Natural BP Control Vs. Medication

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Let’s do it. This has been fun.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

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. 

Joel Fuhrman, MD

I know.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

I’m going to talk about the potential harm for blood pressure medication, statin cholesterol medication, and 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 to directly go on one, two, three, sometimes four medications. What’s wrong with drugs or high blood pressure, Dr. Fuhrman?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

You know, 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 he reduces or he keeps track of your medications and makes the changes in your medical supervision. I just want to comment on that and almost give a warning here, and that is what 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 deprescribe 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 puts a person in danger from being overmedicated if you don’t decrease your medications appropriately quickly 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 into the retreat on November 1st, today’s November 5th, I shouldn’t say the date, but in any case. This is 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 away 100 units 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 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 a health professional that can aid you in prescribing appropriately if you’re jumping into this healthy disease reversal protocol. Is that okay, I said that Dr.Kahn. Now, we can go on to the question.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

No, no, it’s unbelievable. Little mini case history there of rapid improvement and a great, great piece of advice. Yeah, please.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Good so. 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 if the numbers get wider that’s called pulse pressure. So if the first number goes up, just think about this as people age and get sicker and eating unhealthy instead of their blood vessels being elastic and pump in and out in response to the heart. So the heart squeezes and 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 the heart relaxes and the blood vessels contract. The blood vessels, the elasticity, 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 myocardium gets its oxygen during diastole. The coronary arteries get their oxygen during diastole 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, then gets high, and the bottom number gets lower. When the bottom number gets lower the body’s not perfusing getting the blood back to the heart again enough. When we’re using drugs to bring down the systolic blood pressure because of the high systolic blood pressure, the damaged brain cells are damaged kidney cells, when we’re using drugs to lower 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 or what’s going low. Well, don’t forget, the diastolic blood pressure is set at a number to overcome the resistance of the stiffness of atherosclerosis the dislodging. In other words, 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 medicates your blood pressure, he’s pushing your diastolic level to a level that’s unnaturally and deoxygenating the heart. So what I’m saying right now is that medicating, that taking drugs from doctors, especially as you age, that then push the diastolic too 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 90/60 is dangerously not medicating because we are healthy and youthful and have good elasticity to being 90/60 or 90/70 is normal, but a person on medication pushing the blood pressure to 120/60 or lowering it to 130/ 55 or 120/ 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, that the major cause of atrial fibrillation is doctors prescribing blood pressure medications which deoxygenate the heart. That’s the major cause of atrial fibrillation is doctors’ prescriptions. When the only way to lower your systolic blood pressure without causing deoxygenation of the heart and of course without lowering diastolic and appropriately is lifestyle change. Cut the salt out, eat healthy, lose weight, and exercise then we see blood pressure drop radically so much so that I have to be right on top of these blood pressures for people on blood pressure medications because within within a week or so, the blood pressure could become down very could become low. They won’t be on medication anymore.

And I’m saying, that 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’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 appropriate, little by little, lowering your medication. Actually, I just published a, I didn’t publish, but the group of doctors from the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, I was one of a group of about 10 or more doctors who wrote an article about prescribing diabetic medications when people switched to an aggressive diabetes reversal diet. How to cut back on the medications? What are the parameters we look for? When do we cut the medications down and how much do we cut back on the diabetes when the number goes down? 

And then the same thing with blood pressure. We’re talking here about the proper way to deprescribe. And what I’m saying to you was an error on the side of caution with cutting back medications early rather than late. Don’t wait until you are over-medicate. You’re better off letting the glucose, and your blood pressure went a little bit higher because you want to make sure but you don’t push the overly medicate, to push things too low medications when you don’t need them anymore. And this dietary intervention is incredibly effective at lowering blood pressure and preventing future cardiac events. A thousandfold 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. All these people are still taking statin drugs with favorable cholesterol levels. 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 you from having a heart attack. Drugs, and also the drugs could be increasing the risk of cancer at the same time. So it’s not, you don’t think because you have 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 an unfavorable range by the drug. When we’re talking about earning good health and preventing the risk of heart attack in the future that means you have to earn normal blood pressure without medication, earn good cholesterol without medication, earn 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. I’m getting too excited.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

That was 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 cuff, and use it regularly and know how to use it. Otherwise, you might 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 Nutritarian diet, you’ve got so much experience. What do you think is the mechanism by which it lowers blood pressure?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Well, we’re talking about the anti-aging phenomena going on here and with the multiple mechanisms. That’s what’s so great about this because it doesn’t disrupt the 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. The risk of having a heart attack drops a hundredfold in a few weeks. We’re talking about tremendous protection and we’re actually removing, we’re most aggressively 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, but the obstructive plaques are not as risky or really risky compared, 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 than it’s this diet start 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.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

