Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - Reversing Heart Disease & Cholesterol Lies | Dr. Stephen Hussey, MS, DC

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

It’s Valentine’s Day, so let’s talk about matters of the heart—literally. Dr. Stephen Hussey, a chiropractor and functional medicine practitioner, suffered a heart attack despite living a seemingly healthy lifestyle. Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as a child, he found himself failed by the traditional medical system in his highest-stakes moment. But instead of accepting his fate, he completely reversed his own heart disease. Now, he’s on a mission to share what he learned. In this episode, Dr. Hussey dives into the surprising evolutionary origins of heart disease, debunks myths about cholesterol, and reveals how light and environmental health strategies transformed his life. If you thought you knew everything about heart health—think again.Thank you to our sponsors! 😊Joovv | Get an exclusive discount on your first red light therapy order!⁠Cozy Earth⁠ | Use code "ALEX" for 40% OFFMush More Co.| Use code "ALEX" for 20% OFF⁠⁠Masa Chips⁠⁠ | Use code "REALALEXCLARK" for 20% OFFNatural Sloth | Use code "ALEX" for 15% OFFOur Guest:⭐️ Dr. Stephen Hussey, MS, DC InstagramFacebookXWebsite🎀Follow Alex🎀Instagram |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@realalexclark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@cultureapothecary⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@realalexclark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠X |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@yoalexrapz⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@RealAlexClark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcast |⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠New 'Culture Apothecary' Merch OUT NOW! Glass tumblers, weekly wellness planners, hats, crewnecks and more. Use code "Alex Clark" for 10% OFF at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tpusamerch.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join the Cuteservatives Facebook group to connect with likeminded friends who love America and all things health and wellness!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join the CUTEservative Facebook Group!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to ‘Culture Apothecary’ on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. New episodes drop 6pm PST/ 9pm EST every Monday and Thursday.This show is made possible with generous donations from listeners who believe in our mission to heal a sick culture.You can support our show by leaving a tax deductible donation⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠HERE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or by subscribing to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@RealAlexClark⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ YouTube for FREE!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠#cultureapothecary #alexclark #podcast  #health  #wellness #christianity

At age 34, I had a widow maker heart attack. Only 12% of people survive if they have them outside of a hospital setting. I developed plaque in my leg, but I completely reversed it. What sort of diet were the cardiologists in the hospital advising you to start after a heart attack? Low salt, low fat, animal crackers, big newtons, things full of vegetable oils. I said, no offense, but this is the diet that causes inflammation that contributes to heart disease or one thing that contributes to heart disease. It is Valentine's Day, so let's focus on matters of the heart. Meet Dr. Stephen Hussey, a chiropractor who had a heart attack a few years ago after being diagnosed as a child with type 1 diabetes.

He has now completely reversed his own heart disease and is teaching others what he learned after a disastrous experience in the traditional hospital setting after his heart attack. His book, Understanding the Heart, Surprising Insights into the Evolutionary Origins of Heart Disease and Why It Matters, shares the decisions. Dr. Hussey made to get him through the highest stakes moment of his life and what he learned about heart disease as both patient and doctor. We also go quite a bit into cholesterol, which I haven't really touched on yet. Watch this episode on Spotify or Real Alex Clark on YouTube and subscribe. I post a lot of additional vlogs, mini documentaries, and more there. Shop merch for the show at TPSAmerch.com with code Alex Clark. Please welcome Dr. Stephen Hussey to culture apothecary. What are the three imbalances that cause a heart attack?

in balance to the stress response of your autonomic nervous system, inflammation are what people call oxidative stress, and then poor metabolic health, meaning you're not able to readily go back and forth from burning glucose and fatty acids. Those things can predispose the heart to becoming more reliant on glucose than it wants to, and that can cause it to shift its metabolism

over to a type of metabolism that causes tissue death. You're a doctor who reversed your heart disease and plaque in your leg. tell us what happened. In my backstory, I have a lot of chronic disease in my childhood, a lot of inflammatory conditions, ultimately ended up with autoimmune type 1 diabetes at age 9. And so my whole life I've been like somewhat health conscious, paying attention to like diet and exercise and those types of things.

But despite that, it wasn't enough. And at age 34, I had a widow maker heart attack. You know, the type of heart attack that the statistic is only 12% of people survive if they have them outside of a hospital setting. So fortunately, I'm still here. I survived. But then because of what they had to do to save my life that day, because of the heart cath procedure that they did, I developed plaque in my leg as well. So about two months after the heart attack, I started realizing that I was getting pain in my leg when I would walk just fast through the airport. Definitely couldn't run, couldn't play soccer, couldn't snowboard, things I like to do. And eventually found my way to

get an ultrasound and they said I had this plaque development in my leg and I completely reversed that as well, which they say was impossible, especially for a type 1 diabetic. Like if you look at the research, peripheral artery disease is what that is. In type 1 diabetics, usually they fare worse than even type 2 diabetics with that. But I completely reversed it and I did it without medications and I did it without following the recommended diet that they recommended to me because it was wrong and doesn't reflect the research. And the worst part about all that is that they weren't even curious when I told them that I did it. So you tell the doctors, hey, I reversed my heart attack symptoms and I reversed the plaque in

my leg and they just were like, okay, cool, have a great day. They didn't care. Yeah. Yeah. So they told me like after the heart attack, you know, they placed the stint and saved my life. And they told me that I'd be on five medications the rest of my life. and then if I didn't that I would develop heart failure and then I would have another heart attack

and these types of things kind of this fear-based thinking I would say I took a blood thinner for six months because there was a stint in my body that's a foreign body I didn't know how my body was going to react to that but after that I've been in no medications and that's not necessarily what I'm saying

will work for everybody but it's what I decided to do and here I am three months later after the heart attack I got the ultrasound for the echocardiary in my heart and it was completely back to normal The doctor said, well, you must have decided to take your medications. And I was like, actually, I didn't. I did a lot of other things that weren't recommended to me, my own kind of healing protocol. After I got the initial diagnosis of plaque in the leg, a year later, I came back, and it was only 50% blocked at that time.

