Why Your LDL Number Isn’t Enough (After 30 Years in Practice)

The heart beats about 103,680 times, pumping blood through 60,000 miles of blood vessels. First off, what have we done for our heart lately? 103.688 times?

Doing a little clicking pen one day. 103 680x? I think my thumb was safe. I'm not showing up tomorrow. Welcome to Health Breakthroughs with Dr. Stengler.

I'm Dr Mark Stegler and each episode we cut through the noise to bring you practical, science-backed insights for more energy, better health and a life that feels like yours again.

Hey everybody, so good to be with you. With my friend Dr Chris Miletus. Why he's been in medicine for many, many years. I'll let him describe that well over 25 years, because I've been a mess in over 20, five years and he has been practicing longer than I have an author.

He's an educator for doctors for the public. And he was also an educators for Vitaleo clinics at vitaleohealth.com. But Dr. Meletus, great to have you on the show.

We're going to talk about gut health and inflammation and that connection between the two. But before we get into it, tell us more about yourself. You have quite a background, written many books.

I know I do want to hear about a few of your words, which unless I push on it you're not going let the audience know about them, but please go ahead. Well, thank you.

So yeah, my journey into naturopathic medicine, I'm a natiropathy doctor for 30, almost 32 years. I graduated in 1992. so I think that means something.

If practice makes perfect, either getting perfect or being old or perfectly old. I'm now full of more dad jokes than I used to be full. And that's, of course, repealed, I know about dad's jokes.

It happens with age. I've been in practice a long time, written a total of 18 books. We'll cover my 19th book, a second edition of Fertility. As we look at gut health, which we'll talk about today, and we're looking at human fertility, fertility levels are dropping precipitously.

If we were any other species, we'd be like, well, okay, outcomes with autism are, first, very pronounced. fertility levels are dropping, and we'd probably be on a watch, but not in danger.

It was clearly not an endangerment, clearly a Watchlist. There's something going on. And I was back to a copy of the Day of Food and so forth. My most recent book was called MMM Theory, which is a microbial mucosal milieu.

That sounds like, well, that's a perfect conversation for the gut. But I also, in that book, speak about the skin microbiome, brain microbiomes, microbiomas of the bloodstream, the uterus, bladder, prostate.

And they just recently found that in the semen, there's actually a change in microbiota and microbioma of seminal vesicles, altering fertility. Like, who's working for who?

Are we working the bacteria we're working together? Yeah. Yeah, no, you're right. And so there's this pronounced gut body connection, basically every organ cell in the body, there is connection.

Tell us a bit more. People hear about the term inflammation. They kind of get sensitive, pain, aching, maybe fever and all that. Maybe tell the viewers a little bit about what inflammation is and then let's get into the gut.

I do want to hear more about your new book and, and some of that newer research because it sounds like you've taken the microbiome connection to another level, but yeah, go ahead.

Well, so a term that you and I both know came out of Europe, the term Inflammaging. And now, of course, it's very pretty. So the more inflammation we have, whether it be gut-related, elsewhere in our body, is an aggregate.

Often you do an inflammation or C-reactive protein or a sed-rate or interleukin-6. But if you add up all the inflammation, like we add all of the microbiomes, we start looking at, well, what's the total burden?

And we all have a genetic susceptibility. We're prone to certain things genetically. There's epigenetics, diet, lifestyle, things like inflammation and stress, which will contribute to inflammation aging.

So, inflammation ageing affects how well our skin's aging, how our brain is doing, and just every little bit and part of our, at least 37… You've done everything you were told to do and something still feels off.

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You know, a lot of people are always concerned about inflammation and heart disease. Maybe talk about more how that inflammation kind of arises if it originates from the gut.

What's going on the got that's contributing inflammation, you know in the cardiovascular system, other regions of the body. Yeah, certainly. So other than our necessitated act of breathing, because trying not to breathe usually doesn't work well out for people long-term, we have to eat.

Got to breath. Okay, well we're getting lots of toxins and pollutants in. We're also getting oxygen, which oxygen is reactive oxygen species, ROSs. Just the act breathing or doing aerobic exercise, as we tell our patients.

Exercise, that's causing damage, but now we are eating the outside world and align the Outside World into our body. And of course, that's once again, try to live a long time without breathing doesn't work.

