Natural BP Control Vs. Medication

Introduction and Speaker Credentials 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 at 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. Just think about all that education, all those books, all those packages. Board certified family physician, seven time New York Times bestselling 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. Doctor Fuhrman, you're ready to help the audience learn more about our 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 STAT and classical 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 approach is directly going to one, two, three, sometimes four medications. What's wrong with drugs or high blood pressure? Doctor Fuhrman you know, I really let's I want to answer that question in depth. But I want to, comment on something you said about your doctor watch, you know, making sure you he reduces or he keeps track of your medications

Medication Safety and Blood Pressure Monitoring 2:06

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.

They don't prescribe appropriately, leaving the person overmedicated so the blood pressure could drop to low and the person could fall down or even hurt their kidney because the blood pressure is too low or low. Blood pressure also was a risk factor for cardiac arrhythmias going 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 and 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 it would put a person 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 go, so what's funny is I just had a person that came into the retreat November 1st. Today is November 5th. I shouldn't say the date, but in any case, this is five four days later and she came in at 100 units of insulin a day with a blood sugar running about 400, 100 units of insulin a day.

And now she's on no insulin and a blood sugars are running. 120 you know, she dropped her blood sugar down in four days and took 100 years of insulin away. 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're in close enough contact with the health professional that can aid you in prescribing appropriately.

If you're jumping into this healthy disease reversal protocol. Okay. Is that okay? Said the doctor. Can 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. Yeah. So, you know. 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. And everybody knows that. And the if the numbers get wider that's called pulse pressure.

So the first number goes up. And just think about this as people's age and get sicker with eating unhealthy instead of their blood vessels being elastic and pumping in and out in response to the heart. So 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 at the periphery go up. And as the heart squeezes, and then the the heart relaxes and up, and the blood vessels contraction, the blood vessels, the ostensibly the peripheral blood vessels that distend outward like a balloon.

When the heart pumps, they contract inward to help the blood fill up the myocardial muscle. Because the. But because the myocardium gets its oxygen from 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 it goes to 50 gets to 60. It's 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 could damage brain cells or damaged kidney cells. When we're using drugs to lower the blood pressure, we're lowering 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.

But what's going well? Don't forget, the diastolic blood pressure is set at a number to overcome the resistance of the stiffness of the atherosclerosis. The smudging. In other words, the your unhealthy habits make it harder to get the blood to flow back to the heart. But the diastolic blood pressure is set by the body at a level to adequately oxygenate the heart. When the doctor mediates your blood pressure, he's pushing your diastolic level to a level that's unnaturally and de 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 to 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. Be not medicated because if you're 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

Why Blood Pressure Drugs Can Be Harmful 7:38

or lowering it to 130 over 55 or 120 over 55, then medications be couldn't 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 to oxygenate the heart. That's the major cause of regulation is doctors prescriptions. When you the only way to lower your systolic blood pressure without causing deoxygenation of the heart and of course, without lowering diastolic in 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 pressure people and blood pressure medications. Because within a week or so the blood pressure could be come down very could become low. They don't need 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 may not even be 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 a 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 wrote an article about prescribing diabetic medications.

When people switch to an aggressive diabetes reversal diet, how to cut back on the medications. And one of the parameters we look for, and when do we cut the medications down, and how much do we cut back on when the the diabetic with the number goes down and the same thing with blood pressure. We're talking here about the proper way to prescribe. And what I'm saying to you is on the side of caution with cutting back medications early rather than late. Don't wait till you're over medicate. You better off letting the glucose, your blood pressure run a little bit higher because you want to make sure you but you don't push the medic overly medicate to push things too low with medications when you don't need them anymore. And this dietary intervention is incredibly effective at lowering blood pressure and preventing a cardiac event.

Future cardiac event a thousand fold more powerful than drugs do. Because don't forget, the leading cause of death in the United States is still heart. It is 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 stat drugs with favorable cholesterol levels, are 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 you from having a heart attack. Drugs don't. 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, whether it's blood pressure is masked, 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 good cholesterol without medication, or in a good diabetic number without medication and or a good body weight without medication.

You have to do what you takes to achieve good numbers and not falsely think they're okay because you medicated them favorably. Okay, okay. To excitement to who was a, you know, 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 both upper arm home blood pressure digital cup and use it regularly and know how to use it and, otherwise, you may run into this trouble with these low diastolic blood pressures that may rob your heart muscle of the blood flow.