Wow. And 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 Depescribing Among Patients with Type 2 Diabetes is an interesting concept because the standard doctor and the standard pharmaceutical industry are about prescribing. And here we’re talking about safely and purposely deprescribing. And Dr. Fuhrman, along with other friends of ours, like Dr. James Loomis, Salvatore Lacagnina, Michelle McMacken 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. Well, let’s talk since I just introduced that paper that you wrote, and it features diabetes. What is the problem with drugs for diabetes? Don’t they care of your diabetes? And how does the Nutritarian diet compare?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Well, that’s right. I mean, it’s almost it’s the same point here is that you know, 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 were 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? Yes, better to have your sugar be lower for sure but also the drugs cause weight gain, cause inflammation, and cause other drugs do negative things because here’s what diabetes is. Diabetes starts out with insulin resistance 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 produce more insulin. But after years of insulin resistance and the beta cells being stressed to produce six to eight times as much insulin as a normal person of 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 insulin to push the beta cells to get more insulin or other drugs that push the pancreas to lower blood sugar. 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 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. 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. We don’t do, it’s the opposite of medication. With putting nutrients, high levels of nutrients per calorie in your diet to getting high levels of nutrients per cell 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, exercise, and nutritional excellence, which I call a Nutritarian diet can do. Because this magically enables type 2 diabetics to become non-diabetic. I have so many hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people who’ve become non-diabetic. And I see it happen every single day when 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, damage your eyes, damage your nerves, and damage your digestive tract. 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. Even my type 1 diabetic, even those people whose beta cells have no beta cell function and they need to take insulin are still only requiring about one-fifth the amount of insulin, little very small amounts of insulin. They do not require a huge amount. They’re required when they’re eating the wrong type of way of eating.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

Oh, and of course, you have a book called, The End to Diabetes, correct?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

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 to Diabetes. That 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 people always say they lost their brain fog. They feel better, they age slower, and it gets, they lose their depression. It gets their feeling of control over their life back again because diabetes is taking the control out of their life and making them live in fear and 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. Making people can get rid of it.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

Yep. It was a great, great read. I encourage everybody listening here in Reversing Heart Disease Naturally Summit to read that book and work with your practitioner and reach out about seeing if you can deprescribe your diabetic medication safely but progressively. What a great goal to talk about.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

And some of these medications like glitazones and insulin make people gain weight and become more diabetic. More drugs, they’re getting worse on the drugs, not better on the drugs. So they got to really take charge.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

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 Dr. Joel Fuhrman on what’s wrong with drugs for hypertension and diabetes. We’re going to take a short break for the premium members. We’re going to come back and talk a bit about cholesterol-lowering drugs and put a wrap on this. So I thank you and I hope you’re enjoying it. Okay. Welcome back, you premium members. Thank you for your support. We’ve still got Joel Fuhrman here, multiple New York Times best-selling author. He’s given us tremendous information about blood pressure and diabetes. And we’re going to turn the topic a little bit now to cholesterol-lowering drugs, probably most famously, the statin group of drugs, Lipitor, Crestor, and the others. So we’re going to talk about ways to potentially deprescribe cholesterol-lowering medication. What’s wrong with cholesterol-lowering drugs, Dr. Fuhrman?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Well, you know, 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 the risk of cancer and other causes of death. So you don’t get something for nothing. If something has efficacy, it usually has toxic properties. We know that there’s something 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 are too many other causes of cardiovascular instability and clot formation that statin drugs do not protect against. So they’re not as protective as you think that 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 are unhealthy 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 are on a drug, you can be sloppy with your diet and you think you’re okay. So the main thing it does is give 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 increases people’s appetite. It causes more insulin resistance and increases the risk of diabetes and the hallmark of a healthy centenarian, a 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 includes cardiovascular death, which opposes the benefit of LDL lowering.

You don’t just get good things, you get bad things. 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 muscle vitality with aging and your heart’s a muscle, and that’s most likely the case. There are some studies to indicate 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 Nutritarian diet which is obviously the gold standard of the dietary portfolio reverse disease. You do the right thing first. Drugs are for emergencies or people who have some type of very unusual genetic predisposition that we can impact or fix with a diet. 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.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

So there is the fact that we mask the root problem, which is usually the nutritional problem, micronutrient problem, people overeat under the confidence that they’re on a statin and they can make poor quality choices. Plus we are not addressing prevention of heart attacks and prevention of death from heart attacks by emphasizing drugs alone. What are 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?

Joel Fuhrman, MD

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 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 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 by 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 isocaloric. 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.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

Okay. So people got that really great series of pearls that I think we all enjoyed. 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 a Nutritarian diet here in the Reversing Heart Disease Naturally Summit. Dr. Fuhrman, thank you for your time, your expertise, and your decades of success with patients. 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.

Joel Fuhrman, MD

Terrific. Looking forward to it.

Joel Kahn, MD, FACC

Thank you.