Full Transcript Opening on Movement and Longevity 0:00 The thing that we have that is the most effective thing we can possibly do to extend our lifespan and avoid dying early is jumping around, 0:10 moving our physical body for 20 or 30 minutes each day. 0:13 No pharmaceutical in existence can compare to the longevity enhancing disease preventative effects of doing the simple thing. 0:23 Welcome to the Natural Heart Doctor show. 0:25 I'm cardiologist Dr. 0:26 Jack Wolfson. 0:28 Heart problems don't come from a drug deficiency. 0:30 They come root causes where cardiologists never look. 0:34 On this show, I sit down with experts who challenge the mainstream rhetoric and talk about what actually builds a heart built to last. 0:41 Get ready for a dose of cardiac longevity. 0:46 Alright everyone, welcome back to another fantastic episode of the Heart Attack and Stroke Prevention Summit. 0:50 I'm cardiologist Dr. 0:52 Jack Wolfson and today I have the privilege of interviewing a person who I certainly consider a friend and someone who is extremely knowledgeable in the 1:01 health and wellness space and One of his books that he wrote, The Ultimate Guide to Red Light Therapy, I think is absolutely fantastic. 1:08 He's also got Eat for Energy, How to Beat Fatigue and Supercharge of Mitochondria for all-day energy and your heart will not function and you will have 1:15 a heart attack or a stroke if you don't have mitochondrial energy. 1:18 So the founder of Energy Blueprint, Ari Witten, he's here with us today. 1:22 Again, He has written some best-selling books.
Introducing Ari Witten and the Energy Blueprint 1:24 He has a bachelor's in kinesiology certifications from the National Academy of Sports Medicine and is a corrective exercise specialist. 1:32 So we're going to talk about physical activity, movement, exercise, and performance enhancement specialist, he spoke all over the world, 1:38 big stages, a lot of people know him, master's of science in human nutrition and functional medicine. 1:42 He's a family man, He is an outdoor. 1:46 Man, and he's been in this space for a long time. 1:48 Anyways, Ari, welcome to the summit. 1:50 Thanks for having me, Dr. 1:52 Wolfson. 1:52 It's always a pleasure to be with you. 1:53 No, thank you so much. 1:54 All right. 1:54 So listen, you know, undoubtedly when I think about energy and I thing about mitochondrial and cellular energy, I'm thinking about a lot of the stuff I've 2:02 learned from you, so break that down for us as far as what does it mean to have energy? 2:05 And what are the problems if we don't? 2:07 So, you know, I think the bottom line when it comes to energy, without delving into the physiology and the biochemistry of how we make energy and all the 2:18 sort of the more geeky science stuff around energy. 2:21 Energy is the fuel of life. 2:23 Like energy is what allows us to live a full life and do whatever it is we want to do. 2:29 And that becomes clear to you as soon as you don't have much of it. 2:34 You know, when I was in my mid twenties, I got mononucleosis and I get wiped out for close to a year with severe chronic fatigue. 2:42 And I, was a fit, healthy guy. 2:48 factors that went into this, I was in a super moldy house, i was extremely sleep deprived,i was stressed out of my mind and then i got hit with mononucleosis 2:57 and it just wiped me out and i went from being an athlete, being a fit healthy guy for all my life to all of a sudden not having any energy and I didn't 3:05 have The energy to hang out with my friends, my girlfriend, I didn't have the energy. 3:09 To do my job. 3:10 I don't. 3:10 Have the. 3:11 Energy to go to school and to study. 3:13 My brain didn.t work. 3:14 my body didn' work I couldn't do any of the things that I wanted to do. 3:17 And, and that's ultimately what it's like to have chronic fatigue is it. 3:21 It's, it' like being trapped in a prison inside of your own body. 3:25 You just, you can't function. 3:27 Your brain wants to do certain things, but you don't have the inner fuel that allows your cells to actually function and perform well enough to what you 3:37 want to in the world. 3:38 So give us a little bit of science.
