Mark Bell's Power Project - MBPP EP. 630 - Protecting Your Heart & Tests You MUST Take ft. Dr. Michael Twyaman

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

Dr. Michael Twyman is a board certified cardiologist who focuses on the prevention and early detection of heart disease. Dr Twyman completed his cardiovascular training at St Louis University after he completed a 4 year active duty tour as an internist at Naval Hospital Beaufort. He has been in private practice since 2012. Heart Attack Prevention is his passion. He utilizes the best of conventional medicine, integrative/functional medicine, quantum medicine, and biohacking to get to the root cause of the patient’s cardiovascular issues. Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Vertical Diet Meals: https://verticaldiet.com/ Use code POWERPROJECT for free shipping and two free meals + a Kooler Sport when you order 16 meals or more! ➢Vuori Performance Apparel: Visit https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order! ➢Magic Spoon Cereal: Visit https://www.magicspoon.com/powerproject to automatically save $5 off a variety pack! ➢8 Sleep: Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro! ➢Marek Health: https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT15 for 15% off ALL LABS! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Subscribe to the Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Power Project family, how's it going? Here on this podcast, we want to help you guys all live healthier lives, which is why I'm super pumped to introduce you to our next guest, Dr. Michael Twyman. Dr. Twyman is a board-certified cardiologist, and his focus is on prevention and early detection of heart disease. His passion is heart attack prevention, and he uses conventional, integrative, functional, and quantum medicine, as well as biohacking in order to get to the root of cardiovascular issues. We learned a ton about taking care of our heart health from

Dr. Twyman, and we're pumped to share this info with you all. Enjoy. Power Project family, this episode is brought to you by Piedmontese Beef. Now, we've been eating Piedmontese Beef for a very long time now, but the amazing thing about their steaks, and we like to call it diet steaks, is that number one, they have a lot of cuts that are very high fat, but they have a lot of cuts that are low fat. So if you're dieting and you're not eating a lot of fat, you can still enjoy some wonderful tasting steak. Andrew, can you tell them how to get it? Yes, absolutely. You guys got to head over to Piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com at checkout. Enter promo code POWERPROJECT for 25% off your entire order.

And if your order is $150 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Head over there right now. What were you saying about something about China? What are they doing? Yeah, so the dude from Social Dilemma, Ryan Soper, sent me this clip. And the dude from Social Dile dilemma was just recently on rogan and he was talking about how china has implemented for their youth um they've implemented like if they're if kids use tiktok right instead of you know them seeing girls

dancing and and uh like booty shaking and just a bunch of just random wild stuff that's gonna make you stay on the app um they're going going they show kids 14 and under like science projects and things that like make you learn about history, stuff like that. You know, it forces that down the kids throats. And then also, instead of having the I need that. Right. We all need that. And instead of having the endless swipe, you can swipe. But after like two or three videos, it'll pause for five seconds and say, would you like to take a break?

And then you'd have to wait and then it'll swipe more. And then there's also a curfew. So after like 10 p.m., it's locked. 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., the social media, TikTok or whatever, whatever else, other apps for those youth. Nothing good happens after that time. Wow. Yeah. I'm surprised because, you know, I mean, that's just awesome then.

Because normally it's like, no, just, you know, keep them on as long as possible. I know it's not the current app that's doing that. But still, I don't know. I think that's cool. Yeah. That whole episode was good because it went into a lot of things in terms of, like, how, like, Russia and China, they're going into our Facebook and kind of galvanizing different groups and stuff. I got to listen to that full episode. That was cool.

Yeah. whenever something has to be quote unquote policed, then that means that you, somebody has to actively be doing that kind of all the time. And in addition to that, in this case, it's automated. So not a huge problem. Just, you know, anybody that has a app that's a kid, it's just, but then there's all kinds of other weird things that pop up,

like what about when the kid's 16 or 15, like when they get a certain age? Who determines what age gets censored, what age doesn't get censored? And then where are these kids being steered towards is also another thing to examine. Are they being legitimately steered towards healthy things? I would say there's no chance of that. And the reason why I'd say there's no chance of that is because everything always boils down to money. Yeah. In almost every single case, unless there's somebody somewhere that's well-meaning that says, let's put our money behind saving our children.

But I just, I don't, you know what I mean? I think that they'll, the second that somebody has good intent, sometimes that intent stays, but sometimes the money calls and the person will kind of switch or persons or government. And then kind of in addition to that, sometimes there'll be a counter person or a counter government that says, hey, you know what? We could make a lot of money if we kind of steer the kids towards this. And this is what the kids should believe from a religious standpoint, from a belief system standpoint, from an ethics standpoint.

And now it's like, do you want your kid? Everything boils down to one simple thing that just never gets talked about enough. It boils down to parenting. It always boils down to parenting. If you can teach your kids that you would rather have them learn shit from you rather than from the Internet, that would be a great place to start. great place to start so every parent could just at least say that um even though the kid is still going to want to learn from instagram and tiktok and all these things at least it was said at some point at least it was talked about and at least when your kid is 25 or 30 they'll say that's what my mom and dad were talking about and one more thing there's a 40 minute per day limit. Like you can only be on the app

40 minutes a day. That's it. Right. We all need that limit to be perfectly honest, but that's, that's important, you know? Yeah. I mean, our current apps, I mean, phones can do that for any app, but you know, even for myself, like I put a pretty strict screen time on my daughter's phone and she got a different one. And I was really proud of her because she didn't change any of the settings. But, you know, it's really hard when it's like she's talking to a cousin or something and then her screen time just shuts down. And she's like, dude, I was in the middle of like hanging out with somebody, you know, especially during, you know, everything that was going on in the past 20 months now. It was really hard.

And so I'm like, you know what? OK, we on in the past 20 months now, it was really hard. And so I'm like, ah, you know what? Okay. We'll be a lot more loose. So it, those apps are there to do that. But as a parent, it is kind of hard to like, you know, like take the fun away, you know, to be the bad guy. But Mark has said many times, that's sometimes that's what you got to do. And you've guys heard me talk about this before. I'm sure I'm not the only person, but I've talked about how there's going to be a counter to all the social media and how there will be a call out for people to fast away from it, for evolve to try to slow down any form of technology. The technology that's here is already here, and it's just going to keep zipping forward. We already know the dangers of AI.

We've already all seen Terminator 2. We know what happens when Skynet gets fully realized. That shit's happening it's already happening and there's you know there's there'll be some good that comes from those things and there'll be some things that will be you know wicked that come from those things yeah just the way it goes it is you know there was one thing that oh yeah this is the last thing i mentioned about it. Because you know how we had Huberman come on and he talked about dopamine depletion and how you might not have ADHD, it might be.

What I've realized is on TikTok especially, there's something literally called ADHD talk, right? And there are a lot of like Gen Zers and really young individuals that are making tiktoks about having adhd but i think since so many people are using these apps so much and they're like if you use social media a lot you're used to fucking scrolling and getting what came first yeah right um i think not just there's so many young cats dope me like uh dopamine depleted rather than having adhd it's adhd has become something like yeah it's cool it's not like it's not it shouldn't be it should be bad to have adhd if you truly have it i get that's not a problem but i think a lot of youngins are like oh yeah i have adhd too what's up but you don't actually have it you're

just you're just scrolling on fucking TikTok and apps too much. And I'm guilty of using that too much too. That's why I've kind of backed away from it because I realized my attention being taken. I'm just like, wow, if I go farther down this rabbit hole, I might say I have ADHD also because I can see my attention being sapped or my ability to pay attention to single things diminish over time. My son's always had, he's always been a very well-behaved kid, like from the time he was a baby, basically. The only times where he would ever not be well-behaved, I mean, sometimes randomly a kid will do weird shit, but for the most part, he's a really good kid.

The only times where he would act up is like when he got done playing like Minecraft or like a video game type thing. And I don't think video games are bad. love video games i think they're great but he couldn't decipher between like making his own world and having his own rules to now having like rules in the household and having like you know that you don't get to just like build your own world and run it yourself and destruct it and do whatever you are constructed or do whatever you want with it uh there's some rules and so he didn't have like adhd or anything like that or he didn't have anything in particular he just he really loved playing those video games he loved having no rules who wouldn't love that yeah you know and i think a lot of times in this day and age with

video games and uh social media of course the kid rather that. I'd rather kind of veg out and do that too and just kind of chill and have the TV on halfway, pay attention to that and have Instagram and TikTok scrolling on two different phones and just sit there and do nothing. It's like it gets very, very addicting and then somebody might think, well, you can't pay attention for five seconds, but is it this stuff that's driving it and promoting it or is it uh the fact that we you know um that we might have just a i guess a new problem on our hands oh hey now that's you guys i like the 40 minute rule though i think that's pretty dope yeah it is i think he's got them blue lockers on. I think so.

Oh, yeah. How's it going, doctor? Going well. How are you guys today? Doing fantastic. Did you get a chance to listen to Peter Itea on Joe Rogan yet? I did. I listened to it yesterday. Wow, that was pretty fascinating stuff. Let's just dive right in. I'd love to hear some information that you have. I heard Peter Itea talking about how some people are just a little bit more susceptible to heart disease because of a certain type of gene. And then also it'd be great to kind of know, you know, just because you have that certain type of gene, can you still, you know, get your way, get your way out of that? Or is it sort of a death sentence to have these negative genes? Sure. So thank you for the opportunity to chat with your audience. So

