Founder's Story - Heart Disease Is Optional? The Truth About Health, Habits, and Longevity | Ep 261 with Dr. Hosen Kiat

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

We open by challenging a midlife myth: “you’re getting old, expect decline.” Dr. Hosen Kiat counters that aging is plastic—biology is modifiable—illustrated by his ninety-six-year-old mother’s daily hour-long walks after hip surgery and his own “mind overdrive” routine that gets him training on days he least feels like it. The conversation locates prevention where he believes true healing lives: at the meeting point of modern cardiology and time-honoured medical traditions. He explains why Western medicine excels at acute saves (stents, bypass, resuscitation) but underinvests in prevention, and how his Wisdom from Two Worlds philosophy—and his platform at DrKiat.com—helps patients pair evidence-based care with practices that build harmony and resilience over decades. Key Discussion Points:The episode maps the levers that truly add healthy years: Mediterranean-leaning meals with fewer ultra-processed carbs and deep-fried foods; more plants and lightly cooked dishes; routine movement (“any movement beats none”); restorative sleep; and trainable responses to stress. He distinguishes measurable load from the stress we manufacture in our interpretation—two people can finish the same task with identical results yet feel completely different based on mindset—so part of heart health is training reactions. Social connection isn’t optional either; loneliness, he notes, carries cardiovascular risk comparable to smoking, making community a medical issue, not a luxury. On misinformation, he shares a clinic vignette: a couple arrives certain—thanks to social media—that a 70% blockage “needs a stent.” It didn’t. The point isn’t to shame patients but to restore standards: ask for credentials, weigh evidence, and individualize decisions. For listeners in their thirties and forties, he outlines the first medical mile: get a baseline cardiac assessment and labs, review family history, blood pressure, glucose, lipids, inflammatory markers, and signs of chronic infection; then tailor further testing with your physician. Takeaways:Healthspan bends to habit. Train what you eat, how you move and sleep, how you meet stress, and who you stay connected to, and biology follows. Prevention is the main event: marry cutting-edge cardiology with proven traditional practices, treat community as medicine, verify before you medicalize social-media advice, and get a baseline assessment in your forties so you’re not flying blind. Most importantly, start small and daily—one walk, one better plate, one calmer reaction—repeated until they become identity. Closing Thoughts:Dr. Kiat’s message is disarmingly practical: decline isn’t a sentence but a series of choices. If you build “healthy habits” and guard your mindset, your heart—and your years—change course. Prevention today is the price of freedom tomorrow. Get more leads and grow your business. Go to https://www.pipedrive.com/founders and get started with a 30 day free trial. Ditch the other hiring sites, and let ZipRecruiter find what you’re looking for — the needle in the haystack. Try it FOR FREE at this exclusive web address: ZipRecruiter.com/WORK. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So Dr. Kiat, this topic is really near and dear to me because I've had a lot of personal experiences with people in my family who have had issues, passed away, things like that. Plus, as I'm now in my 40s, it's really something that I'm thinking about. But I'm very curious, Ron, what would you say is one lie that the medical system tells us about aging, in health. Yeah, I'm not sure whether it's a lie, but it is such an easy misconception for people to swallow is that their doctors often tell them, well, Jeff, you're getting old. You should expect your memory, your vitality, your strength to decline. And people often just swallow this. But in fact, in fact, aging is plastic. Biology is absolutely modifiable. My mom, 96, she's living in L.A. She walks for an hour, 96, for an hour every day,

rain or shine, not that it rains a lot in L.A. But she would walk. Doesn't matter what the weather is, whether how hot it is, she would walk. And this is despite the fact that at the age of 93, she had a hip surgery. And that is something. Today, for example, I had two Zoom meetings in the morning, and this is one of the three interviews that I'll be doing. And this morning, the last thing in my mind was going to the gym. So I had this life strategy called Mind Overdrive, and I've talked about that in my book, Wisdom from Two Worlds. This mine overdrive made me go. So, yeah, I didn't do my 95 kilo bench press, but I did enough volume to, you know, to keep my muscles warm. But these are the sort of things that we can do at any age

if we have towards healthy habits. These are healthy habits. Once we're into that habit, in fact, we can live a lot longer with vitality, with strength, and hopefully our memory continues to be as sharp as ever. And my mom's memory is as sharp as when you was 40. Wow. I only dream of being in my 90s and still have the sharpness of how I am in my 40s. I'm a little bit nervous because I don't have as many healthy habits as I need to. So can you walk me through what are some of the healthy habits that you do? Then you know what healthy habits are, obviously healthy eating, Mediterranean food, less fatty foods, less fried foods.