What Energy and Chronic Fatigue Really Mean 3:40 And I know you could go super geek mode because I've heard that and go totally down the rabbit hole of biochemistry, if you will, 3:45 into some really fundamental basics. 3:48 But maybe talk to us about. 3:50 What does it mean to have that mitochondrial energy? 3:53 How is that Mitochondria involved? 3:56 how does the total cell, the cell membrane become involved and then ultimately we'll get into how that lack thereof leads to heart attack and stroke. 4:05 Yeah. 4:06 Well, one of the big, I think, ideas that we are all educated with when it comes to mitochondria is, first of all, you know, 4:13 at a low level, we learn in sort of grade school, mitochondrial is the powerhouse of cell. 4:17 That's the thing you got to remember on your multiple choice exam. 4:20 It gets a little more sophisticated when you get into high school. 4:23 You learn a bit more about ATP. 4:26 And then at the undergraduate level and graduate level, you got into the biochemistry of mitochondria and the electron transport chain and different complexes 4:35 and NADH. 4:37 Here's how food as fuel is ultimately transformed biochemically through this electron transfer chain into ATP in the cell by the mitochondrion. 4:47 And when we look at it from that frame, we tend to understand mitochondria really as these sort of mindless cellular energy generators. 4:57 Their job is just to sort take in the food we eat and pump out ATP. 5:02 And in recent years, it's really been discovered largely through the work of Dr. 5:06 Robert Naviot, who runs a lab for mitochondrial medicine at the University of California, San Diego. 5:12 He published a paper about a decade ago called The Cell Danger Response. 5:16 And this, this was a synthesis of sort of insights and research that's been done for the last few decades by researchers studying mitochondria all over 5:26 the world. 5:26 And the big insight from this research is that mitochondrion are actually much more than just mindless cellular energy generators that take in the food 5:37 we eat and pump out ATP. 5:38 They are really the canaries in a coal mine of our body.They are exquisitely sensitive environmental sensors. 5:47 And in Dr. 5:48 Naviot's words, they are the central hub of the wheel of metabolism. 5:52 And we hear this word metabolism, people think about weight loss and resting metabolic rate, but metabolism is really the, 5:58 basically all of the biochemical reactions, the totality of everything happening in all the cells in your body. 6:05 That's what metabolism. 6:07 And so mitochondria, he's saying, are the central hub of The Wheel of Metabolism. 6:12 They aren't just, you know, sort of one of many organelles, over here you have the Golgi apparatus and here's the lysosomes and the nucleus and then here 6:20 is the mitochondrion, right? 6:22 It's, no, mitochondria are really, really important in, in the big picture of human physiology and human health. 6:29 And the, I would say the main insight to oversimplify a bit here, the mean insight from the cell danger response, Naviot's all of his work is really that 6:41 mitochondrion actually have two roles. 6:43 One is as energy generators, which is the side of the story we all learn about and the other side. 6:48 is danger sensors, these environmental sensors that are designed to basically constantly sample what's going on inside the body and say, 6:59 are we safe? 7:01 Are we in danger? 7:03 are under attack? 7:04 And to the degree that the mitochondria are picking up on danger signals, their job is to, as sort of the canaries of coalmine, 7:13 that first layer of sensors that's picking up on those threats or those stresses, those danger signals, their job is basically to say,
Mitochondria as Energy Generators and Danger Sensors 7:22 okay, we're going to turn down the dial on energy production, our role as energy generators, and we are going switch our resources. 7:30 We're gonna queue the body to switch over to cellular defense mode, And we gonna go into responding to this threat. 7:37 And so basically what's critical to understand is that these two roles, these to modes of operation of how our cells and how are physiology can operate 7:46 are mutually exclusive. 7:48 So to the degree that the mitochondria are picking up on signals that make them decide to shift into danger mode, they are shifting out of energy production mode. 7:59 And that is the fundamental driver of what controls our subjective energy levels. 8:05 That's fantastic. 8:05 So in the case of the mitochondria, as amazing as the body is in mitochondrion, the cells are, what you're saying is you can't do two things at once. 8:13 You can, especially effectively like you ideally would. 8:19 In that scenario, just give me like a little sample of what is the Mitochondria is doing in that cell danger response mode mode like what is actually you 8:30 know you say it's sampling of what's going on and obviously you're talking about the dangers of environmental toxins pollutants of which there are infinite 8:37 we already you we could discuss that all day but again as those toxins come in what does the mitochondria then going out and doing well so it can be toxins 8:45 it could actually be any number of different stressors so basically I'll give you a quick rundown. 8:51 Any type of stressor or threat to the body that, and it could be something as simple as alcohol consumption, cigarette smoking, 9:00 junk food, you know, eating a poor diet. 9:03 It could sleep deprivation, it can be psychological stress. 