Ologies with Alie Ward - Cardiology (THE HEART) with Herman Taylor
Episode Date: February 26, 2025It beats. It throws blood. It breaks – but not if Dr. Herman Taylor can help it. He is a physician, professor and director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the Morehouse School of Medicin...e in Atlanta, and an absolute legend. Cardiology is a vast field but Dr. Taylor joined for a 101 on how the heart works, and how to take care of it. Get pumped for valves, tubes, electrical shocks, Grey’s Anatomy glossaries, heavy metal hearts, the effects of long term stress and systemic oppression on the heart, what those blood pressure numbers mean, what to do in an emergency, cardiac disease symptoms, what your heart wants you to eat, how to decipher your cholesterol numbers and why you would want to. Also: the worst heart tattoos out there. Browse Dr. Taylor’s publications on ResearchGate and follow Dr. Matthew Evan TaylorA donation went to the Center for Black Agency and ResilienceMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Surgical Angiology (VEINS & ARTERIES), Hematology (BLOOD), BlackAFinSTEM with various Ologists, Black American Magirology (FOOD, RACE & CULTURE), Surgical Oncology (BREAST CANCER), Thyroidology (THYROID GLAND), Addictionology (ADDICTION), Somnology (SLEEP), Chronobiology (CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS), FIELD TRIP: My Butt, a Colonoscopy Ride Along & How-ToSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow Ologies on Instagram and BlueskyFollow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTokEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jake ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn
Transcript
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Oh hey, it's the woman on the swamp tour who won't stop screaming yeehaw, Allie Ward,
and we are here with your heart in your ears cardiology.
Let's consider this episode a one on one.
It's a very basic intro to a really huge discipline and this is a guest I have waited months and
months and months to interview.
It all started, I got a note from a listener named Matthew Evan Taylor who said not only
was this person a top cardiologist in the country, but he also has a great radio voice and also was his dad. I did a
little research and quickly realized no other cardiologist would do. Me and this
guest, we chatted months back over the phone and he wanted to time the episode
so that it hit in February to
encompass both American Heart Month and Black History Month but he's super busy.
He had a conference to go to in November and then he was going to the
Super Bowl in February. Turns out he didn't just have a conference to go to
he was being awarded the Clinical Research Prize at the American Heart
Association's Scientific Sessions in 2024.
Oh, and the Super Bowl tickets? You know, he was there as the Director of Player Engagement and
Education and a co-investigator into the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University. He was
there working. He is a professor and a director at the Cardiovascular Research Institute at the
Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.
He did his undergrad at Princeton,
his doctorate from Harvard Medical School,
and has been named the American Heart Association's
Physician of the Year.
This man's schedule, like some of our arteries,
is packed wall to wall with huge responsibilities,
but he is gracious and generous,
and we were able to nab him for about an hour this past Saturday morning.
I was terrified to take up too much of his time because I already loved him so
much. And we turned this episode around in just a few days.
He showed up on video in a shirt and tie, all smiles.
He let me ask him so many questions. But first, before we get into it,
thank you to all the patrons who submitted their questions
before we recorded.
Thanks to all the folks in Ology's merch
from ologysmerch.com.
Thank you to all the listeners leaving reviews,
which helped the show so much,
such as this recent review from Amy in Arlington,
who wrote, you learn new stuff each time.
You come away amazed by all the smart
and good people in the world,
something we all need nowadays.
Thank you, Amy and Arlington,
and everyone who has ever left a review,
I have read them all.
Okay, let's get to the heart of the matter.
Cardiology comes from the Greek for heart, easy,
and we covered as much as we could in the time that we had.
So yeah, consider this a 101, a primer, get pumped,
for valves, tubes, beats, electrical shocks,
Graze Anatomy, glossaries, heavy metal hearts,
the effects of long-term stress on the heart,
what those blood pressure numbers mean,
how to read an EKG, what to do in an emergency,
cardiac disease symptoms, what your heart wants you to eat,
how to decipher your cholesterol numbers
and why you would want to.
Trust me, it's fun.
The worst heart art out there and why you would want to. Trust me, it's fun. The worst heart art
out there and why a wedding ring goes on that finger with researcher, professor, physician, This one is going to come up on Tuesday.
So this is going to be a quick turnaround.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Well, let's get to it. Okay. He, him? Yes. Okay, all right. Let's get to it. Okay. He him? Yes. Okay. Herman Taylor. Now,
you're a cardiologist. How long have you been a cardiologist?
I've been a cardiologist really since 1990, which now I guess is what 35 years. Is that right? Yeah.
Yes. Quite a long time. Now what was it that drove you into
cardiology when you were in med school, when you were on this path to becoming a
doctor? When did that passion start for you? Well let's see. Originally I was I
guess just very interested in science. The thing that got me going actually was
believe it or not and this dates me a a bit, the space program. That got me first interested
in science in general, and I gravitated through a period where I wanted to be an oceanographer.
You may not be familiar with the undersea world of Jacques Cousteau. We would like to know more
about this serpent, who ages ago returned from land to the ocean of his origin to prey on the tiny bottom dwellers
But if you go back in the archives, I'm sure you could find that I found that really inspirational
But as time went by got more interested in physics as it turns out
Which led me actually to?
Cardiovascular physiology the way it was taught back, there was a heavy emphasis on hemodynamics and
flows and fluids as sort of one of the primary things you had to master if you wanted to understand
what was going on with the circulation, with the heart. In college, while I was still vacillating
a little bit about what I was going to do after college, I had the opportunity to go to Cornell
University's School of Medicine for a research fellowship and part of that experience was teaching
cardiovascular physiology and that's sort of where things every everything came together for me in terms of my interest in the heart and circulation and
That combined with sort of seeing through the opportunity of this summer research fellowship seeing
Clinical scenarios that showed that marginalized populations had a particularly bad time with cardiovascular disease.
All that sort of piqued my interest, got my passions going, and pointed in the direction
of cardiology.
After spending some time on a faculty in Birmingham, my hometown, teaching cardiology, seeing patients, et cetera,
and really having a wonderful experience
being in my hometown, treating people who were
maybe colleagues and friends and coworkers
of my parents and friends.
And I got inspired by the idea of studying
a large population of African Americans looking specifically at
cardiovascular risk.
There had been a study, and still actually still is a study, called the Framingham Heart
Study, which looked at a long-term, took a long-term view of cardiovascular health in
a population in the Northeast that happened to be almost entirely white. In fact, even
more specifically, mostly it was either Italian, Irish, or Irish-Italian in terms of its heritage.
So this study, founded just after World War II, focused on the long-term heart health
of over 5,000 residents of Framington, Massachusetts. And it's ongoing. It's in its third generation
of volunteer subjects.
And among many discoveries, chronicled in thousands of published papers, were findings
about cigarette smoke and heart disease, psychosocial factors, and genetic or inherited risk factors.
That study has been tremendous in its contributions, but there was a major omission. You know,
that's a very small slice of the human family
when you talk about people whose heritage is traced
principally to Western Europe.
Mankind, womankind is much broader than that
and there were some special challenges
in the black population that weren't adequately being met.
So the world of research was really looking for
a way to fill that gap. And we came together with the idea of the Jackson Heart Study to do that.
So it was a particularly fun time of my career.
And the Jackson Heart Study, started 25 years ago, looked at the cardiac health of, again,
over 5,000 participants, but this time in Jackson, Mississippi.
And another reason why we waited until February for this episode, at Dr. Taylor's suggestion
for Black History Month, is that black history factors into what care patients receive.
