Heart attack prevention requires a deeper understanding beyond traditional cholesterol monitoring. Research reveals that cholesterol levels alone are not reliable indicators of heart attack risk. Advanced imaging techniques like echocardiograms and CT angiograms, including the Clearly scan, offer more accurate insights into arterial health and plaque buildup. These tools, alongside a focus on managing oxidative stress, can help identify and address cardiovascular risks effectively.

Lifestyle changes, stress management, and diet play a significant role in maintaining heart health. Avoiding inflammatory foods, adopting antioxidant-rich diets, and incorporating regular exercise are key strategies. Addressing issues like sleep apnea and exploring supportive interventions like testosterone therapy for muscle health and oxygen transport further enhance cardiovascular wellness. By prioritizing comprehensive assessments and proactive measures, individuals can significantly reduce their risk of heart attacks and strokes.

Highlights of the Podcast

00:03 – Cholesterol Myths and Heart Health

01:20 – Recommended Imaging for Heart Health

05:17 – Manipulating Cholesterol for Insurance Coverage

06:37 – Root Cause of Plaque Formation

07:40 – Lifestyle Factors Affecting Heart Health

10:07 – Sleep Apnea and Cardiovascular Risks

11:06 – Exercise and Angiogenesis

12:07 – Dietary and Supplementary Recommendations

13:23 – Testosterone’s Role in Heart Health

14:44 – Comprehensive Testing

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:03] Heart attacks are kind of important to go through. A buddy of mine just died from a heart attack. And I am pretty sure after Covid that heart attacks are probably going to be the or heart issues are going to be the biggest thing for me to worry about. My heart got my support during Covid. So there’s a couple of different things. I talk about this a lot. But cholesterol levels, blood lab cholesterol levels have very little to do with long term cardiovascular health. UCLA medical did a study of in 2009 of 136,000 people who’d been in the heart who went to the hospital because they had a heart attack. And what they looked at was that over 75% of those people had what would be considered good cholesterol levels. So they weren’t too high. They weren’t anything like that. They were kind of within range. So that shows us two different things that are very important. One, just having high cholesterol doesn’t mean that you’re going to have a heart attack. And two, if you have good cholesterol levels, that does not mean you’re safe. So basically what it told us was that. Blood, looking at blood cholesterol levels and then trying to figure out how we’re going to apply those to heart attack and stroke risk is really not going to work.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:01:20] We need a better system. So and I’ve talked about that a lot. Now, let’s talk about the imaging that we actually want to do. One is an echocardiogram, which is a video of the heart beating leaky valves, holes in the heart, myocarditis ejection fraction issues. You know, all those things we can see and we can now we need to fix this or we to do whatever we can to look at that down the road. But it’s literally a video of your heart beating and you can see the inside of it, the whole deal. So echocardiograms are great, super important if you’ve never gotten one. Definitely recommend that now. The important thing for cardiovascular health as far as planning goes, the very best option that we have is called a Clearly the clearly is a CT angiogram. So it’s a calcium CT with dye, but it also uses air technology to map the inside of the artery. And from all the research and working with it and seeing the results, it is the closest we have to sticking a camera up inside your artery and seeing what’s inside. So as far as plaque goes. Now, obviously stick a camera up in your artery would be the the gold standard. Very best way to see if you have any plaque. But that’s highly invasive and not super. It has has a decent amount of risk involved with it and it clearly doesn’t.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:37] Now you’re going to see clearly run anywhere from probably 2 to 3 grand. And so not everybody is going be able to throw down 2 or 3 grand for a study, which is why I don’t talk about it primarily. However, it is the best. And if you’ve got the money, I highly recommend that you guys get the clearly done. The second one would be a CT angiogram or a CT. What that is, is that it fills your fills your blood vessel with a dye. And what we’re looking for is if the blood vessels this big and you have that much dying, it, you’re like, well, I think is full of dye. So it’s obviously very, very patent, very, very open. Now, if we have that blood vessel that’s like this, and then we we do that, the dye comes through just a little tiny, little, tiny little speck. Right. Just like that. Like a really thin stream. Or we know there’s a lot of plaque in that artery. And so we go, this is a bad thing. We need to get a stent in there. We do something in there. We need to get that thing knocked out when you get that fixed. So that would be the next one. And then those are running between 600 and $2000. And then the the the calcium CT is going to run you about 200 bucks.