9:06 There's a whole field of research called mitochondrial psychobiology that is about the mind mitochondria connection. 9:12 And they've shown that what happens at the level of the minds affects the mitochondrion literally within a matter of seconds. 9:19 mitochondria throughout the body. 9:20 And it could be environmental toxins, it can be pathogens, physical stressors, overexertion. 9:26 It could a long list of different things. 9:29 Ultimately, these different stressor or threats converge on a few different pathways mechanistically. 9:36 They might cause an overabundance of reactive oxygen species. 9:40 or reactive nitrogen species, they might cause an increase in inflammatory cytokines, or they may cause actual cellular damage, 9:48 in which case you get leakage of contents from the cell into the bloodstream and certain compounds from inside the cells when they leak into blood stream. 9:57 actually act as signaling molecules that the mitochondria are designed to pick up on and sense that damage occurring. 10:03 And that's a signal that body is under threat, that something's happening that is damaging the body. 10:09 So almost every type of stressor you can imagine, including what you mentioned as environmental toxicants. 10:14 ultimately converge on those few pathways. 10:16 And so through those simple, you know, few, pathways, the mitochondria can pick up on basically any type of threat you can imagine from having an infection. 10:25 What's a classic sign of getting a cold or a flu or COVID or something? 10:29 Fatigue, right? 10:30 This is, this is part of a big part, of what drives that, that symptom. 10:34 The same with physical overexertion, same, with eating a junk diet, The Same with environmental toxicants and any other type, 10:40 or stressor you could think of. 10:41 So you're getting really to the root cause of inflammation and oxidative stress. 10:46 So, you know, all the medical doctors and I mean, that's, practicing holistically as well. 10:51 We love to talk about oxidant stress, measure oxidate of stress and you are getting into, well, when you measure, oxidated stress this is what's happening 10:59 at a mitochondrial level, right? 11:00 You're just producing all these pro-oxidative factors. 11:03 Of course, your antioxidant system is not working and now you're out of balance, you are out that accident of stress. 11:07 The medical docs know that it's linked to heart disease. 11:09 They don't have any solutions for it outside of pharmaceuticals. 11:12 Yes. 11:13 It might be an interesting path to go down to talk about reactive oxygen species and there's a whole set of misconceptions in that area. 11:21 You asked me about what happens inside the cell when the mitochondria pick up on danger signals. 11:26 So when they do pick-up on those threats, once they determine those threads exceed their capacity to handle those stressors, 11:34 that's an important point we might want to go into later. 11:37 Basically, they switch into what Naviot termed the cell danger response. 11:41 And there's a whole sequence of different changes that happen. 11:44 The mitochondria start producing less ATP and start, producing more reactive oxygen species.
Cell Danger Response, Inflammation, and Oxidative Stress 11:49 Actually, reactive, oxygen, species can be sometimes more commonly referred to as free radicals. 11:56 can be part of the cellular defense mechanism, for example, against pathogens. 12:00 So mitochondria are designed in certain cases to actually start throwing off more reactive oxygen species. 12:06 That's part the body's immune response, the innate immune responses. 12:09 Another part is that cell membranes stiffen. 12:13 So instead of being very permeable and very fluid, they start to stiffen up and decrease communication between cells. 12:20 And that's basically a protective mechanism. 12:22 Like if you've got something bad inside your cells, the body's trying to seal it off and prevent it from traveling throughout the whole system. 12:30 It's designed to coordinate an immune response, it's design to increase inflammatory cytokines. 12:36 There's a whole sequence of different responses that involve the immune system in particular to get it to respond to this. 12:43 This is why, you know, there's all this hubbub about chronic inflammation. 12:47 Inflammation, people talk about inflammation causing all these sorts of diseases.Inflamation is part of the body's response. 12:55 to problems that are present. 12:57 It's not the ultimate root cause in and of itself, and there's a lot of confusion around that point. 13:02 Chronic inflammation is a sign that something is wrong in the body, but it is not. 13:06 Yeah, you know, because that goes back to some of the work from Paul Ridker, who's pretty famous cardiologist, lipidologist where he did some early statin 13:15 trials where they were looking not at lipids as an endpoint, they where looking at elevated HSCRP as an endpoint. 13:22 And what they found, people with high CRP, they lowered it down with statin drugs. 13:27 They get a little tiny benefit. 13:28 Everybody got excited, which just kind of speaks to the fact that nobody's going after root cause. 13:33 It's all like, yeah, we know inflammation's bad. 13:35 All we have is aspirin and maybe some other new biological therapies that they're trying, but there's never any discussion about all of these mechanisms 13:45 that are happening to lead to that area. 13:48 You know, people talk about hacking, hacking our biology, biohacking. 