And one 2020 study laying out a lot of info was published in the Journal of Hypertension,
titled, Discrimination and Hypertension Risk Among African Americans in the Jackson Heart
Study. You mentioned that there are certain circumstances that put heart health at risk more. What is
genetic versus what is lifestyle? What is access to medical care? What factors are really
affecting any person?
Well, there's so many. And it's a combination, a convergence of a lot of different dimensions, let's say.
So the genetic, certainly, you know, family history and things that run in families are
important. There are some very specific things like abnormalities and cholesterol metabolism,
tendencies towards high blood pressure. Those things can run in families. But so can things like eating habits,
which are not genetic in any serious way. If there is a family tradition of eating a quote
southern diet or what people might consider a soul food diet or some other diet that has a
preponderance of certain types of foods, seasoning, that carry certain electrolytes that might not be good,
taken in overabundance, the tendency to fry foods, which causes chemical changes in foods that may
not be ideal, etc. So cardiac disease may involve a straight-up DNA predisposition, like familial
hypercholesterolemia,
which is caused by this genetic link
on how your body recycles LDL or bad cholesterol.
And it might require meds,
no matter how you change your habits.
And of course, heart health is affected by geographic
and lifestyle factors,
like how walkable your neighborhood is
or diet in your culture.
And actually, if you want a great Black History Month
episode on cuisine, Dr. Psyche Williams-Forsen
is a food historian who we interviewed for a Black
American Magurology episode.
But yeah, some heart conditions are just wired
into your cells.
Those types of things can run in families.
Then you have cultural and societal exposures
that may be quite material in terms of whether a person develops high blood
pressure, diabetes, etc., or heart disease itself. And these can relate to things that induce stress
in the population, whether it's the stress of city life, or the stress of, you know, let's let's call it discriminatory practices or
limited access to care or
limited access to good food those things too can all
Come together to create an ecosystem. That's very unfavorable for
For your heart and some people face those things day in and day out, and they accumulate over time
and can lead to some fairly serious sequela.
Yeah, I didn't know what that word meant.
Sequela, yes.
Sequela, okay, got it.
Maybe I should pick another word.
No, I just don't have that.
Things that happen in consequence,
or in sequence, I guess.
But, you know, I'm not sure.
I don't take you as someone who spends a lot of time
scrolling on social media because you've got
a lot of important things to do.
But there was this viral video that went around of this heart.
So it is, eh?
One piece.
Wow.
Can you do a piece?
Can I see?
So it was a model of a heart that they
were teaching in anatomy. and it almost was spiral,
the muscle, they almost stretched it out like unrolling a map or something.
Is that how a heart is constructed?
Wow.
Well, I haven't seen the video.
But what is true is that the heart in the embryo, the heart starts out as a straight
tube of cells and as gestation goes forward, that tube begins to fold up, twist on itself
and fuse and what you wind up having is this four chambered marvel of a muscle.
Muscle is maybe too simple a description of what it is
because it has electrical properties,
it has contractile properties,
and even sort of a mind of its own.
I mean, it can beat on outside of your body
powered by its own spontaneous electrical impulses
that's left totally through its own devices,
as long as it had oxygen and nutrients.
So when you see people in medical dramas,
hopefully not in real life, unless you're
a health care worker, in which case, thank you so much,
they may be using what's called an AED.
And this is an automated external defibrillator.
And it's called automatic because it detects,
and then it analyzes a patient's heart rhythm
and then it delivers an electrical shock
to reset the cardiac arrhythmia, which,
arrhythmic, so it's out of sync heartbeats.
So if a person has a cardiac arrest,
the protocol is typically to administer CPR,
if you know how to do it,
and then if there's an AED nearby, use that next. And I cannot stress enough that first aid training
is gonna do a better job than me.
I'm a podcast host, and I'm just search-engineing
how to save a life, and then I'm trying to tell you
in like 17 seconds.
Now, if a heart can beat with electrical charge and oxygen,
is that what happens in heart transplants?
I don't know, I've never had one,
but our guest, Dr. Tom Volk, in the Mycology episode
did have a heart transplant,
and we discussed it in his episode,
which we'll link for you,
during which he pointed me toward this felted box
on his desk.
It looked like a Kleenex box,
but it contained a fluid-filled plastic bag
with the heart he was born with.
It was sliced up like thick roast beef.
Now how do those transplants work?
Well, in brief, a donor heart is removed,
usually from a patient who has experienced brain death
but is alive via intubation.
And once that support is withdrawn and the patient passes,
the heart is removed and it's taken on ice
to wherever the recipient is, hopefully close by. They only have a couple hours on ice to wherever the recipient is, hopefully close by.
They only have a couple hours on ice.
Now the recipient is prepped and while the surgeons replace their heart, a cardiopulmonary
bypass machine circulates and oxygenates their blood while the recipient's heart is getting
taken out.
Now typically the donor heart would be transplanted, not beating, and then restarted.
But thrillingly, weirdly, and surreally,
as described in this 2023 paper, first inhuman beating heart
transplant, Dr. Joseph Wu and his team at Stanford
were able to restart a donor heart,
keep it warm with blood and beating
as it was being implanted into its new recipient.
Trust me, we could do a 13 episode series just on this topic, but those are some basics.
Back to even basicer basics, how did you build your heart in the first place? How did you do it?
So yeah, it starts out as a two, it twists and folds, infuses in just the right way,
and you get, again, this four-chambered structure that we know as the heart.
What are those four chambers doing?
If you had to break it down to someone who is obviously not a cardiologist, the ventricles,
the chambers, what's doing what?
Okay.
So, there are four chambers.
There's a left heart, if you will, and a right heart.
Each side of the heart, let's go with that terminology, has sort of an atrium, just like
the atrium to a building, the four-year-end of building.
And that atrium is the first chamber, and it receives blood and then loads the sort of more business in the stronger
More thickly muscle chamber called the ventricle the right atrium
Takes all of the venous blood all the blood has been say used let's call it
It's been out to the body has dropped off as a nutrients in its oxygen is
Participated in cholesterol transport has taken immune cells to where they need to go and all the various functions of blood,
that comes back with a lot of the oxygen and nutrients depleted for another round to pick
up essentially more oxygen by being pumped through the lungs.
So there's a special part of the heart that's devoted entirely to making sure that fresh
blood with a fresh supply of oxygen is supplied to the body.
The first stop after first coming into that right atrium, going through a valve, which
is a one-way door.
Now that valve is called a tricuspid valve for those who want detail. But coming through that valve, leaving the atrium, it goes into the right ventricle.
Which is downstairs from the right entry or atrium.
That strong ventricle then pumps it up to the lungs where it goes through this amazing
network of blood vessels and down to where the blood vessels
are so thin they come right up next to the little sacs that have air, oxygen.
And they're so close that the oxygen can just diffuse across into the blood.
And then after the blood gets refreshed from people like to talk about blue blood and bright
red blood, it turns much more closer to this bright red type of blood.
So once again, the spent blood enters the right atrium via the vena cava as venous blood,
heads to the ventricle and then to the lungs via the pulmonary arteries where it fills
up on oxygen and then it heads back to the heart's left atrium via the pulmonary veins. Okay, so you got fresh blood back to the heart
for distribution. All of that then drains from the lungs into now the left atrium,
okay, which is the first chamber after the blood has been refreshed. Once there, that atrium squeezes and pushes,
loads the true business end of the heart,
the left ventricle.
This is the most powerful part of the heart.
