Natural BP Control Vs. Medication

Introduction to Dr. Fuhrman and the summit 0:00

All right, everybody, we got a real zinger here. You definitely want to pay attention as I get the honor of interviewing world famous physician Joel Fuhrman, M.D., my co-host, Reversing Heart Disease Naturally Summit. You know, I'm on PBS, a man who's raised over $70 million for PBS. I mean, an amazing statistic. You just think about all that education, all those books, all those packages. Board Certified Family Physician. Seven Time New York Times. Best selling author and an internationally recognized expert on nutrition and natural healing.

He operates the Eat to Live Retreat in San Diego and if you don't have a copy of the book The End of Heart Disease, you want a copy of that book. And his most recent book, Eat for Life, which is tremendous. It is available in paperback. President of the Nutritional Research Foundation. So accolades galore as he deserves. Dr. Fuhrman, you ready to help the audience learn more about heart disease? Let's do it. This has been fun. Okay, so we're going to talk about the topic. Drugs will not save you.

You're making lots of enemies out there with the pharma industry. I'm going to talk about the potential harm for blood pressure medication, statin cholesterol medication, diabetic medication. I'll just say and I know you'd agree. Everybody listen carefully, but discuss this topic with your own personal physician. Do not stop drugs just because you relate to what we're talking about right now. If you're going to have a goal, do it with your medical team and do it carefully. But you need to know the facts.

So let's dive right in and let's talk about high blood pressure. Millions and millions of people have high blood pressure and the usual approaches

Why medication changes require close monitoring 2:00

directly go on a one, two, three, sometimes four medications. What's wrong with drugs or high blood pressure, Dr. Fuhrman? You know, I really I want to answer that question in-depth, but I want to comment on something you said about your doctor. What, you know, making sure he reduces or he keeps track of your medications and make the changes in your medical supervision. I just want to comment on that. Almost give a warning here, and that is that I've been doing in the decades, the many multiple decades I've been doing this, I've seen doctors not step up to the plate and put people at risk, because when people change their diet and start to eat so healthily and cut out the salt, their physicians are not monitoring their blood pressure, their blood glucose, and they don't take their medications away.

Appropriately, we don't prescribe appropriately, leaving the person overmedicated so the blood pressure could drop too low and the person could fall down or even hurt their kidney because their blood pressure is too low or low. Blood pressure also is a risk factor for cardiac arrhythmias being from being overmedicated. So what I'm saying right now, I'm saying it's your responsibility when you make this dietary change to follow your blood glucose and follow your blood pressure, then alert your physician that a medication reduction is indicated because your doctor is not following you around and waiting for your next visit for two months from now or three months from now could put yourself at risk.

So what I'm saying is it's very important because the dietary intervention that we're recommending here can lower blood pressure and blood sugar so radically that whole purpose and in danger from being overmedicated if you don't decrease your medications appropriately quick enough. And I could just give a couple of examples of that, but I guess what's funny is I just had a person that came in to the retreat November 1st, today's November 5th, I shouldn't say the date, but in any case, this is five, four days later.

And she came in on 100 units of insulin a day with a blood sugar, running about 400 on 100 units of insulin a day. And now she's on no insulin and her blood sugars are running 120. You know, she dropped her blood sugar down in four days and took a hundred use of insulin. Now, if she was seeing a regular doctor, he wouldn't have never known the diet was going to work that effectively. He would have cut cut her insulin back from 100 to 90 or 80, and she would be hypoglycemic and could have her injured herself.

So I'm just saying take charge, learn the information and make sure you are in close enough contact with with a health professional that can aid you in prescribing appropriately if you're jumping into this healthy disease reversal protocol. Okay. Is that okay? Said that Dr. Kahn now we can go on to the question. No, no, it's unbelievable. Little mini case history there of rapid improvement and a great, great piece of advice. Yeah, please. So good. So now now we're talking about that the systolic blood pressure is the first number and the diastolic blood pressure is the second number.

You know that. Everybody knows that. And the if the numbers get wider, that's called pulse pressure. So if the first number goes up. And just think about this as people's age and get sicker with eating healthy instead of their blood vessels being elastic and pumping in and out in response to the heart. See, the heart squeezes in the heart. Blood vessels go out and the heart relaxes and the blood vessels go in and push the blood back to the heart. So the blood vessels out the periphery go open as the heart squeezes.