Try to Live a Long Time Without Eating doesn t work kind of like the basics. You see why after 32 years, I was still practicing to figure this out. What are we eating?

Natural foods, processed foods. And our grandparents, our great-grandparents, and wherever we all originally came from, whatever country, their lands were by nature organic 200 years ago.

There wasn't a better living through chemistry, there wasn' roundup, There was the herbicide and pesticides that we use today. So every time we're eating, we are poisoning our microbiome and that's altering the inflammation of our gut.

You and I measure this on our stool test. secretory IgA, calcortectin, lactoferrin. We're looking for those things, or maybe eosinophil protein X, all fancy words, but they're all pointing towards an inflammatory process.

But now we're feeding our little microbiome, like little packed men and packed women, and they eat Like little fledgling birds, when mother bird brings a worm, while they're eating, and depending on what we're feeding them, they also will contribute to either a nice tight junction, so we don't have a leaky gut as much, or they'll contribute a pro-inflammatory thing.

But we are just throwing a lot of junk in. I tell my patients, we're more aware of which gas station we stop at to fill our car. Like, well, that's off-brand.

I don't know whether I'm right, but off brand in my car, so an awfully important big investment. You can trade a car in, you can't trade the body in. Not yet, at least.

Yeah. And so what's the degradation that's happening? Let's say someone has inflammation, probably part of it, or a lot of its arising in the gut. What's happened to the body?

What is happening with this inflammation? Say the blood vessels or, you know, other the brain, the other organs of the Well, the inflammation and you mentioned the heart.

And I want to do a shout out to one of our now past colleagues, a medical doctor, Steven Sinatra and Steven Sonatra. I had written a book about the cholesterol myth and he was a cardiologist, MD cardiologists, but on the functional holistic side.

He says this inflammation we want be looking at and we know that inflammation damages not only the endothelia. When I graduated, we thought of the lining or a blood vessel like a nonstick frying pan.

And it's like, as long as it goes fresh, the coding often are fine. Well, now we know, of course, that's coding. Not many non-sick towns are toxic. That's a whole nother conversation.

But now, we now within the blood vessels, there's something called the glycopalic. And if anybody wants to look at the word glyopalics or look images, it looks like we have fur.

at the electron microscope level within our blood vessels. So it's not so much smoothing when we got this glycol calyx, but what the inflammation is doing is damaging the anothelia, damaging that glyco calix, and of course, damage in our heart muscles.

On a daily basis, the heart beats about 103,680 times, pumping blood through 60,000 miles of blood vessels. First off, what have we done for our heart lately?

103.688 times. Doing a little clicking pen one day. 103 680x. I think my son would say, I'm not showing up tomorrow. Thank goodness our hearts goes. So what it does is actually damage those tissues and also inflammation accelerates certain pro-inflammatory things that causes clots and platelet aggregation.

So we increase our chance for stroke and a heart attack. Our 60,000 miles of blood vessels become more restrictive. And with inflammation, it's a physiological stressor.

So it can increase blood pressure, but it is also changing our brain and our whole neurochemistry as well, all at once. Multiple pathways. The key is what can we do to quiet it?

And I would just read an article the other day about butyrate. And how butyrate which is in our gut, which you and I often will measure in a stool test, but I encourage people to get a school test done.

Get a stool test and see what's your butyrite levels. Where are your friendly bacteria working for you or not? Because if your gut's healthy, so are you.

And Hippocrates 400 BC said, And I think he probably should have attributed it to his wife, but it's attributed to him. Well, food is medicine. He probably came home one day walking around in the Mediterranean.

I'm a Greek, so I can appreciate a warm, hot environment. And he says, I am so tired. My body hurts. Then his life says here's some food that's good for you.

It's all food, it is all medicine, okay? And then he said, one he came to me and said my tummy hurts, she probably gave him an herb and she said here, try this.

Okay, well, food is medicine. Medicine is your food and all disease begins in the gut. I mean, you have to wonder how did he ponder all this by himself?

Of course, maybe there's a voice in his head, but it's like, hmm, so we want to eat well. But one of the things we're talking about today is gut health.