I'm Dr. Michael Kleiman. I'm a board certified cardiologist, and my passion is helping people prevent their, you know, basically the risk factors from causing the heart attacks or strokes. And so you'd mentioned, you know, genetics are important, but your environment is even more important at turning those genes on or off. But the gene that everybody needs to be checked for is do they carry something called lipoprotein little a or LP little a it's a genetically determined cholesterol particle. So cholesterol is neither good nor bad, but if cholesterol is building up in the walls of the artery, that's not so good. LPLA tends to do that more frequently than just the regular LDL particles. And approximately one in 10 to one in 20%, I should say, it's 20% of the population potentially

has this LPLA. So you either get a copy from your mom or your dad. And it's something that the level's pretty much set from birth and there's not a great, you know, nutrition change for it that will make it lower. There's not an exercise thing that's going to make it lower. You know, there are some supplements that have a slide effect, but there's drugs in development that they're looking at that will lower it like 90%. Those drugs are fairly safe so far, but they're still trying to prove that they actually reduce heart attacks and strokes. So first off, you need to get that lab test. It's done at any kind of major commercial lab,

cost maybe 20 bucks. And if you have it, great, you're at higher risk. So fix all your other risk factors. If you don't have it, you never need to check it again. Yeah. We're fortunate enough on this podcast to be sponsored by a company called Merrick Health. And you've taken a look at my blood before and seen different things with like cholesterol and all these different things. And you've been assisting me with staying healthy. More recently, we've seen a lot of bodybuilders. I don't know if you're aware, but there's been like a handful of bodybuilders in the last two years that have unfortunately died. Most of them, it appears to be from heart attacks. What are some things, I mean, aside, the bodybuilders

aside for a moment, what are some things that just generally tend to cause heart disease? You mentioned cholesterol not necessarily being good nor bad, but my understanding that sometimes some of these things can become inflammatory to a certain extent, then they could potentially calcify, and then that's when you maybe start to run into problems. So maybe in a more doctor-y way, you can sum it up for us. Sure. So it generally starts with something called endothelial dysfunction. So the endothelium is inner lining of your arteries. Your endothelium is one cell thick, and it's a protective coating for the walls of the artery. Your endothelium makes something called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide

is a gas that dilates the arteries, but also acts kind of like a nonstick surface so that things that are floating through the blood don't stick to the arteries to begin with. So all atherosclerosis will start initially with this endothelial dysfunction. So the endothelium gets damaged, there's inflammation that happens. So your immune system's turned on while stuff is sticking to the artery. And then those lipoproteins, which, you know, like I said earlier, cholesterol isn't necessarily bad. You know, every cell in your body needs cholesterol. You make your hormones with it. You make your bile acids from it. You know, your cell membranes are made with cholesterol. So without cholesterol, you're dead. So the lipoproteins that are made in the liver, they're like cargo

ships. They fill up full of this cholesterol, triglycerides, vitamins, phospholipids, and they're shipped out to your muscle cells that need energy. But if they come to take a detour and they go through this damage into theelium, well, now they're dumping their payload off in the walls of the artery, and then the plaque can start building up. And unfortunately, in America, every 40 seconds, somebody has a heart attack. There's over 800,000 heart attacks a year in the United States. And even more unfortunately, half the time people have heart attacks, they had no symptoms before they had that heart attack. So this is one of those cases where the disease is silent for many years until it's not. But fortunately, there's a lot of advanced non-invasive

tests that can tell you, are you already developing plaque in your arteries? And you've undergone some of those tests. I'm curious about this definitely because, you know, we've had some individuals come on and talk about how like individuals who do take performance enhancing drugs because their blood is thicker, they should be giving blood. But I was talking to someone the other day and he was mentioning how he thinks just everyone in general should give blood just for their health. Is there any, is there anything backing that? Is that something beneficial that even if you're not taking PEDs, should you still give blood every so often? Not necessarily that it would be a blanket statement. It would be individualized to what is your hemoglobin hematocrit? So

hemoglobin is what ferries oxygen around the system. And then also kind of what your iron stores are. So if your iron stores, your ferritin levels are very high. And I tell people, you know, iron is kind of like Goldilocks. If you don't have iron, you can't make your hemoglobin. You're going to be short of breath. You're going to have exercise intolerance because you can't get oxygen to your muscles. But if you have, like you said, you know, if you're on too high dose of testosterone and that ramps up your red blood cell production from your bone marrow, then your blood's getting stickier. But with more red blood cells, you have more iron. And then just the chance with iron and oxygen, there's more likely that there's going to be oxidation.

There's more rusting that happens to your other cells. So that's the benefit for the people that have high hemoglobins and high ferritins is you pull that iron down, there's less oxidation happening, less oxidation happening, less inflammation for the walls of the artery. What happens if we eat iron, you know, through like, you know, through something like red meat, you know, if we get a good amount of, some of my understanding of almost all this stuff always kind of goes back to the overconsumption of calories. But I'm also curious because we're meat eaters.

We love to eat meat and we love to eat Piedmontese beef because it's low in fat, but still super tender. But in our quest to have muscle mass and to utilize red meat as kind of leverage for our nutrition and the nutrients and stuff, is there maybe a mistake being made there because maybe we're consuming too much iron and maybe that iron doesn't have anywhere to go? Really, that'd be for the individuals that have some known as hemochromatosis where they're just sequestering that extra iron. So you can somewhat tell that on a blood test, you know, if they have high liver function tests, they have these high ferritin levels, you know, irrespective of, you know, what their hemoglobin is, you know, then you have to

kind of go down a pathway where that person has to be on a lower iron type diet or be on kind of like these iron binders. But the average person, that's not the issue. You're not getting too much iron from your diet per se. You didn't mention two factors as far as telling if someone's going to have heart disease or heart attack. You mentioned LP little a, and then you also mentioned environment. When you said environment, were you talking about their nutrition and stress, et cetera? Like what exactly did you mean by environment? I don't know if I missed that. Sure. So, I mean, your environment is, you know, the key to the game. So, you know, you're born with the set of genes that your mom and dad gave you, and then your environment turns those genes on or off. So your epigenetics,

so your mitochondria, the organelles in your cells, they make energy for you. You know, they do more things than that, but most of your mitochondria in your brain, your heart, your immune system, your muscles. So if your mitochondria make an energy for you, you're healthy. If you don't have energy in your mitochondria, you're sick. And so it's mostly things that you do in your environment that determine how much energy those mitochondria make. Is there any major offenders to heart disease when it comes to like particular macronutrients? Like, do you think that fat is worse or carbs are worse or is it potentially,

you know, constantly elevated insulin levels? Or again, does it just go back to the equation of just do your best to try to get through every single day without overeating? just do your best to try to get through every single day without overeating. I think it actually even goes even up higher than that is that, you know, it's your circadian biology. It's the light environments that you choose to live under. You know, we evolved to be outside, you know, under full spectrum sunlight, you know, that sunlight programs, your immune system, it programs, you know, your insulin and glucose response. And if you actually look at it, you know, as long as the food wasn't made in a lab, all food came through the photosynthesis web. So you're either eating a plant that sunlight grew, or you're eating the animal that ate that plant. And then it's

Java, your mitochondria to reverse that sunlight and to make energy for you. So look at your light environment first, then, you know, the macronutrients, you know, um, you know, there are certain individuals that, you know a high-fat keto diet is not optimized for them. They may have an ApoE4 gene where that's just not going to work well. They're going to hyperabsorb things in their gut, and then they're going to tend to make more lipoproteins with that. But that's an individual thing that you would know if you're working with your doctor in

the tech labs. They say, yeah, this diet probably isn't right for you. But the other big thing is that there is no perfect diet for each individual. It depends on where they're at in the world at that time. So if you're in an environment where there's four seasons, your diet would be more seasonally appropriate that you'd be more keto in the wintertime because vegetables and fruits aren't growing in your environment. Just because they get shipped up from Mexico or Chile doesn't mean your body was optimized to eat them that time of the year. You know, basically think of carbohydrates are, you know, high in sunlight. If you're putting high sunlight

foods into your gut, but your eyes and your skin is cold, there's a mismatch of information when that happens. And that causes inflammation. Now, I don't want to, I want to come has to come back to the mitochondria piece, but I want to know if there are any, because you mentioned sleep and obviously, you know, a lot of large individuals, big bodybuilders, big powerlifters, they have sleep apnea. So they're probably getting sort of messed up sleep. Some of these individuals who some of them do take performance enhancing drugs, they walk around with massive amounts of muscle that maybe their heart isn't able to handle. So, it makes me wonder what are some ways and what are some practices that these athletes can take to make sure that as they're going through their athletic careers, whatever it is that they're going down, that they can make sure that they're just staying as safe as possible and they have as least risk as possible in terms of having heart issues or a heart attack, etc. Because isn't it more so men that end up dying of heart attacks too than women, like a much higher percentage of men?

Not necessarily. So the women are kind of phase shifted 10 years later when they start developing more disease, when estrogen levels drop and menopause. Heart disease is still the number one thing that takes out both men and women. More women die of heart disease than breast cancer. So breast cancer is very serious, but you still need to be screened for your cardiovascular risk. So I'll kind of take the first one, like it's test. Don't guess, you know, again, if half the heart attacks happen to people that don't have symptoms, you need to go looking before they have their symptoms, you know, doing a classic stress test in somebody who's not having symptoms, it's very unlikely that they would fail a stress test. You know, by the time you fail a

stress test, you generally have a 70% blockage in one of your heart arteries. And so somebody who's very fit is probably going to very easily pass that stress test, but they still could have arteries of an 80 year old man inside. And they wouldn't know that because most of the heart attacks that actually happen are in smaller blockages that don't cause symptoms. It's kind of like having a pimple on your artery. And if that pimple pops now the blood clots in that area, and now you have a hundred percent blockage and that's what causes the heart attack. So the non-invasive test that you can look at, you know, one, if you have access to some called an endopat, it looks at the endothelial function. So it can tell your body how much nitric oxide can you make right now?

If you're making good nitric oxide, less likely stuff sticking to your arteries to begin with, and you have healthy arteries, but if you don't have healthy endothelium, well, then the first thing that happens is that the walls of the artery start thickening. They start getting more inflamed, you know, stuff that's floating through the bloodstream sticks to the artery, gets below the wall of the artery and the immune system turns on things. Hey man, there's an infection going on and sends out, you know, the warriors to go fight it.

And then that tissue starts swelling. So you can do an ultrasound of your neck and measure that thickness. If there's thickness in the walls of the arteries in your neck, then you're set up to start developing plaque in the arteries. And so that test will actually give you a vascular aid. So if you're biologically 45, but they tell you your arteries are 65, you're as old as your arteries are. There's a physician in the 1600s. His name is Thomas Sintam. That was the same man is as old as his arteries. So that test is called a carotid intimal medial thickness test or CIMT painless ultrasound test takes five, 10 minutes, but then, you know, we've kind of go down the pathways of, okay, your arteries are inflamed. What's the next step. If you don't

shut off what's causing the damage, then that's when you start getting those calcifications and fibrotic tissue buildup in the arteries. And you can go get a test, you know, most places, you know, do it for about a hundred dollars, $200 called a CT coronary calcium scan or calcium scan, low dose radiation, CT scan that looks at your heart arteries and looks at, do you have any calcium in the walls of the artery? Obviously calcium is supposed to be in your bones and teeth. It's not supposed to be in your arteries. So if you have calcium in your arteries, that indicates that there's plaque present. And it's not so much concerning that you got hard calcified plaque. That stuff rarely causes heart attacks. It can

cause symptoms if you have a big rock in the artery and it's restricting blood flow, but you know that there's calcified plaque in the arteries. There's also the soft plaque. And it's more concerning about that soft plaque because sometimes that's much more vulnerable to rupturing. Again, it's like a pimple. If that pimple pops, blood clots there, boom, that's what the heart attack is. So the real goal is first find the person. Do they have plaque in their arteries? Do they have plaque? Then do the blood work.

Do they have LPLA? Do they have APOE genes that are APOE4? Do they have high APOE particles? You know, there's all sorts of advanced cardiovascular markers that you can check. And then you usually can pinpoint, okay, this is what's likely putting the plaque in your arteries. Let's pull this lever, shut it down. And if you give enough time, the body has an amazing ability to start healing itself.