This is the thickest muscle in the heart.
Why?
Because it has to then generate enough pressure
to push blood through the body to every cubic millimeter or even smaller
portion of tissue throughout the heart and every organ to again supply oxygen and nutrients
and then allow after it all is used for the whole thing to circle back again to the heart. The heart does this through,
it's estimated thousands of miles. If you could stretch all of these vessels out end to end,
they'd be several thousand miles for an individual person, which is kind of hard to conceive.
Several thousand.
But when you consider that the blood vessels go from the big obvious vessels down to tiny
microscopic capillaries that allow, again, the diffusion of nutrients and oxygen into
every part of tissues and organs throughout the body, you can imagine that, yeah, if it
was possible, that it would make
for a very, very long highway of blood vessels.
Okay.
So the atrium is on top, the ventricles are on the bottom, and the left side is tasked
with shooting blood out to your whole body, like an Olympic shot putter, but just throwing
buckets of blood as far as it can.
And that beefy left side is why our heart is kind of left leaning in our chest.
Now as for a wedding ring on the left ring finger, what's the deal with that so-called
vena amoris, which is the blood plumbing that leads from the heart straight to that one
wedding ring finger digit?
Friends, it's flim flam. All the
veins and the arteries go back and forth to the heart. And wedding rings, over
time, they've been worn on either hand. Some were even worn on the thumb when
the fashion was like blingier and bulkier hundreds of years ago. So no, you
do not have a vein or an artery that goes straight from your heart to your
wedding ring. It's cute though.
Now, if you're like, I must know more about this history.
You can see the 1917 book.
Hold on, I'm going to take a breath here.
It's titled Rings for the Finger from the Earliest Known Times to the Present with Full
Descriptions of the Origin, Early Making, Materials, the Archaeology, History, for Affection, for Love, for Engagement, for
Wedding, Commemorative, Mourning, etc.
That's the whole title.
I find that et cetera at the end to be like the funniest thing I've ever read because
it's the longest title of a book maybe in the universe.
Anyway, onward.
I need you to know also that atrium, you know how it means entry hall for the heart, ventricle
derives from the Latin for little belly.
So that's the little belly of your heart.
More on guts and your hearts later in the episode.
Now remember how in the recent surgical angiology episode with Dr. Sheila Blumberg about veins
and arteries, we learned that venous blood is on its return trip to the heart.
It's darker in color
It's low in oxygen from delivering it all over your body while arterial blood it's fresh from the lungs
It's brighter and it's fueled up with o2 on the way to your body
If you don't remember that that's okay, because I just told you so obviously
The speed and pressure that that fluid is pumping through your body is important.
When it comes to blood pressure, when it comes to heart health too, we always hear like,
my blood pressure, it's good or bad. What does blood pressure have to do with your heart health?
Well, it has so much to do with it. One, the pressure you need to keep blood actually flowing to the heart itself, just like every
other tissue in the body, the blood has arteries that feed itself, that pump blood through
to the heart muscle, what's called the myocardium.
Okay.
So a quick terminology breakdown here.
Myomuscle, card, heart.
Eum means the tissue and itis means inflammation.
So myocardium is the muscle tissue of the heart
and myocarditis is inflammation
of the muscle tissue of the heart.
But yeah, the myocardium, the heart muscle, is the pump.
And in fluid dynamics or hemodynamics,
you need to keep things moving, baby.
In order to do that, there's a certain head of pressure that's needed in the heart, but
it can't be too much. If it's too much, then what can happen is those arteries that are
so vital to the heart survival become damaged. The lining inside of them called the endothelium, that thin
lining that allows for the exchange of oxygen and nutrients and so forth, is so
very important. If it becomes damaged and starts to dysfunction, that allows all
sorts of badness like cholesterol accumulation, the formation of what we
call fatty streaks, which are just, it's like a giant oil slick
on a road where you have cholesterol gathering, breaking through the barrier that should be
intact. That cholesterol then is being consumed by cells from the body that are designed to
protect the body against invaders.
They're called leukocytes, aka white blood cells.
Those macrophages that gobble up the LDL or the bad cholesterol, they help convert it
to foam cells.
Don't worry, don't worry about that.
So these macrophages, Dr. Taylor explains.
But they come in, they engorge themselves on the cholesterol, they break down and form
debris, it causes inflammation. And there's this cascade of events that then leads to the body trying to contain it by
forming a plaque over the top, a very fragile covering over this whole mess, right?
And that contains the damage for a while.
And it could be years.
This whole process can take years in development.
In fact, we see some of these changes I'm describing
in the autopsies of soldiers who are 18, 19 years old.
You can see the very beginnings of this process.
Anyway, that type of damage can be initiated
by pressures that are too high.
That then sets up a situation where that plaque
could erode or rupture.
And remember, that plaque is like spackle over a moldy wall.
Exposing all of that garbage to the blood passing by,
which sort of sees it as this disruption in the artery and then sends
all sorts of things to fix this break in the artery.
Platelets, which you remember from high school biology, are mainly intended to stop you from
bleeding, right?
They form a clot to close a cut you may have or bruise. But in this case, the platelets, which are
like, think of these tiny pieces of Velcro, they come to the site where all of this has
happened and they stick to each other as well as sticking to the site.
So we covered this a little in the surgical angiology episode, but atherosclerosis or
hardening of the arteries is kind of under the umbrella of coronary artery disease.
And high blood pressure can stress out the arteries and it damages cells and it invites
more plaque to build up.
So what is high blood pressure exactly?
Well, the top number of your blood pressure is your systolic blood pressure.
And that is how much force is pushing against your artery walls when the heart contracts.
Like how stiff is the garden hose?
Now the bottom number of your blood pressure is the diastolic blood pressure.
And that's how much pressure is in the arteries or the hose between the beats.
So the top number is usually what's under scrutiny for your heart health.
Because again, that's the higher pressure.
It's when it contracts and pumps out blood.
And numbers above 130 over 80 will kind of
raise your cardiologist's eyebrows.
Because something over 130 over 80
could cause some plaque in your arteries to break off.
OK, then what would happen?
And this process can go on as a cascade out of control and ultimately cause a blockage
in that artery, which could lead to a heart attack.
Oh, that's not good.
Now I've abbreviated a whole lot of processes just to somewhat dramatize the idea that blood
pressure is one of those things that damages the artery that leads to a cascade of events
that could be quite
quite bad for you and that's the a mechanical injury to the wall. Now you
can also have a chemical injury to the wall from things like cigarette smoke
and all of the toxins that are in the cigarette smoke. Other inflammatory
processes that might be tied to obesity, diabetes, even things like stress can be injurious and
set up this cascade of problems that can lead to damage to the vital insides of the arteries.
It's important to know that having blood pressure out of control can damage the heart itself.
It can damage it another way, by the way. If you imagine this heart, and your heart beats about,
what, 100,000 times a day, 100,000 times a day,
silently it's carrying out its function over and over,
this repetitive and steady activity.
That's a lot of weightlifting.
If you have pressure inside the system higher than it should
be then your muscle is working harder than it should and that strain causes
the muscle to grow just like if you did a whole lot of curls with a weight you
you'd expect your biceps to grow. Then that muscle grows bigger than it was originally intended to grow.
And that can lead to other problems in terms of the function of that ventricle.
To put it simply, to overwork the heart for any long period of time under the strain of
high blood pressure can lead to failure of the pump.
Actually, two types of failure.
One failure being that the heart can begin to sag and be weak and ineffective,
and the pump is sort of worn out.