And then they the heart relaxes and and the blood vessels contraction. The blood vessels, the elasticity, the peripheral blood vessels that distend outward like a balloon. When the heart pumps, they contract the inward to help the blood fill up the myocardial muscle. Because the but because the myocardium gets its oxygen during diastole, the coronary arteries gets its oxygen during diastole when the when the peripheral blood vessels are contracting inward. Now, as your blood vessels get stiffer, they don't push out very much.

So the systolic blood pressure elevates and they don't push in very much. So the diastolic blood pressure drops with aging. So the pulse pressure widens with aging. So instead of it being 40, goes to 50, gets to 60, it's up never gets high, the bottom number gets lower. When the bottom number gets lower, the body's not refusing. Getting the blood back to the heart again enough when we're using drugs to bring down the systolic blood pressure because the high systolic blood pressure, the damaged brain cells are damaged kidney cells.

When we're using drugs to lower the blood pressure, we're low in the diastolic blood pressure, the systolic blood pressure at the expense of pushing the diastolic blood pressure even lower, particularly when it's low already. What's going low Don't forget, the diastolic blood pressure is set at a number to overcome the resistance of the stiffness of the atherosclerosis, this dislodging, the slugging. In other words, the your unhealthy habits make it harder to get the blood to flow back to the heart.

Blood pressure, pulse pressure, and heart risk 7:00

But the diastolic blood pressure is set by the body at a level to adequately oxygenate the heart. When the doctor medicate your blood pressure, he's pushing your diastolic level to a level that's unnaturally and oxygenating the heart. So what I'm saying right now, that medicating, that taking drugs from doctors, especially as you age, that then push the diastolic to low like below 70 increases the risk of heart attack and taking drugs to push the level below 60 in the elderly triples the risk of heart attack.

Now, I'm not saying having low blood pressure of 90 over 60 is dangerous. We not medicating because we are healthy and youthful and have a good elasticity for being 90 over 60 or 90 over 70 is normal, but a person on medication pushing the blood pressure to 120 over 60 or lowering it to 130 over 55 or 120 over 55, then medications would be can reduce oxygenation to the heart, increasing risk of irregular heartbeat, atrial fibrillation and even sudden cardiac death. And I'm saying right now the major cause of atrial fibrillation is doctors prescribing blood pressure medications which do oxygenate the heart.

That's the major cause of atrial fibrillation is doctors prescriptions. When you the only way to lower your systolic blood pressure without causing deoxygenation one of the heart and of course without lowering diastolic and appropriately is lifestyle change. Cut the salt out, eat healthy, lose weight right and exercise and so and we see blood pressure drop radically so much so that I have to be right on top of these blood pressures. People want blood pressure medications because within within a week or so, the blood pressure could become down very could become low.

They won't be medication anymore. And I'm saying 75% of my clients who come to my retreat here are off the blood pressure medication. Even the first month they're here because they don't need it anymore. Now, if you went to a conventional doctor and you changed your doctor and you changed your diet, you mandated back to your doctor in time to change your blood pressure. So requires a phone call to tell your doctor you're doing this diet and you have to and you've got to get a blood pressure, cuff yourself, and you've got to follow your blood pressure on your own to make sure you're appropriately, little by little, lowering your medication.

Actually, I just published. I didn't publish, but the A group of doctors from the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, I was one of a group of about ten or more doctors who wrote an article about deprescribing diabetic medications. When people switched to an aggressive diabetes reversal diet, how to cut back on the medications and what are the parameters we look for and when do we cut the medications down and how much do we cut back on the diabetes in a number goes down. And then same thing with blood pressure.

We're talking here about the proper way to prescribe. And what I'm saying to you was error on the side of caution with cutting back medications early rather than late. Don't wait till you over medicate. You're better off letting the glucose, your blood pressure went a little bit higher because you want to make sure your but you don't push the med overly medicate to push things too low of medications when you don't need them anymore. And this dietary intervention is incredibly effective at lowering blood pressure and preventing a cardiac of future cardiac events.

A thousand fold more powerful than drugs do. Because don't forget the leading cause of death in the United States is still heart disease. But the leading cause of death in people in adult Americans over the age of 65 is still heart disease and strokes. And all these people are still taking statin drugs with favorable cholesterol level. They're still having heart attacks and strokes and they're still taking blood pressure medications. If you live on American food, then you're going to develop high blood pressure as you age and you'll be put on medication.