And they actually did the test twice because they were like, we don't really believe that it's less, right? And so they did it again, and it showed the same thing. And he said, well, we can't say it's better because we don't see these things get better. And I was like, well, you just saw it. You just saw it, right? And then a year later, it was completely normal. And then a year after that, there's another follow-up test, and it's still normal. And I can run now.

I can do what I want besides, you know, being a professional athlete because I'm not that. Let's talk about the hours and days after the heart attack. You're in the hospital. What sorts of care were you getting from the cardiologists? Well, I like to describe it as kind of a broken record because at that point, I was like, all right, guys. Like, I knew a lot of stuff prior to this, you know, that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease and statin drugs aren't really worth it or don't really work based on the literature. But at that point, I was just like, all right, what happened, guys? Like, tell me what happened?

What do I do? You know, I want to know your opinion because obviously I got it wrong, right? And it was just a broken record cholesterol. Oh, cholesterol does this. Your cholesterol is high. Clusterall causes heart attacks. It's the same thing. Whether it was an intern, a resident, a physician, attending physician, they all said the same thing.

And I was just like, well, that's just really disappointing and myopic, first of all, to think that this one biomolecular, this one, quote-unquote imbalance in the body can drive a whole disease process or cause a heart attack. And so I started asking questions, just, you know, not in an aggressive way or anything, but just like, well, because they want to be in a blood thinner. And I was like, well, what about magnesium is a blood thinner? And they would say, well, magnesium is not a blood thinner. I was like, well, I know that's false based on the literature. Now, I don't expect them to have like some procedure they use in the hospital to replace a blood thinning medication because they don't have that. But I have found literature that shows that after a stint placement, intravenous magnesium can be just as effective as a blood thinner. But it's also not the standard of care.

So if he can't recommend that because if he, he's been programmed to think that he's liable. If something happens to me, he hasn't done the standard of care, which is, you know, predetermined by whoever the hospital systems and all that kind of stuff. then he's liable, so to speak. So that doesn't mean the hospital has that protocol in place, but it just goes to show that they'd rather use the thing that's profitable to them, which is the blood thinning medication rather than the intravenous magnesium, which is not as beneficial or not as profitable to them. What other directives or initiatives were the cardiologist giving you in the hospital

that made absolutely no sense to you? They prescribed, I think, 8 to 11 different medications while I was in there, everything from, you know, an anti-anxiety medication to two blood pressure medications, to a statin drug, to blood thinners, aspirin, all this type of stuff. Yeah, so it was just medication. I would just sit there. I was laying there in the hospital bed and watching like ESPN because there's nothing else to do. It was during COVID.

No visitors were allowed. I was just on my own. And someone would pop up on the TV screen and say, you've been prescribed another medication. And then someone would walk in the door and be like, hey, we're going to give you this medication. And I was like, whoa. like no one's talked to me about this or said why it's just like this cookie cutter approach yeah the thing was is that my blood pressure has always been relatively normal or even on the lower end um like 112 over 70 and they want to be on two blood pressure medications that was their standard of care and i i took one for one day and that night i woke up because they wake you up three times a night which is not great for healing and they took my blood pressure and it was 90 over 50 which is extremely low yeah And I looked up and I was like, whoa, that's pretty low. And then they left the room and I realized it was burning up in the room.

So I was going to get up and turn down a thermostat. And I almost passed out walking to the thermostat because my blood pressure was so low. It was very clear that like someone's had a heart attack, this is what you do. You don't assess the person at all. They weren't looking at the individual seeing how things can be tailored for you. It's the same cookie cutter set of medications for every person no matter what. Yeah. And they wanted me on two.

And I took one for one day. And then I was like, no more of that. But what would happen if I had taken two? What sort of diet were the cardiologists in the hospital advising you to start after a heart attack? This cardiac nurse came in and tried to educate me on diet, which I have a master's in human nutrition and functional medicine. So I was, you know, she's just doing a job. But, you know, she started telling me low salt, low fat, things that I was okay to eat, things on the list of okay to eat was animal crashes. figg-newtons, things full of vegetable oils.

And I was like, I said, no offense, but you know, this is the diet that causes inflammation that contributes to heart disease or one thing that contributes to heart disease. And she was like, well, this is what powers that be tell us to recommend. So this is what we're told to tell you. And I was just like, well, I'm probably not going to eat that. But in the hospital, I really had no choice. They were feeding me, you know, crap pretty much. I pretty much fasted for three days in the hospital.

because I didn't want to eat the food they were bringing me. My dad had two different things going on last year. He had the brain tumor, glioblastoma, but he also had heart failure. That ended up being the thing that killed him in December. But he had had two heart attacks. He was also type 2 diabetic. So he was just a mess.

When we were in the hospital this past year with the heart stuff, plus having the brain tumor, I told him, Dad, you need to tell them that you need to be on a keto diet. Like, ask them about keto diet. And he did. He said, so my daughter, she's like really into health. and she's telling me I should do keto. And they said to him, oh, no, sir, that's terrible for your heart problems.

You can't eat, you cannot eat keto. Also bringing him soda and all this kind of stuff while he was in the hospital room. I mean, it was just infuriating to me. So what are your thoughts on a keto diet for heart issues? The first thing I'll say is that there's studies that show that the heart actually prefers ketones and fatty acids for fuel. It's like it's one of the few tissues that does prefer that. because usually like if there's glucose present, a tissue will burn that first.

It's like this oxidated priority that happens. But even in the presence of glucose, the heart tissue will choose to burn fatty acids and ketones because they're more efficient and the heart is always contracting. So it needs to be as efficient as possible. You ask me about that first question, we're talking about what can predispose us to certain types of heart attacks. One of them is when that metabolism shifts to burning more glucose because it's forced to, which involves different mechanisms of doing that. But so how could, you know, this diet that induces us or creates a response of making ketones in her body and providing the heart with ketones be bad for it when the heart prefers ketones?