Another type of failure is that the heart gets so thick
that it doesn't relax in between
beats.
Oh.
That non-relaxation then produces symptoms that are very much like the heart failure
when the heart is baggy and weak.
And so one we call HEP-REF, one we call HEP-PEPef, that's an acronym for heart failure with preserved ejection
fraction and heart failure with a reduced ejection fraction.
An ejection fraction is simply a measure of how much blood the pump pumps out with each
beat.
So when that left ventricle is either too big or too baggy, and it goes to squeeze out blood.
It may only squirt like a dribble, you know, like below 50% of what's in there instead
of the normal 70%.
Does the heart ever take in more than it's pumping?
Does it ever get behind, like taking in too much and not able to pump it out fast enough
or vice versa?
Yes.
And that happens in a number of ways.
I just talked about the heart failure of the really thick heart where it's not relaxing
like it should.
And what happens is that the pressures go up inside the heart and that pressure backs
into the lungs.
It manifests as shortness of breath, fatigue, other things.
That can happen with a heart that's gotten too big.
And that's congestive heart failure,
which again can occur if the heart muscle is too weak
to pump a lot of blood when it contracts,
which would be a systolic issue.
Or if it's too thick and therefore that left ventricle
or the left little belly is too small
to fill up properly
between beats which would be diastolic. And the classic picture of that can look
like swollen legs, swollen liver, and sort of the engorgement of all the organs
that otherwise normally let blood flow right back up to the heart. And where
does stress factor into all of this? If you're freaking out over any various amount of things,
let's say your job or your home life,
or you just have a lot of stress in your life.
This is the year 2025.
What is that doing to your heart,
like beat by beat, day by day?
Well, stress and the hormones related to stress, like adrenaline just as one that everybody
is somewhat familiar with, those things can cause blood pressure to go up, can cause arteries
to constrict, and cause the heart rate to increase.
Those things increase the stress on the system.
And adrenaline has a very good reason for doing this.
It's raising your blood pressure so blood can rush
where it needs to be to run away
or to stay and kick someone's ass.
Inflammation that can be tied to all of those processes
not only help raise the blood pressure directly,
but they can be, again, injurious to the blood vessels
and weaken them in important ways.
So, for instance, take the stress of perceived discrimination
as just one example.
And this applies to discrimination based on race,
on appearance, and other things.
And this is true across many marginalized populations,
such as Native communities, women, LGBTQ folks,
people of lower socioeconomic status,
trauma survivors, and more.
And you can see the 2010 paper,
The Impact of Social Determinants
on Cardiovascular Disease, for a start,
or the 2024 study, LGBTQ+, Cardiovascular Health Equity,
the 2020 study, Cardiovascular Health
in American Indians and Alaska Natives,
or Dr. Taylor's recent paper Cardiovascular Risk and Resilience Among Black Adults, Rationale
and Design of the Morehouse Emory Center for Health Equity Study, or his 2016 paper Perceived
Discrimination is Associated with Health Behaviors Among African Americans in the Jackson Heart
Study.
It's clear that from the Jackson Heart Study and other studies that having the perception
that you're being discriminated against can actually raise your blood pressure and lead
to a chronic sustained elevation in your blood pressure, which can lead to some of the things
we've already talked about.
Stress can come in many ways.
So there's the emotional stress.
There's a stress sometimes of environmental toxins, if you will,
you know, inhaled exhaust from living near highways,
other aspects of the environment that can add to systemic inflammation,
add to a stressful day emotionally,
all of these things can again converge
and really cause the cardiovascular system,
cause the difficulties.
I mean, the system is so sensitive to the environment
and sometimes that's a positive thing.
So it's very curious to note that
if you listen to a certain type of music,
if you listen to slow, soothing music, your heart tends to slow towards the beat of the music.
Wow.
If you listen to a lot of agitated type music, it's stimulating.
I have one example of this from early in my practice,
where this came into play in a very dramatic
way. I was doing a residency and rotating through Western North Carolina, through Appalachia,
and a woman came in in the middle of the night with a massive heart attack. And part of the
things that we do in those situations is not only all of the fancy drugs, but it's very important to
keep the heart rate down. The faster the heart beats, the more oxygen it requires. And you
don't want a heart that's undergoing a fresh event to be overworking like that. And this
woman, we could not get her heart rate down. We were even using medications, the standard medications,
to help bring it down.
And it was resistant to that.
Her husband was watching us as we
were paying a lot of attention to the monitor in terms
of how fast the heart was going.
And he said, Doc, do you mind if I sing to her?
And of course, we looked at each other.
And it was the middle of the night, we're in the ICU.
And I said, you know, we've tried everything else.
I would, yeah, I would invite that.
So the guy goes to his car, gets a dulcimer, this beautiful mountain stringed instrument,
comes back to the ICU and starts singing this beautiful bluegrass melody to her.
The first thing you saw was the calm that came over her face.
The next thing you saw was a monitor showing us that her heart rate was steadily coming down to where it should be.
Wow.
It was one of the most impressive and beautiful moments early in my career.
But the heart is that type of organ.
It is very responsive to things in the environment that could be used for good, although sometimes
the environment can be hostile and be hard on the heart.
The proof is in the studies, such as the effects of music on the cardiovascular system and
cardiovascular health.
And the abstract of that study states that the greatest benefit on health is visible
with classical music and meditation music, whereas heavy metal music or techno are not
only ineffective, but possibly dangerous and
can lead to stress and or life-threatening arrhythmias.
But I needed to know what metal was chosen for these studies.
And according to the 2014 German paper, acute auditory stimulation with different styles
of music influences cardiac autonomic regulation in men.
The researchers chose Heavy Metal Universe
by German power metal band Gamma Ray.
Let's take a quick listen.
Okay, that's probably good.
Can you explain what signs to look for
for having cardiac issues?
I feel like there's a lot of maybe misinformation
or fragmented information about how to spot heart issues, what symptoms you might be
having, what should people look for?
Okay, well there are many forms of heart disease, of course, but the one that kills most people,
and we'll go straight to things that kill you. I'm ready.
The one that kills most people is of course heart attack.
And unfortunately a huge segment of heart disease deaths
manifest as the very first symptom of heart disease.
It was often said when I was in training that when it comes to death from heart disease
often the first symptom is the last. And what
was meant by that of course is that a lot of people have no suspicion that they have
heart disease even though you know in often in retrospect they say well I should have
known. So this question of how do you know or what should trigger you to thinking about
heart disease?
It's a big question.
Heart disease kills more Americans than any other cause.
Really?
What about globally?
I mean, America, we're not known for our walkable cities
or our bike-friendly roads
or a commitment to conservative portions.
We love hot dogs and pie.
Surely globally, there must be bigger threats
across the whole world.
Wait, okay.
According to world life expectancy statistics,
the number one cause of death globally in 2019
with 18.6 million deaths worldwide
was cardiovascular disease.
The leading diagnosis within the heart disease category
is heart attack or myocardial infarction.
That just means, myocardial means cardiac muscle, and infarction means death.
So a death of a portion of the beating heart muscle is what a heart attack is, and it's
caused by that series of events where you get usually an acute blockage in an artery that is supposed to
supply the heart muscle with an ever fresh supply of blood full of oxygen and nutrients.
And when that gets interrupted by thrombus, that shuts down and things south of the blockage
then are exposed to death.
So a clot or thrombosis is really sadly common
and about 25% of deaths worldwide are due to this
because they can get into the lungs as an embolism
or a clot can cause a stroke or of course a heart attack.