more raw and lightly cooked meals instead of heavily sort of fried, deep fried stuff. So these are all the healthy habits, less refined or ultra-refine carbohydrates, less meat, stick to more plant-based foods. And then, of course, regular physical activities, what we call movement. Any movement is better than none. sleeping well, stress strategies. Everyone has stress, but, you know, we just somehow has to manage that stress. So all these things, staying connected, for example, loneliness as is as risky as smoking, for example. So staying connected, being in an environment that

you're not socially isolated is a very important thing to do. So these are what we call healthy living and healthy habits. And these two words, healthy habits will keep you, hopefully, living longer, but more importantly, living healthier. So as we discuss, yeah, as we discuss early, medicine should be more about preventing disease instead of treating disease. I like that mindset. I like that mindset about prevention rather than treating, because I feel like once you get to the treating phase, it's pretty miserable because you're already suffering from something. I have this feeling that social media could potentially be an extra cause of isolation.

It makes a lot of less people, it makes a lot of people less social. But then I also see a slight danger. And there's a lot of health advice that I've seen given that are not from people that have any expertise. How do people in the medical profession look at that? Yeah, I guess social media can be a plus or minus. And more and more, we are challenged. Our patients come to us with knowledge, so-called knowledge, information from social media. I have a brilliant influencer. She and her husband came to see me. Her husband has about 70% narrowing in one of the heart vessels of his heart. She just blatantly said to me, he needs a stent. I said, why? Because everyone

knows. She said, everyone knows if you have 70% blockage, you need a stent. I said, how so? She said, well, it's a social norm. You know, every social media will tell you this. So everything, you know, everything that she looked at, she said, would tell her that. But, you see, when you ask, who are these people who say this? What are their credentials? Of course, she couldn't tell me. And I'm sure that I said to her, I'm sure they were not professor of cardiology who say this.

So that's a classic example. And of course, he didn't have a stem. Yeah, there's like this thing going around about not using sunscreen and that sunscreen causes can't. There's this really wild stuff. So I had to get a dermatologist and say like, okay, what do you think? For me, I go to people that have real world expertise because anyone can go on social media and say something like you said. I thank you for that example. How do you see this old world meets new world, this healing around cutting edge science meets ancient wisdom? Because I am very interested to learn more about this.

Western trained, so I practice Western medicine, but more and more I can see that while Western medicine is very, very good in acute heart attacks, say, we've really safe lives there because we can put the stent in, we can do acute bypass surgery and save the patients, people with severe infection, we can treat them, people who basically collapse, we can give them resuscitation and intubation and so on. So yes, Western medicine is very good in more acute medicine. But when it comes to prevention, a lot we have to respect the traditional medicine, which has stood the test of time, that they work in creating living in harmony, anybody with nature. So in my book, Wisdom from Two Worlds, I mentioned an example, and this is a widely known knowledge that you can Google, in fact, as well.

So during the Vietnam War, American soldiers in Vietnam were in fact suffering from a lot of tropical infections. And of course, I've got the best antibiotics, but you couldn't really pump antibiotics all the time. And so guess what? They, in fact, got from mainland China stoppile of this traditional Chinese medicine called Pianzai Huang in Chinese, which is in fact a concoction of several things, netto-ginzeng and deer mask and box bile, etc., which has been around since the Ming Dynasty.

and has been used as an antibiotic, antiseptic, for thousands of use. But they're slow. They cannot treat acute septicemia, but they're very good when people are in a place that they just keep getting recurrent infections. And that's how East and West meet without boundaries, basically. They would still have the antibiotics if they have an acute septicic condition, but they would be taking these bianzai Huang all the time to prevent the chronic festering infections.