13:53 Now, a lot of people, I think, don't realize that the ultimate in bio-hackin', what epitomizes it, like the pinnacle of the bio hacking approach is actually 14:02 conventional medicine. 14:03 conventional medicine, where we try to study the specific mechanisms and pathology and biochemistry of diseases. 14:10 And then we tried to hack a solution by saying, here's the specifically mechanism that we think is causing atherosclerosis. 14:18 Here's that mechanism causing depression. 14:20 here is the mechanism we thinks causing Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. 14:24 and let's go into our chemistry laboratories and synthesize a man-made chemical that blocks or interrupts that mechanism and tries to solve it in that way. 14:34 It's the pinnacle of a hacking approach. 14:36 The problem is it just doesn't work very well for almost all of the chronic disease burden that now afflicts modern humanity. 14:43 Yeah, most certainly, I'm very critical on medicine. 14:48 And again, to me, God bless the men and women who work in emergency rooms and trauma centers. 14:52 Then there is a time and a place for pharmaceuticals, but it's at the end of the game, not at resides. 15:01 Now, as it relates to, you know, again, food, uh, foods becomes energy. 15:04 You mentioned that before, and along with the protons, the hydrogen, that protons that are coming in, they were breaking down from food. 15:12 Then we're going to combine that with oxygen. 15:14 And that's going be your concept, right? 15:17 Where you're so heavily involved with breath work. 15:19 So maybe, maybe touch on that a little bit where, where breathwork really comes into, cause we were living around infinite stressors, 15:27 activating that cell danger response. 15:29 maybe unpack that a little bit as far as where we go with breath work. 15:33 What if your heart could actually get better, not just managed? 15:37 What If your recovery didn't depend on adding more prescription drugs, but on finally understanding why your Heart is struggling in the first place? 15:45 I'm Dr. 15:46 Jack Wolfson, cardiologist at Natural Heart Doctor, and we believe heart disease isn't random, it's a message. 15:52 It's a message that inflammation, toxins, nutrient deficiencies or lifestyle stressors are driving your symptoms beneath the surface. 16:01 That's why our approach goes far beyond the band-aid, typical cardiology approaches. 16:06 What we do is if we want to prevent, treat and reverse cardiovascular disease, we help you develop a natural evidence-based plan to help your heart recover. 16:15 So if you're ready to move past fear, past confusion, and past just take this and wait, you deserve real answers. 16:22 Visit naturalheartdoctor.com forward slash discovery and get the answers you've been searching for. 16:28 The answers that can help you achieve your best heart health. 16:31 Your next chapter with a simple free discovery call should start now. 16:37 Breathwork offers a lot of different benefits physiologically. 16:41 It requires a bit of a deep dive to get into some of the sort of underlying science behind it. 16:47 But one of, one are the interesting things about breathing that most people don't understand very well is the role of CO2.
Breathwork, CO2, and Oxygen Delivery 16:54 CO 2 carbon dioxide is something that we're sort of taught growing up is just this waste product. 17:00 It's like a by-product of we get oxygen, we produce this, waste gas of carbon dioxide, and we need to exhale it. 17:06 But carbon-dioxide is actually critically important in human physiology. 17:11 And there's a principle called the Bohr effect, B-O-H-R. 17:16 Basically this has to do with the oxygen dissociation curve. 17:23 on red blood cells. 17:24 Okay. 17:24 So oxygen binds to red cells and it needs to be held there as it flows around your bloodstream. 17:38 in the bloodstream, in blood vessels, and then they need to release that oxygen at the appropriate time. 17:44 And how do they know when to released it? 17:47 Well, it's primarily dictated by pH, based on how alkaline or acidic that environment is, that affects how tightly bound that Oxygen is to the red blood cell. 17:59 Basically, In the presence of a more acidic environment, Oxygen tends to release from the red blood cell in the presence of higher levels of carbon dioxide. 18:09 The oxygen tends release and it tends go off the Red Blood Cell and then diffuse out of the bloodstream into the cell. 18:15 Okay. 18:16 Now what's really interesting about that is that humans, based on how we breathe, we will have a different level of, carbon based, 18:25 on, how, and a few other factors like our diet actually, even our psychological stress. 18:30 can affect our carbon dioxide tolerance, which is essentially how much carbon di oxide we are holding in our body. 18:38 So we have this misconception again, that we inhale oxygen, we exhale carbon, dioxide, but actually we hold quite a lot of the carbon. 18:46 Dioxide that is produced on each breath. 18:49 We, hold it. 18:50 we don't get rid of it all. 18:51 each breath. 18:52 It stays in the body and that's designed for a reason. 18:55 We want to maintain that carbon dioxide in lungs and we want maintain a certain level of carbon-dioxide systemically in our body. 19:02 And that level, of CO2 that we're maintaining internally varies between individuals and it's largely dependent on what is your carbon di-oxide tolerance. 