How does it lead to a heart attack?
So a big enough clot in a blood tube means
that the heart gets starved of oxygen, that's known as hypoxia, and other nutrients it needs.
And that starved heart muscle is in coagulative necrosis,
which is a great name for a fashion line sold at Hot Topic.
But what becomes of that dead heart tissue
is a scar that functionally doesn't contribute much.
It's just like a hot mess of a house guest
who is a drain on your home and your vibe.
And this dead muscle or an infarction
can look kind of drained and pale yellowish.
Imagine like a stake is your heart with a rubbery,
pale spot, that would be the infarction.
Now in the event of a heart attack,
CPR keeps the blood circulating
because you're manually pumping the heart.
And this is done to keep oxygen supplying
your body's tissues, including the heart,
to prevent cell death.
A defibrillator, however, can give the electrical stimulus
to restart the heart so that it beats again on its own.
And remember that AED, the automated external defibrillator
that we talked about.
So if you're ever feeling like you don't know how to help
in this topsy-turvy world, you don't know where to start,
consider maybe a first aid class,
because you never know when a stranger's life
could just depend on a course that you took
at the community center.
While I'm on this, I should also say that it's particularly important that we stress
that the leading cause of death for women is heart disease.
The leading cause perhaps of medical angst in a lot of women is cancer, specifically breast
cancer.
Yeah.
And that is a very important, very important disease on the sort of on the landscape of
things that threaten women's health.
But if I were to tell you that one in 39 women will succumb to breast cancer. I would counter, I would further tell you to be aware
that one in three women will succumb to heart disease.
Wow.
Oh my gosh.
So it's important to know that.
And one of the distressing things in recent publications
from American Heart Association is that women
were more aware of the threat of heart disease in 2009 than they were in
2019.
Why is that?
I'm not entirely sure.
Yeah.
But it was particularly true among younger women who seemed somehow to have become either
less worried or less informed about that particular
threat.
Now, breast cancer advocacy and visibility has done so much for awareness and promoting
screenings.
And if you're in any of the countries that have designated October as Breast Cancer Awareness
Month, you've likely been exposed to pink ribbons and balloons and campaigns.
We released a surgical oncology
episode in October 2018 and we talked about those campaigns. But did you even know that
February is Heart Month in the U.S. and also in Canada, the U.K., in the Philippines, Australia,
New Zealand? Now globally, World Heart Day is September 29th, but as the leading cause
of death in the world, it flies under the radar more than
I would expect.
We're not as scared and thus preventative about it as many cardiologists would like,
especially for people assigned female at birth.
They largely viewed cancer, in particular breast cancer, as the leading threat to their
lives.
So it's important.
And for men, the rates of death from heart disease are even higher.
So should every woman run out and get a calcium coronary CT to look for coronary calcium today?
No, I don't think that's where I want to go with this.
I think, first of all, it's important that people know their numbers, we like to say.
That is, know some basic things
about your physiology right now.
You need to know what your blood pressure is
from a fairly recent reading.
If you have no idea, then you should go and get it checked
and there's some specifics about how to get it checked.
So ask your doctor or nurse or healthcare provider
to check it and note those numbers.
Get your cholesterol checked.
Even hit that blood pressure machine at the back of the pharmacy, which is not just for
bored kids stuck waiting for their parents to get a prescription.
Are you a dentist?
Save a life and take blood pressure readings when people come in for their six-month cleanings
and checkups.
If you're like, why would a dentist do that?
I thought the same thing.
My dentist, Dr. Peter Sheeran in LA, takes my blood pressure every time I come in.
And at first I was like, why are we doing this doc?
We're here for my chompers.
And he explained many people don't see medical doctors until there's a problem.
And he was like, people are in here regularly, let's do it.
And he's helped catch cardiovascular disease in earlier stages for his patients.
Dr. Sheeran, that fucking rocks.
Other dentists, think about it.
You should know what your cholesterol profile looks like,
what your LDL and HDL numbers in particular look like.
There are some other categories of cholesterol
that might even be more important to know,
but at least knowing your LDL and HDL is important.
Just some crib notes. LDL, it stands for low density lipoprotein, and it's the bad cholesterol.
It's the main source of blockages in the arteries. Now HDL, high density lipoprotein,
is the good cholesterol, which helps get rid of bad LDL cholesterol. In general, if you're
over 20 years old, you're going to want total cholesterol under 200. With that LDL, the
bad stuff, under 100, and HDL, the good stuff, over 40. 60 or above is best. Mine, last time
I checked it, my total is 198. So I'm really riding the line here. And later, Dr. Taylor will tell me and you what to do about it.
You need to know what your blood sugar or something called
your hemoglobin A1C is critically important for all of us,
particularly those of us in families
that have high rates of diabetes or heart disease.
And you need to have an idea about your weight or BMI,
or waist circumference.
Having some idea about those numbers
gives you an idea about how much of the dangerous type of fat
you may be carrying around your waist, around your viscera, and that which is the more toxic form of weight
distribution.
Those are the first things.
And I should add to that quickly, those are the sort of numbers, the measured numbers.
And a certain set of behaviors also that are concerning that with these numbers together
can pose a real threat for early onset coronary disease
and other types of heart disease.
Those behaviors are, exercise or the lack thereof,
and your eating habits,
what types of foods you like and what quantities.
I see exercise, eating, sleep.
Let me say it again, sleep. You don't get enough of it.
Right, right.
When I was coming up through medicine in particular, people thought it was really cool to say,
I'll stay up all night and I'll do this and I'll do that and I'll learn from every patient
that comes in the door.
I'm going to be the best doctor ever was, you know,
I'll sleep when I'm dead kind of attitude, right?
Not a good philosophy, not a good philosophy at all.
And of course, smoking or vaping, those things are, again, as I've said a couple of times,
one of those chemical insults to the endothelium that can start a whole cascade of problems.
We chat about vaping risks to your arteries in the recent Surgical Ingeology episode.
We also discuss gardening or smoking the ganja and how that can affect your heart.
And we also have episodes on sleeping and dreaming and circadian rhythms, which is going
to scare your ass into pajamas pretty quick. So, okay, so there's the cluster of things that if there are any aberrations, if you
are, let's call it, non-compliant with what we like to say is a healthy lifestyle, then
you begin to put yourself at an increased need to surveil yourself in terms of whether or not there are issues
related to your health.
Now, I didn't talk about genetics.
Genetics can be very, very important.
If you have a history of someone in your family, particular first-order relative, father, mother,
sister, brother, that died early, say a woman who died before age 65 or a man who died before
age 55 of heart-related problems, then you yourself will probably be at enhanced risk
and need to be a little more vigilant than the next person about your heart.
Certainly, if you're having symptoms, then that sort of raises the ante.
If you're having some of the classic heart-related symptoms, let's go again with heart attack
or angina, which comes from angina being pain, pectoris is the whole name, angina pectoris
being chest pain.
That of course is a significant red flag.
So angina means pain.
I didn't know that.
I also thought it was pronounced angina this whole time.
Alas, now we know why Gray's Anatomy is always shouting
these medical words like myocardial infarction
and pectoral angina, because this is the stuff
we actually die from.
And if you're having discomfort in your chest,
particularly on exertion or instances of high motion,
those things need to be paid attention to
and may require specific evaluation.