But it's not going to stop with me having a heart attack. Drugs and also the drugs could be increasing risk of cancer at the same time. So it's not you don't think because you have a normal blood pressure and you're on drugs, that you're normal, you just have abnormal blood pressure that's masked by a drug. So you still have stiffening and sick blood vessels where there's blood pressure is mass pushed down to a unfavorable range by the drug. When we're talking about earning good health and preventing risk of heart attack in your future, that means you have to earn a normal blood pressure without medication or a good cholesterol without medication or in a good diabetic number without medication and earn a good body weight without medication, you have to do what you do takes to achieve good numbers and not falsely think they're okay because you medicated them favorably.

Get to excited to the. Studio is a real eye opener about, you know, being your own best doctor. You can work with your doctor. Obviously, you're going to need a home blood pressure cuff, a good, reliable upper arm home blood pressure, digital cup and use it regularly and know how to use it. And otherwise you might run into this trouble with these low diastolic blood pressures that may rob your heart muscle of the blood. So it needs a driving force. It needs a sweet spot. Yeah. How can a neutral tearing diet, you know, you've got so much experience.

What do you think is the mechanism by which it lowers blood pressure? Well, you know, we're talking about the anti-aging phenomenons going on here and with the multiple mechanisms. That's what's so great about this, because, you know, it doesn't just drop LDL cholesterol, it abnormally drops oxidized LDL. The inflammatory and all the inflammatory markers that create endothelial inflammation go away quickly. Within weeks, not even within months, he was having a heart attack, drops, you know, a hundred fold in a few weeks.

We're talking about tremendously protection. And we're and we're actually removing we're most aggressively is what's called vulnerable plaque or juvenile plaque because when you gain weight, then you lay down more cholesterol laden plaque. Over the years, that plaque may be invaded with smooth muscle and scar tissue and calcifications and become more, you could say, obstructive,

Lifestyle changes that lower blood pressure safely 13:00

but the obstructive plaques are not as risky or really risky. Compare anything compared to a more newly laid down plaque that's full of cholesterol and that's more fatty. And it's the fatty, more cholesterol laden, softer plaques that are younger, that it's this diet starts to melt away more quickly and right away. So what I'm saying here is that the dangerous types of plaque are addressed immediately and quickly, and the plaques that are more stable and less dangerous are addressed more slowly, which is good, which puts a person.

It means that they're going to a safer place right away. They're not taking years to go to a safer place. They're taking weeks or months to go to a significantly safer place. Wow. And you know, you did mention I was just looking real quick that you are the author of a recent article. If anybody wants to look it up, it's clinical diabetes. And the title of the article is Medication D. Prescribing among patients with type two diabetes is an interesting concept because the standard doctor and the standard pharmaceutical industry is about prescribing.

And here we're talking about safely and purposely d prescribing. And Dr. Fuhrman, along with other friends of ours, like Dr. James Loomis and Salvatore, that's a ninan. Michelle McCracken put together a great protocol on how you do that for other doctors, but obviously listeners to the summit need to get some idea of how to monitor their own health, their own blood sugar, their own blood pressure and the rest. Right. Well, let's let's talk since I just introduced that paper that you wrote and it's features diabetes.

What is the problem with drugs for diabetes? Don't take your diabetes. And how does the nutrition diet compare? Well, that's right. I mean, it's almost it's the same point here is that, you know, there's a there's a study called the Accord Study, which they gave half the people with diabetes more medical care and more attention from their physicians to make sure their blood sugars were more accurately lowered in the most favorable range. But the government had to come in and stop the study because those people are getting more medical care and more drugs had more deaths and more morbidity and mortality.

In other words, more medical problems developed and more deaths happened. And the government has stopped the study whose goal is getting less medical care with the sugars running higher and not taking as many drugs. We're living longer and we're healthier. And doctors said, how could this be happening? Isn't it better to have your sugar be lower and yes, better to have your sugar be lower, for sure. But but also the drugs cause, you know, cause weight gain and cause inflammation and cause know the drugs are doing negative things because here's what diabetes is.

Diabetes is is starts out with insulin resistance. So you're not. So the insulin receptor is not working well when the insulin receptor is not working well because of the body fat and saturated fats in the body, then the beta cells in the pancreas that produce more insulin. But after years of insulin resistance and the beta cells being stressed to produce 6 to 8 times as much insulin as a normal person of a normal body weight would need, the beta cells start to poop out so doctors give you drugs that push the pumping out beta cells to work harder.