19:14 Okay, so if you happen to be very fit and do lots of exercise, you will tend to have A higher carbon dioxide tolerance, which means your body will tend 19:24 to hold more carbon, dioxide, and that by holding more, carbon-dioxide, it tends to lead to more efficient oxygen delivery to the cells. 19:33 Ultimately, that's, what this all boils down to. 19:36 Having a higher, Carbon dioxide. 19:37 Tolerance means ultimately you're going to be better at getting the oxygen from your lungs to your blood, to, the, cells where you want it to go. 19:46 So fitter people will do that well. 19:48 If you, if you don't exercise regularly, you will have a lower carbon dioxide level and you'll tend to be less effective in delivering oxygen to the cells. 19:58 Another layer to this story that's really interesting is diet. 20:01 the acid load of your diet will actually affect the pH of you bloodstream. 20:07 And one of the key ways that the body has a pH buffering system built into it to maintain a certain level of pH in the blood. 20:15 One of ways it deals with that acid-load from the diet is by lowering levels of carbon dioxide in your blood So there's a complex aspect of this sort of 20:27 multiple variables that can affect it, like from your diet to your fitness level. 20:31 But these things tend to drive down your overall carbon dioxide level and your carbon-dioxide tolerance, ultimately, which means your body is going to 20:40 deliver oxygen to the cells much less effectively. 20:43 So one of the key things we can do, as you might imagine, is increase our level of fitness, right? 20:48 That's, that's a critical way to do it, to increase your carbon dioxide tolerance. 20:52 Another key way do this is to improve our diet. 20:55 Part of problem is as a result of so many years and decades of doing the wrong things, The carbon dioxide tolerance gets set at quite a low level and we 21:06 have to do the work to rebuild that back up. 21:09 And this is really where breath work comes in and is a really powerful tool to rapidly increase that carbon-dioxide tolerance and start to. 21:18 make a big change in how your body handles and delivers oxygen to the cells. 21:23 So one of the fastest ways, the best ways that we can do this is by actually practicing with a load, a high load of carbon dioxide. 21:32 Every time we hold our breath, while we're holding our breathe, carbon-dioxide levels build up dramatically in our system. 21:39 And if we practice that regularly, just like going to the gym and lifting heavy weights or going on the treadmill and challenging our muscles by challenging 21:48 the system metabolically by building up those internal carbon dioxide levels over the course of days and a few weeks, we can start to build up that carbon-dioxide 21:58 tolerance and it will even manifest as altering our normal breathing rate. 22:01 So you'll start to see that you're breathing less at rest than you used to. 22:06 You might go from breathing 15 or 18 breaths per minute, down to 13 or 12 or 10 or 8 breaths, per-minute with practice. 22:15 And basically that's a sign of how efficient, not only your respiratory system is, but also a side of, how high your carbon dioxide levels, 22:23 your, carbon-dioxide thresholds are, so that basically how efficiently can you take in and deliver oxygen to the cells? 22:31 Do you need to breathe 18 breaths per minute or do you to breath eight or 10 breaths? 22:36 And is that the metric that we're going to follow? 22:39 Is that that objective measurement? 22:40 How else would you kind of be able to track success on this? 22:44 The easiest metric to use is what's called the BOLT score, body oxygen level test. 22:50 And the way we can do it is actually very easy. 22:53 You can it in right now. 22:54 I can guide people through it on exactly how to do this, literally in the next minute. 22:59 But basically what we do is we take a few just normal breaths, okay, not deep breaths. 23:05 Just normal, typical depth. 23:08 of breath through your nose, in and out. 23:10 And then at the end of a normal exhale, again, not fully exhale. 23:14 Not forcing the air out, just a normally breath. 23:16 At the of the normal, exhale pinch our nose and see how long you can hold before you have the first clear urge to breathe. 23:25 that you can hold comfortably before you have a strong urge to breathe is your Bolt Score. 23:30 And so typically what people experience, what most people will have is they might have Bolt score somewhere in the neighborhood of sometimes it's as low 23:39 as five or six seconds. 23:40 More typically it might be 12 or 20 seconds, but where you want it to be, where it is in a really healthy fit person is about 40 or 45 seconds minimum. 23:50 Very cool. 23:51 Okay. 23:52 When you talk about physical activity, Um, you know, what are your, some of your physical activities, your movements that you think are going to be most 24:00 beneficial to improve that kind of, as you said, the CO2 exchange, increasing those cellular levels of CO two exercises. 24:08 And then of course I'm thinking about, well, right, back when somebody was hyperventilating, he would put a paper bag over their face. 24:14 Is there any, is there, any hack in that sense? 24:16 There's, there's some subtle use of rebreathing in at CO 2. is that a way to cheat the system?