That doesn't make sense. And it's just kind of flawed thinking. He said, well, you know, I asked the nutritionist, and it's the hospital nutritionist, Alex, who said that that's a bad idea. So who am I supposed to believe the person who is a nutritionist working at a hospital or my daughter who just two years ago became interested in this? And I understand that. That's fair. That's valid. that's valid and as a parent

you're probably always going to be doubting your kid who you look at as your baby, you know, telling you this kind of stuff above the experts. But what I said was, dad, just do me a favor because he was meeting with this person periodically. I said, ask that nutritionist where they went to school. I said,

just ask them. And then let's look up who funds that school. Let's look up who's funding the studies, the curriculum that's telling them what to feed certain people. So my question to you is, if we know that this entire list that the hospitals are giving out to heart patients is causing heart disease, where in the world is this information coming from that's causing these people to say, like, well, the powers

that be are saying this is what's healthy for hearts. Who is coming up with this information and why? Do I know the backstory? Yes. Yes. Back in the late 40s, early 50s, heart disease was becoming a very prominent thing. And before that, it was like unheard of, right? Early 1900s, it was like, especially coronary artery disease, which is plaque forming in the arteries of the heart, was almost unheard of, right? So it's rising at this time, which I think for many reasons, smoking, stress from two war wars, lots of different things like that. But President Eisenhower famously had a heart attack while he was serving as president. And so the world was looking for an answer. United States was looking for an answer. And this guy named Ansel Keys gave them an answer.

And Ansel Keys was an epidemiologist at University of Minnesota. And he came up with what he called his six country study where he looked at the data of six different countries about how much saturated fat and cholesterol they had in their diets and how much heart disease the country had. And so he concluded that there was an association between the two. First of all, it's a type of study that is the lowest form of research there is called epidemiology. It can only show that there's a relationship between two things. It can't show that one's causing the other. So the example I give is like if I'm standing on the sidewalk and I see a traffic jam and I also see that it's cloudy, I'm I can't say the traffic jam caused the clouds or the clouds caused the traffic jam, just that they're happening at the same time.

However, the more nefarious thing that he did was that there was data from 22 countries available at the time. And he cherry-picked the six countries. And then he repeated it and did a seven-country study later that showed him the relationship that he wanted. And there are many theories as to why he did this. People say that he had lots of backing from the food industry and from the pharmaceutical industry that wanted this theory to take hold. because if you convince the population that cholesterol and saturated fat cause heart disease,

then you can sell them a lot of processed junk food that doesn't have saturated fat and cholesterol in it, processed grain, sugars, and menstrual oils. Also, if you convince the population and the medical establishment that cholesterol in the blood, lipids, lipoproteins in the blood, cause heart disease,

and you have a drug that can lower that, then you can sell a lot of that drug. And that's exactly what we see happened. When this theory took off, which interestingly, it's probably one of the most detested nutritional theories out there because they've done a lot of studies in the 60s and 70s after this idea came out where they replaced saturated fat and people's diets with unsaturated fat. And the people with unsaturated fat got more heart disease. And they hushed up

the studies and they kind of published them in small journals and didn't publish them until years later. And they just kind of covered all this up. Because people wanted to make money off pills. Right. Because there was too much money behind the theory. So by the time, there's that famous you know, episode or an episode, but issue of Time magazine where there's like a frowny face with a bacon and two eggs, you know, that's 1960 something. And so by the time they did these studies, the theory had taken off and it was, and so in 1984, they got together and this committee got together and decided incorrectly, in my opinion, that cholesterol was bad. And then we needed to lower it. There was good cholesterol and there was bad cholesterol, which is no such thing in my opinion.

There's just cholesterol. There's just lipoproteins in the blood. And what they were, is what you're metabolizing at the time. But this committee got together and incorrectly decided that it was wrong. And at the time, they decided that your LDL, which is something you see on a lipid panel, should be 250 or lower. And then over the years, it was the pharmaceutical companies pushed to lower that to 200 and then to 150 and then to 100. Because to lower that recommendation, the more people need the drugs, right? Oh, my gosh. And this is very well documented that this happened.

So there was really no evidence for this theory in the first place. So I find it really, really frustrating and interesting that people who are against this theory and pushing back against it are having to provide so much evidence that it's not when there was never any good evidence in the first place. I mean, if you look at the original studies that Keyes did after his theory came out and then he did these clinical trials where he replaced saturated fat with unsaturated fat in the diet, well, they omitted data in the first publications. of those things that made them look better than they actually are. And so later this guy, Christopher Ramson, he looked it up and he republished it with all the data. And he found that those studies actually showed that for every 22 points, your cholesterol lowered, you had an increased risk of heart disease. Oh, my gosh.

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Some exclusions apply. And so where does the American Heart Association and dietary guidelines come in with all this? So the pharmaceutical companies are funding those associations. So they're going to do whatever the pharmaceutical companies tell them, whatever's going to protect the pharmaceuticals bottom line. So the pharmaceutical companies and maybe even different food industries or whatever, because canola is one of the biggest funders of the American Heart Association. And so they're coming up maybe with these things knowing it's actually going to create more heart disease and keep people sick.

And then that's good for the organization because they're going to keep getting donations and making money off, you know, people being sick. Exactly. Yeah. That's insidious. And so the thing is, since 1984, we have seen a decrease in heart disease deaths, right? And people will say, well, it's because statin drugs and it's because of, you know, medicine in general. And part of it is because of medicine because people like me are still alive. That's what it means.

