Reversing Plaque: Plant-Based Lifestyle, Advanced Labs, & the Full Toolbox

Introduction to the Two-Part Battle Plan 0:00

Well welcome back to Reversing Heart Disease Naturally 4.0 Summit I am again your host Joel Kahn medical doctor. I prepared and hopefully you viewed part one of a War on Heart Attack two Year Battle Plan 2026. I'm going to now dive into part two and finish up what I hope you agree is an important topic. So we talked about imaging heart disease. But if we do find atherosclerosis generally people have not had enough testing. I had to get into it pretty good with a patient this week who had seen a cardiologist and had a lot of faith in his local cardiologist, a good person.

I know the doctor and I never shake a patient's faith in their doctors, but I had to say, have you looked at the 17 daggers of Arterial disease? This is a picture from a medical journal that's over a decade old, looking at things that can cause atherosclerosis that you're not hearing about in the doctor's office. Nitric oxide, oxidized LDL, C-reactive protein, vitamin K2, and on and on. If I were to redo this picture and I probably should, I would easily be able to come up with 27 daggers of arterial disease.

I'm going to talk about 1 or 2 of the novel ones coming up.

Hidden Drivers of Atherosclerosis 1:14

You'd also have to include Covid, the infection, and possibly the vaccine based on data that they can injure the lining of arteries called your endothelium. So one of the lab tests everybody in this summit hopefully has heard about and should know their results. But if you don't, please write down I will check my lipoprotein. A blood test amount of $25. Blood tests available everywhere. It's an awkward name. It has to be a small a lowercase a. It cannot be a capital H. There's a different blood test that could confuse the lab.

If you put a capital, a lipoprotein level A, the heart's quite killer. And we now know that this inherited genetic cholesterol, is pro-inflammatory. Professor Hygenic and pro clotting pro thrombotic. It's a nasty little beast. Well, how come you haven't heard more about it? Because about 20% of people around the world inherit the ability to make this. And 80% don't from one or both parents. Well, that's about 1.5 billion people worldwide. It's about 90 million people in the United States. And doctors have been asked since 2019 to get a blood test on all their patients.

But the latest data in the last 12 months is that only 1% of doctors are ordering this test. I will say in my clinic for 20 years we've gotten this test on everybody. And if you're abnormal, we keep repeating it till we get it down. But that's a whole nother topic. What can lipoprotein literally do if you inherit it on the left? It can clogged arteries anywhere in the body. Some people have it and they don't get clogged arteries. That's confusing. But it can it can clog a valve in the heart called the Arctic val.

And finally, on the right, some data that has an impact

Lipoprotein(a) Testing and Risk 3:04

on other systems, like wound healing. We do know that beyond lipoproteins, that our disease is reversible through lifestyle. The most important study demonstrating it and the most important figure, I think, in cardiology literature are here the Dean Ornish 1990 lifestyle A Hard Trial follow up publication, 1998, that when you eat a whole food plant based diet, you exercise every day. You limit your alcohol. Of course you don't smoke, you manage your stress, and you can actually reverse soft plaque from the heart arteries.

Of course, they didn't have the CTA technology. Doctor Ornish was using invasive catheterization data and measured by a computer. But if you look to the right, the most famous figure, on reversing heart disease, I know of the black circles are heart patients who, were the control group with their local cardiologist. And over the course of five years, their arteries got more and more narrow. Despite seeing a cardiologist and getting therapy, they were actually in a research study. So they were getting a lot of attention, but they weren't getting what the treatment group got, which was very careful intervention on their diet plant based on their exercise, walking, meditation, yoga and their stress management and group support.

We also know from the medical literature, and there's a separate presentation on this in this summit, that there are some supplements that actually have scientific, randomized data about contributing to the reversal of atherosclerosis. We always could use more data. Some of these, you have heard of, like omega three and age garlic and pomegranate. Some of them may be less familiar to you like pig nodules and Telecom Asiatic. And the green seaweed that you find in a, supplement called our carousel.

We also know that drugs are getting better and better and lowering cholesterol soon. Drugs to lower lipoprotein little like drugs to lower inflammation, like colchicine. An old school inexpensive gout drug.

Lifestyle Reversal of Heart Disease 5:14

And in this, very wonderful review article looking at the nature of a plaque in an artery and the things we have available now, these are pharmacology, and soon we will be making more inroads on reversing heart disease. You might say that's not natural. I understand, but we need all the tools in the toolbox. So on this part two presentation, I think it's timely to at least speak for a moment about the new USDA food pyramid that was presented, in early 2026. And I always take people back to 1980.

Was this new food pyramid really a revolution? And many of us disagree with very important parts of it, of course. But if you go back to 1980, the first recommendations of the USDA on how Americans should eat, what does it say? Avoid too much fat saturated fat and cholesterol. Well, that was 1980. The current guidelines say keep saturated fat less than 10% of calories. They don't present a very good plan for doing that. But that's what they say. What's right below that? Eat foods with adequate starch and fiber.

Boy, is that a hot topic in 2026. How about avoid too much sugar? Was it just the latest guidelines that came up with that recommendation? No, it goes back. You can argue in the 1960s, 70s and beyond now the sugar industry has tried to fight us publicly talking about cutting back on sugar. The soda industry has fought back and is publicly talking about cutting back on sugar, but it's been in the guidelines. So how about avoid too much sodium? Been a topic for decades and decades. Moderation without alcohol.

Pretty much the same recommendations are in 2025. So much of this is actually not new, but the portion of the inverted food pyramid the most objected to is that big, juicy steak in the upper left hand corner, with the two cows saying, this doesn't look good. We aren't really benefiting from a secretary of health and Human Services who proudly announces he's a carnivore.