BOLT Score and Breath Training 24:22 It's another way of challenging the system, similarly to holding your breath. 24:27 It is a way to actually build up carbon dioxide levels in the body. 24:31 And it can be used in certain cases of panic attacks. 24:34 I don't know actually the efficacy of that context of using it in an acute way, to try to manage panic attack or something like that. 24:41 But theoretically it's a similar challenge to hold your breathe. 24:49 You're basically doing something that's going to build up carbon dioxide levels in the body. 24:54 What's really interesting is carbon-dioxide levels also tie into, it ties into stress and fear processing in brain. 25:03 So there are experiments where you can basically, where they've had people just inhale a mixture of 5% or 7CO2, which is a higher concentration of CO2. 25:14 And just by inhaling that gas. 25:17 it will rapidly induce a feeling of stress and anxiety. 25:21 Okay, so what's really interesting, and this is an area that's somewhat speculative, there's still like some holes in the literature of things that need 25:29 to be clarified. 25:30 But what is clear is that there is interplay between our breathing and our stress-and-fear processing at the level of the brain. 25:39 And this makes sense, right? 25:40 Like if, if you have the feeling of being choked or suffocated, it's you want to have a red alert going off in your brain, 25:49 letting you know, whoa, you're in serious danger. 25:52 You need to deal with this threat so you don't die from suffocation right now. 25:56 Right? 25:57 Like it's, it was to our evolutionary advantage to have a sensitive system alerting us to the feeling of suffocation. 26:04 What's interesting is that that feeling, of I can't breathe, is actually much more driven by high CO2 levels than it is driven, 26:12 by low oxygen levels. 26:14 Okay. 26:14 So, for example, free divers, when they hold their breath and they go underwater, the training is much, more about decreasing the brain's reactiveness 26:24 to CO2, at least at the beginning stages, actually, I should clarify. 26:29 The beginning stage is it's way more about decreasing your brain's reactiveness to having elevated CO two levels than it is about actually entering a low 26:39 oxygen state. 26:40 So as an interesting test, you can put on a pulse oximeter on your finger. 26:44 It's a cheap device, costs 15 or 20 bucks on Amazon, and you see your blood oxygen saturation. 26:49 And so what somebody who is not experienced, somebody, who's not an experienced free diver, like most people, they will put this blood oximeter on. 26:58 And if we said right now, okay, hold your breath for as long as you can. 27:02 They would hold their breath. 27:03 Maybe they get to 45 seconds. 27:08 And then they feel a tremendous urge to breathe. 27:10 They feel like they're running out of oxygen. 27:12 If you looked at the pulse oximeter, it would probably still be showing 98, 99 oxygen saturation of the red blood cells. 27:19 So that urge is driven by high CO2 levels, not actually by being in a hypoxic state, by, being a state of low oxygen levels. 27:28 But with training over the course of just a few weeks, what will start to happen as you practice breath holds is your brain's responsiveness to having 27:37 elevated CO2 levels will, start, to go down. 27:40 You'll start become less sensitive to high CO 2 or another way of stating that is, your CO two threshold goes up and you'll, 27:48 you start look down at your pulse oximeter and, and start seeing your blood oxygen level actually starting to drop now. 27:55 before you feel the urge to breathe. 27:58 So maybe you get it down to 90 or 85 or, you know, I've gone into the 60s even, and maybe sometimes into 50s on occasion. 28:08 And so you can get that blood oxygen saturation way into hypoxic states before your feel that urge breathe and most of that adaptation in the initial phases 28:20 is about increasing the CO2 threshold decreasing the brain's sensitivity and reactivity to elevated CO 2 levels. 28:26 But the point I wanted to make is because of how that ties into stress and fear processing in the. 28:32 There's quite a bit of research showing that higher CO two thresholds also help reduce stress.