Like it means we have better interventions where people are having heart attacks. We keep them from dying, right? But it's still, like, if you look at it, it's nothing like it was at the beginning of the century. Maybe for some of these people, I think about my death. That is an example. Yes, his life was spared for another 10, 15 or so years, but was he really kept alive or was he just dying slower? Exactly. I think a lot of these people that are having heart attacks or dealing with heart disease and on all these statins and all these different things, I think they're still dying. It's just that we're prolonging death instead of actually giving

people the tools to truly live. Right. If I had taken their advice when I had a heart attack, I would probably be right back in there or my health would decline. I did not take their advice and that was my personal decision and I went home and I did my own thing. And what was your own thing? How did you completely reverse

your heart disease after a heart attack? Here's the thing, people should know this, especially all the doctors who were skeptical out there. My lipids in my blood before the heart attack, after the heart attack, and while I reversed plaque in my body were astronomically higher

than what they should be, so to speak. And that's because I eat a low-carb diet because it's very easy as a type 1 diabetic to eat that diet and control blood sugars. But when you eat a low carb diet, your body has to deliver more fatty acids and fuel to your tissue. And it does that via lipoproteins, which are these cholesterol molecules, where we call cholesterol molecules in the blood. So that's why mine is higher. But during this whole process, you know, where, because, you know, six months prior to my heart attack,

I had a scan down of my heart, showing no plaque, no hardened plaque, calcified plaque in my arteries, zero was my perfect score. And then six months later I had a heart attack. So even that testing is not great. But during this time, my LDL levels were really, really high. So people will say, well, that's why he had a heart attack. I was like, well, then how can I reverse it? If it's so causative, how did I completely reverse a 70 to 5 to 99% blockage of plaque in my artery with levels that high?

Probably because it's not relevant, right? It's not the cause of heart disease. It may get involved down the line once the process starts, but it doesn't cause heart disease. So then what do you think cause? caused your heart attack? You're this healthy guy, chiropractor. What happened? Like I said before, I was always focused on diet and exercise. Those are things I can control, especially when the poor college kid, like I could always do diet and exercise. I could eat whole foods and exercise. But heart disease, to me, in my opinion, is not prevented nor caused solely by diet. And that's

what cholesterol has made at this huge distraction. Right. So what happened to me is a spontaneous clot formed that blocked the left anterior descending artery which is the most commonplace for heart attacks to happen and the clot formed because of to me I think well based on the literature it's lack of blood flow or poor blood flow so way back in 1856 this guy named rudolph fur chow just found out that what causes clotting in arteries is when we get poor stagnant blood flow damage to line an artery and when elements of blood become too sticky they're sticking together too much those are the things that create clotting. And when you look at what atherosclerosis is, some people have this buildup of plaque in their arteries, it's clotting tissue. You analyze that stuff, and it's like 87%

plus or minus 8% clotting tissue according to one study. There's no like large amounts of cholesterol there. There's just this fibrodite clotting tissue, which is the same tissue that forms if I cut my leg and a scab forms, right? So my body's trying to repair something, heal something. And so for me, when they did the heart cath, they went in and they looked at my arteries and there was no plaque whatsoever, there was just a giant clot in that one spot. And so that's what caused my instantaneous heart attack. And I don't think anybody will ever be able to tell me exactly what caused it, but based on my own searching of the literature, because this is personal to me, I think dehydration was a big issue at the time. And if you don't have enough water in the

system, it's definitely going to be more stagnant and not moving like it's supposed to. I was dealing with constipation at the time. And I was just, I convinced myself that I don't need to drink water when I was thirsty. And so I was having probably a cup of bone broth a day. And I should have had way more water, way more hydration. And I was also going through a lot of stress at the time. COVID was happening. And there was things in COVID that I didn't agree with. And it was frustrating to me. But then I heard some very unfortunate news about a close family member a day and a half before this happened. Oh, wow. And it wasn't just the news. It was the inability of me or my family to get to this person and help them. They were in a different country.

And it was during COVID, we couldn't really go that easily. So all day, the next day, I spent trying to figure out how I can get to this person. And then I slept very poorly two nights in a row, woke up on Tuesday morning, and unwisely did, tried to do an intense workout like I would usually do. And then 30 minutes later, 20, 30 minutes later, boom, heart attack. So stress, it sounds like, does play a huge role in heart attacks. Yeah. And if you look at what happens during acute stress, clotting factors go up significantly. which makes sense like evolutionarily because like if I think that I'm going to die because I'm running from something that's trying to eat me,

then I may get injured. My body's increasing clotting mechanisms so that if I do get injured, I don't bleed out or it's less likely that I'll bleed out. So it makes sense that that would happen. But yes, they go up significantly. So I was already in this pro-clotting state. And then exercise in itself is kind of an inflammatory thing. It's good for us long term. But in that state that I was in, probably wasn't a good idea.

And it was probably the straw that broke the camel's back. in that state of dehydration and stress, it was probably an issue. So just because I know you had Sally Norton on, I also was, I think, going through oxalate dumping at the time because I had been on an animal-based diet for about two to three years. And the only time I've ever had oxalates in my urine was during the time I had the heart attack. So I was dumping oxalates at the time, which is when she says, you know, is when you, the most common time you dump oxalate. So that could have played a role too, but I think it's multifactorial.

What advice do you have for type 1 diabetics when it comes to heart disease? So I recently came across some literature that showed that, you know, because type 1 diabetes, like my body, quote unquote, attacked the cells that make insulin. So I don't make insulin anymore. No matter how well I control my diet, I have to administer insulin unless there's some stem cell cure that comes along someday. Whereas type 2 very different. They've pathologically gone into insulin resistance and their body's not responding to insulin, even though they're still making it.

So for me, when I'm trying to be a pancreas and administer insulin to myself, it's much easier if I eat foods that don't spike insulin a lot, like glucose, like carbohydrates, they do. So eating lower carbohydrate is very easy to manage blood sugars. And so I wish that was the first thing I was told as a kid at nine years old when I was diagnosed with type 1. But it wasn't until 11 years later that I even came across a low carb diet. That's really, really important. However, I came across some literature recently that seems to show that it's not the fluctuation of blood sugars. Because no matter how hard I try, my blood sugars are still going to fluctuate more than the person who's not type 1 diabetic. Because it's just hard to try and be a pancreas myself.

That study seems to suggest that it's not the fluctuating blood sugars that make it more likely that a type 1 diabetic gets more artery disease or gets pathology in their arteries. Because, you know, being diabetic, there's more chance that your eyes will go bad. the smaller arteries get damaged. You get neuropathy in your feet, the small arteries down there or the kidney damage, that kind of stuff. But this study suggests that it's not the fluctuating blood sugars that does that. So my advice to type 1 diabetics would be, as someone who's reversed plaque in an artery, would be get as much infrared light as you can.