And you can see that plaque start regressing. You're mentioning a lot of tests. And I really do want to encourage people to look into getting a doctor. I think a lot of times people don't even know who their primary care doctor is. And they may have never even investigated just getting some lab work done. You don't even need to necessarily go to a doctor to some lab work done. You don't even need to necessarily go to a doctor to get lab work done. A little bit later on the show, we'll let people know how they can benefit from Merrick Health and get their blood work done and have a doctor kind of oversee

everything. So I definitely want to encourage that. But what are some things where someone can kind of just look in the mirror or maybe use measuring tape to measure their waist? or maybe use measuring tape to measure their waist. Is there any sort of correlate between like our waistline, our body weight, BMI, any of these things with whether we should really have major concern or like if you have a 28-inch waist, are you like, hey, I really don't think I have a problem. But as you mentioned, heart attack is so dangerous because there doesn't appear to be any symptoms for a lot of folks. Correct. And, you know, there are some people that, you know, you can look and say they're probably going to be higher risk of having cardiovascular disease. So,

you know, if they have a lot of adiposity or fat tissue over their abdomen area, that stuff tends to be very, you know, highly inflammatory. But even that kind of subcutaneous fat isn't as bad as the fat that's outlining your organs. So if you're putting fat on the outside of your liver or outside of your heart, that's much more inflammatory to the system. And that's the stuff you can't see unless you do, you know, certain types of imaging tests or you do blood work and shows that they have high inflammatory markers. Well, then you got to figure out what's causing that inflammation. You know, one interesting sign that's not specific for it, but if you notice it is that,

you know, if you look at somebody's earlobes and they have a big crease going through it, that's called the Frank sign. It means there's some issue with the collagen production in that region. Collagens, you know, all throughout your body and your tendons and, you know, kind of what connects everything together. But if you have poor collagen in your earlobes, sometimes that associates with having poor collagen in your cardiovascular system. You don't have it, bro.

I just started looking at Joe's ear. I was like. Are there some other telltale signs that are kind of similar to that, perhaps? Well, I mean, they would be a little bit more rare. So some people have some familial hyperlipidemia. So they got excessively high lipid particles. So basically the cholesterol starts kind of depositing into their, you know, in their eyes. So their cornea will be yellow. They'll have low yellow dots over their tendons. Now that's extremely rare. I've only seen a few

cases of that, but again, most of the time, just looking at somebody from the outside, you can't truly always know what the cardiovascular system is doing. And you guys know that, you know, Bob Harper was very fit on the outside. He ends up having an MI in the gym and got resuscitated by a medical student. He ended up getting a stent in his left anterior descending artery and later found out he had lipoprotein little a. Again, he didn't know that. Not saying I could have prevented him from having a heart attack, but if he had a calcium score test and some other things, he probably had some soft plaques building up that you

might've said, hey, you're at higher risk. I can't absolutely prevent this, but you need to know that, you know, you're at risk and mitigate some of those risk factors. Can these things be reversed with like training? Like, uh, can you go out for like a brisk run or a good walk and, uh, have your heart rate be, you know, just, uh, a little bit elevated for a bit and, and maybe you can somehow, uh, increase the strength of your heart and are any of these things, any of these things amplifiers to help you, you live longer perhaps? Oh, for sure. I mean, exercise is, you know, the, you know, the best drug that we have,

you know, it's the best anti-aging thing that, you know, humans have ever figured out. Now there's always a correct dose of the exercise. And so I know that sometimes the challenge with, you know, the pro athletes and such is that they overdo it. And so I know that sometimes the challenge with, you know, the pro athletes and such is that they overdo it. And, you know, said earlier about sleep, we'll circle back around to that. But the, you know, the story is that, you know, exercise, you know, is a stressor to the system. You know, you stress the system, you recover the system, but during exercise, you know,

you release a lot of nitric oxide, that nitric oxide is very healthy for the endothelium stuff. Doesn't stick to your arteries during exercise. You know, you create a lot of nitric oxide. That nitric oxide is very healthy for the endothelium. Stuff doesn't stick to your arteries. During exercise, you create heat in your body. That heat is a form of energy that the cells can ultimately use in these water networks in the mitochondria. And then exercise helps with stress reduction. So if you have less stress, less issues with blood pressure.

So there's so many beneficial things of exercise. So you start with the person where they're at. So there's somebody who's a complete couch potato. Yeah. Maybe they're just going to go out there and start walking initially. And then, you know, you work them up to doing some more, you know, vigorous type of cardiovascular exercise, but, you know, you guys are the experts in, you know, strength training stuff. So you, you know, teach them where they're at and, you know, get them stronger. You talked about plaque and like the arteries and veins. And I veins. I wanted to know about this. As far as sauna therapy or sauna and cold plunge, there's been research to show how individuals that use sauna four or five times a week, they have a big decrease in all-cause mortality. Now, can that be something that people can do that actually does help the heart? I'm just curious about the actual mechanisms that that has, if there are any that potentially might be helpful with the heart. Oh, for sure. And there's

a lot of data coming out of Japan with that. Um, for patients who actually have weak hearts, cardiomyopathy, or they have high blood pressure, hypertension, you know, generally that's, you know, three to four sessions a week. And, you know, the kind of the goals is just that you're not got rivers of sweat coming off you. So it doesn't matter exactly what temperature it's used at. It doesn't mean if, you know, necessarily matter if it's a finish sauna or it's one of the newer, uh, you know, near mid and far infrared panels, you know, as long as you're sweating, you're getting the benefit. So the, the way it actually works is that that infrared light is penetrating deep into your cells. It's stimulating the water that surrounds the mitochondria. So you're putting energy in your cells without having to eat that energy.

You're sweating. So a lot of toxins are being released from your body when you're sweating. So heavy metals and plastics or anything you've been exposed to. And then it's also stimulating blood flow. So your blood dilates to bring, you know, basically to cool off from that heating mechanism. So when you heat that up, you heat up something called the heat shock proteins. The heat shock proteins get activated by the sauna, and that helps keep the other proteins essentially healthy. It helps repair the proteins that are getting misfolded. So, you know, sauna three or four times a week, especially in the wintertime is outstanding.

It's a great way to kind of keep the body energized until the sunlight comes back in her environment. I like the sounds of that because that could be something that could be utilized for folks that just they don't have any sort of exercise background. And it's basically like exercise without exercising. And I'm also curious, too, because some people do a sauna and a cold plunge. But I heard recently, I think it was Rhonda Patrick. and a cold plunge. But I heard recently, I think it was Rhonda Patrick. She mentioned that some people ended up like getting a kind of a, not a heart attack, but something happened from going from vasodilation to vasoconstriction really quickly. Is there anything that people need to

be careful with going from a sauna immediately to a cold plunge back to a sauna? Or is that actually just a really beneficial thing to do? It's something you definitely have to work yourself up to. I mean, that's kind of the Finnish tradition is, you know, they had, you know, the outside saunas, you know, they heat themselves up and then they got side lay in the snow, cool themselves down and they go back in the sauna. So it's, you know, has a long tradition, but if you're not somebody who's, you know, conditioned to do that, yeah, that's a pretty big shock on the system going from hot to cold like that. And you could potentially pass out from that quick change. So just kind of ease your way into it. But the cold therapy is extremely fascinating.

Obviously, athletes have been using it for a long time to recover after injuries and such. But the way that the cold works is that it's something that helps the energy flow in your mitochondria. Your mitochondria take your food, and there's not an input to your mitochondria called a carbohydrate input or a fat input. They just take the carbs, the fats, they break it down to electrons and then put the electrons through the mitochondria. When you get to mitochondria cold, the mitochondria proteins, they get closer together. So you're like a semiconductor superconducting those electrons through. So they flow through faster. So you make energy more efficiently when things are cold.

So that's how cold therapy really works at a mitochondrial level. You're a cardiologist in the dead center of the middle of this country. I believe you're out in like St. Louis, right? That's correct. I mean, that's like the heartbeat of the country. And there's a lot of tremendously delicious foods out there. What is kind of like your biggest hurdle? I know that you want to take all things into consideration, processed foods and seed oils, and we'd love to see folks try to go more organic and grass-fed and all these different things, but that's not usually the best place to start.

like all these different things, but that's not like not usually the best place to start. You know, the best place to start a lot of times is like, hey, let's see if we can reduce you drinking, you know, seven Cokes a day and let's get down to three and let's see if we can get you to drink more water and stuff like that. What do you think, in your opinion, are three things that you have maybe recommended or suggested to some people in the last couple of years, it's really been just super helpful where maybe you encourage someone to use a CPAP machine, or maybe you encourage someone to use a particular cholesterol medication, or what do you think would be kind of in your top three things that have been really, really impactful? No, that's a great question. And it's something

that I get often is that nutrition and exercise, they're extremely important. They're bedrocks of health, but it's not enough. People can eat clean, they can exercise and they can still have heart attacks. So what are the parts that they're sometimes missing? So the number one thing is the circadian biology, the 24 hour cycles. How do they live with mother nature? What is their exposure to sunlight? The sunlight programs your hormones and neurotransmitters throughout the day. So if you're somebody who's stuck inside in front of a computer 12 hours a day, your body makes different hormones than if you spend that time outside.

So seeing every sunrise and helping set your circadian rhythm is absolutely key for longevity and health. Second thing is the rest and recovery. You know, you guys are excellent at, you know, pushing it super hard in the gym, but how good are you actually recovering from that? You know, something I frequently recommend people monitor some of your heart rate variability. So heart rate variability is definitely in the pathway of the cardiology world. So, you know, your heart rate is, you know, the beat beat, you know, 70 beats a minute or whatever, but as you breathe in and out, that heartbeat is supposed to expand and contract.

You know, your heart shouldn't be like a metronome. So your heart rate goes up to like 80, drops down to 65 as you're breathing in and out. So that heart rate variability is a good metric of how much stress your body is sensing at that time. It's also a good metric for like, you know, you push it really hard in the gym, you're going to have low heart rate variability. And then does it go back to your normal baseline? Cool.

You've recovered. I'll go back to the gym and try to get a personal best again. But if you wake up the next day and you got crushed heart rate variability, well, you haven't fully recovered from the exercise or you didn't sleep well, or you're coming down with an infection. That's not a day to go for personal best. You don't need to stack on more stressors to your system at that point. So rest and recovery is extremely important. And the third thing would be, you know, the ability for the body to heal itself when you get out of its way. So there's so much stuff that we do, you know, that's against mother nature.

You know, we use our technology at the wrong times of day. We, you know, we spend time inside, we eat foods that isn't, you know, made by mother nature, this package stuff. So like, you know, the story of packaged foods is really just that it's a mismatch of information coming to your system. Your body's always just trying to figure out what time of day it is and what it's supposed to be doing. And man tried to create this stuff that kind of jams the way mother nature was supposed to do it. You've been talking so much about mitochondria.