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:03:47] So the calcium CT is not the very best is not what I would recommend for somebody who has any type of issues or they’re worried about. But it is the best thing to do for $200. So at the end of the day, we’ve kind of got to figure out, you know, what can we get done with the budget we’ve got and that type of thing. So like I said, it goes clearly. CTA and then the calcium CTA. Now, I will tell you that the other side of this and this doesn’t really help out second day in January because my deductibles have started over. But if you’re wanting to get the CT angiogram put on your insurance, it’s usually pretty easy to get covered. What you have to have is any type of elevated cholesterol labs and any type of family history of heart disease, heart issues, heart attack, stroke, that type of thing. In your family history, mother, father, grandfather, you know, that type of thing, uncle and everybody else. So that’s how you do it. Now, like I said, a lot of people who have standard within the range cholesterol levels also have plaque. And so how would you get that covered by insurance? There are lots of ways of manipulating your cholesterol, blood labs to be higher than normal. So now. Would walking through an artificially or intentionally, let’s say intentionally, cause it’s not our official intentionally raising your cholesterol levels so that you could get the study done.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:17] Is that wrong to do to the insurance company? That’s a decision you’re going to have to make. I mean, if you think they’ve been super fair to you and you want to return in kind and I totally understand not elevating your cholesterol levels on purpose if you do not believe that they’ve been super fair and kind to you and. You know, then above board with it, with a contract, you guys sign with them. Then maybe, maybe you decide that altering your cholesterol levels so that you can get them a little higher so you get your studies done is something that you’d want to do. Either way, how we want to play it, that’s fine. But getting those studies done can be really, really important. Now, let’s say that you do have some plaque in there. So now we’ve we’ve done the studies and we found plaque or we haven’t found plaque and we decided we don’t want plaque. What do we do? So first of all, if there’s you know, if you have significant narrowing, stents are great. Get a stent, but a stent and knock it out. You’re good to go. Do I think that we should start throwing out cholesterol lowering drugs like statins at this? Nope. Statins don’t seem to help long term. The the research on them is that it makes your body makes you feel terrible because it does damage to your body in lots and lots of ways, but it doesn’t really get us where we want to go. And that’s because the total number of cholesterol you have in your blood has nothing to do with plaque.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:37] What causes plaque is called lipid peroxidation Because, I mean, think of it this way. You don’t have to be a genius to figure this out. If the amount of cholesterol that’s in your blood caused the plaque thing that people with really low cholesterol would never, ever have plaque and people with really high cholesterol would always have plaque. That is not what we say. And so something has to be has a has to happen to the cholesterol to make it plaque. The thing that happens to the cholesterol to make it plaque is called lipid Peroxidation. Lipid peroxidation is damage to the cholesterol by free radical damage. So if you’re as old as I am, you’ll remember that we talked about free radicals and we talked about antioxidants really a whole lot in the 90s for like 3 or 4 years. And no one said anything about them ever again. That’s the issue. So when we talk about inflammatory issues, when we talk about things like that, we’re talking about the free radicals, We’re talking about the the oxidative stress that happens to the tissue in the body, causes cancer, causes heart attacks, causes strokes, has all sorts of things. And we know this for a fact. Is it the only thing? No, but it is one of the major things that we know the pushback against.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:07:40] This is why we’re telling people not to eat seed oils is why we’re talking about processed foods. This is why we’re telling people not to take a lot of medications just because those things create inflammation, those things create oxidative stress, stress, psychological stress is probably the biggest thing we’ve got to we have to recognize and push back against. And I talk to guys all the time who are like, I don’t have any stress. Like, are you married? And they’re like, Yeah, I’d like to have kids. They’re like, Well, yeah. I’m like, Do you have a job? And they’re like, Yeah, I am like, And you have no stress. None. Like, well, I mean. I mean, yeah, I guess I have some stress. Yeah. We’ve got tons of stress. And stress is one of those things that, you know, there is no real argument on this that stress, psychological stress or greatly affects the physical body. If you look at ulcers, you know who gets ulcers, who are stressed. Why? Because when you get stress, you shift from sympathetic I’m sorry, from parasympathetic was resting, digesting you shift into fight flight freeze, which is sympathetic and that shuts off all of your gut function. So same idea. When we have stress, we shut off our gut function. We don’t process things as well. We don’t have as much gut flora.