Stop exposing yourself to toxins. So heavy metals and plastics and all this kind of stuff because that stuff damages the artery. and then set your circadian rhythm. That is probably the number one thing I would suggest. Because if you're not setting your circadian rhythm, your melatonin is low and you're not healing at night. And if you're not healing at night, damage is just accumulating over time. Do you know who Dr. Charlie Faganholz is? Yes.

Okay. He was just on. His episode just came out a couple weeks ago. And he said that infrared light was the future of medicine. And you think about it. So all life on Earth. is trying to gain energy from its environment. And all that energy for all life on Earth comes from the sun.

So we are either absorbing sunlight directly and changing it to energy and storing that in structured water in our bodies, or we are in direct contact with the Earth, absorbing electrons straight from the Earth through grounding, or we're harvesting the chemical bonds in food, changing it to electrons. And all of this is gaining energy from sunlight.

If you look at how the body stores energy, it stores it in what's called structured water, which also forms on the lining of the artery, and it's a large part of how I reverse plaque in my body. Infrared light is the number one thing that builds structured water in the body. That's according to Dr. Gerald Pollock at University of Washington, who's like the foremost authority on structured water. And the sun, regardless of what time of day it's up, is about 40 to 50% infrared light.

So I think what we really have in society is a lack of sunlight exposure. Well, 100%. I mean, that's the number one thing is sunrise, sundown, being outside during those times for sure. It's just, unfortunately, we're just not doing that as a society. When was the last time you actually brought something nice when visiting someone's house for the first time? Like, back in the day, it was an unspoken rule. You brought a little something, a bottle of wine, some flowers, maybe a hand-painted mug. But now you show up empty-handed.

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And it's by Doppler ultrasound that go in and visualize the flow through that area. And at first it was estimated 75 to 99% blocked. And then it was down to 50% a year after that. And now it's that completely normal. And the only things that change is my diet stayed the same, my cholesterol level stayed the same, higher than what they should be, so to speak. My stress stayed the same. Unfortunately, might have got a little worse at times than it was.

But the only things that changed were is I increased my infrared light exposure and sunlight exposure. I did a lot of grounding, and I set my circadian rhythm. So I allowed my body to heal at night when I slept by increasing melatonin levels. That's what I changed. So if we're doing it in one experiment, those were the big heavy hitters. Are you anti-cardiologist?

I have a lot of very good cardiology friends. They're the cool cardiologist. Who are they? Tell us. So Philip Avadia is one. He's the nicest guy. And where's he at? I think he lives in Florida, but he's all over the place. Okay.

He travels a lot. And I think he does online consulting. A good friend of mine, Thomas Cabell, is in Nashville. And I just finally met him in person recently. And he's very awesome. He's very knowledgeable, a great guy. But there's other, like, lots of cardiologists who are big fans of low-car. like Brett Sher and Nadir Ali and things like that.

So there's lots of cardiologists that are kind of more in the know. It's few and far between that I find one that's aware of all these things. Lots of them like low carb diets, but they're not aware of infrared light or they're not as well versed in it. So I try to put the whole thing together. I have no filter. Like I look for everything. I'm not like, you know,

saying, oh, it's just diet or it's just light or whatever. It's a combination of everything. And that's just kind of the benefit I had. not coming from the field of cardiology. You say that the heart is actually not the biggest blood mover in the body. So what is? It's the infrared light. So here's a little lesson on structured water.

So structured water is this state of water that's like a fourth phase. We all know that water can be ice, water, or steam. But there's actually this fourth phase it can be. And it's kind of like a gel. So it's kind of like the consistency of raw egg white or like jello. We bring in it. So it's kind of like if I touch my skin, you know, it feels like a gel. gel, right? So most of the water in my body is actually a gel in my cells. But this does happen

in the lining of the artery as well. And they've proven this in Gerald Pollack's lab at the University of Washington. They've done this in chick embryos. They've found that there's this layer between the lining of the artery wall and the red blood cells, this gel layer that excludes everything that's not it. And so the way that structured water forms, it becomes a very electronegatively charged entity or space. And then next to it becomes a very positive. charged because it cleaves off like water is in oxygen and two hydrogens and it cleaves off a hydrogen and that makes the hydrogen very positive space here negative space here and a positive next to a negative is a battery and so that's why we have a positive negative end in and a battery and so this i mentioned earlier

that's how our body holds this charge is structured water it forms structured water and forms this charge and they've shown the discharge separation you can plug an electrode into the negative and positive in and power a bite bulb um so it holds energy and in a tube When it gets next to the lining of the artery, it actually creates blood flow. And they've done this over and over again. They put this hydrophilic tube made of a water-loving solution into water, and they shine infrared light on it. And the water starts to move through the tube with no pump acting on it whatsoever.

So this is what creates blood flow. And so when you think about what a plaque in an artery is, which is clotting tissue, which one of the ways that we form clotting is poor blood flow. and you think about how deprived we are of infrared light these days because we're living indoors, it starts to make a lot of sense. And there's a lot of research out there showing that hemodynamics, how blood is moving, dictates whether or not we get plaque in our arteries. Wow.

Okay. Another huge plug for the red light devices, I'm telling you. Should salt actually be avoided for heart patients? I don't think so. No. There's really not much literature on that. There's actually literature that shows that if you have low salt, you're going to increase your chance of insulin resistance,

which is the number one cause, or a number one risk factor for heart disease. So, and there's actually a study that I found where they were using a diuretic on its own, and then they had other patients where they're using a diuretic and salt, an assault solution. And the people who used the salt solution actually lost more fluid.