I see you wearing blockers, blue blockers there. I'm curious because I have a red light therapy device at home that I use almost on your butthole. You know what? All right. If we're being real, I mean, I stand in front of my real life device naked, but I,

you know, I tuck my thing, I get my balls in front of it and then I turn around and I get my back in front of it. But it has been reported to help with like a mitochondrial efficiency. And I want to know your take on that. If you think that's beneficial and maybe other things that individuals can do for their mitochondria specifically,

obviously circadian rhythm, like all that is helpful too. Sure. So, I mean, you know, the photobody modulation panels, the red light panels, they're very useful at lowering inflammation. You know, I usually tell people it's kind of like, you know, an artificial sun, it's putting beneficial wavelengths of light directly into the mitochondria. And so if you put energy into your mitochondria, that energy can be used for work. And so if you can put energy in without having to eat, well, then you don't have to create that kind of reactive oxygen species when you're eating. When you eat food, it's basically combustion. You got to use oxygen and there's going to be

some waste products. If you get free energy without that, there's less waste products being made. And so I've seen the kind of the weight training worlds and stuff. You know, if you put red light on your muscles before you work out, you stimulate the muscles ahead of time, you tend to be able to lift longer, maybe not heavier, but you can lift longer before failure. And then if you use red light therapy after working out, you'll have less delayed onset muscle soreness because the red light therapy penetrates the, uh, you know, generally 10 to 30 centimeters. It's going to cause blood vessels to dilate, bring blood flow to the territory. It's tamping down the immune system. So there's less inflammation when that happens. Um, so red light therapy is excellent for musculoskeletal injuries or prevention of

injuries. Um, but you know, for the reason you're using it. So yeah, it definitely has data that it can raise testosterone, maybe three, 400%, uh, when the red light penetrates the gonads. Now, the other way to do it, you're probably stimulating the prostate. So not too many guys are getting their prostates out in the sun too often, but the red light therapy could potentially help with that. Pretty dope. What kind of glasses do you have there? Just so maybe people have an idea of those that those look nice. They don't look like you're about to abort a spacecraft. Right, yeah.

These are made by a company called EMR Tech. They make a lot of the red light panels. So this is their Wolverine brand. I just like them because they're like 24 karat gold. They're kind of like pimpin' 1970s version, you know. But these are the day glasses that they would make. So for those that maybe are just listening to these are more like yellow tinted glasses. So the yellow will filter out

some of the blue light that comes from your technology devices. Your technology devices essentially have like three to four times more blue light coming out of them than sunlight. So your brain always gets the wrong signal when you're staring at your screens. It always thinks it's noontime. So that just kind of cools down what your eyes are seeing from a blue light perspective. And if you keep your blue light at a reasonable level, your sleep is going to be better because you'll have more melatonin when you're going to sleep. And at night you're in red glasses probably, right? Generally about an hour before going to bed, switch to the red glasses. The red glasses make you look like the Terminator. They're pretty awesome. I have the same company that makes these, they make the red ones, but I started with the

wraparound, Terminator style ones. And those ones block 100% of the blue light and most of the green light. So basically it tells your brain it's midnight. So even if you're not ready to go to sleep, your brain's at least going to signal like, okay, we need to shut down for the night. Cortisol will start dropping and melatonin will start rising and melatonin initiates sleep but melatonin is extremely important for kind of repairing the damage that's going on throughout the day so melatonin is like the fuel for the mitochondria the more melatonin you have the better you can repair the damage that happened during the daytime i don't know if it's placebo but i've noticed that when i put on red light glasses at night it conks me out so anybody

that's having a hard time sleeping you might want to i don't typically have hard time falling asleep, so I don't really need to wear them that often, or it doesn't feel like I need to wear them. But for some people that have a hard time with falling asleep, they might want to look into it. Yeah. And also you don't really wear those outside, right? Like when you go outside, you don't use your red or blue, like, I just want to get punched in the face. I'm not Bono or something like that. Yeah. It's no, it's, you know, you want mother nature's full spectrum light to get into your eyes because that's what tells your brain what time of day it is and how you're going to make your hormones. So if you're putting on a lot of dark sunglasses, you're not telling your brain it's nighttime through your eyes, but your skin's still thinking it's daytime. So you don't want that mismatch.

Let's go back to the mitochondria stuff just for a moment. mitochondria stuff just for a moment. Do you think that when we get proper sunlight, that we are maybe more efficient at utilizing calories perhaps? Or if we're eating things that are seasonal, maybe our bodies are going to be a little bit more in tune with being able to utilize that energy efficiently. And if so, like, how do we find out? How do we even know? Like, I don't even know what would be seasonal, like around here. I got no idea because I go to the grocery store and they got fucking everything. So I don't know. Yeah. I mean, no, it's a great question. I mean, you got basically four surfaces that need to match up. So your eyes, your skin, your gut, and your airways all need to kind of match up.

And they're basically always just trying to decode what's going on outside. So your question about, you know, eating outside versus eating inside, you know, there is a difference. So when you got UV in your eyes, you actually will upregulate your glute for receptor from your muscles. So that's like a straw that goes for your bloodstream and then sucks the sugar out of your bloodstream. So not telling people to eat a bunch of junk, but if you're going to do it, eat outside, you're going to be more insulin sensitive when you're outside having UV into your eyes. transport food from Mexico and Chile year round, you know, you did not see a ton of fruit in your area unless it grew outside your door. So, you know, you would have eaten much more kind of keto carnivorous in the winter time. And then in the summertime, when the vegetables and fruits came back, then you would have started eating that stuff again. Andrew makes sense. Oh yeah. I wanted to ask, cause we were talking about the blue blockers and stuff. Um, you know,

on all my devices, I have the, uh, like on iPhones, like the night shift, I have it as far orange as possible. Same thing with my laptop. If I did it here, the cameras and everything would look really strange to the viewer. So I haven't done it here. But I'm curious because it's still a screen. Does that filter actually do anything or does it just kind of simulate what, think should be working and therefore it's kind of like a placebo effect? So it's not a placebo, but it's just not sufficient enough because sometimes it's also the lux or the actual brightness of the device that still has an effect on your body's ability to release melatonin at night. So I definitely recommend people on their iPhones or their droids, set the night shift

mode so that your phone's more orangish or more yellowish at nighttime. There are companies that make old school screen protectors that you can lay over them if you don't want to change the colors. But I usually recommend people at least protect their eyes in the evening time. I'm pretty hardcore. I wear these anytime I'm in front of a computer. I'm always using them also to teach people about circadian biology. But, you know, the key time is really that hour or two before you go to bed.

You really want to start having to be much dimmer at nighttime. So ideally, stop using your technology with screens if you can. If you can't stop using it for whatever reason, at least be protecting your eyes with some type of glasses. Power Project Family, how's it going? Now, you guys know that we have had so many individuals come on to this podcast. Doctors, therapists, coaches that have talked about the importance of getting your blood work done. Mark's done it.

Andrew's done it. I've done it. And when we got our numbers back, let me tell you that we didn't know what the fuck we were looking at. That's why we partnered with Merrick Health, owned by More Plates, More Dates. Derek from More Plates, More Dates. And when you get your blood work done from Merrick Health, a patient care coordinator goes over your blood work and gives you an idea of the things you need to get done specifically for you. This is why they are the premium telehealth clinic to go to, because they don't give you cookie cutter plans. They give you plans that are specific to you, your numbers,

and your blood work. Andrew, how can people get it? Yes, you guys got to head over to MerrickHealth.com. That's M-A-R-R-E-K-Health.com. And if you are manually checking out, you can use promo code PowerProject10 to save 10% off all of your labs. But if you are interested in TRT or HRT or something that you need additional help with, you're going to be speaking to somebody on the phone. And with that, you can still mention promo code PowerProject10 to save 10% off all of their recommended labs. Again, that's at MerrickHealth.com. Links to them down in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. When you first heard about some of this circadian stuff, did you think, this has got to be some

bullshit right here? Oh, yeah. I thought it was crazy. And what turned you on to it ultimately? So back in 2017, my wife wanted to go travel to the country of Bhutan, which is sandwiched between India and China. And it's apparently the happiest place in the world. So she went to go see why these people are so happy. And I was like, cool, I'll go. But it's like a 14 hour flight from St. Louis. And I was like, the jet lag is going to kill me. I know I'll die if I go there. So I knew a little bit

about melatonin at that point for jet lag mitigation, but didn't know much more and did some Google searching and came upon the blue bike and glasses. I got the crazy, the red Terminator version. And I did not understand why they would work. I said, you're supposed to wear these on the plane. I'm like, okay, I'll just wear them on the plane. And so I look like the Unabomber on the plane. I had a hoodie up, had the red glasses on.

And I get over to Thailand and Bhutan. I had a hoodie up, had the red glasses on, and I get over to Thailand and Bhutan. I still had jet lag, but it was maybe a third as bad as I expected it to be. By the next day, I was out exploring and enjoying myself. I was like, there's something to this. When I got back to St. Louis, I fell down the rabbit hole of circadian biology and then just really realized that that's the linchpin. I keep telling people, nutrition and exercise, extremely important. But if you miss the circadian biology part of it, you're just not going to get the gains that you really want. So you've got to get the light

environment right first. If you get your light environment right, the other stuff tends to just fall into line. You know what's so interesting, man? Because I've been using blue blockers for a while too. And we had Andrew Huberman on. And then I also saw an interview that Andrew Huberman was talking to this doctor that was like a specialist in light. And he's super against blue blockers. But you look at all the anecdotal evidence from a lot of people like Mark. You use it before you like some before you go to bed. You're like, well, I conk out.

I noticed the same thing. You notice like the same thing. I know so many people who get so much benefit from it. They're not going outside and using it, obviously. But it's so interesting how on the medical side, like some individuals in the field or doctors are like, no, blue blockers are unnecessary. They don't make a difference. And people that are actually using it are like, it makes a pretty fucking big difference. It's like people I'm like, even I'm somewhat confused. I'm like these work do they not i see benefit but

when are we going to figure this out i just wonder you know it's going to be one of those things that you know there's not going to be a ton of like you know you know double blind placebo controlled studies looking at blue blocking glasses at any time soon so you're right a lot of it's going to be kind of the biohackers and the anecdotal evidence initially. But if you track your sleep with an Oura ring or a Whoop band, do some nights where you don't wear your glasses, see how much deep sleep you got. And then the only change, wear your glasses. Should you get more deep sleep? I bet you probably do. And if you get better sleep and you feel better and your heart rate variability is better, what's the harm? You're not harming things if you're wearing them inside. Again,

you want mother nature's frequencies always in your eyes. And so that is somewhere where people are like, blue light's bad. You don't want any blue light. That is not true. That's the reason the sky is blue. Your body's always sensing how much blue light is outside so it can make the hormones efficiently. But when you keep pumping out the screen technology blue light, your brain keeps getting confused. Was it still truly new? And it's not. So, you know, I'm a firm believer that it has an effect. You know, if you can check, you know, blood work, you know, most of the time your inflammatory markers are going to improve if you do these things over time. So. It seems like pharmaceuticals are getting a lot better, especially when it comes

to heart disease, when it comes to diabetes, like it seems like we're kind of on the precipice of being able to, maybe in some sense, in the next 10 years, be able to really have some awesome medication that can almost help solve obesity, which sounds crazy, but I've been made aware of a couple of types of drugs that can help people lose 40, 50, 60 pounds, I think, by changing their appetite and things of that nature. What are you kind of seeing coming down the pipeline that could be, that you're excited about where you're like, this actually sounds really cool and doesn't appear to have a lot of negative side effects? I really can focus way upstream. I mean, I've taken care of hundreds, if not thousands of patients having heart attacks over my career. And there's always going to be doctors that are needed to do that.