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:46] We don’t have as much, you know, breakdown of nutrients like we’re supposed to. And we drive ourselves a lot harder. We run out of adrenaline, we push down on testosterone. All these things start to happen. But the other thing is, is that, like I said, we we’re pushing ourselves really hard, high cortisol levels and the body doesn’t have usually doesn’t have the nutrients it needs to properly process things. So we’re going to start running out of stuff that’s really important. The things like in day, the things like in a sea, the things like CoQ10, methylated, vitamins, specifically B vitamins, these type of things are going to start to break down. We’re going to have DNA. We’re not going to break down our proteins very well. We’re going to have a lot more histidine, which is damaging to the plaque, damaging the arteries. We’re going to a higher histamine response, our livers saying I have more things to process. The liver can be more strained. So these are all things that we start to see. The other thing that we have to look out for is hypoxia or lack of oxygen. The easiest thing we the easiest lowest hanging fruit to check on this one is sleep apnea. If you snore, if you stop the worst thing and wives. Tell me about this. What about husbands all the time? Is it they’ll snore and then they’ll stop snoring and they won’t make a sound for five, seven, ten, 15 seconds and look like they’re gasping for air. So snoring is central. I’m sorry. Snoring is obstructive sleep apnea.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:10:07] That sound is literally the sound of you choking to death in your own flesh. The where you stop breathing and it’s gasped for air. That centralized apnea. I have both of those. And so if you do have that, if your neck is bigger and 15in your chest is bigger, like 45in, you’ve got it. We just don’t know how bad. So. Give me your back if you’ll roll this bill over. It helps a lot, but most of the time we either need a job plan to pull the job forward and remove the obstruction for the obstructive sleep apnea, the snoring, or have CPAp to force air into the lungs for centralized and for obstructive sleep apnea. And so you get a sleep study and you guys give me CPAp and I’ll watch you all the way through that. That’s great. That is one of the number one reasons that we have issues with brain function and issues with cardiovascular health. That lowered oxygen really keeps the body from producing energy ATP the way it’s supposed to. It produces a giant amount of free radicals that end up eating away and damaging the whole body.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:11:06] So oxygen at night, breathing at night is super important. You can fight back against that by getting a CPAp and doing hyperbaric oxygen, doing breathing exercises and exercising. So exercise is one of those things. The reason why we want to exercise is because cardiovascular wise is because as you start to deprive the body of oxygen as you’re running and your legs are burning and your lungs are burning, this tells the body that it doesn’t have enough blood vessels, and so it starts creating more blood vessels. It’s called angiogenesis. And what ends up happening is that now we have better blood vessels, we have better oxygen flow, we have we have better removal of carbon dioxide from the tissues. And so the level of oxygenation stays a little bit higher. This removal and process of carbon dioxide is also how we break down specific fats and carbohydrates in the body. And so a lot of times increasing, you know, the the process of producing and removing carbon dioxide is beneficial for weight loss as well. So you get multiple things on this. When you get to heal your heart, you can heal your body. You heal your blood vessels.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:12:07] Push back on cardio cardiovascular instances like heart attacks and strokes and get leaner. But you go to cardio cardio sucks. Like, let’s just be honest about that. So you can walk into the cardio thing. Literally. You can start walking into the cardio to give yourself healthier. But that’s going to be another piece. Supplementation and diet early begins on this as well. It’s not that you have to actually remove the cholesterol 90 which is the time I radically increase the cholesterol people are consuming. But what we do is we take things that are we take the processing out. We take the chemical structures out. We take the seed oils out. You move back from like vegetable oils and seed oils to like tallow, which is fat animal fat we can use depend on how hot you’re cooking avocado oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, like those type of things. That helps tremendously. You don’t want to get extra virgin olive oil. You want to get some of these things over about 350 degrees. So if you’re gonna be frying or cooking over 300 degrees, I would tell you to use tallow or some type of duck fat, that type of thing. That’s a little bit more stable at higher temperatures. So these are the ways that we start to push back against cardiovascular events. There isn’t really a drug you can take that’s going to help with these type of things. If you have if you have electrical issues like beta blockers sometimes can help with that pressure issues. It’s a different type of conversation, different story.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:13:23] Now, the other thing I always like to recommend for heart function that’s a little bit weird is testosterone. A lot of people will tell you that testosterone will cause heart attacks and strokes. I have never one time seen any real research that shows that. If you look at like, what do we know about testosterone? Testosterone makes muscles stronger and healthier where your heart’s a muscle. So guess what? We’re you need to do. We need to make it stronger and healthier. The tuna, tuna, media, Tunica media is the inside of that. So that’s the middle of the blood vessel. The middle of this blood vessel creates is a muscle. And so if it gets weak, it kind of collapses. And as it collapses, you get divots. And so those are basically blood clot, blood clots that the lungs are hit that hit the brain. Strokes are the hardest strokes and create heart attacks and strokes and things like that. So strengthening that muscle, keeping that muscle healthy is going be good for you long term. It also testosterone also can raise hemoglobin hematocrit levels, which is super great for you to a certain point because as we have more hemoglobin hematocrit, our bodies carry more oxygen. As it carries more oxygen. We can denature free radicals, we can heal it, we can feed the brain the heart, we can feed everything the oxygen requires. So more hemoglobin hematocrit is really, really good to a certain point. Now, once it gets to a certain point, the blood gets a little thicker.