but with devices like air fryers, for example, I’m totally against them because they create advanced glycation end products.

I really like my convection oven :(

Triglycerides are a very good clue. If your triglycerides are absolutely normal—and normal is not less than 150—remember, we fudged a lot of the numbers. It's not 150; it's less than 100. That's normal. It's just that the population today has so much triglycerides that they put the level at that—just like your liver enzymes. When I was in training, liver enzymes greater than 25 were abnormal. Now it's 45 because everyone's got a fatty liver, so they just bumped it up. How daft is that?

Also unfortunately indirectly harming people.

For example, I'll tell you about myself: my "LDL" level is about 170-something—large particles, calcium score zero. My triglycerides are 80; "HDL" 75. That's what you want. You want a good, high "HDL" and a nice, low triglyceride. Then the "LDL" is going to take care of itself. You're going to have large, fluffy particles, and you can test for it. Someone like me—I'm going to test coronary calcium. With my coronary calcium score being zero, I know I'm going to be okay.

I should try to get coronary calcium as part of my yearly medical.

Mycotoxins, phthalates, glyphosate, herbicides, pesticides, and heavy metals all cause inflammation and impair mitochondrial function.

My personal opinion is that it's very likely plant toxins do too.

A major study from Finland showed that people with severe coronary disease who used a regular (not infrared) sauna three times a week had a 40%–50% reduction in sudden cardiac death. If I had a drug that did that, it would be a bestseller. Those who used a sauna five days a week had about a 60% reduction. These findings have been published, but they rarely make the news. Still, sauna clearly offers benefits.

Some argue that sauna raises body temperature and increases heart rate by about 30%, making it comparable to low-level exercise. Maybe. Another likely reason is detoxification, as toxins are excreted through sweat.

I really ought to start.

You can address all these different inflammatory pathways: the endocrine system, the liver, leaky gut, toxins, metals, lifestyle. But there's one thing that touches all the mechanisms and improves them all, and that's fasting.

Glad I started.

I teach patients how to breathe—breathing exercises, breathing in—and how to go into silence. I teach them to cultivate mental, internal silence. That is anti-inflammatory because you’re not sending those messages to the platelets; there is no message when you’re in silence.

I had no idea meditation was anti-inflammatory!

Atherosclerosis, or plaque, is not a focal disease. It’s a systemic disease. If you’ve got it in one artery, guess what? You’ve got it in every artery—and you may think you don’t.

A bit terrifying.

Why am I stressing this? Because if you don’t want to develop plaque, don’t want plaque progression, and don’t want the consequences of plaque formation and rupture, you need to know the cause. It’s inflammatory. It’s not linear. It’s not just a scar that keeps growing. It cracks, repairs, cracks, repairs. It’s all related to inflammation. What is your inflammatory status? We are becoming increasingly inflammatory as humans. That’s why this happens. The body reacts, and you get inflammation.

Plaques are both caused by inflammation and inflammatory.

There are two parts to this whole problem. One is plaque formation and plaque rupture—that’s all about the plaque. The next is your blood. If your blood is clotty and your platelets are very jittery, you’re going to get a big blood clot. It’s as much a hematological event as it is an inflammatory process. There are two parts to this equation. That’s why we started paying more attention to the condition of your blood. Do you have clotty blood? Because if you rupture a minor plaque, you can get a big blood clot.

I wonder if grounding, which can decrease the viscosity of blood, can help? Blood donation also helps.

With aggressive lifestyle, dietary, and environmental changes—reducing toxicity, improving your food, and everything else—you can regress it. But the extent—probably the percentage stenosis—is likely very low. That means you can reduce it by maybe 10%.

Unfortunately it seems that lifestyle changes cannot reverse plaque entirely, and it also has to be managed by reducing inflammation as much as possible.

Bonus points for the star trek cap. Man, this guy talks so slowly. 3x!

One downside of these casual interviews is the studies are not listed for the talking points. Though everything he has mentioned does have a backing study I've seen presented elsewhere. He still pushes some of the common myths around (phytonutrients, fiber, etc) which references would be good to justify... just saying i'm not 100% aligned with his presentation

He doesn't talk about the bart kay turbulence theory

To me the question is a LCHF diet enough for perfect CV health? Or does it need periodic fasting?

The keto-CTA study didn't incorporate fasting as a element. I wonder what the difference would be

Our thesis is that when it comes to plaque or blood clots, inflammation is at the root, and this is a systemic process.

I found that 70% of the patients with what they call prediabetes had extremely high insulin levels. So, in spite of decent sugars, they had so much insulin. That identified a whole group of patients at extremely high risk of having a new event—another stent, progressive disease, increasing coronary calcium, heart attacks. So your metabolic condition matters. The biggest metabolic condition I found was prediabetes.

I can walk into the room and tell which patient has fatty liver and visceral fat—and therefore is metabolically abnormal and likely has high insulin levels.

What I often call “leaky gut”—more precisely, intestinal permeability—also plays a role, because inflammation from the gut is first processed in the liver.

You can be inflamed because of your lifestyle. Generally speaking, you’re inflamed because you’re nutritionally insufficient, so you can’t handle even normal stresses, and you develop inflammatory stress responses.

I’ve evolved to include toxicity workups as part of my plans, and I’ve mapped out the biochemical pathways by which toxicity creates atherosclerosis and inflammation in the body. So if you’re heavy-metal toxic, if you have a lot of mycotoxins from mold, if you have a lot of glyphosate, other herbicides and pesticides, plastics, BPA, and phthalates in your body—they don’t belong there. You didn’t evolve with them. Evolution did not include them. Your body’s chemistry—this is common sense, but we don’t want to accept it because we’re so used to this Western lifestyle—was not designed for those chemicals. They’re not supposed to be in your body, and you do not have the mechanisms to cope with them.

The next cause of small, dense LDL is omega-6. If you eat a lot of vegetable oils, it’s almost guaranteed that those oils enter normal LDL, displace cholesterol, and take up space. Now you’ve created small, dense LDL: cholesterol is gone and replaced by omega-6. Omega-6 is pro-inflammatory. That’s why none of my patients eat vegetable oils.

The most compelling case for me for being on a LCHF diet is the fact that multiple independant medical practicioners and researches, in various fields of expertise, have remarkably consistent experiences, theories, and approaches to treating chronic inflammation and improving metabolic health. It makes such a strong case.