Supplements and Medications for Plaque 7:22

Breakfast and dinner are nothing but grilled steak. And the cows are concerned as I am too. So what's good about the new guidelines? It encourages vegetables, whether they be frozen or canned. People don't eat enough vegetables. I'd always prefer fresh encourages protein. That's a controversial point. I always will side with Doctor Valter Longo. The longevity diet, the founder of pro on and his, calculations that were, largely over stuffing ourselves with protein already encourages fruit and vegetable intake.

God blessed limit sugar old news with good news limits. Artificial dyes. Good news last processed food clearly good news. But what are the downsides and a minimum that the foods that are being encouraged are too high in saturated fat? It discourages eating whole grains. They're way at the bottom of the pyramid, encourages too much meat and cheese. Doesn't give a limit to alcohol. Doesn't emphasize plant based protein over animal based protein. And clearly we're winning the battle. A plant based protein doesn't give any exercise guidelines a lot of people don't like and understand the idea of a pyramid.

Moderation of non-nutritive sweeteners. Some controversy sweeteners, like a river or tall, may be quite unhealthy and kids know added sugar. Zero for kids is probably not realistic, but limiting it is very important.

USDA Food Pyramid Critique 8:51

So I love what, a colleague of mine, Doctor Beth, did, is she just turned the pyramid. A couple turns to the right. So now you can see the whole dairy, and the meat is at the tip of the pyramid. Don't do much of that. Of course I don't do any at all. And I love what's on the top of the pyramid now. The fruits, the vegetables, the whole grains. She added a big pile there to the right of nuts and seeds, because for some reason, beans also were not even present in the pyramid. That's the food pyramid that Americans need to learn.

So feel free to look her up and share that. One more topic of nutrition that I'm interested in recently has been, antibodies to certain components of food. So, for example, maybe you've heard of a red meat allergy, something called Alpha Gal. This is from Doctor Michael Greger's, nutrition facts that are videos. Of course, you can see alpha gal in the paragraph. It's people that eat red meat develop an antibody to it. And the next time they have a burger, they may start wheezing and other, anaphylactic shock manifestations.

It started around Virginia, in an area where there are a lot of tick bites from a tick called the Lone Star tick. Unfortunately, the area that is covered now by this tick is at least half the United States. It's estimated a million people in America that eat red meat can get, a red meat allergy. It can even be just a gelatin based vitamin A gelatin based, prescription drug. Not a vegan capsule, vitamin or prescription drug. And it's also known that in the interaction between our immune system and this, component of red meat called AlphaGo, you also can get inflammation.

If you read the paragraph there by Doctor Greger, you can get chronic inflammation in your heart arteries from a red meat allergy. So this may be a bigger deal than we understand. And there is data from this publication that a common food allergen may also be associated with cardiac disease. And this is looking at people that have an antibody in the blood to something called casein. Casein is a protein in dairy cows milk. And they looked at people that had a casein antibody. And you can get this blood test anywhere, all the big labs.

Food Allergies and Heart Disease 11:16

And if you don't have the antibody, you're not milk sensitized. If you have the antibody you're milk sensitized. And we look at two very large American databases. You'll see that over the course about 14 years, the number of actual heart deaths was higher in people with an antibody to the dairy protein called casein. So does this absolutely prove the point that maybe the allergy to dairy is driving inflammation in the heart? Arteries, like the allergy to red meat, is driving inflammation at heart already, so it doesn't prove it.

But it's very likely the case. And if you're concerned as your doctor, there is a blood test for the alpha gal antibody. And there is a blood test for the casein antibody. Almost done. Because I wish that 2026 was a year that I could authentically tell you that the holy grail of cardiology has arrived. This is a marketing piece sent to me a couple of months ago. You can see the date that a medication that's over the counter, I guess you'd call it a supplement, that you give as a rectal suppository drives incredible reversal of heart disease.

And the company put this out, and the company said that they published a research article in a journal called Cardiovascular Research and Cardiovascular Medicine. Well, there's two authors. The first author owns the company. So you always want to question, could there be bias? The second author is a well-known cardiologist and friend of mine. So when I saw this article that alleged that you can really shrink black with this rectal suppository over-the-counter product from Australia, I called up the physician and he told me a couple of things.

Number one, he didn't write this paper. Shocking to see his name on it. Number two, he never read this paper till it got published. Now we're there. He didn't approve of the paper and that any quotes by him in the paper came from his website that the owner of the company had lifted and used. Now they knew each other. The cardiologist wrote a letter to the journal and informed them that he had given no permission to use his website data as something purportedly to be an academic.

Questionable Claims and Closing Advice 13:34

Article number two, I learned that this journal will accept, I was told, articles for publication on a pay to play basis, but at any rate, they're reporting that they can reverse established coronary calcification. Our own FDA has so many questions about this that they generally don't let this product through customs into the United States. They have done it on and off. But right now, my understanding is they're not allowing it. They believe that there have been violations of communication and information and presenting the real data on this product.

It may be useful. And the cardiologist is doing a prospective study right now using a similar but, different source of this product. We'll have to wait and see. So this is the actual holy grail that I still respect and love. So when we get to the end, you've now had a two part presentation that I wore on heart attacks as needed. The time is now. We need to fight hard. We want to start young in life and prevent heart disease with ultimate lifestyle. Blood testing by age 40, some kind of imaging of the carotid arteries, of the heart arteries.

And if plaque is identified, like those people in the Spanish banker work or studies, we want to apply lifestyle, plant based diets, fitness, sleep, stress reduction, optimizing vitamin levels. We want to use, science backed supplements and, if needed, prescription drugs. So I thank you very much for joining me on this presentation. And I look forward to, discussing with you by any way you can reach out to me. I'm easy to find. Thank you.