Wow, you know, I had an issue before with me, and I went to so many doctors, they couldn't figure it out, and I looked at, I don't know why, I just was reading about Chinese medicine, and the wild thing is the Chinese medicine told me to look at, was the actual issue. And that blew me away. That's why I was very interested to learn more because basically, you know, five doctors couldn't tell me what it was. Chinese medicine told me what it was and I was able to resolve it. So I'm really interested about that. And thank you for, thank you for sharing. And I love, I love the book that you have. I wanted to go back to stress. I feel like, you know, the last few years during COVID, just in general, if you're an entrepreneur and

business owner that there's always a tremendous amount of stress and many times you're not sleeping, you're doing probably the two, you know, terrible things for you. And I think, I think I've read it, you know, stress is the new smoking. And, and how, like, so how much do you think this actually can take away from us if we're, A, not sleeping and B, we're overstressed. Yeah, so modify the risk factors of health basically are broadly categorized into physical and non-physical, and stress obviously in the non-physical risk factors. The problem with stress, in fact, we're just discussing this earlier today. Stress can be objectively quantified, but a lot of people when they talk but stress is the other part of stress,

which is the thing that is out of their mindset, which cannot be quantified. So I was just explaining, if you and I then, we go and do the same video game, and the score is exactly the same after 30 seconds. You may feel very stress of the outcome because you didn't score 100%.

I may have been celebrating because of the outcome, because I thought, wow, you know, I did pretty well. And my stress level and your stress level at that time would be different. You would feel a bit more anxious because you didn't get it. Well, I felt okay. But the quantifiable stress with you and I, the CPU, was the same. dealing with this stress for 30 seconds and getting, say, the same outcome, but your stress level that you perceive as stress is different from mind. So that sort of stress is not quantifiable

because it is completely out of your perception. So if someone cut in front of you when you're driving, you may feel very stressed and angry. The same thing that happened to me or the same thing that happened to you for another day because you're in a good mood, it didn't stress you at all. I like that. I need to adjust reactions, right? If stress, I don't have to stress if I don't want to stress based on the reactions that I can have, which could potentially maybe give me a longer life that I'm healthier. So thank you for that. I'm going to start, I need to focus on that. I need to do more meditation and yoga because sometimes I find myself stressing and it could be because I'm not sleeping. I have a question about a test. So when you when you look at maybe or you think

about people over the age of 30, 40, is there a specific test that you think that they should go to their doctor and get today? Sure. For heart test, certainly at the age of 40, most people should have a baseline cardiac assessment, and that always will start with doctor, checking what your risk factors are from genetics, from family history, from your blood pressure, you're based on blood sugar, you're based on cholesterol, you're based on inflammation markers, whether you have got signs of chronic infections like chronic gingivitis, chronic sinusitis, all this chronic inflammation will drive risk factors of heart disease. So these are all interview and physical examination and basic pathology studies.

Now, based on that, then your doctor may go further with more specific tests. That's for the cardiac side. For example, like airing our lead's friend who died at age of 40, I'm almost certainly, he felt well. He never had any, never went to a doctor probably for anything. And so his cholesterol could have been sky high, but no one knew. Yeah, 10 years ago, my mom was on a hike. She was in her mid-60s at that time.

Very healthy. My whole life, she always ate very healthy, mostly vegetables, fish. While she was on this hike, she hiked like 10 miles every day. She had a heart attack while she was hiking. And she, and then when they, I think it was, I don't know, that percentage of blockage was very eye. And she was shocked and I was shocked because she never had any issues, super healthy, always did the right things.

But, you know, genetically, you know, she couldn't escape. But the good thing was she was healthy after. And obviously the heart attack was very mild. So, you know, potentially I'm sure it could have been a lot worse. So I'm very passionate about this, too. If people want to get in touch with you, they want to read the book, how can they do so? Definitely, www.com, d-R-K-I-A-T-I-A-T-com. And you can also follow me on YouTube's.

Well, Dr. Kiyad, I really appreciate your time. I was talking earlier when we jumped on about, you know, how many things you have behind you really shows a lot about your credibility and your expertise. And I'm glad there's people like you who are being more vocal because, a lot of us are getting our information from social media, from people that have no real world expertise, which we talked about. So I think it's very important what you're doing. And I hope that, you know, a millions of people can read and can learn. And maybe this will help them with their prevention. But thank you so much for joining us on founders. And that's why I did go on

the social media now, because I feel that it's about time that I help this credible in the standard of the social media. The world needs you. The world needs you. But thank you so much for all that you do.