So, friendly bacteria. But do we over wash our hands? Do we under wash your hands and when we all do have to eat or go to an Italian restaurant or hispanically influenced restaurant and they offer you those chips or that extra loaf of bread.

Not only are they processed and of course we're feeding ourselves, which we worry about obesity and that we are also saying, okay, well, they just clean somebody else's table.

And the dilemma of, well, our microbiome came from, you know, we're vaginally born. We get a lot of microbial exposure through a vaginal birth versus the C-section.

Lots of health issues there, but it's also intriguing to look at the fact that we are eating continuously other microbiota, other bacteria and parasites potentially and other things based on how well somebody else has washed their hands.

and so called fecal oral and in case someone's going to eat lunch or dinner right before this, I'm not going any further. Hey everybody, i want to take just a quick moment and invite you to my website drstengler.com.

Here we have the supplements that we've been using with our patients for many many years. High quality and high potency supplements, very pure. So if you're looking for high quality supplements where you can notice a difference both in how you feel on your lab tests, go to our website at dr.stegler Yes, very true.

So when you have your patients, obviously, let's say they got chronic joint pain, they've got autoimmune disease, heart disease. they've got cancer, whatever is going on, you're going to pay attention to the gut.

You often run a stool test. That's like a functional stool tests. It's not the typical stool task. We knew your, regular medical doctor, they're not running these types of tests, this is giving you a lot more information, the microbiome, more in depth analysis of the bacteria and the parasites and how you are breaking food down and all that.

So it gives you lot of information. This is always a basis of how you're addressing this inflammation that's going on the body. Maybe just walk us through that bit like with a patient, whatever.

you know, type of chronic inflammation you have. Maybe just walk us through. You can do the diet, maybe some other analysis, supplements. Tell us kind of what you typically do with patients.

Well, routinely I'll do a stool test. Like you said, it's a functional stool tests. It's not the kind we just measure, hey, do you upload in your stool and so forth.

I mean, measures for that as well. But what it does is we're looking for how well have we fed our critters? Which critter have came into our neighborhood?

Are they friendly neighbors or those neighbors like, I hope I don't run into them at the mailbox. And then we look at diet relative to how are we fueling ourselves.

Are we eating our five to seven fruits and vegetables a day, ideally fresh? And we know for an audience probably does to a large degree, there's a dirty dozen foods and there is a 15 clean foods.

And that's actually a categorization done by the environmental working group, ewg.org. So just call the dirty dozen, you Google it, and you say, if you can't buy these organic, because we all have a limited budget and welcome to the world of inflation.

So, but then there's a 15 clean. Okay, You're pretty good, I think you buy those produced that way. But like strawberries, spinach, If you cant buy them organic you probably shouldn't be eating them.

Because once again, YOU'RE eating, them and we are what we eat from our head to our feet. but we're also feeding our critters down there. Critters feed the microbiome.

So then what I do is I want to make sure everybody's having two to three bowel movements a day. And that's where my patients are like, what? Who does that?

I said, well, healthy people. Then it's like okay, then they're probably thinking, does he go that often at TMI? And so the answer is we want it to have a babbling brook and not a stagnant pond.

You and I use in our practice the concept of the Bristol B-R-I-S-T-O-L stool chart. Everybody wants to look up Bristol stool charts, if you're not familiar with it.

And you want to be pretty much a four, a Costco hot dog, and I'm not picking on Costco, Onward Hammer or Ballpark, Frank or whatever, you wanna be a costco hotdog.

If you are wet and you have very loose stools, we know where the moisture goes. All the toxins, but lots of nutrients go that direction. You become malnourished with diarrhea.

But then I say, well, what happens if we have a one, two or three in a Bristol Stool chart? I don't know. And I'm working here with Nike and Intel executives and other employees, bright people, right people.

It's I have no idea why I haven't been sure. Well, I said, you're reabsorbing money of water. I sit on being caught. You wonder why you feeling poopy, pun intended.

So we want to make sure we have a babbling brook. We're feeding our microbiome, we got our fiber. Then what we wanted to do is we wanna look at mindful eating and virtually every culture around the world has an attitude of gratitude around food.

So they'll either say a little mindful prayer or something about thank you for the deer that gives us life or thank for you the plants or the trees or And from a Judeo-Christian perspective, we say, you know, bless this food into my body.