Exercise, CO2 Tolerance, and Stress Reduction 28:38 And anxiety as well. 28:39 Very interesting. 28:40 So, you know, to kind of summarize this, essentially, we're talking about mitochondrial energy and we are talking preventing the excess inflammation oxidative 28:51 stress at a mitochondria level. 28:52 Because when we have that excess, inflammation, oxidated stress, it's clearly linked to heart attack through many different mechanisms of how that's happening 29:02 and obviously in that scenario you're going to have decreased energy production, decreased ATP production and therefore affecting really every metabolic 29:11 response and anything that would, you know, in the scenario, right, if the mitochondria of an endothelial cell is not working you are going have leaky 29:21 endotherium and you'll have a lot of these oxidized particles getting into the endothelium, inflammation, oxidative stress, 29:28 macrophages, foam cells, plaque formation, rupture and death. 29:31 So it's all linked in together. 29:33 I just want the audience to make sure, you know, that they kind of get where a lot of this is going. 29:38 And ultimately your strategies, which I want to hear about how, because people are going to be very interested obviously in how they can work with you. 29:46 to walk through these different breathing and exercise and a lot of the work that you've already done. 29:51 So maybe tell us about your program and where people can learn more. 29:56 I like how you started at mitochondria and then you tracked things down to sort of more of biochemical molecular level, the cellular bio-chemical, 30:06 molecular-level, foam cells, macrophages, all these kinds of things, talking about the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. 30:13 I think one of the big insights, one the shifts that I would think would be very beneficial for people, particularly around heart health and risk of heart 30:23 disease and athroscleroses is actually being able to track things in the kind of sequence that you just presented. 30:30 And here's what I mean by that. 30:33 We have a tendency in our culture, very much reinforced by the conventional medical paradigm and way of understanding health and disease, 30:40 that is very about the micro level. 30:43 It's very, much about what's happening at the cellular and even more so what is happening the biochemical and molecular level and what are the specific 30:54 micro-level mechanisms that are driving this particular disease. 31:00 And we fundamentally confuse something. 31:02 We think that the more micro the scale that we are looking at a problem, the More we get out our magnifying glass and our microscope and the higher powered microscope, 31:13 and look and peer into the most micro level parts of a particular problem. 31:17 we think we're arriving closer to the truth of its level of causation as we do that. 31:22 And actually we're getting something fundamentally backward here, because the actual level of causation of heart disease isn't at that level. 31:32 It's at the macro level, it's a macro-level of how we are living. 31:36 And this is why we can go to a hunter-gatherer population somewhere in the middle of the jungle in Amazon. 31:43 Like for example, the recently studied tribe of Cimane tribe, its spelled T-S-I-M-A-N-E in Bolivia. 31:51 who have now been shown to have the best cardiovascular health and the lowest rates of cardiovascular disease of any group of humans that's ever been studied. 32:00 It's not because they have accumulated some vast body of knowledge around the specific biochemistry of atherosclerosis and have developed through that 32:10 body knowledge, manmade chemicals to intervene in those processes. 32:14 They have in fact, no knowledge of, any of that stuff. 32:18 nor do they have access to modern medicine, nor did they access any pharmaceuticals of any kind. 32:23 They also, by the way, have the best brain health and the lowest rates of dementia and Alzheimer's of human population ever studied. 32:31 So we have to understand that the ways that we've been taught to think about these problems are fundamentally misguided in many, 32:40 many ways. 32:41 And rather than assuming that the answer to heart disease rests in more knowledge of the mechanisms and pathogenesis of heart diseases and more chemicals 32:52 devised by pharmaceutical company chemistry laboratories. 32:55 What if another way of thinking about it was, well, why don't we go look at the people who actually have the lowest rates of cardiovascular disease on 33:03 the planet and try to replicate more of the things that they do? 33:06 Right?