But how do you start earlier? And so I always look at the endothelial function. So whatever you can do to protect the endothelial function, if you protect the blood flow to your heart, you don't have heart attacks, you protect your brain, you don't have strokes, you protect it to your immune system, you don't get serious infections,, strokes, you know, you protect it to your immune system. You don't get serious infections. You know, your blood flow is everything. It provides the oxygen, the nutrients to things. So focus upstream to that endothelial function. So there are different supplements that can support nitric oxide production. There's different supplements that are helping regrow some called the glycocalyx. The glycocalyx sits on top of the endothelium. The glycocalyx is this gel coat. You think, you know, if you look down in the water of a river and you see kind of these like

little hair-like projections floating, that's kind of what the glycocalyx is. It's sitting there sensing what's floating through your bloodstream and certain things can then kind of dock there and other things are supposed to go past it. But infections, high insulin, inflammation, basically it gives a haircut to that glycocalyx. And when that glycocalyx, that gel coat isn't there, then the thalium then is kind of laid bare to what's floating through the bloodstream and it's getting pounded with different things and stops releasing nitric oxide because it's got to do other things. So if you can go upstream and fix the nitric oxide production, then you fix all the downstream side effects. We talked a lot about, and we've had a lot of, then you fix all the downstream side effects.

You know, we talked a lot about, and we've had a lot of people who've come on the podcast to talk about breathing. We had Patrick McKeown, you know, Andrew Hoobin actually talked about it a bit. I forgot the author of that book called Breathe. Shit, I forgot his name too. It'll come to me. It'll come to us.

But we've talked a lot about nasal breathing versus mouth breathing. I'm curious, since you've worked with so many people as a cardiologist, um, James Nestor, James Nestor, y'all got to check that one out. Um, but you know, even, even I've noticed, uh, when I use my mouth tape before I go to bed, cause sometimes I do snore without mouth tape, but my sleep quality is always better. I have lower respiratory rate when I sleep and I always wake up a little bit faster when I'm only breathing through my nose at night. And I also make sure with exercise and through my day, I'm always nasal breathing nowadays. Um, how have you,

what have you noticed in terms of people's breathing patterns in terms of like in correlation to their heart health? Do you notice any strong correlations between mouth breeders, worse heart health, et cetera, or no? I don't know if I've actually had enough patients really look deep into that if they're doing it for themselves. I played around with it a little bit. I've noticed my sleep is maybe a little bit better, but the way that the nasal breathing is supposed to work, if you do it correctly and you do kind of like the humming sensation, that then you're stimulating the sinuses to potentially release more nitric oxide. That nitric oxide basically can help kill pathogens that are coming through your nose. So you're not going to get sick as much.

It can also help with blood pressure support, so dilating blood vessels. So nasal breathing, if you can do it, it's something you should try to do. So they have the different little mouth tapes. Just give it a try. How did statins end up getting demonized? Statins are supposed to be things that assist people when their, I guess their lipid profile is out of whack. So statins are tools. I mean, the statins, more people have been on statins

than almost any other medication. But I always say that fit the tool to the job. So if somebody is a young person, especially a woman, and somebody's saying, hey, your cholesterol is quote high. Well, first, are they doing the right cholesterol testing? First, make sure they're checking something like an LDL particle number, or they're checking an ApoB number, and that you truly have high lipoproteins and not just a high total cholesterol. will be number and that you truly have high lipoproteins and not just a high total cholesterol. So those people, just lowering cholesterol may not necessarily lower their risk. So I always recommend people first do something where they look at the health of their arteries. So if they have an abnormal CIMT scan or they have a normal calcium score tan, then they're in higher risk.

Stans might be appropriate for that person to help reduce that risk of a heart attack or stroke. There's really no debate. If somebody's already had a heart attack, they got stents in their arteries, they've had bypass surgery, they've had a stroke, stans are going to help them reduce the risk of having another event. The debate usually comes in is to the people who've never had an event, especially younger people under 45, like should they be on these medicines? That's a nuanced decision you got to have with your own doctor. If you don't have plaque in your arteries and your cholesterol is quite high, benefits probably not there so much. But if you're a younger person, you have a lot of plaque, stands are tools that help one, lower down kind of like the production. So less of these little cargo ships are going to be

leaving your liver, but stands lower inflammation. And they also stabilize that plaque. They kind of take that soft baby plaque that's about to rupture and cause a heart attack, and they make it a hard calcified plaque so that it doesn't cause those events. But where it has an issue in the kind of the younger people, especially the very active people, is that it's the untoward side effects of the statins. So you want those beneficial things for the blood vessels, but two things it does is that it can lower the CoQ10 cycle in the liver. So if CoQ10 levels are lower, lower the CoQ10 cycle in the liver. So if CoQ10 levels are lower, you need CoQ10 to help shuttle energy in the mitochondria. But then also statins can get into the muscle cells.

And if it basically somewhat poisons the mitochondria and the muscle cells, you may have muscle weakness, muscle pain. And then the worst case scenario is that the statins actually would cause rhabdomyolysis. The muscle cells die and you spill out all the proteins into your urine. It looks like you're peeing blood and you can damage your kidneys doing that. When I was back as a Naval officer, I was treating a lot of the Marine recruits at Paris Island. Those kids were out there humping it for 18 hours a day and they'd go into rhabdomyolysis and look like they're peeing blood and we had to hydrate them and protect their kidneys and such.

I've never seen a case of statins doing that, but there are case reports that it could happen. So there's different statins that you can use that tend to have less side effects like that. And then there's other tests you would do to look at that person. What is their vitamin D level? What is their thyroid function? What is their CoQ10 level? What is their ApoE status?

If those things are optimized, they're less likely to have side effects. But if somebody's vitamin D deficient, their level's less than 30, they have low CoQ10, that person's almost for sure going to have a side effect if you have any type of stat. And I know, okay, so I know supplementation is something that, you know, if you're, for example, when I was a teenager, I was iron deficient. So I started eating more spinach and taking some iron supplements. I don't have to take iron anymore. I'm not deficient.

But you mentioned vitamin D, et cetera. And I'm pretty, I think that creatine also helps the mitochondrial efficiency to some extent. Right. So I'm curious what you think are some supplements that people maybe should think about and look more into that would help their overall heart health, all that like mitochondria, et cetera. And so it's actually one of those things that where I've probably gone away from a lot of supplementation in the past. It used to be like,

okay, if you have a, some type of illness, here's your pill. So most of the time there used to be a pharmaceutical. And then a lot of people are like, well, I don't want to take a pharmaceutical. What supplement can you give me instead? Well, supplements have the role when you have deficiencies, you know, or, you know, there's something that you really truly need to push back up. Um, so sometimes I still definitely use them for certain people, but I don't necessarily blanket say, well, everybody should be taking, you know, vitamin D, CoQ10 and vitamin C. You know, if you don't take that, you're, you're wrong, you know, figure out what you're missing from mother nature and replace that.

Honestly, I think most people's vitamin D levels are way too low because they spend way too much time in front of these screens. They don't spend enough time with the sun hitting their skin making that vitamin D. I like what you're saying there because I always kind of think about like once you start to go that route of taking a pharmaceutical, to think about like once you start to go that route of taking a pharmaceutical, even with taking performance enhancing drugs or even just taking a supplement, the next question is usually like, and then what? So you're going to take this vitamin C supplement from the time you're 15 and you read that it's a good idea to take a gram of it a day until you're 100, you know? And then what other things are you going to run into over the years where you're going to be like, oh, I'm going to add that one. I'm going to add that one. Now, next thing you know, you might be taking like 40 or

50 pills every single day, not even really knowing like what's doing what and all that. So I think just allowing your body to try to find out and figure out like what it's supposed to be doing in the first place is probably a great route to go. Sure. And I mean, once you start getting up to like 10 medications or 10 supplements, you for sure are having drug, drug or drug supplement interactions. And then you start taking more stuff to counteract the first thing that you're taking. So I'm not saying that you don't take any supplements, but figure out what are actually mission critical that you got to take.

Has magnesium or any of these things like that, has there been certain supplements that you've seen that have been heart healthy, just kind of more in general? Oh, for sure. Magnesium is extremely important for like three to 400 different reactions in the body. And so most people that show up to a cardiologist are, you know, by definition, I'm just going to have some type of magnesium deficiency because if you're low with magnesium, you're more likely to have high blood pressure, more likely to have abnormal heart rhythms. Um, so, but that doesn't necessarily mean that magnesium will make your heart healthier. It's just that, okay. I understand. That's what's kind of, you know, causing the symptoms is the deficiency. So ideally you're getting it through it through your greens and your vegetables and such. And then your water source.

Your water is extremely important. You want to have good minerals in your water. You don't have a bunch of junk in your water. Are there cardio baselines that you think that a lot of athletes that listen to this show should pay attention to? Like I mentioned, a lot of these athletes are lifters, big guys and women that lift too. I mentioned a lot of these athletes are lifters, big guys and women that live too. So are there, is there a level of cardio skill or, or like heart rate that they should be looking at to, so they can make sure that they're at a good level of fitness? So it really depends on what kind of their fitness goals are, but you know, it's kind

of at some point you got to have a decision, you know, are you doing this for, you know, to be a professional athlete or are you doing this for a longevity benefit? Because those are two different things, obviously. Um, and so more for the kind of longevity benefit, it's doing kind of more of the zone two type training where it's the low and slow and you're teaching the mitochondria to be more efficient at fat burning. And then once you've done enough of that, then you can add on more interval training. So you become more efficient at glucose burning. So, you know, the heart rate is going to be a little bit individualized. So most time you'd recommend somebody do symptoms, symptom limited stress test and kind of figure out what their peak heart rate is.

And you can backtrack it, you know, doing that. You do a VO two max study, the VO two max study just adds on a face mask and then measures efficiently, you know, where your lactate threshold is. So where do you go from fat burning to half the burning sugar for energy production? So you can use those types of studies to figure out kind of heart rate goals. You know, the old school 220 minus your age is your maximum heart rate is fairly inaccurate. I mean, it gives you directionally about where you want to shoot for, but, um, really just measure your heart rate when you're exercising and, you know, kind of look at it by your breath works.