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 phenomenon is going on here and the multiple mechanisms. That's what's so great about this because, you know, it doesn't disrupt LDL cholesterol, but, normally drops oxidized LDL, the inflammatory and all the inflammatory markers that create endothelial inflammation go away quickly within weeks, not even within months, you risk

Dietary Reversal of Blood Pressure and Plaque 12:14

having a heart attack drops, you know, a hundred fold within 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 can say obstructive, 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 and softer plaques that are younger that this 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, is clinical Diabetes. And the title of the article is medication d prescribing among patients with type two diabetes. An interesting concept because the standard doctor in the standard pharmaceutical industry is about prescribing. And here we're talking about safely and, purposely d prescribing.

And Doctor Fuhrman, along with other friends of ours like Doctor James Loomis and Salvador, that's a Nina and Michelle MC and, 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 care of diabetes. And how does the nutrition diet compare that. 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 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 because school is getting less medical care, with the sugars running higher and not taking as many drugs. We're living longer and more 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, causes weight gain and cause inflammation and cause and other drugs are doing negative things because here's what diabetes is.

Diabetes is a 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 if saturated fats on the body, then the beta cells in the pancreas have to 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 pooping out beta cells to work harder.

They give you a softener is to push the beta cells to put 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 need to use less insulin, not more insulin. Insulin is a fat promoting hormone that promotes cancer and promoting pro-inflammatory and promotes deposition of cholesterol and of of 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, eating anti-inflammatory foods, and eating foods that don't stress the beta cells to work more, to rest the beta cells so we rest the pancreas.

Diabetes Reversal and Medication De-prescribing 16:48

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 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 lifestyle, what diet and exercise and nutritional excellence, which I call a new tutoring 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 have become diabetic. And I see it happen every single day where people will be coming 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 sugars means that you're allowing the diabetes to damage your lid, to damage your brain, to damage your eyes, to damage your nerves.

The damaged 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't get rid of it. And even my type one diabetic. So even those people whose beta cells have no beta cell function and they need to take diabetes and need to take insulin, are still only requiring about one fifth the amount of insulin will very small amounts of insulin. They're not requiring a huge amount they required when they were 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 is my 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 know, 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.

Reversing heart disease naturally summit to read that book and work with your practitioner. And reach out, about seeing if you can prescribe your diabetic medication safely but progressively. What a great goal to talk about. And in some of these medications, like the question, 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. All right. Well, everybody in the general audience, thank you so much for tuning in here to this, you know, kind of mini amazing symposium with Doctor Joel Fuhrman on what's wrong with drugs for hypertension and diabetes.

So we're going to talk about ways to potentially prescribe cholesterol lowering medication. What's wrong with cholesterol lowering drugs, doctor Fuhrman? Well, you know, I'm I'm of the opinion that almost all drugs I mean, the first time, the first thing you learn in medical school is the drugs are toxic. And they most likely cumulatively and combined synergistically increased 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 statin drugs are not, you know, now that everybody is 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 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 and animal products and so 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 the 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 and the hallmark of a cent of a healthy centenarian, the person who lives a long time to 100 years old and good health is high insulin sensitivity and low circulating insulin. And you get low insulin sensitivity with low body fat. And these statin drugs destroy the possibility of having high insulin sensitivity to statin drugs, cause insulin resistance, and make no doubt about it.

These statin drugs worsen diabetes and create a lot of diabetics so that 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 prediabetes. Your 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 then they cause muscle weakness and muscle damage.

Statins, Cholesterol, and Lifestyle Medicine 22:48

Just because you don't feel fatigue 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 think 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 that indicate that that when people have been 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 criterion diet, which is the obviously the gold standard of life of the dietary portfolio, reverse disease. You do the right thing first. Drugs are for emergencies or people who wear 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 our population in a very deep and profound way, you know, so, there and the fact that we mask the root problem, which is usually a nutritional problem, micronutrient problem, people overeat under the confidence that they're on a statin and they can make poor quality choices. Plus, we're not addressing, you know, prevention of heart attacks and prevention of death from heart attacks, by emphasizing drugs alone. What 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 2 or 3, 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 the 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 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 on the body in some people, but you're still getting protective effects and you're 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 neutral turning diet to show maximum cholesterol lowering with his portfolio diet, which was a which was a plant based diet with nuts and seeds, is the source of fat.

This is David Jenkins from Toronto. And he found that the neutral tearing diet lowered LDL cholesterol 33% in just a few weeks. You know, just in minimal weeks. I think it was 4 to 6 weeks to drop 33% LDL. But that's because he kept the diet basal caloric. He didn't induce weight loss. So people dropped their cholesterol more than statin drugs did on a 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 was 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 kids 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 prescribe some of your cholesterol medicine using nutrition and diets here at the words reversing our disease naturally summit.

Doctor Fuhrman, thank you for your time, your expertise, your decades of success with 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.