They give you a cell phone to to push the beta cells to get more insulin or other drugs that push the pancreas to lower blood sugar. And all it does is accelerate the rate of beta cell failure or they give you insulin. Now, you already had too much insulin. It doesn't overcome the insulin resistance. We use less insulin, not more insulin. Insulin is a fat loading hormone that promotes cancer and promotes and pro-inflammatory and promotes deposition of cholesterol in the blood vessels too. What I'm saying here is that the only way to reverse diabetes safely is by getting rid of insulin resistance, getting the fat off your body and eating the right fats, and eating and eating the right diet and eating anti-inflammatory foods and eating foods that don't stress

Deprescribing diabetes medications and reversing diabetes 17:00

the beta cells to work more to rest the beta cells. So we rest the pancreas. We don't do. It's the opposite of medication. And with putting nutrients, high levels of nutrients per calorie in your diet to getting high levels of nutrients. Purcell Low volume in your body restores the function of the beta cells to a degree and enables the diabetes to go away because we took away the insulin resistance, the insulin receptors stopped working and we enabled the beta cells to function better. Drugs can't do what life, what diet and exercise and nutritional excellence, which I call a new chittering diet, can do.

Because this magically enables type two diabetics to become non-diabetic and I have so many hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people who've become non-diabetic. And I see it happen every single day where people are becoming off their diabetic medication, reversing their diabetes. And I say, don't treat your diabetes, reverse it, get rid of it, get rid of your diabetes, because covering up with drugs means you still have it. And by the fact that you need medications to control your blood sugar, this means that you're allowing the diabetes to damage your liver, damage your brain, to damage your eyes, to damage your nerves, to damage digestive track.

You're allowing diabetes to slowly kill you if you're still treating it with drugs, we're saying get rid of it because you can get rid of it. And even my type one diabetics, even those people whose beta cells have no beta cells function and they need to take diabetes and need to take insulin are still only requiring about one fifth the amount of insulin, little very small amounts of insulin. They're not required a huge amount. They're required when they're eating the wrong type of way of eating.

Oh, and of course, you have a book called The End to Diabetes, correct? That's right. One of my best selling books, believe it or not, you know, besides Eat to Live, which might be my number one bestseller. My number two bestseller was probably the end of diabetes that was really did super well and enabled so many people to get rid of their diabetes. And let me say that that getting rid of your diabetes is critical and doable and it gets you feeling good. And you and your people always say they lost their brain fog.

They feel better, they age slower, and it gets their lose. They lose their depression. It gets their feeling of control over their life back again because the diabetes is taking the control out of their life and making them live in fear and live in medical live with this medical disease that's hurting them. And we can just get rid of it and telling people they can get rid of their diabetes. You know, the end of diabetes, that's the name of the book, The End of diabetes. They can people can get rid of it.

Yep. It was a great, great read. And I encourage everybody listening here and reversing heart disease naturally summit to read that book and work with your practitioner and reach out about seeing if you can d prescribe your diabetic medication safely but progressively. What a great goal to talk about. And some of these medications like the class and the reason the insulin makes people gain weight, become more diabetic, more drugs, they're getting worse on the drugs, not better on the drugs. So they got to really take charge.

And we're going to turn the topic a little bit now to cholesterol lowering drugs, probably most famously, the Statine group of drugs, Lipitor, Crestor and the others. So we're going to talk about ways to potentially prescribe cholesterol lowering medication. What's wrong with cholesterol lowering drugs? Dr. Fuhrman? Well, you know, I'm I'm of the opinion that almost all drugs I mean, the first time the first thing we learn in medical school is that drugs are toxic and they most likely cumulatively and combined synergistically increase risk of cancer and other causes of death.

So you don't get you don't get something for nothing. If something has efficacy, it usually has toxic properties. We know that there's some in. So but in any case, statins, drugs are not you know, now that everybody's taking them and everybody's cholesterol is favorable. It didn't stop people from having heart disease. People are still having because there's too many other causes of cardiovascular instability and and clot formation that statin drugs do not protect against. So they're not as protective as you think that lowering the drug, lowering your cholesterol, the statin drug, this is the problem with it.

The main problem, your cholesterol looks good and you think it's okay to eat animal fats in animal products since they eat unhealthily because now your numbers look good and you don't see the damage that's occurring that you would have seen if you weren't on the drug. Because if you were off the drug and you ate it unhealthy, your cholesterol would go up and you say, Oh, I can't eat those foods. But now that you on a drug, you can be sloppy with your diet and you think you're okay. So the main thing it does is gives people a false sense of security because they're not okay because those foods are causing damage, whether your cholesterol is elevated or not.