I mean, if you can hold a conversation, you're probably not doing it long enough or fast enough. You know, if you're actually panting, you need to dial it back down then. I think Peter Itea was mentioning on Joe Rogan's show that, you know, the benefits of exercise and how it can help you live longer. But I actually, I don't think what he was saying was very true. I actually question it quite a bit. Not that I don't love exercise. I do. I'm addicted to it for sure. But I'm not aware, like, do you think that people live longer that exercise versus that don't. I think some of what he was talking about is probably more related to people that he's helped and assisted that maybe potentially are already ill and then they have a nutritional protocol and then they exercise. And so, of course,

it's going to be effective. But what I would say is that folks that have never had to think about exercise before or ever had to think about their diet that probably don't live in the United States probably are the people that are going to live the longest because they never had to even question it because they've always been healthy. They've never been sick in their life. So what are some of your thoughts on that? So I think probably two things that he was probably getting at is one is, you know, how bad sarcopenia is for somebody as they age. So, you know, if your muscle mass goes down, um, you don't have that metabolic engine anymore to handle your metabolism, but you also don't have that muscle that supports you. So when you fall, you can't get back up.

You're much more likely to break your hip. You break your hip. You know, your risk of mortality is extremely high. It's worse than cancer. If you break your hip at a certain age, uh, you know, you're going to get a blood clot and die from a blood clot, or you're just going to be so disabled, you can't do what you want to do anymore. Side note, my grandpa was like 93 years old, almost 94. He didn't do any pre-planning to get to 93, 94 years old. He's still pretty mentally with it, but physically, he was never an exerciser. And a couple of weeks ago, he had his first fall. He was a stubborn guy. He's like, I'm not going to use any walk or anything like that. I'm, you know, 94.

I was in career war. I don't need that stuff. And, uh, you know, you have to let them fail and, you know, you can get up on the floor and he's like, oh, I actually don't have the muscle mass to do this. So now I have to do physical therapy, you know, every day to get stronger. So it's like you had to pre-plan to get for, you know, to be elderly and be healthy. So that's where I think the exercise component comes in is that you want to be focusing on muscle health as you age. Um, but to your point, yeah, yeah, it's a whole lot easier to stay healthy through, you know, your life than to get really sick and

try to reverse it all at that stage. You know, when you're much older, we had, um, wow, it's almost at Aubrey Marcus, Dave Asprey on the podcast. And, you know, he's somebody that he's a biohacker. He knows a ton about how to optimize the body. And what everybody always points to is like, OK, if you know so much, how come you're not in like the world's greatest shape or whatever? And his response is always like, well, I don't want to have that much muscle because I'm trying to live forever. Is there a certain I don't know what it would be biomarker or I'll just say a limit to like forever. Is there a certain, I don't know what it would be, biomarker or I'll just say a limit to like muscle, like how much muscle is too much muscle or is that even a thing or is that just person by person, which I'm sure it is. But you know, when I hear that, I just, I'm shocked

because of what you were just saying just now, you know, we need muscle, we want to be harder to kill, but here is somebody who's done tons of research and he's just like, no, I don't want to have that much muscle because I want to live longer. So is there a such thing as too much muscle? This is where it gets complicated. The answer is going to be yes. But what is that threshold? I don't fully know. So, again, it comes down to energetics.

So the majority of the energy in your system is supposed to go to your central nervous system, your brain, and then your heart. And then the rest of the energy goes wherever it needs to go. So if you spend so much time in the gym, focusing on growing big muscles and making the mitochondria and the muscles healthy, and you're stealing energy from your brain and heart, you're probably going to end up with neurodegeneration. You're going to end up with heart disease because you put the energy in the wrong places for too long. So, you know, there's a reason why, you know, humans evolved with bigger brains and mitochondrial density in their heart and brains, and they don't have as much in their muscles. You know, the genes for a chimpanzee and a gorilla are very, very similar to humans. And they're a hell of a lot stronger than the average human is because their mitochondrial density is in their muscle mass. You know, a gorilla is just

absolutely ripped from birth, you know? And so like, you know, so you got to optimize for what, you know, evolution decided for you. You know, humans were supposed to have really big brains that could make tools and get other things done for them. Now, I'm not saying don't have muscle mass, but there is a law of diminishing returns. You know, it's probably a point of, it's like those guys that train so hard that they never let their body recover and their body's just aging faster than it should.

It appears that most people that live really long, like centurions and stuff like that, they're usually really little. They're usually very, very small. And I don't, again, who the hell knows if that's a direct correlate. You're not really typically hearing about, you know, former NFL athletes or NBA athletes that are, you know, 127 years old because they trained all, you know, power lifters, bodybuilders. I mean, there's a lot of other things that go into those sports sometimes. And again, you know, you could have performance enhancing drugs at play in some cases. I think the main thing is to try to figure out what you, I like what the way that you worded it with your dad and being in his 90s. I think that was a kind of a fair statement of saying, you know, how did he get there and could his life be slightly better if he had a little bit of exercise in his past?

Probably so. Right. Yeah. I feel like, well, you know, this is just a feeling, but I think that like if a lot of individuals who do training like yourself, right, or train like powerlifters or bodybuilders, like yourself, right. Or, or train like power lifters or bodybuilders, if they pick up a habit, um, that will allow them to enjoy cardiovascular work and just become more efficient, uh, they'd probably be fine. Like, cause I mean, you know, like, I mean, my, when I do jujitsu or whatever, I feel that I'm, I'm, I'm extremely efficient at moving, I guess, all of this mass around, you know, it doesn't feel like, uh, I don't feel labored at all, ever.

So if we could just figure out some things that we could do that could allow us to still pursue our whatever, bodybuilding or powerlifting, but still have a high level of cardiovascular efficiency, we'd be in a good place. For sure. I mean, it's a combination. What is your strength? What's your cardiovascular fitness? What's your flexibility? You know, all those things play a role. And, you know, what is your strength? What's your cardiovascular fitness? What's your flexibility? You know, all those things, you know, play a role. And, you know, many people, you know, focus too narrowly on one thing.

And sometimes, you know, when you're a pro athlete, you got to do that thing. But if you're playing the longevity game, you got to have a little bit more fair balance on those. Yeah. For as long as I've been training, I've always incorporated some version of cardiovascular training, something that even if it looked pathetic to somebody that already had great endurance, it was still cardiovascular for me because it was like a superset of something. And because at certain times I wasn't very fit,

something like dragging a sled or doing some walking lunges with low rest in between would be cardiovascular exercise. Have you seen cardiovascular exercise? You know, I've heard some things about it increasing, like I think the left ventricle of your heart. I'm not sure if I got that right or not. And that it can be beneficial. And you mentioned that zone two training.

Do you really feel that that is pretty powerful in being able to assist people to avoid something like a heart attack? I think it will be. I think that's the goal is that, you know, if you really focus on mitochondrial health, a lot of these things that we talk about as being diseases go away. If you can make the mitochondria make more energy, things go well. And so the kind of idea of like doing, you know, a lot of chronic cardio and not letting your body recover is also as bad as lifting heavy and not recovering. You know, your body doesn't know the difference. You know, I shouldn't say that, you know,

your body knows that it was stressed in some way and it's going to have an adaptive response. And so, you know, it's the same risk for, you know, people who are marathon runners having heart attacks and be like, that guy's so aerobically fit, how could this happen? Well, he's got horrific endothelial dysfunction and his arteries are inflamed and he ruptured a plaque. It happens. But to your one question, exercise is a drug and at a certain point it becomes maladaptive. So there are more in the runners and the cyclists, I believe, like the left side of the heart will enlarge to accept a larger volume of blood so that you have a higher cardiac output. And that at some point you're kind of, we'll

kind of stretch it out a little bit too much and there's potentially more risk of scar tissue. So on these really high endurance athletes, you know, they have a higher risk of atrial fibrillation, which the top chamber of the heart, the atria kind of quivers, and there's more risk of a blood clot happening up in that chamber. And then that blood clot breaks free. That causes a stroke. But usually, atrial fibrillation is associated with people who are elderly, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, but not athletes. But the chronic endurance athlete is more at risk for it because they've stretched that atrial out because they needed that stroke volume of blood to provide the oxygen and

nutrients to their muscles and their lungs. In the case of some of these bodybuilders that have passed, what would you maybe speculate? Obviously, we don't know their business. We don't know exactly what they've done. None of us have any of their medical information. But just in your own professional opinion, maybe perhaps coming across some folks that have used performance-enhancing drugs in the past or just your own speculation on things that you've seen,

what do you think maybe some of these people are having heart attacks from? I mean, my best guess on many of the things is that it's a combination of poor sleep, that's not recovering well enough, and just chronic inflammation. You need inflammation when you have an infection. When you exercise, you cause low levels of inflammation and you want your body to take care of it. But if you stay at this chronic level of inflammation and the arteries are essentially going to be on fire forever, there's just more risk that this plaque is going to develop over time. And then these guys, even though they look extremely fit on the outside, their arteries are 30 years older than they should be. And they ruptured these plaques. And so I need to just tell people, you know, just, you know, I don't

really care. You know, I shouldn't say it that way either. I don't really care if you use performance enhancing drugs or you put the stuff in your system. Like, you know, why don't we look and see what it's actually doing to you? So like, let's do some non-invasive testing and say your arteries are healthy. Like, I don't recommend you still do this stuff, but you're getting away with it for now. Or, wow, look what we found.

