not have a BFF. If you do not have a supportive crew around you, you can have one through Breast Buddies. What this does completely free is it takes newly diagnosed women and matches them for age for age, stage for stage, and treatment for treatment with those who have been there, done that, and they are there online waiting for you because they cannot wait to come alongside you and be a source of encouragement, support, and friendship so that you have that social connection that translates on a cellular level to decreasing mortality from breast cancer. Power up, please check it out. Then we also empower you with products in the Elements Store. Each one of these products is meant to help a woman on her breast cancer journey before, during, or after a diagnosis. It always promotes health. Everything is always vegan. Not everything is supplement-based. A lot of it is like scar creams that I have found to truly be effective, creams for radiation if you are going through that, or certain garments that are helpful. I thoughtfully culled all of this together over my 23 years of being a surgeon and put it in one place for you.
Joel Fuhrman, MD
Terrific. All right. Well, thanks for joining us, everybody. Dr. Funk. I am happy you are part of this community, and you are doing this to motivate and educate women and be a leader in this field. Thank you for your participation, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. Keep believing you can do this, everybody. You can jump in and do this and not wait until a medical tragedy or something happens. Start it right now. Today.Okay. All right. Take care, everybody.
Kristi Funk, MD
Bye
Joel Fuhrman, MD
Thanks again. Bye.
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