So when you have low salt, your body's going to try and hold on, to those minerals. It's going to hold on to it because it needs them. If you provide your body with enough salt, so when you hold on to those minerals, you're also going to hold on to fluid. If you have enough salt, your body can let some of that salt go because you're giving it more. And so it can let go of fluid. And that's what that study so nicely shows. Now, if someone's been, you know, going off salt for a while because they've been recommended that, and then all of a sudden they add a bunch back in, they may see some effects of that at first because the body's not used to

having that much salt. But also, isn't there something to be said about real salt, good salt, versus just the bleach table salt stuff? Yeah, for sure. I mean, the bleach table salt are the preservative salts you find in a lot of processed foods. Those are not ideal. We want like balanced minerals with all the 60 minerals. It's mostly going to be sodium potassium, those types of things, but you still have all the other minerals in it. You know what I have from Redmond's? I have, it's literally just like a chunk of salt rock that they give you to just lick some. times. Oh, like a salt lick. Yeah. So animals do they got in the wood, they find a salt lick. And they said it's like

one lick like provides all these electrolytes and all this kind of stuff. So I just have that. It's like if you ever start feeling, they said it's great for fasting, like when you're fasting to do that. But I'm not fasting. But anyway, I just thought that was interesting. We're basically big bags of salt. That's what we are. Yeah. We need minerals to do physiology. So depriving your body of that can lead to some issues for sure. Now the American Heart Association says that butter is bad for health. and that vegetable oils are good for heart health. What is wrong with this advice? Well, the first thing that's wrong with it is that butter's been around forever.

And vegetable oils are new. And, you know, it's just an association, but the consumption of vegetable oils, which started in the early 1900s, correlates directly with heart disease. It's just one thing. And I think it's one small thing, one small part of the entire picture of heart disease.

But, you know, I could pick apart research all day long. And I think that at the end of the day, lots of research is a flawed construct and that we'll never really get the answer from research, from human design research. But people like to argue about saturated fat versus unsaturated fat and vegetable oils versus, you know, tallow and butter and things like that. And I think they're getting lost in the weeds. Yeah. I mean, you have to think about it from, we didn't have hard days before, you know, and we do now, what has changed? That's the most important thing. And there's probably multiple things that have changed.

one of those, a form of fat is so different than what we've ever had before. And that doesn't make sense to me that that's okay and that the thing we used to have is not okay. Right. That's dumb. But it's also, when you take into the financial part of it, you're like, there's money to be made on vegetable oils, not as much to be made on animal foods. Because I have friends who are in like the animal farming business. And it's like, you can make a living, but you're going to make a lot of profit. So the profit is in the processed foods. You talked about magnesium. Were there other supplements in place of medications that you liked for reversing heart disease. I used some other ones, but I don't think that they were the driver in the reversal.

I did use taurine, which you find in high amounts in animal foods anyways. So I was getting a lot of that through diet. But torrein's been shown to help promote health and aligning of the artery. I also used an enzyme called serapeptase. And there are other ones too, like natokinase or lumbrokinase that are good for breaking up fibrode clotting tissue. They've been shown the research to be good at that. if I wanted to get rid of plaque, that could be useful.

So I took that. Again, I have no idea if these things were helpful not, but this is what I did when I reversed it. I also did infrared light and infrared sauna and sunlight and that kind of stuff. So those, I don't know, what was the major player? I don't know. Maybe it was a combination of them all. Oh, I also took a supplement called Wobene or Strophanthus, which is something our body

makes indogynously from the adrenal glands. And what it does is it stimulates a non-stress signal to the heart. So for me, you know, they had put this fear in me and I was going to develop heart failure. And so I was doing anything I could to not develop. That's originally why I started using the sauna. It wasn't because of the plaque. It was because they were like, you've had a heart attack.

Your chances of developing heart failure are really high. And I was like, oh, no. My dad needed a heart transplant badly. And he would have been on the list the next day except for having brain cancer. You're not eligible for, you know, organ transplants when you've got cancer. So it was just a horrible lose-lose situation.

And like, just so people know, like, if you look at the literature on heart failure in infrared sauna, it's phenomenal. Like their ejection fraction goes up, the heart size goes back down, swelling goes down. Now there's a point if you get so far along that it's really hard to come back from. But for the most part, the studies are really, really promising. Also for infrared sauna and peripheral artery disease, which I didn't know was at the time when I started doing the sauna, but there are studies out of Japan that show that it's really effective for peripheral artery disease, which is what I had.

So again, this infrared light piece is really, really important. How many minutes a day are you doing red light therapy? So I do infrared sauna. I also have a red and infrared light panel and then I do sunlight. What panel do you use? EMR tech. Okay. That's the one I have.

I like it because there's no flicker. Uh-huh. You know? Yep. I use Juvv and they did it. They have a no flicker test. Yeah. And then I use Mnfred sauna.

So I use my sauna probably four to six times a week for about 20 minutes. And I stay in there until I start sweating and I wait five minutes and I get out. But I'm also getting sunlight a lot during the day. So as much as I can. So even if it's 20 degrees outside, I'm usually sitting in the sun. And it actually feels nice. Like with the sun on you, you get pretty warm. Like I start to sweat a little bit sometimes in 20 degrees.

It's crazy how much energy you're getting from the sun. I heard this the other day. Don't know if it's true that the best areas, if you want to really be absorbing vitamin D, is to have your stomach exposed in your legs. I would say at least 50% of your body. Okay, 50% of your body. But stomach is very important because when we talk about circadian rhythm and the signals that the sun is supposed to give us from like,

Time it rises in the different wavelengths and colors of light that it changes throughout the day. That gives your body information. And there's actually some literature that suggests that your microbiome responds to sunlight. I knew it was going to beat the gut microbiome. Yeah. Cool. So there's probably truth to that one at least. Let me set the scene.

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Treat yourself to some Masa Chips and use code real Alex Clark to get 20% off your first order at Masa Chips.com. That's real Alex Clark at Masa Chips.com for 20% off your first order. Don't let life's little curses get you down. When you're telling somebody your story and they are somebody who is dealing with heart problems and they're on tons of medication and they start feeling defensive, you saying, you know, there's a way that you might be able to get off these medications and stuff, how do you approach that subject? Because I'm sure that there are people in my audience who have parents or grandparents. or loved ones who were kind of in that rat race and they want to help them get out. Well, the big one is statins, right?

