Change Your Brain Every Day - The Silent Menace that Melts Your Heart & Batters Your Brain Health with Dr. Mark Houston

Episode Date: March 23, 2017

One interesting statistic, most people, men and women, 68% in fact, have their first heart attack at having had no previous symptoms. Today, we're going to talk about inflammation and how devastating this can be to your heart and brain if left unchecked.

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amen.

Welcome back to The Brain Warrior's Way. Tana and I are here with Dr. Mark Houston. We're having such a great time. Mark is an internist, a cardiologist. He's an associate clinical professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University. He's published widely, and he's also written seven books, including the Hypertension Handbook and What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Heart Disease. Today, Mark, I want to talk about inflammation, which comes from the Latin word to set a fire. And it's like you have a low-level fire in your body destroying your organs. Talk about the connection between inflammation, heart disease, and brain disease. Actually, most of us who don't follow an optimal lifestyle with our nutrition and exercise and so forth are basically volcanoes getting ready to erupt.

Amazing. So that subliminal fire you're talking about is they're rumbling away. It's subclinical, asymptomatic, and then you have your first heart attack and you realize, or your first stroke, that you've been inflamed for a long time. One interesting statistic, most people, men and women, 68% in fact, have their first heart attack and having had no previous symptoms. Amazing. We are missing a very good opportunity to diagnose and intervene earlier. I'm talking decades earlier. I mean, we're like in your teenage years to start an effective program to reduce the inflammatory vascular disease. That's the primary etiology for heart disease. But at the same time, as you know, if we reduce inflammation

in the vascular system, you're going to reduce inflammation in the brain. Those two are highly connected. So Dr. Houston, we often tell our community, you know, you got to get your important numbers checked for this reason. What are your favorite markers to check for this? So for inflammation, the best certified studied is from Harvard with Dr. Paul Ritker, and that's high sensitivity C-reactive protein. It's sort of the mother of all risk factors. And if it's elevated by itself, it is a significant risk factor and risk marker. In other words, we know it's associated with coronary heart disease and stroke. But in addition, the CRP itself has 35 different mechanisms by which it causes heart disease. So that's a bad actor.

Right. The precursors for isentia CRP are called interleukins, interleukin 6, 1B, and another one called TNF-alpha. They all kind of come in from various places, the heart, adipose tissue, vascular tissue, and they go to the liver, and the liver spits out this C-reactive protein. So that's one I do. Another new one is called myeloperoxidase or MPO, which is a great marker for oxidative stress and inflammation. Another one is PLAC2, L-P-P-L-A-2, which actually can predict very accurately a stroke or heart attack before you have it. So I use those three.

Say that one again, because I haven't heard of that. Yeah, me either. LP, PLA two, plaque two. Okay. It's an inflammation marker that says you have vulnerable plaque in your coronary arteries or in your carotid arteries, and it puts you at high risk for a stroke or heart attack. So you said two things that I find very interesting in talking to our people. One of which is they frequently say that their physician refuses to order certain lab tests because they're just out of the norm. That's one thing we deal with a lot. And the second thing is

people often say, well, why do I have to eat clean or do certain things? Because isn't that my liver's job is to detoxify me, right? So you just really touched on that. And I think if your physician doesn't allow you to get optimal medical care based on current medical guidelines and risk factor reduction, you just need to go somewhere else. Thank you. Or get your labs done and then give them to your doctor and let him try to interpret them. But that becomes a problem because they don't know how to interpret the labs frequently. Right. So we often say that your physician is not your mother, your father, or your boss. You need to find one who's your partner. Absolutely. Which are the worst pro-inflammatory foods and which ones are the best to deal with? Okay, I would rank these from worst, starting with refined carbohydrates,

number one. Trans fats are pretty close to that. Then you would probably put an omega-6 fatty acids. And then we get into the controversial one, which is saturated fats. And I'll go back to that in a moment. And then you drop down to the really good ones, which are monounsaturated fats, olive oil, nuts, olive oil products, and probably the best, which is the omega-3 fatty acids, often deemed polyunsaturated fats. Now the saturated fats, I just finished reviewing the literature on that related to heart disease and inflammation. If you'd like me to give you the little one-minute synopsis of that. Yeah, so here's the myth dispelled. Not all saturated fats are bad.