We often get so stuck as professionals and just busy, moms, dads, scooping our food in without the attitude of gratitude. And back to that gas station analogy, fast food is A, not fast, sitting in line for a very long time, and B, it's a fast way only to be ill health.

And so sometimes you can just catch 10, but that mindful, prepared with love. And I think we've all heard that saying, I could taste the love, so your wife or your significant other, or you're grandma makes some food or, you make the food for the family yourselves.

You and I, we barbecue something and there's like, wow, it tastes a lot. It's nothing as good as grandma's cookies or some other things. So I that's important.

bowel movements, great hydration, because once again, we're not hydrated. We're once, again a stagnant pond like a cesspool. Then we want to make sure we are doing some good probiotic fiber inducing things to help with butyrate levels.

And I recommend a stool test for people because that's very, very important. It's going to tie into another thing we probably will chat about today, which is we were talking about the Greek Hippocrates and food is your medicine, all disease begins in the gut.

But then there's Leucriticus. which is a Roman philosophy. I said, what is food for one is poison for another. Yeah. And that's a very compelling point.

So I want to make sure they got great gut. They're really mindful. If your tummy is ever talking to you, whether it be upper stomach, like gastric ulcer, gastritis, taking too much non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, of course you want get checked out.

If your lower GI tract, some 25 feet of intestine, are complaining you're bloated or distended, that's a wake-up call to say things aren't working so well down there.

And, you know, if it was our house, we'd call Roto-Rooter, so we don't want to necessarily recommend Rota-Rooters for the body. I'm not, by the way. But we want to kind of say, okay, we need to get things tended to.

And the best thing to do is have knowledge. Doing a test is very important. There's a way to that just as a consumer. As a customer, you can go, let's say to a company I work with, I have no ownership of it.

You can order a functional test that you and I order normally. Of course, it's always best to work for the functional medicine provider that will actually look into the nuances of things.

But the report's really nice and the very insights fully gives us power. Yeah. Well, that's a very, very good basis. And we're going to do another session with you another time on the connection of food sensitivities and gut health, because a lot of people are interested in that subject and in how to test for it, how do you deal with it?

How to improve and all those types of things. So that great. Maybe in just an ending, I know it depends on what's going on with the person or testing all that.

What are some of your favorite supplements in terms of gut, health? Just kind of a general sense, you see work pretty well consistently for people. So assuming there's not a stomach ulcer or duodenal, small intestine ulcers, I'm big on digestive enzymes.

There's a saying that I came up with when I gave a lecture 25 years ago at a Whole Food International retreat, and these are hard for raw foodists. I mean, they'll eat raw meat.

Everything is raw in their life, but I am not recommending that either in terms of the raw Live food for living people, dead food, for dying people. The more vitality you have, the better.

Because a lot of our foods are processed and we are at Keshe's Ketch Can Helter Skelter World. Digestive enzymes, very important. And if you a dairy wheat issue, then of course there's ones that have DPP4 in it, which is helping with casein and gluten.

But then I like L-glutamine. I liked butyrate. In fact, I got my butyrate right here in front of me. Butyrates supported for the gut health helps at the right level with obesity.

And at same time, it also helps with brain function. So the leaky gut, leakey brain, and so many people post the last three years of what I'll term the COVID era, have brain fog.

They have other issues. Not only were we stressed, where's our adrenal glands, but where is our health in all of this? And we also were sequesters. So we weren't eating and we were socializing.

We weren''t doing all that. I'm big on glutamine, inocid glutosamine. Of course, probiotic, the butyric acid, which you can also find in clarified butter and organic butter ideally.

These are my big ones. of course we can go into nuances of how to kill critters, but we really, once again, you want to test. And there are on the, like the tests that Battaglia Health offers, let's get, I'm not pitching them.

They're just an example of one of the big labs out there that offer these things, their resource, but it actually has a category for pro-inflammatory and autoimmune bacteria.

And so it's like, hmm, wouldn't that be nice to know? Do I have something in that category of pro inflammatory or auto immune? And that's just, yeah, we definitely want to.

Those are great recommendations. And yeah, I'll look forward to talking to you in another interview on food sensitivities that the viewers will want to watch.

So Dr. Miletus, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for having me.