If you are in the throes of an actual heart attack,
we're getting really sort of deep into the disease process
now, but if you're having classically an elephant sitting on your
chest, shortness of breath, cold sweats, pain radiating down your arm, obviously something is
quite wrong and you need to dial 911. Don't drive, don't have someone drive you, don't get on the
subway, call 911 because the care is coming to you to be initiated right away, not when
you arrive at a hospital, even if it's three blocks away.
That description I gave you is classic and derived almost entirely from the male population. So it needs to be amended and amended in everyone's mind
to be inclusive of other manifestations that are perhaps
a little more frequent among women.
Now, women can have any of those classic symptoms,
but they have a higher preponderance
of what we have historically called atypical presentations.
They may be typical for women, but they were atypical according to the old textbooks.
That can be more of a deep fatigue, a deep sense of indigestion, other symptoms above the waist that are just distinctly unusual
and lasting 15, 20 minutes. Those things also have been shown to be manifestations of significant
blockages that lead to heart attacks in women. Now, you will also get indigestion sometimes, right?
That's going to happen.
You will also maybe have fleeting symptoms that concern you
that won't be your heart.
However, if you are, you know, Saturday morning, you know, and you're at the soccer match and
you're having this unmistakable, undeniable deep, again, as some of our patients used
to say, this misery in the chest or, you know, even in the stomach, it's just, it's not,
it's not going away, it's insistent.
You may need to dial 911.
Run the risk of being embarrassed,
quote unquote, that it was just indigestion.
I say run that risk because some people will delay or
deny or say I don't want to cause people a lot of trouble. I certainly don't want the embarrassment of an ambulance coming up here to my son's soccer
match.
Right?
How dramatic is that?
But unfortunately, I've had patients die of what they thought was indigestion when in
fact it was a heart attack in the making.
So I'm not trying to scare people. What I want to do is sort of elevate alertness to the manifestations of a significant health
problem that might not fit the Hollywood description of what you saw in the movie, right?
So you don't have to clutch your chest and scream, I'm having a heart attack to be having
a heart attack.
And it doesn't just involve pain down your left arm.
Some real world non-Hollywood symptoms of a cardiac emergency can be chest pain or discomfort,
pain or discomfort in the jaw, neck or back, pain or discomfort in the arms, either arms
or shoulders, shortness of breath, feeling very tired, lightheaded
or faint, even nausea or vomiting.
And ladies and those assigned female at birth, you may have additional or different red flags,
including anxiety, pain in the back or arm, upset stomach.
And brushing off these cardiac symptoms could lead to your family donating all your clothes
to Goodwill and starting a GoFundMe to buy your casket. Not to freak you out, let's
just be real. So that alertness may save lives and I myself always had respect
for the person who came in and we found you know the EKG is normal, the blood
work is normal, everything's beautiful, and you can go home.
I don't mind seeing, you know,
a whole bunch of people like that over the course of the day,
if that means that people are paying attention,
and it might mean that we may save someone
who otherwise may have dismissed their symptoms.
Can I ask you just a couple of questions from listeners?
Sure.
Go ahead.
OK, great.
And each week we send money from our heart
to an organization chosen by theologist.
And this week, Dr. Herman Taylor
suggested the Center for Black Agency and Resilience,
CBAR, which was recently founded
to trumpet the indisputable tradition of black resilience
and agency, challenging the narrative that
emphasizes vulnerability. And as the founder and president, Dr. Taylor aims to increase
knowledge about the Black community's interpersonal relationships, which provide joy and resilience
via a multidisciplinary research project. So a donation will go to cbar.org, which is
linked in the show notes. And thanks to sponsors of the show for helping us do that.
Okay, your questions. Dr. Taylor is a very, very busy man. So we didn't even get to scratch
the surface because cardiology is a huge field and this is just one episode, but we got to
ask a few great ones from patrons via patreon.com slash ologies. Onward. Let's hear them.
We had so many great questions. Jenna Congdon wanted to know.
Hey, so my question is regarding EKG tracings in the wild. You see them on logos, on people's
tattoos, kind of everywhere. And very often they're really inaccurate and pretty funny
if you know what you're looking at. My husband and I both work in healthcare and we play
a little game of pointing out these really wrong EKG tracings and trying to diagnose
them. Do you notice when you
see really wacky EKG lines and try to make up in your head what they could be if they were in real
life? I have seen one that just didn't make any sense and was so inaccurate on the side of an
ambulance. So let me know if you played this game too. Oh, all the time. Yeah. I mean, you know,
Oh, all the time. Yeah. You know, it's in logos. It's where, you know, the critical parts of the waveforms are missing that would either not exist in nature or be totally alarming.
You know, they tend to be a little bit idealized. So yeah, but we're okay. In terms of not getting too upset about that.
Actually, we kind of like the attention that people are thinking about their hearts in that way.
And if you're like, hey, yes, but you have no idea what Jenna or Dr. Taylor are talking about,
congratulations, you are Alli Ward. Come along as I figure out what those waves mean.
Okay, so a normal EKG or ECG, an electrocardiogram, is when they adorn you with all those wired
stickers that look like they have little denim rivets or small robot nipples on them.
And they pick up electrical activity that looks like a line with
some wiggles and a spike and it repeats over and over if you are not dead. And
this is called a sinus wave because the sinus node is a part of the heart that
works as a pacemaker and it's keeping things on beat. So on an EKG there's a
little bump above the baseline followed by that big spike which then comes down dips a little below the baseline and then another bump like the baseline, followed by that big spike, which then comes down,
dips a little below the baseline, and then another bump, like the first one, but a little
bigger.
Very, very simply, that first small bump is a P wave, and that represents the electrical
activity in the atria, the two atriums.
And the big spike, or QRS complex is what that big spike is called, is the ventricle electrical activity.
And then the third bump, a little bigger than that P wave, is called a T wave, and that's when the
heart is at rest. And if these rhythms are off, then that could indicate an issue under the hood,
buddy. You got something going on. And an irregular beat is called an arrhythmia. An AFib, or atrial fibrillation, is an irregular,
and some say chaotic, heart rhythm
that needs to be monitored to make sure
that it doesn't cause blood clots or stroke down the line.
Now, how many beats a minute should you have?
What's the good tempo you wanna shoot for?
So 60 to 100 is in the healthy range,
but consistently over 100 is what's known as tachycardia,
which means fast heart.
And if you're in good cardiovascular shape, you might have a lower resting heart rate
because your myocardium is strong enough where a heartbeat blasts enough blood out so it
can kind of slow down the pace.
It's reason along.
Conversely, a weaker heart
has to kind of frantically beat faster to get blood to where it needs to go. Now, back to the tissues
and the issues of the heart. How is the heart electrified? What is happening here? Asked.
Azam's partner Ali, Andy Pepper, Zach Ever-8, first time question askers Melanie Abbott and
Jacqueline Costa, Rye of the Tiger, Earl of Graham Oaken, and Tiger Yuri Sigao Young wanted to know, are there really similar cells
to brains and guts in the heart?
Well, yeah, in a manner of speaking. In particular, one, let's start with the brain. You know,
the heart has a nervous system of sorts in that I mentioned that if it was removed from the body of a human or another
species if you will, it would continue beating.
And it beats because of that electrical system.
It has its own pacemaker.
It generates its own electricity that the muscle responds to.
The muscle is what we call an excitable tissue.
If you shock it, it jumps.
If it had stopped for whatever reason,
it'll beat after the shock.
There are cells that we say they spontaneously depolarize
and that is there's a flux of ions
across the membranes of the cells.
You know, potassium and sodium are flowing and calcium are flowing
in a certain way that the change in the electrical potential across the membrane causes a discharge
to occur from this pacemaker.