It depends on their carbon link. A C10 or less would be a short chain fatty acid. Those are beneficial and have no adverse effects on cardiovascular disease. C12, 14, 16, and 18, which are lauric, myristic, steric, and palmatic. So that's like coconut oil and chocolate, correct? Exactly. And that's another one I'll bring up, Tana, if you'll remind me about the coconut oil myth. So medium chain would be C12 and long chain is 14, 16, and 18. Those typically have adverse effects on coronary heart disease risk,

insulin resistance, diabetes, obesity, endothelial dysfunction, and all other kinds of problems. So I think based on current studies, we need to avoid C12 through C18. One caveat, C18 has a genetic SNP that allows you to convert that to a monounsaturated fat. If you don't have that SNP, though, you're going to keep that saturated fat in your system. So that's the bottom line on that one. And the coconut oil is another myth. If you go to the literature and look at coconut oil, it's 92% long chain or medium chain fatty acid.

It's mostly lauric and myristic and others that are higher in the chain. Very little in the way of medium chain or short chain fatty acids. So the data with coconut oil is not there. There's no data. You cannot find it that it shows any benefit related to coronary heart disease. Now, what about the brain? Because we had heard that it actually is good for brain health? I think that I would say this. When I talk about the vascular system and the periphery, it's really the same system in the brain. There's no difference. And now neural tissue, that's your expertise, not mine.

And that's maybe something that would be different and might respond different because of the membranes. So it's a tough question to say that what you do for the heart may be exactly the same for the brain because you're looking at really two different questions, vascular and neural. And honestly, I don't know the answer to that. So using it as a fuel as opposed to how it's affecting the vessels. Well, alcohol is another example where there are plenty of studies that show that a bit can be helpful for your heart, but it's my experience looking at scans. So that's what we do here at

Amen Clinics. We have a database of 125,000 scans and moderate drinking is associated with lower overall activity in the brain. So it may be good for your heart, but you're not going to be thinking that well. Okay. So that's good to point. Now, based on that though, a lot of companies are coming out with these MCT oils. What about that? Yeah. So if you define an MCT as carbon 10 length or less, they're going to be probably beneficial for both cardiovascular and brain. But once you get past a C12, it gets a little dicey for at least cardiovascular. Because you had said C12 is a medium chain.

Would you stay away from the C12 carbons and opt for what's less than that? I would tend to go more with C10 or less. It's no question you can do some C12s because they're medium chains, so they're not as bad. But when you get to the 14, 16, and 18, those typically have some pretty bad effects, not just on lipids, but also on other risk factors and CHD risk. So like palmitic acid and those types of acids in meat, in like industrial-raised meat and things like that are definitely things to stay away from. And the other thing that's important for your audience to know

is if you're on a saturated fat diet with a C14, 16, 18, and you then substitute isocalorically, that means the same number of calories per day, with a polyunsaturated fat or a monounsaturated fat. You dramatically reduce your risk for coronary heart disease by anywhere from 6 to 18 percent. OK, so what is the fat in beef in a New York state? Yeah, most beef depends on the how it's how the beef were fed, obviously. So if it's corn-fed versus grass-fed, you're going to have a totally different constituent of fats in the red meat.

Grass-fed being much better because you can get more omega-3s. But if you're doing corn-fed beef, it's going to be saturated fats, and that's not a good thing. And in the process, red meat's even worse. So, but saturated fat with the high C carbons? Yeah, the long chains, that's the 14, 16, 18. That's what you're going to get from the corn fed and the other to fatten up the beef.

But if it's grass fed, it's going to be omega-3s mostly. So it'll be better. All right. Inflammation, so important. That was really good. I learned something new. Dr. Houston's book, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Heart Disease, pick it up. I mean, it'll make a huge difference for your heart, but also for your brain. And also hypertensioninstitute.com

to learn more about Dr. Houston's work. Stay with us. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes,

you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.