That's the one that has pushed the most, either number one or number two prescribed drug every year, that and opioids, which wrote a book on opioids too. But like those two are huge. And so statin drugs are pushed because they're just, they just think that cholesterol causes heart disease. And if you don't take that,

you're going to die pretty much. And so I'm driven by information. So if I'm talking to someone, and first of all, I tell them that I'm just going to give you information. What you decide to do is totally up to you, right? It's not up to your doctor. It's not up to me. It's up to you. You can do what you want, you know, that sovereignty over your medical care.

If you choose to take these medications and do what I'm recommending, that's fine. If you choose not to, that's fine too. You know, but it's your decision. I'm not telling you what to do. But I will tell you that when you look at the studies on statins, it's bad. right so there's these there's these major clinical trials that the industry and cardiologists use to tout statins and they are just you know full of statistical manipulation um and so if you look at so there's like the four s trial the jupiter trial the ascot trial the west of scotland trial there's so many

trials that they use and like take the ascot trial for example they they had a treatment group and a control group right the treatment group took the statins controlled group didn't And in the treatment group, 98.1% of them did not have a heart attack or stroke or event of some sort. And 97% of the control group did not. So that's a 1.1% difference between the treatment group, which is not statistically significant. It doesn't really matter. That's the absolute risk is 1%, which doesn't matter. If you do relative risk go and you take that 1.1%, you compare it to the 3% that did have a heart attack or stroke or whatever in the non-treatment group,

you get a 36% reduction. So they're manipulating statistics to make it look better than it actually is, right? Which they shouldn't be allowed to do that. They shouldn't be allowed to use relative risk because it's a misrepresentation of the data. And they do that in all the studies.

Another one is if you look at the literature, there's literature that shows they looked at all those studies, those big clinical trials they use, using number needed to treat, which means that number needed to treat, which means that number needed to treat is just something to look at, like this many people would have to take the drug for this long to prevent one heart attack or one stroke or whatever. And they looked at all those studies and they found that like the numbers were like 83 people would have to take the drug for five years to prevent one heart attack, which mean 82 people, sorry.

Yeah. And then like that that was deaths actually to prevent deaths. And then 39 people would have to take the drug for one year or for five years to prevent one heart attack. and 125 people would have to take the drug for five years to prevent one stroke, which are just not good numbers. Like there's so many people that are still left vulnerable. But the thing is, people are told, just take these and you'll find, like, you prevent heart disease.

And they're not giving any advice about infrared light or food or anything else. So what happens if people, like the information that you're sharing right now, somebody listening who's got all these issues, if they go to their cardiologist and they say, like, well, what about this, this and this on statins? and the cardiologist, I mean, what is like a typical cardiologist going to say? Lots of times they get frustrated with you if you don't, if you're questioning them. So what do you do? Because they don't know the answer.

So you have to understand that they want to measure things that they know how to treat, so to speak. With the pills. Right. So that's why they measure cholesterol. That's why the whole field of cardiology is obsessed with measuring that number. I mean, they do take other things like inflammation markers and things like that. But they rarely take like a fasting insulin. or a fasting leptin level because if they get that back and it's abnormal they don't know what to

tell the person they don't know how to fix that they don't know how to counsel them on diet and circadian rhythm um so they take what they can treat so to speak but are really having an effect i don't know and so you have to understand that and so like what would i tell someone you have to i don't know you have to be a smart consumer and you have to it's very hard today because and i recognize that people aren't weren't in the position that i was in with the knowledge that i had and the knowledge that I've gained since then to make those decisions myself. And so it's a scary situation. But that's why I'm trying to promote this stuff and educate people, you know,

and get it out there so that people can make more informed decisions. Otherwise, you're just stuck in fear. And what does fear do, shut down decision making? Exactly. And you do a wonderful job in your book. I mean, every nook and cranny of heart disease in the process and diet and cholesterol and statins. I mean, you break down everything.

And it's very in-depth chapters there for people. They can get into more if they're interested beyond this, you know, hour or so interview, which is great. What alternative methods do you recommend to assess cholesterol's impact on health beyond standard lipid panels? So this one's tough for me because if you look at blood testing in general, it's one snapshot in time of one tissue in the body. So how is it really supposed to tell us risk of anything? I would argue, right? So even if I said, okay, markers of inflammation are way more important. They're way more telling that.

I think they are. You know, you could get a high-sensitivity C-reactive protein. You could get myeloporoxidase. You could get L-P-L-A-2. These are all markers of inflammation in the body and of the artery specifically. But that's what it was then. Five minutes later, it could be different. If you go out into the sunlight, it could be totally different. Right. Right. So when people get tested, and they say, my cholesterol is this. It was that. But Dave Feldman, you know, who's an engineer who's kind of researched this stuff, has showed us that it changes hour to hour. You know, so unless you have a CGM for lipids, it's not really going to tell you too much. So you could also measure markers of clotting risk. You could look fibrinogen and prothrombin and ESR, things like that in blood.

But again, that's what it was, one snapshot in time. So I like to tell people that the testing doesn't determine risk. Your environment does. Your behavior does. Right. So you can get that number and be like, oh, man, I need to do something about that. But that doesn't necessarily determine that you're at risk chronically, I guess. Okay.

So when somebody gets their cholesterol checked, what should they be looking for? Like, what actually matters in terms of cholesterol? One useful thing you could do is look at a trigged HDL ratio, triglycerides divided by HDL. That number should be 1.5 or lower. And so that's an indication that you may have some poor metabolic health, which is a big risk factor for developing plaque or for plaque sticking around once it's developed. Perfect. So that's something you could look at. Okay.

You can look at a fasting insulin level or fasting leptin level. Those are also signs of poor metabolic health. And those are kind of kind of stay that way, regardless of how your environment changes minute to minute, if you have poor metabolic health. So if you change those, then you're decreasing your risk, yes. So there's no such thing as bad or good cholesterol? I would argue not. Chlesterol is just something that's reflecting your metabolism. So if you ate a low-carb diet and the only fuel source you were giving in your body was fatty acids and ketones, those fatty acids have to be delivered to the tissues.