I'm trying not to go too deep into technicalities, I hope I haven't lost people.
But because of that property, the
heart has its own pacemaker and the rest of the heart responds. The pacemaker is way up
in that right atrium we talked about earlier. But there's a network of fibers that carry
each impulse through the rest of the heart, as well as the heart muscle itself can carry
the impulse even without those fibers,
but it does have a sort of nervous system.
Cardiac muscle is different from skeletal muscle is perhaps in some ways it has some
similarities to smooth muscle and other parts of the body, but the myocardium is special.
It has a ton of mitochondria, those energy producing cells.
It has that spontaneous depolarization property.
And it is woven in a special way that allows the type of contraction with each beat that
propels the blood forward.
And that depolarization, which creates the humps and the spike of a sinus wave on the
EKG, that's this wave of electrical depolarization, and it triggers the cardiac muscle to contract.
And as for the heart and the gut alliance, a study just came out a month or so ago titled
Unlocking the Gut Cardiac Axis, a Paradigm Shift in Cardiovascular Health.
And it notes that an imbalance in your gut microbiome can trigger an immune response
and that inflammation can affect the lining of your arteries and it can lead to plaque
buildup.
And we all know now that plaque buildup can cause all kinds of problems for the heart.
Also you have a vagus nerve that runs from your brain to your gut and it can regulate
heart rate and arrhythmias, which is another reason to just respect your wonderful bod,
eat your vegetables, go for a walk if you can.
Now, congestive heart failure,
is that one of the bigger risks for people?
And how is congestive heart failure,
how is that different than a heart attack?
Is that more insidious?
Yeah, great question.
Heart failure can be thought of as sort of a final common pathway
for a lot of different problems, okay?
Let's start with a quick description of heart failure.
Let's go with the classic heart failure,
the congestive heart failure, as you referred to it.
The heart wears out, right? It gets big and baggy
and it's not a very good pump. That ejection fraction should normally, each time the heart
beats, it should pump out about 60% of what's in it, right? The ejection fraction can go down
to 20% or less. So operating at about a third of what it should be,
congesting the heart like a traffic congestion,
which is frustrating.
Also in this case, low-key lethal.
That's heart failure of a sort.
Now, how does that happen?
A big heart attack.
In the wake of that, you could develop heart failure.
A valve breaks down and leaks severely because
valves are normally supposed to be a one-way door that keeps blood flowing through the
heart in one direction. That breaks down, congestion can happen. The heart gets big
and weak. Uncontrolled high blood pressure, as we talked about earlier, that can lead
to heart failure. Viral infections can lead to heart... certain viral infections.
Alcohol excess can poison the muscle and lead to congestive heart failure.
And there are other causes.
Even uncontrolled thyroid disease can lead to heart failure.
Just a side note, we got a recent thyroid episode.
You know who wants to hear it? Your thyroid. So cue it up. It tends to be a fairly gradual onset process taking years
and multiple insults to finally get to that stage. It is a deeply, it's a challenging
problem. If today someone was diagnosed with a congestive heart failure, their five-year survival would
probably be roughly equivalent to the five-year survival of receiving a diagnosis of colorectal
cancer the same day, right?
Wow.
However, we have developed multiple approaches to the treatment of heart failure that are
promising and the specific type of heart failure matters in terms of how we approach it.
The specifics of those therapeutic approaches are best discussed with your physician.
And I want to just, I want to leave a note of hope.
Because of these therapeutic advances, things are getting better all the time.
And even today, I was reviewing a paper that looked at engineered heart muscle that was
grown from stem cells that actually was proven to improve the contractile function of the left
ventricle to a significant degree. And there are all sorts of other new advancements that
are being made. So there's a lot of hope in the area.
And when it comes to what you eat yourself, a lot of people, Raya, Anastasia Press, Don
Smallcheck, Raya asked the relationship
between high sugar intake and heart health, assuming one eats otherwise well,
asking for a quote friend. Anastasia wanted us to know what you think of plant-based
diets and Don asked are Cheerios actually good for your heart? Diet was also in the
minds of patrons Mims, Isabella Bartleson, Raya, Anastasia Press, Ronnie Rob
Morgan, Alias Tired, Karen H. Ron, Wendy Forman, and Stacey Pinkowitz who asked,
am I going to live to be 500 because I eat oatmeal with flax seed meal every day?
When it comes to what you eat, your diet, what does Dr. Herman Taylor recommend?
Let me tell you what I recommend. No, I have to say, and this is kudos to my wife,
we are really beginning to move as much as we can,
as deliberately as we can, to more and more of a plant-based
diet, which doesn't eliminate consumption of certain meats,
especially fish.
Our ideal is a Mediterranean-style, right? Where there's plenty of
fiber, plenty of vegetables and fruits, olive oil, it doesn't totally restrict other types
of meat, but it doesn't eliminate it, but it does restrict it. And we try not to overdo
the sodium, we stay away from processed meats as much as possible because
there's all sorts of badness there. But I strongly recommend leaning towards plant-based
types of food. There's also something called the DASH diet, which was designed specifically
to help lower blood pressure. And it too is characterized by high number of feedings of
vegetables and fruits, as well as high amounts of fiber,
potassium, low fat, high calcium foods like yogurt, and an assortment of sort of dietary
alterations that actually have been shown to lower blood pressure by some 11 points
in certain populations, which is as much as some drugs.
And the DASH diet, side note, stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, and it recommends
eating vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, including fat-free or low-fat dairy products,
fish, poultry, beans, nuts, and vegetable oils, and limiting foods that are high in
saturated fat, like fatty meats, full fat dairy products,
tropical oils like coconut, palm kernel, palm oil,
and limiting sugar sweetened beverages and sweets.
And the DASH diet eating plan says it's important
to choose foods that are low in saturated and trans fats
and rich in potassium, calcium, magnesium,
fiber and protein, and also lower in sodium.
Since excess sodium, usually from processed foods, makes your body retain water to dilute
that sodium, which raises your blood volume and it leads to higher than healthy blood
pressure.
Now, for folks with low blood pressure or low blood volume, say if you have POTS, if
your doctor says to go hog wild on the sodium for other reasons, obviously listen to them.
But in general, we eat way more sodium than we evolved to do.
Now, what if you're on a road trip or you are bad at cooking?
The American Heart Association says that good convenience store-dash diet snacks include part skim string cheese,
boiled eggs, unsalted nuts, Greek yogurt, and whole foods, which
are not Cheetos, but they will keep you alive.
Now when it comes to hydration and eating produce, sometimes you're like, the world
sucks, I need a treat.
So what I like to do is pretend that I'm in a post-apocalyptic world, like Mad Max style,
and that water is something that people start worse over.
So if anyone gives me free water, like at a restaurant, I like to pretend it's the score
of a lifetime.
My fridge dispenses clean, filtered water.
I would be a fool to pass up 64 ounces or more of that a day.
Fruits and vegetables?
What if I mouthed off of the government and I got shipped to Mars, but I escaped the prison
pod and I found a stash of salads and oranges until I could build a ship to go home. That's elaborate, but you can just like pretend you're
lost at sea or something and then you see water and vegetables and you're like, what
a sleigh, got to have them.
There's help out there. Dash diet, Mediterranean diet, those are sort of two at the top of
my list and eat plants every chance you get.
Do you ever experience any eye pain when you see headlines about carnivore diets?
Like, do you roll your eyes so hard that they hurt?
That's a very good question.