Now you got to make the decision, you know, with your doctor, do you continue down this pathway of being a pro athlete using these stuff? Or do you kind of dial back and say, I'm going to play the longevity game now because I'm at much higher risk of a heart attack. So just work with that person. Just give them some scans and say, okay, this is what you're dealing with. It sounds like some of these deaths could have been maybe prevented. And so it's great that you put forth some of this information. What are maybe your top three tests? You did mention, uh, calcium score. You did mention,

uh, I think the artery one, like, uh, what are all those called and, uh, what are kind of your top three? So, you know, the number one thing for somebody over the age of 40 is, you know, go get a CT corner calcium score test. Cause that's easy as one that almost anybody can get in any big city, almost every major hospital will offer it. So, you know, it's a 10 minute test. You hold your breath, you know, for about 30 seconds, they do a quick scan and they tell you, you have calcium mean arteries. Yes or no. If you don't have calcium mean arteries, you know, it's not a perfect, you know, world, you know, there's still some slight risk, but you know, in all comers, you know, it's reported that a 0.4% risk, you're going to have a heart attack over the next five years. So, you know, score zero, you know, maybe you do some blood work and see, did you inherit

LPLA, all those types of things. But then, you know, if you're, you know, a little bit more, you know, aggressive, then go looking at a carotid scan, you know, that'll look at for soft plaque, that'll look at vascular age, you know, or you're kind of an earlier stage of vascular disease. It's always easier to replace or fix it at earlier stages than waiting for everything to be calcified. You know, there's still, you know, work you can be done to stabilize it and that person won't necessarily have an event, but try to find it even earlier. And then the third test, you know, do some tests that looks at your endothelial function. So, you know, two tests that you can consider is some called the endopat, like a 15 minute test where they use blood pressure

cuffs to measure the flow in your, break your artery, the artery in the, in your arm, basically a stress test to the artery that says like how much nitric oxide can get pumped out when it's stressed. Ideally it should at least double in size. And then there's another test called the max pulse. It's like a little finger probe measuring the flow in your fingers. It gives you a good idea of the volume of blood in your arteries. So your arteries should kind of act like an accordion, expand and contract quickly. And if they do that, they're probably making nitric oxide. If it's more like a lead pipe, then you have really stiff arteries and you have poor pulse

wave velocity on the max pulse test. So those are kind of the three major tests I recommend most people get. And then there's obviously the awesome test that you ended up going to get that the clearly test is kind of gonna be the gold standard telling people they're the plaque volume. So, I mean, it looks at soft plaque, it looks at necrotic plaque, it looks at hard plaque, gives you an exact percentage of blockage in each artery. Um, it's really going to be the gold standard going forward for predicting risk for people. Awesome. Um, I'm curious as to how you eat and, uh, how you exercise. It's a great question. Uh, the eating part, I generally do stay pretty seasonal. So I tried to,

uh, um, switch it up. So for breakfast, usually in the summer, and I, you know, usually do some kind of a smoothie in the morning has some different berries, protein powder, avocado, has some different berries, protein powder, avocado, uh, almond butter, coconut milk. Um, and then, uh, in the wintertime, it's more usually like some kind of egg casserole, sausage or something like that. Um, try to get seafood, you know, three, four times a week, you know, keep the DHA levels high. Um, and, you know, usually, uh, just to be, uh, consistent and not have, you know, really any, have really any struggle thing. Like when we eat, I usually have things like prepackaged, go to a place in St. Louis that makes things all to the macros

that you want them to and make sure I'm eating my 30 grams of protein per meal. Otherwise, Dr. Lyon will yell at me. So usually do that. And then for dinner, just whatever I end up deciding to do in the area. but the big thing I do for nutrition is I do pretty much time restricted eating. You know, I'm personally not big into doing a lot of fast. I just don't have a metabolic reason that I want to right now. Um, but I'm really big at trying to eat, you know, daylight hours. You know, your body is supposed to have a period where delivering gut shuts off. Um, and you know, I generally will not eat at least three hours before I go gut shuts off. Um, and you know, I generally will

not eat at least three hours before I go to bed so that, that, you know, that system will shut off. So, you know, I don't eat perfectly. I generally pretty clean and I consider it mostly paleo. Um, but you know, I know you recently were over in Italy. I was in Italy, you know, last month and I ate more pasta that week than I would eat in like five years. You're in Italy, you're going to do it. So, um, but I also know how to get it off when I get back. And then for exercise, I've kind of shifted around a little bit more. I'm doing more of the zone two type training. During the pandemic, I got a Peloton and played around with it.

And I usually don't listen to what they're talking about. I just fire up a podcast and listen to that while I'm doing the zone two training or make some phone calls and then try to do some resistance training, you know, two or three times a week, some kettlebells and stuff. Great. Thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. I think the listeners got a lot of great things they can look into and investigate and, you know, hopefully stay healthy and avoid this disease that hits people every 40 seconds in this country. Where can people find you where they can find out more information about you? Well, thank you again for the opportunity to talk to your audience.

You know, and I just want to leave people with a message that, you know, heart disease can be common, but heart attacks don't have to be, you know, there are tests, you know, fairly simply a pain that can tell you you're at high risk. If you're high risk, you know, find an individual like me or a doctor near you that can help you mitigate that risk. But if people want to follow me, I'm, you know, on Instagram and my website, they're both just Dr. Twyman, you know, not spelled D-R-T-W-Y-M-A-N. Oh, you know what? I don't know if I got like some quote unquote misinformation or not, but I thought I heard some sort of correlation between heart disease and the amount of times you poop in a day. And I don't know if you've heard anything like that or not

but I don't know. I just, something like that. Somebody sent me a link to something like that the other day. I haven't heard that one yet but I mean, your gut is essentially a tube to the outside and if your gut isn't working well, you're more likely to be inflamed.

You're more likely to get heart disease. Maybe that's the link. Awesome. Have a great day. Thank you. I think some of what he was talking about when we were mentioning those bodybuilders, I think some of that

makes a lot of sense in the fact that hopefully some people listening that do want to try to take bodybuilding to a high level, hopefully they'll end up hearing some of that message and get some of these tests done. You know, the coronary calcium scan thing that I did, it was a little bit of a pain in the ass. I did have to drive to San Francisco, but I think it was like $120. A lot of times your insurance won't cover it. Maybe in some cases it would, but that doesn't sound like a crazy amount to pay to gain that information. It seems pretty useful. And some of the other tests you mentioned, they sound non-invasive. They sound like they can happen pretty useful. And, you know, some of the other tests he mentioned, they sound like non-invasive.

They sound like they can happen pretty quickly. And if you're somebody that's just really pushing the envelope in anything, I would suggest why not just take a look? Yeah, especially if you're in that genre of sport, with everything that's been happening, it's better to be safe, especially right now. What if they instituted that as a rule? You know, like just, hey, you just, you have to get this work done. You have to get these tests done.

I mean, I wonder, you know, and they got like some sort of, sounds crazy, got some sort of like, you know, I don't know, just making that a standard and saying like, you know, it's a start there. I don't know what they would do with that information or how they would delineate who can compete and who can't. But that could be massively beneficial because I think that definitely one aspect of this, people may be saying they're getting a lot of tests, but if you're doing something and you know there is a danger of something, there is a lot of individuals that are, would rather

just not see the results, would rather just like, oh yeah, I'm getting tests. But they're, you know, you're not getting the tests would rather just like, Oh yeah, I'm getting tests, but they're, they're, you know, you're not getting the tests you know you should be getting because you don't, you, you know what might be there. So you don't actually get it. I think there's a lot more people like that than people that are getting tests as often as you know, you hear that they should, you know, that's why America is so useful in America. So helpful in this type of situation, because like he talked about those tests, you can get, well, you can potentially Merrick is so useful. Merrick is so helpful in this type of situation because like he talked about those tests you can get.

Well, you can potentially get those tests with them. Yeah. And remember, like in school or whatever you're growing up, you had to take a physical to play a certain sport. Yeah. Like, I don't know. That sounds silly because this is like bodybuilding, right? And like, of course, they're going to be physically fit to perform. But, you know know like we always say

with america like you got to see what's going on under the hood like maybe i think that's a really good idea mark yeah well i mean maybe someone smarter than me can think of think it out and think it through a little bit more but i think that uh shit um you know it like i i saw derrick put a video out saying like someone might have to die on stage in order for bodybuilding to change, which hopefully nothing ever gets to that point. Hopefully some of the things that have happened are somewhat coincidental, and hopefully we'll see it subside. And we won't have to think about it anymore. But it's clearly a dangerous sport, and some of the things that are required for the sport seem to be dangerous. And powerlifters, you know, too, you know, uh,

the people that are listening to the show that have an extra 30, 40, 50 pounds on your body that you otherwise wouldn't have, even if it's through natural means, like if you have an extra 40, 50 pounds on your body and it's a combination of muscle and fat and you did it naturally, it still is stressing your body out. If you, you know, when you graduated high school, if you were 170 and now you're like 240 all the time, it, okay, it took a while for you to gain the weight and you can, you know, say, hey, you know, I gained the weight gradually over time and so, and I did it naturally

so I'm probably pretty healthy and you're probably right. Probably got a good point. Um, but your heart's probably working harder than it was when you were 15 or 16. And that might be your kind of natural, uh, fighting weight, your natural body weight. And so I think everyone should just get exams. It doesn't, doesn't hurt to, uh, to look at it. And if it turns out that there's not much going on with it, then that's good. You know what I was thinking? Cause you're having this conversation the other day about, um, bodybuilding. Like if, if, you know, these athletes were drug tested and they were forced to be a little bit smaller, would people actually enjoy this? Like, would people still tune in? I was, I thought of this afterwards. I'm like, you know, if you have these athletes

that are competing in bodybuilding and let's say they're not they're not as big as the bodybuilders you see now um and then you have these big massive bodybuilders walking around on the street who are taking a lot of stuff who look bigger and better than the guys that you see on stage on tv i like it's it's different because like you you don't see that with basketball it doesn't matter like you know um in pro basketball or pro sports people have to say i'll like all the top level track athletes are on drugs etc but the guys that you see that are professionally and the women that you see professionally on tv you're not going to see anybody out here just randomly being better than them but in bodybuilding

because it's an it's a visual sport like you'll see guys that are on, just hopped on a bunch of shit that are just bigger than those guys that you see on TV. So I don't think it'd be a comparable type of deal. If you tried to diversify bodybuilding, that would certainly help. If you tried to make it to the point where they had to do something physical, then that would automatically start to change stuff. to change stuff because if you look at something like crossfit um at least i'm unaware there's not some mutant freak crossfitter out there that's doing extraordinary things on like instagram that's like blowing all the other crossfitters away now taking all the attention away from uh the the the crossfitters that have won the crossfit games and stuff like that i mean there are people doing mutant type shit you know on uh on the internet. And those people do get attention and they do have millions of followers.

So I understand that. But I think if you were just to add anything into bodybuilding, I think you change bodybuilding probably too much. But for example, years ago, I don't even know if they still do this, but women used to have a category called fitness where they would do kind of a gymnastics routine along with, you know, posing and flexing and all those things. When you have to do that kind of stuff, you have like a floor routine to do or something. I'm not even saying that that should happen in bodybuilding. But as soon as you have those things to do, that's going to be hard to be 290 on stage and be all dried out and stuff if you have a performance to do.

So I don't know. There's a lot of different things that can be done, but I think ultimately it changes what we're used to. So it's kind of hard to see the future when that happens. I mean, at the end of the day, it's not, I, okay. I mean, shoot, I don't know, but I don't think the sport's going to, it'll get bigger, but it'll never become something mainstream because it's just the prevalent drug use.

Like there's a lot of fucking drugs that are being used on an NPC level bodybuilding. And if that's just going to be how it's going, it's going to continue to be a very niche sport. It's never been mainstream and it never, never will be. I mean, like Arnold pushed it about his Arnold and Joe Weider combination, um,

that pushed it. I think as far as it would ever go. I mean, there's probably more people into it now than there was then just because of sheer numbers. But that's kind of because of kind of who pushed the envelope beforehand. But, I mean, I don't know. You just never know. Imagine if some – I mean, I don't know why anybody would do this, but imagine if someone like Chris Bumstead said, fuck it, man, I'm going off everything and I'm going to compete, you know,

next year and drug test and stuff. It wouldn't appease people because people would be like, well, he was on for so long and blah, blah, blah. And he's got to be off for seven years and his blood level has to be this for the next, you know, I don't know why everyone talks the same when it's the annoying voice but it's always that same voice yeah that's the internet talking right there yeah but even like you know if my parents seen any bodybuilder natural uh what's um wnbf wnbf okay if you said that they would have Okay, if you said that, they would have no idea. If you said NPC, they would have no idea.