And so more fatty acids you deliver via more LDL molecule so your LDL goes up. And then if you ate more glucose and carbohydrates, you wouldn't need to deliver as many fatty acids so they come down. And that happens in generally everybody. And some people who go on low-carb diets, they go really high. Like me, the lipids go really high. A group of researchers has labeled those people lean-need. mass hyper responders. But there was actually a really interesting one-person experiment done by a guy at Harvard

named Nick Norwitz where he is a lean mass hyper responder. He eats a low-carb diet and his LDL goes way up. And so what he did was he then ate 12 Oreo cookies for six days, I think it was, and his LDL plummeted, right? Because he's eating glucose, right? So he didn't have to deliver fats anymore. And then he went off the Oreos, went back on his low-carb diet, and his LDL went back up. and then he went on a statin drug for six days, and it lowered his LDL.

But the Oreos worked way better than the statin. So I hope the cardiologists don't hear that and think, oh, we're going to prescribe Oreos now. Now they will. You know it. How do you approach cholesterol, though, in the context of aging or hormonal changes? Those are usually liver issues, I think. So the liver is processing and metabolizing everything, but it's responsible for taking up cholesterol and metabolizing it. And so if your liver is stressed, like when a change in hormones happens or during just stress

or toxin exposures, things like that, it can affect the liver's ability to deal with cholesterol like it was before. And you get this change in cholesterol. But again, do we really know it was a change? Because we're just looking at one snapshot in time. So unless we had a continuous cholesterol monitor measuring what it is all the time, do we know it's changing? But, you know, there's plenty of studies that said that just your natural circadian rhythm,

your lipids change naturally through that all day long. So there's lots of things that affect it. So when we measure it and we treat that number, we're just treating a number. We're not treating a person. And that's a profitable way of looking at things. It's from the medical perspective, but it's not really helping the person.

Because lots of the studies that tout statins, they look at the ability to lower cholesterol and heart disease rates, but they kind of ignore all cause mortality. So these people are dying, with lower cholesterol, right? Great, they have low cholesterol, but they're dying of something else. Because it's not really affecting the person's health.

What simple steps can somebody struggling with heart disease take today to start getting back on track and healing? I think the number one thing people should do is get more infrared light. If you look at what's happened since the invention of fluorescent light in the 1950s, which is when heart disease started to skyrocket, we all moved indoors under more artificial light for most of the day, right? Before that, we had incandescent bulbs which were very high in infrared light. We had fire and we had sunlight.

So making it a point to get more infrared light in your life would be huge. Eat a Whole Foods diet. You know, there's lots of dogma about diet, carnivore, keto, you know, vegan and whatever. I don't recommend vegan diets, but I think that at the very least eat whole foods, you know, and no worry food comes from and eat seasonally if you can. Give us like one minute on why eating seasonally is important. Well, first of all, it's a huge argument for like a keto diet because in the winter, if I lived in the woods and farming hadn't been invented yet, what would I eat? Animals.

And I would be on a keto diet, right? But second, I think that our body gets signals from the light environment that our food was grown in or raised in. And if we're eating food that's been shipped from all over the world in different light environments, our body's getting different information. And I think that confuses the body. And there's, you know, when you break down the chemical bonds and that food, those electrons, carry different light information. And so if I'm eating a food from Mexico in February and Virginia where I live, like that's totally different light information.

And light is information. And we know that because an electromagnetic signal from a cell phone to a cell phone is light, and it's carrying information from it. So light is giving your body information. So really be conscious of what light environment your body is getting and the information that's getting. So the easiest way to do that then would be not even probably buying produce at the grocery store because that is going to be shipped from who knows where, but you'd

have to shop with your local vegetable farmer and be like, okay, what do you have this month? What are you growing this month? Basically would be how you'd have to do that. Exactly. Yeah. So for me right now, I'm fairly carnivore because that's what's available from the local farm down the road for me is I have their grass-fed meats. Because we're filming in winter. Yeah. It's winter right now. And then in the spring and summer, when the farmer's markets come around and they have vegetables available, I'll eat some low-car vegetables and things. If you could offer one remedy to heal us at culture, this is physically, emotionally, spiritually, maybe it has nothing to do with the hard stuff, just something else, what would it be? We would stop attaching labels to things or to people, right?

You know, because, I mean, it's fine if you feel like you identify with a certain label or something like that. But what I mean is like in the sense that like, oh, like my example, oh, he's a chiropractor. What does he know about cardiology? Right. Well, like, what does it take to know something about heart disease? Experience, research. Does that require a degree? No.

Or that person's liberal. That person's Catholic, that whatever, you know. Then all of a sudden, you're preconceived notions about that label. You judge that person, right? Rather than get to know the person. So I don't like to label myself anything. I'm Stephen. If you want to know things about me, then get to know me.

If somebody wants to work with you directly and just talk to you. you about their heart issues, can they? Yeah. So my website is resource your health.com. And on that website, I have courses I've developed that teach a lot of this stuff. My books are on there. I also have a health community. People can join and have access to me. And there's lots of resources in there as well.

And that's all on my website, resourceyhealth.com. And what is the name of your book? Understanding the Heart. Are you on social media? Can people follow you there? Yes. So my handle is Dr. Stephen Hussey. I'm on Instagram mostly, but also X.

Great. Thank you, Dr. Hussey, for coming on Culture Apothecary. Thanks for having me. So crazy that he knew to say to the doctor, how about magnesium? And the doctor was like, oh, I don't know about any of that. Just Crazy Town, USA. If you or someone you know has ever had something where they've had to be in a hospital like that for something serious, you know the frustration of what that can be like, knowing what we know as people who consume content like this

and listen to people like Dr. Hussey. Please leave a five-star review. Tell others why they should listen to Culture Apothecary if you're a fan of the show. If you're new here, we'd love to have you. You can follow the show on Instagram at Culture Apothecary or me at Real Alex Clark. We're on a mission to heal us at Culture. I have guests come on twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific, bringing their own unique remedy to do just that.

You can subscribe to Real Alex Clark on YouTube. I will see you next time. I'm Alex Clark, and this is Culture Apothecary.