They are not my favorite.
Now, this is a controversial area for some,
but yeah, we're omnivores, right?
So some meat's okay.
But I think historically meat was more of a condiment than it was a central part of
the meal.
And I think that as sort of a model of where we need to go in terms of inching more and
more towards vegetable sources of protein and all the other great things that vegetables
do, I think we should keep pushing towards that.
Saturated fats are much more cholesterolgenic
than eating cholesterol.
Eating a piece of steak will produce a lot more issues
in terms of cholesterol than eating an egg, right?
So I would say that, yeah,
I don't really dig the carnivore diet.
I figured it was something along those lines. So that's helpful in terms of what to put in your
mouth. But how about lacing up your sneakers or dipping into some water aerobics, maybe roller
blading without a shirt, patrons Matt Cacato, Anthony Richards, Bethan Greer, Kyla C., Marathoner Curtis Takahashi,
Samwise, Addie Capello, Ghoul Next Door,
and Haley Balanzo, first time question asker.
They all asked about the effects of exercise on the heart.
And Haley, I'm happy to accompany you in your ears
on any walks you take.
I know a lot of oligites.
You're here to learn about weird stuff
while you're out on strolls.
I salute you. Way to go.
But is it ever too
late to start that?
And very, very last question from listeners, Brendan and Ashley, first time question asker,
asked, can getting into shape through regular cardio later in life undo some of the potential
heart damage of being obese or sedentary previously? They say I was overweight my whole life until
last year when I started running and eating better and lost 85 pounds. Is it ever too
late to get to help out your heart?
Never too early, never too late.
I'm so proud of her.
That is fantastic.
That's cause for celebration.
Your heart is celebrating.
Let me tell you, when you take off,
even a loss of 5% of total body fat is felt by the heart in terms of
that strain of pumping through those thousands of miles of arteries, capillaries, and so
forth.
That's critically important to your heart health.
You have done yourself a tremendous favor.
I would say to you, congratulations, and I wish I had more patience like you.
Oh, that's such great news. So that's inspiring. It's never too late to do something good for
your heart. Now, what about you? What's the hardest part of your job and the part you
love the most?
Well, in recent years, I migrated much more heavily towards research, but I will tell
you that the hardest part of my job, if I look over the span of my career, was seeing
people when it was too late.
Was the heart attack or the cardiac arrest, we could not reverse.
You know, walking from that bedside and telling the family was, yes. Those were the hardest moments.
What I have loved the most clinically
is I guess kind of the opposite
of coming out of the cath lab
and telling a family who was worried about chest pain
in their loved ones that the arteries were clear.
While we may not have the answer to the chest pain today,
what we know is that
the most dangerous thing that it could be appears not to be on the table. And we can
now move methodically through the other less lethal possibilities. Those were good moments.
I think finally, I think, realizing that for some populations where we hear a lot of important work, which I've been
proud to contribute to, on the disparities that those populations, like
African-Americans, like other marginalized populations historically,
that there's a lot of bad news, there's a lot of news about foreshortened lives or
higher rates of heart disease, hypertension,
and so forth.
Important to document, important to heighten our awareness that we need to have public
health and other approaches that target some of these really troubling statistics.
That simultaneous with the sort of bad news that there's a lot of reason
to be excited about the resilience of these populations.
You know, there was a time in American history
about 100 years ago where the extinction
of African Americans was predicted based on statistics
at that time and the circumstances of the fallback
on reconstruction
and other things that were aimed at helping
the black population that was newly freed.
Despite all that travail, there are incredible stories
of health and longevity and call it joy among the population
that has had to confront such important obstacles. And that resilience, I think,
really points to another aspect of human existence, if you will, that points to how
it is so humanly possible to overcome so many of these challenges. And I'm very, very proud of those resilient African
Americans and others who are living life long and well
and thriving and flourishing despite some of the challenges
that they've faced historically and present day.
So I think that resilience that I see evidence of
all the time is something that gives me a lot of happiness and joy.
Well, your work is amazing and I thank Matthew for suggesting.
I'll deal with him later.
We're now friends online.
I do have to just say Matthew is my oldest son.
I'm so proud of him out at UC Berkeley.
And the frontier that he's opening up in music,
I think is exciting.
And everybody should pay attention
to what happens next for Matthew Evan Taylor.
You know, I need to have him on for a music episode now.
You got to do that.
You got to do that.
Multi-generational Taylors.
Well, thank you so, so much.
I'll let you get back to your Saturday.
I really appreciate it.
No, it's been, it's been great.
So ask caring people your cardiac curiosities,
because you only live once and you will live better
and longer if you listen to them.
I cannot thank Dr. Herman Taylor enough for his time
to do this episode and for highlighting February
as Heart Month and as Black History Month.
And it's just another among millions of examples of how much diversity matters in science because
discovery is all about what questions we're asking. And you need a variety of experience
and perspectives to identify and tackle problems and find solutions. Thank you again, Dr. Taylor,
for all of your work. Thank you to his son, Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor, who's an associate professor of composition
at UC Berkeley's Department of Music.
Dr. Taylor, Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor that is, will release his first LP soon.
It's called Life Returns and it was recorded live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
2022.
You can find out more about that and follow Matthew on Instagram at Matthew Evan Taylor.
Now we are at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm at Allie Ward on both.
We have shorter, kid-safe, and classroom-friendly versions of Ologies. Wherever you get podcasts,
just look for them in their own feed. We have new green artwork by a Portland artist,
Bonnie Dutch. Also, Ologies merch is available at Ologiesmerch.com. And if you would like to be a
patron of the show and submit questions before we record,
you can find us at patreon.com slash ologies.
It costs $1 a month to join.
That is the entrance fee into our heart.
Now, Erin Talbert admins the Ologies podcast Facebook group.
Aveline Malik makes our pro transcripts.
Kelly Ardwyer does the website.
Noel Dilworth is keeping us on beat as scheduling producer.
Susan Hale is managing director and the blood supplying all of our organs and also did additional
research and producing for this episode. Thank you, Susan. Our assistant editor and atria
for raw audio is Jake Chafee and Left Ventricle helping us pump these out every Tuesday is
Mercedes Maitland, our lead editor of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn, Pace Made the Theme
Music and if you stick around until the end, I burden you with a secret about my life and is Mercedes Maitland, our lead editor of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn, Pace Made the Theme Music,
and if you stick around until the end,
I burden you with a secret about my life
and some behind the scenes on this episode.
Okay, so we were recording with Dr. Taylor.
It was going great.
He was amazing.
The mic that we sent him was working wonderfully.
For some reason, the interface that I used to record
kept popping up with a notice saying
that his end wasn't recording.
No fault of his own, I have no idea what was going on
with the website that was supposed to be recording us.
And in fact, I went to go look at the files.
The files were not there, they did not record.
Thankfully, Mercedes found a backup copy somewhere
in a folder that had to be downloaded and pieced together so all of the
audio survived. But I was like, if this is just not recording, I don't even know. I'm going to
disappear. I'm going to go into witness protection or something. I'm going to change my name. I'm
going to wear a wig the rest of my life. This is too embarrassing. I honestly started crying when
she told me that she was able to get a backup of the files. I shed tears. I was so thrilled.
Anyway, think of your heart like a shelter pet who deserves nothing but the
best in life and take care of it as you would a stray guinea pig or a surrendered Dozoology, Litology, Nanotechnology, Meteorology, Fepatology,
Nephology,
Seriology,
Stenology.
Honey, you have such a big heart.