And the second thing it is, it increases people's appetite. It causes more insulin resistance and increases risk of diabetes and the hallmark

Statins, cholesterol, and the limits of drug therapy 22:00

of a sense of a healthy centenarian. The person who lives a long time to 100 years old in good health is high insulin sensitivity and low circulating insulin. And you get low insulin sensitivity with low body fat. And the statin drugs destroy the possibility of having high insulin sensitivity because statin drugs cause insulin resistance. And make no doubt about it, these statin drugs worsen diabetes and create a lot of diabetics that are people that were not diabetics. They make pre diabetics into diabetics.

And I'm saying all overweight people are pre-diabetic, which means that when you're overweight, you're producing extra insulin. That means a statin drug is dangerous for overweight people because it's making your pre-diabetes you're in into high insulin get worse, which is accelerating death and including cardiovascular death, which opposes the benefit of LDL lowering. You don't just get good things, you get bad things. And it causes and they cause muscle weakness and muscle damage just because you don't feel fatigued from the drug or muscle soreness from the drug doesn't mean it's not causing under the radar imperceptible muscle damage.

And don't forget reducing your you could say, muscle vitality with aging and your heart's the muscle. And it's most likely the case. And there are some studies to indicate that, that when people when taking statin drugs for decades or for a long time and then they have a heart attack, their heart attack is more dangerous because the heart muscle has been injured from the chronic use of the statin drug. So even though we're talking so we're saying here that it's lifestyle medicine first, it's a new territory in diet, which is the obviously the gold standard of light of the dietary portfolio, reverse disease.

You do the right thing first. Drugs are for emergencies or people who where who who have some type of very unusual genetic predisposition, genetic predisposition that we can impact or fix with a diet. They're they're not things you start with and conventional doctors that's all they have in their toolbox are drugs. And it just damages a population in a very deep and profound way, you know. So there the fact that we mask the root problem, which is is in nutritional problem, micronutrient problem, people overeat under the confidence that they're on a statin and they can make poor quality choices that we're not addressing.

You know, prevention of heart attacks and prevention of death from heart attacks by emphasizing drugs alone. What's some of the experiences you've been able to see at your Eat to Live retreat in San Diego with cholesterol control through diet over a month or two or three when people stay there. You know, the experience is that we get radical results in cholesterol dropping. However, because people have such a high saturated fat, in other words, they have so much saturated fat in their own body that a lot of times their weight comes down and their blood pressure comes down.

But the cholesterol doesn't come down initially because they're still burning up a lot of saturated fat that they have stored in their body. But once they pass some threshold of body fat loss, then you start to see the cholesterol drop significantly. But while it's even not dropping fully, you're still having the anti-inflammatory effects and the protective effects of the diet. So I'm saying the benefits of cholesterol lowering might lag a little bit compared to the blood pressure and blood glucose because you still have a lot of saturated fat in the body in some people, but you're still getting protective effects and you reducing oxidized LDL pretty more radically, even though your total LDL might be somewhat elevated for a while.

So what I'm saying right now is that if you eat in like, for example, in in David Jenkins study in Toronto, he's a famous cholesterol researcher who used a dietary portfolio, which was essentially the nutritarian diet to show maximal cholesterol lowering with his portfolio diet, which was a which was a plant based diet with nuts and seeds as a source of fat. This is David Jenkins from Toronto. And he found that the nutritarian diet lowered LDL cholesterol 33% in just a few weeks, you know, just in minimal weeks.

I think it was 4 to 6 weeks. It dropped 33% LDL. But that's because he kept the diet ISO caloric. He didn't induce weight loss. So people drop their cholesterol more than statin drugs did on the diet. But when we see weight loss accompanying the drop in the the diet, then it could actually have less for some people, less dropping of the cholesterol because they're still burning up too much, retained saturated fat or animal fats stored in their body. But don't be alarmed by that. It's going to take a little longer, but your cholesterol is going to come down.

Okay. So people got that really great series of pearls that I think we all enjoyed and be suspicious of prescription drugs. Work with your medical care team. You can check your own cholesterol. There are kits available. I think the in lab is a little bit more accurate. But rather than having no information, you can do that and maybe you can deprescribe some of your cholesterol medicine using nutritarian diets here the was reversing heart disease naturally summit. Dr. Fuhrman thank you for your time, your expertize, your decades of success for patients.

And we've really enjoyed this and we're going to be able to chat with you some other time about some other topics, but I'll let you get back to your work. Okay. Terrific. Looking forward to it. Thank you.