Yeah, it's niche. So a majority of the population, they would see any bodybuilder in basically any shape, and they're going to be like, steroids. They're all going to assume it already. Yeah. So if it does all become drug tested, I don't know, maybe you can publicize that and people would care, but chances are people are still going to believe what they believe. Yeah.

You know, it's so, oh man's this funny video from this um this company jubilee jubilee does all these videos of like uh um where they get like a certain group of people and they ask um just questions like that body or fitness people on and they're like do you think bodybuilders have small penises or how much importance do you put in your body? And these individuals, they stand in a line and it's like they're in the middle. And then there's like, yes, no. Yeah, whatever. And they'll just have different opinions on stuff. And it's just really interesting even having those athletes talk about it.

I wish they got other people because one of the questions and we should we should actually talk about this video but one of the questions was like like how like how much importance do you put into your body or something and these ended like one guy who was he was kind of fit he looked pretty good but he was like you know when I was competing I just made me realize oh if you're doing bodybuilding you're gonna have to be on stuff and i was like bro why do you have to say that shit because you don't have to be on drugs to do bodybuilding and you're not even that big but this dude was like yeah i just realized at a certain point in competing that i had to start taking steroids say shit like that all the time that you have to be on drugs to be strong yeah and it just puts out like especially since this video is going to be

viewed by a lot of people yeah it's not true yeah and this video is going to be viewed by a lot of people yeah it's not true yeah and this video is going to be viewed by a lot of people it just kind of stamps and puts down that uh that that idea that oh yeah if you want to be big or if you want to get gain muscle yeah you're gonna have to take drugs like this motherfucker wasn't even that big like dude come the fuck on it's kind of frustrating because that just that pushes that idea out to so many people and it's the thing that people want to believe people want to because if you believe that just say that's true for you that's that's that's your belief for yourself you know that was my belief for myself otherwise i would have never taken them i thought that for

me to be the strongest me personally to be the strongest I could be, that I had to take performance enhancing drugs. But that doesn't mean for anyone to be strong that they have to take them. And that also doesn't mean that people can't whoop my ass in lifting in all different kinds of things in the gym just because I take something, even if they're not taking anything. People don't want to admit that. And I've never had an issue with admitting it. Like people are just, sometimes they're really just fucking good at stuff. And let's rewind.

I can do about it. I want to, I want people because people are going to take what you said and feel, Oh yeah. Even Mark said that he had to be, he had to take stuff to be strong. No, you said the strong guest because before you started taking shit,

you were 220, 225 pounds. You were still benching monstrous amounts of weight. You were fucking big. You just wanted to take it to a freak freak level. You're already a freak. You just had to want it to take it here. So that's got to be understood.

I think I did 225 bench for 40 reps, which I can't even do nowadays. That was before you hopped on again and you were training at that time. That was 12 years of training. You started at 13, hopped on at and you were training at that time that was 12 years of training started at 13 hopped on at 25 so you've already trained for 12 years people aren't willing to put down that amount of time on almost anything right on almost anything and that's why like you train for four or five years you're like oh you know everyone who's big or

strong needs to take shit and then you hop on after five or four, four years of training. No, man, no. Everybody always talks about leveling up, you know, until it's time to pay up. That's from, uh,

Eric Thomas, you know, until it's time to like actually do the thing that, that kind of, you know, shoves you into that level up mode. Yeah. It,

you're, the resistance is great. And you're like, this is too much. This is too hard. For me personally, this is a different podcast for another day, but that's also not the reason why I took performance enhancing drugs. I wasn't like, oh, man, I hit a wall. I'll never get any stronger than this.

I actually just never explored it. I don't have any idea how strong I could have been. Maybe I could have lifted similar amounts of weight. I don't know. how strong I could have been. I don't know. Maybe I could have lifted similar amounts of weight. I don't, I don't know. Um, I believe what performance enhancing drugs did for me more so than anything was, uh, of course they help with a strength gain because they help you build muscle mass, but it just helped me grow a lot, like gain a lot of size. Um, and that feeling is, uh, really encouraging. You gain size and strength kind of simultaneously,

and it's kind of a snowballing effect to the point where they are addicting in a sense because you're like, fuck, yeah, this has the result that I was looking for. This is really awesome. It's enjoyable. It made a lot of the workouts almost more fun to me in a sense, almost as if I was new. And so that's, that's part of the reason why I took them. It wasn't necessarily because I was like, I think at the time I did like around a 500 pound floor press. So I already had a lot of strength. I think the most I ever floor pressed, even while taking stuff

was like 555 or 575. So that's a nice increase on something that I was already pretty strong with, but it's also like the difference between weighing around 220 pounds versus weighing 300 something pounds. My deadlift before I ever took anything, I did a 635 deadlift while getting on stuff and lifting in a, or doing a sumo deadlift in a squat suit. I did a 766 deadlift, but it's also 10 years later, you know, I'm a lot heavier. Obviously the squat is really skewed because I wore powerlifting equipment. So who the hell knows what would ever happen with that.

But my vantage point of myself just from being around strength for so long and being around just like individuals that are in my opinion actually insanely strong i never put myself in that category yeah i always thought i was above average for sure i benched 405 like almost around the time of like uh i think the last couple days i was in high school, you know, so that's a very young age, you know, to be able to be able to move that, that kind of weight. So definitely a way above average, but there's also like Eric Spoto who benched 500 when

he was in, in, in school. So there's, for me, I, I just kind of thought the people I looked up to in powerlifting, they were on shit because they were in federations that weren't testing. I wasn't looking at the people that were in the tested federations. That wasn't my thing. I was like, who lifts the most? I want to figure that out. You show up at this event with whatever you want, whatever you got, and that's the way we're going to do our battle, and that's the way we're going to shoot it out. You show up at this event with whatever you want, whatever you got.

And that's the way we're going to do our battle. And that's where we're going to shoot it out. That's, that's what I wanted to do. That's what I got excited about. That's why I took them. I have a cool question for you, man. If you could put yourself in your mind, if you could put yourself in your mind when you were younger, let's say that you did see, or there was a presence of individuals that

some people like they're drug tested not drug free but the drug tested individuals in the usapl because you see something it was like five six years ago and i was seeing big ray and some of those people and bryce lewis and these guys yeah i would have definitely i would have definitely stayed natural for at least longer and i would have definitely seen if i I could compete under those circumstances for sure. I mean, that's where I started out. I started out in the ADFPA, which then eventually turned into the USAPL, which now doesn't exist anymore, I don't think. Something weird happened with it or something, or it got debunked from the IPF.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah. So maybe it still exists, but I don't know. Weird shit's going on. Yeah. I was just curious. Right? Yeah. So maybe it still exists, but I don't know. Weird shit's going on. Yeah. I was just curious. That's okay.

Cool. Yeah, I would have definitely tested myself against other people in that federation, especially because when I was younger, there was no delineation between drug tested and not. They didn't have, they didn't have it really. Yeah. I just mentioned they had the ADFPA, but that was a little bit newer and it was a lie detector test. And I saw, I think the guy's name was Frank Scalpey, I can't remember his first name. I don't know if I got that right. Deadlift like 804 at 198, veins bursting out everywhere. And I was like, I don't know. I don't know about that. I don't know if I got that right deadlift like 804 at 198 veins bursting out everywhere and I was like I don't know you know I don't know about that I don't know how accurate a lie detector test is

but I always admired even without knowing I always admired the guys that were on shit I didn't even really know but these guys were 270 280 just in my own gym and they were dead lifting 700 pounds for reps and stuff so i always kind of was just almost vibed towards that more but like i said there wasn't as much delineation between the federations um and when i came back to powerlifting when i was older after i tried you know football and and professional wrestling and things like that. The most popular form of powerlifting, at least in my eyes, was the WPO. It was Chuck Vogelpool. It was Westside Barbell. That was the cool shit. That was the stuff I wanted to do. And that was the route that I was going to go. I was like, those guys are doing that. That's what it takes. I'm going to head in that direction.

So I may have been under the illusion that that's what I needed, but I also don't have any problem in saying that I don't know if I really needed it. I didn't really try without it for that long, especially when it came to that level of power lifting. Yeah. Want to take us on out of here, Andrew?

Sure thing. Thank you everybody for checking out today's episode. Please follow the podcast at Mark Bell's PowerPowerProject on Instagram, at MBPowerProject on TikTok and Twitter. It makes you guys are subscribed right here on YouTube and subscribe on iTunes. And please leave us a review if you guys are digging the episodes. And my Instagram is at IamAndrewZ, at TheAndrewZ on TikTok.

Oh, wow. You almost... Dinked it right off the light. They're going to redo it. Sorry. I don't even know if I said mine right. At IamAndrewZ on TikTok. At IamAndrewZ on Instagram and Twitter.

At TheAndrewZ on TikTok. Jesus. I'll take that from you. And see what you got. It's up and... It is pretty windy, though. At InsimaYinYang on Instagram and YouTube. At InsimaYinYang on TikTok and Twitter, Mark.

I hope all the people that are watching, I hope're digging this new uh studio that we're in oh it's moved out to change too y'all ain't even ready for what's about to happen here yeah pretty fresh yeah i ordered some stuff so i can hang some new lights yeah that's the someone's alarm was going off which is also being worked on to help eliminate some of the sound but yeah i'm gonna get some back lighting going and then we got some more decorative items coming in. It's going to be sick. It's going to be popping. I think there's a couple things that we should have here.

We should have like an outward facing screen so that people that walk by can kind of check shit out. We should have an outward facing camera that just tracks motherfuckers that are walking by so that they're automatically on the show and every once in a while you can fuck with it and hit the button

and be like yo you're on the show you know well yeah I'll fuck it Andrew's like I already got that camera well I had sent out an email to everybody and I was just like hey when we're recording like

cause we're very close to some bathrooms now. I'm like, hey, like bathrooms are kind of off limits. Don't use these ones. Don't use these while we're recording or else you will become a special guest on the podcast because these microphones pick up everything that's going on in there. So, yeah, maybe we can get a camera. A bathroom camera. No, no, not a bathroom camera.

Aw. Because that would just be a camera. A bathroom camera. No, no, not a bathroom camera. Aw. Because that would just be you in there the whole time. Anyway, yeah. Oh, and we need some headphones over there so people can listen. So you can just sit there and chill and listen and watch. Have some fans over there or something. I can make that happen. I think I can do that right now.

Well, you don't need to do it right now. I mean, with the equipment that we have, we just need people to provide their own headphones, and I think that would work until we get some. I'm at Mark Smiley Bell. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.

Bye.