Root Causes of Heart Disease and Evolutionary Mismatch 33:08 That would make more sense to us in any other context of life. 33:12 But when it comes to human health, we've been taught to think of it as a matter of accumulating knowledge of diseases, the micro-level mechanisms, 33:20 synthesizing man-made chemicals in a laboratory. 33:22 It's almost like a conspiracy you'd say maybe, right? 33:25 Where, you know, that the controllers and the pharmaceutical companies in bed with the doctors and hospitals almost want us to not understand those common 33:36 sense things. 33:36 Right? 33:36 Somebody can, and I know because I've listened to you on different podcasts and stuff like that and how you've gone a little bit deep. 33:45 with us here on how, like you said, you can go into quantum level discussions. 33:53 You can to these subatomic particles that are infinitely small and talk about the science of how that all impacts things. 34:00 But these are really just common sense things when you, and you could tell people, hey, if you want to do a super duper deep dive, 34:08 yeah, go ahead and do it. 34:08 10 and dozens of years of deep science work that somebody could do. 34:14 Or you can just understand, these are the foods of our hunter, gatherer, forager ancestors. 34:20 This is how they spend time outside. 34:23 this is when they went to sleep. 34:25 You know, this the physical activity. 34:27 Their toxin burden level was obviously extraordinarily low compared to what it is. 34:32 There's a strong sense of community. 34:36 and spirituality and self-worth and acceptance and purpose and all these other things that just make it so simplistic. 34:45 It really is a beautiful, beautiful thing. 34:47 And that's all really people need to know. 34:49 What's really interesting about that is Our brains are programmed to see all of this knowledge of all the mechanisms of disease and all that fancy, 35:01 you know, pharmaceutical companies, technology that screens for these diseases, the pharmaceutical drugs for those diseases. 35:09 We're programmed, to believe that that is, of course, obviously going to lead to a vastly superior result than all those primitive stuff that you talked 35:19 about of just eating healthy foods and doing exercise in the gym. 35:23 and having a healthy circadian rhythm and managing our stress and blah, blah blah. 35:27 Like we are very enamored with technology and knowledge of all these mechanisms of diseases such that our brains believe that that must be the more effective route. 35:37 And in fact, the opposite is true. 35:39 These seemingly much more primitive, much less scientifically sophisticated interventions are actually likely to lead to vastly more powerful results. 35:49 Here's an interesting way of conceptualizing that. 35:52 You know, over the last roughly 75 years, during which time heart disease has been the number one killer in the US during that entire time, 36:02 we have poured trillions of dollars into researching and understanding heart diseases. 36:08 And we've synthesized all of conventional medicine and all this collective research that's been done over roughly the past century has synthesised millions 36:20 We've accumulated an enormous body of knowledge, a Himalayan, an Everest-sized mountain of knowledge on the specific micro-level mechanisms of atherosclerosis 36:31 and every other disease. 36:32 And we've gone into the laboratory with trillions of dollars of funding and synthesized millions of pharmaceutical candidates. 36:41 of which 19,000 of, which have gone on to FDA approval. 36:46 And with all of that knowledge, we just, even with every drug we've synthesized, the thing that we have that is the most effective thing we can possibly 36:56 do to extend our lifespan and avoid dying early is jumping around, moving our physical body for 20 or 30 minutes each day. 37:05 No pharmaceutical in existence can compare to the longevity enhancing disease preventative effects of doing the simple thing. 37:13 And why should that be the case that just like moving your physical body should be so good for us? 37:19 It's of course, because. 37:22 That's what our body is designed to do. 37:24 And the modern world has presented us with an unprecedented degree of evolutionary mismatch. 37:30 We are living in a world and in the lifestyle that is fundamentally mismatched to our biological needs, to what are biology requires to express health 37:42 as its natural default state. 37:44 And then we're trying to, when we, as a result of that mismatch, get all these diseases, and about 80% of the chronic disease burden is our diseases of 37:56 evolutionary mismatched. 37:56 When we get these disease, we ignore the actual root causes at the level of this mismatching that I'm describing. 38:04 And instead we research the mechanisms, develop drugs in a laboratory to try to cure the disease.
Simple Lifestyle Habits and Closing Remarks 38:09 And this is why just simply jumping around or riding a bike or going for a jog for 20 or 30 minutes is more effective than any drug. 38:18 It's because it actually addresses the underlying root causes. 38:23 Just one layer of the factors that drives most of modern chronic disease. 38:28 And all that stuff you just mentioned is totally free. 38:30 Totally free, totally. 38:32 You know, the typical stuff we talk about, right? 38:34 Sunshine, sleep, physical activity, movement. 38:37 It's all free. 38:38 Yeah. 38:39 Hashtag no excuses. 38:40 Ari, how do people find you, Ari? 38:42 You can go to my website, TheEnergyBlueprint.com. 38:44 There you go. 38:45 Simple enough. 38:46 Thank you so much. 38:47 Brilliant, brilliant stuff. 38:48 Arie Witten, thank you for this episode of the Heart Attack and Stroke Prevention and Recovery Summit. 38:54 We'll see you next time with another fantastic guest. 38:57 Until then, be well. 38:58 Good job, my friend. 38:59 Thanks, Jack. 38:59 Pleasure chatting with you. 39:00 Thanks for listening to the Natural Heart Doctors show. 39:03 If this episode challenged what you thought you knew about heart health, make sure you follow the show so you don't miss what's next. 39:10 And if you're ready for a deeper personalized approach, you can schedule a complimentary discovery call at naturalheartdoctor.com forward slash discovery.
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