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:14:44] And as the blood gets a little thicker, it gets it puts more pressure on the heart and on the blood vessels. And so we want to kind of monitor that, which is pretty easy. Draw blood every 3 or 4 months while you’re on testosterone and bang, you’re there. So that’s one of those things. And again, if we want to start manipulating hemoglobin, have adequate levels, heme iron, which is from red meat, is the easiest way to get it and is a really, really beneficial way of giving your body the chemicals it requires to make the chemicals it requires to function. So if you’re worried about a heart attack or stroke, if somebody if your family members have had heart attacks or strokes or if you just want to make sure that your heart is as healthy as possible, do these do these things like just go out and get these things done? If you want to work with somebody who does works with this all the time and can put. The stuff together for you and get all checked off and all of the stuff we can get checked, set up and processed in a month if we wanted to do studies. DNA studies are great for this methylation. Functional studies are great for this. Those usually take about two months to come back. So you could do DNA methylation, study, do everything else.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:15:45] We’re talking about everything else pretty much in place. And then when the methylation studies come back, if there’s anything we need to add nutrient wise, we can always have it. So that’s typically how we run those. So we’ll send people out for an echocardiogram and then we’ll figure out what’s the best function thing we can do. If we can get a clearly for you, we will. If we do the CTA for you, we will get those studies done and we’ll walk you through the dietary supplementation changes, will check your hormones, make sure everything’s supposed to be. The other thing is we have to push back against diabetes on this one. So we’re looking at fasting insulin levels. Fasting insulin levels are really, really important to tell us where we are from a hormonal insulin resistance type position in diabetes type of position. And so if the fasting insulin is above ten, then we can start teaching you how to bring those levels back down, change your glycemic function, bring those levels back down into the under the ten piece, which is going to be where we really, really want. And we don’t want to have a lot of insulin resistance creating a secondary problem. Too many sugars in the blood and in insulin resistance is highly problematic for both cardiovascular health and brain health, which is why we talk about dementia being type three diabetes.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:16:53] If you got type two diabetes, it’s not that hard for most people for us to fix the type two diabetes. Sometimes I’m just like, Here’s the diet and it works and we got to tweak as we go along. And depending on how bad the type of type two diabetes is, we’ll have you on glucose monitors and I’ll walk you through that. But those are the changes that will make if you guys are worried about, you know, heart attacks and strokes or if you’re like, look, I want to get healthy in the new year, but, you know, I want to make sure I want to pick a thing. Pick heart health, because with heart health, we get brain health to a degree. And so pick this one, you know, do these one thing because, you know, my buddy had done these properly. He probably would still be alive. So it’s one of those things that, you know, every time I have to deal with a patient or somebody, a family member or friend of mine having heart issues who hasn’t done these studies, it always irritates me, irritates me more when I told people to do this and they don’t, which is a decent amount of people and you know who you are. But anyway, if you guys are looking for this type of stuff, if you guys need this type of stuff, get it done. Have your docs do it, Get a hold of me.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:17:59] We’ll walk you through it. It’s super important. It’s one of those things where this isn’t something you do for you because if you die, you’re done. You do this for your kids, you do this for the people around you. Just people who love you and depend on you and need you around. So don’t don’t be like, Well, I don’t need this. Your kids need it flat out. I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman. We have a lot of women die from heart attacks. The numbers are pretty much even out nowadays. So if you’re a mom or if you’re a dad or if you’re, you know, you’re running a company or you have people who depend on you, you got to get this stuff done. It is on you to do this to help the people around you. Nice thing is it helps you, too. So get these studies done, get this stuff checked off. If you guys have any questions, you have some questions at Amazon.com. Drop them in the comments we’re building. You guys go and your docs be able to get this stuff. Don’t go into if they have not talk to you about this. I don’t know why these are all medical tests and the research is really, really good. So I don’t know why they haven’t time to talk to you about them, but they haven’t been talk to you about them. I don’t know if you want to use them. I mean, why would they not discuss this with you anyway? If you guys have more questions, is up. Thanks. Thanks for your time.

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