The Dr. Hyman Show - Office Hours: Cholesterol and Heart Disease — What I’ve Changed My Mind About

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

For decades, we’ve been told that high cholesterol is the main driver of heart disease—and that lowering LDL should be the primary goal. But as science has evolved, so has my thinking. In today’...s Office Hours, I explain why cholesterol alone doesn’t tell the full story, what most doctors still aren’t testing, and what’s really driving heart disease for the majority of people. Today we discuss: • Why many people have heart attacks despite “normal” LDL cholesterol • The difference between cholesterol levels and cholesterol particles • How inflammation and insulin resistance fuel heart disease • Why sugar and refined starches are more dangerous than fat • The most important labs to assess real cardiovascular risk • What ApoB, lipoprotein(a), and triglyceride-to-HDL ratio reveal about your health • How metabolic dysfunction—not cholesterol alone—drives plaque buildup Heart disease is far more complex than a single lab value. When you understand the role of metabolic health, inflammation, and the right biomarkers, you can take meaningful steps to protect your heart and long-term health. Visit ⁠functionhealth.com⁠ for 160+ lab tests at just $365 a year. Helpful Resources: Join the 10-Day Detox to Reset Your Metabolic Health https://drhyman.com/pages/10-day-detox Have a question you’d love answered on Office Hours? Submit it here 👉https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdNF2y4lFWEOMLlzVNlFDpJ4xl7oOpH9NlImMoHr5mHggL_Ww/viewform?usp=header

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:12 Welcome to office hours. This is our dedicated one-on-one space to go deeper, get clear, and explore what truly moves the needle for your health. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and each week we're going to pull back the curtain and share the insights, the research, the lessons that don't always make it into our conversations with guests. Because at the end of the day, you are the CEO of your own health. And for many of you, your family's health too. And you might not feel it all the time, but you have far more power in agency than you realize. I'm glad you're here. This episode is brought to you by Function Health, empowering you to live with.
Starting point is 00:00:44 100 healthy years with over 160 lab tests at just $365 a year. Sign up today at functionhealth.com slash mark and use code Mark 2026 to get $50 towards your membership. Hey, everybody. You know, from time and time, science changes and I change. I look at the data. I see what's changed. And I change my thinking.
Starting point is 00:01:05 I change my practice. And I just don't want to keep you up to date because science is an evolving process. We're constantly doing research. We're constantly learning. And old ideas may not always be the right ideas. And even though they can be pretty strong, like for example, that low fat diets are good for heart disease. Well, that ain't true.
Starting point is 00:01:24 And we know what happened with that with snack, book cookies, and we went low fat, and we all got fat, and we all got diabetes, and we all got more heart disease. So we have to look at the things that we hold on to, like these sacred idols, and we have to let them go if the science doesn't prove that they're true. anymore. So today I want to talk about something I've changed my mind about over the years,
Starting point is 00:01:48 cholesterol and heart disease. Now, heart disease is the number one kill of Americans since the 1950s and yet so many are still approaching it with the same outdated framework that we use for decades. Now, for a long time, cholesterol was seen as the enemy. You got to get it as low as possible. You got to avoid fat. You got to take a statin. And that was what we're all told. That's what doctors are trained in. And that's the story most people still believe. You go to your doctor, they check your labs, they do a cholesterol test, and they do the wrong one, by the way, and that's why at Function Health, we do the right ones, including ones you never get from your doctor, like ApoB, which is far more important than all the other cholesterol tests, and LPPLA, which most
Starting point is 00:02:25 people don't check, which is highly important genetic marker. So you got to know your numbers, but you got to know the right numbers. So doctors check your old cholesterol number. They see your LDL's high. They go, LVL, high, let's get lower, take a statin, without really much thought. And that's unfortunate because it's a much more nuanced problem than just a state. fat and deficiency that's causing heart disease. Now, the latest research shows that we need to think about this differently. And with my patients, I've also learned a lot and how variable people respond to different things.
Starting point is 00:02:54 I've had people with extremely high cholesterol that do extremely well on an extremely high fat ketogenic diet and lower their cholesterol and other people who are the opposite, who will take a keto diet and actually make their cholesterol worse. So you've got to really look at individuals and figure out what's going on. let me ask you this. If cholesterol were truly the main cause of heart disease, then why to half the people who have heart attacks have normal LDL levels? Now, I wrote about this in my book, Eat Fat, get then. There was a study of like 136,000 people who had heart attacks, went to the ER, and 75% had a, quote, normal LDL level. So that begs the question, then what the hell is going on here?
Starting point is 00:03:32 The question opens the door to a whole new way of thinking about heart health. So here's what I used to believe. I got trained, like every other doctor, that LDL was a lot. the issue that you had a high cholesterol, high LDL, that causes heart attacks, cause and effect. And the goal was to lower your LDL no matter what at all costs, get as low as possible. We also learned that saturated fat is bad because it can raise your cholesterol, particularly LDL cholesterol. So the message is pretty simple, but it wasn't accurate for most people. Real life clinical work really changed that simplicity.
Starting point is 00:04:07 Now, when you graduate from medical school, you think you know everything. but you start practicing medicine and after 30 or 40 years, you really don't know that much and how everybody's different and there's not the simplicity that we think applies to certain things, like LDL, heart disease, statin, cure.
Starting point is 00:04:25 It's just not so simple. We've treated cholesterol like a villain, but the truth is really way more nuanced. All right, so what did the old model get wrong? Well, the new science that's emerging has identified a couple of key problems. The first is that total cluster is actually a poor predictor of heart disease.
Starting point is 00:04:44 Up to 50% or even more in the studies of people who have heart attacks have a, quote, normal LDL level. The risk really comes from something that's not being tested by almost every doctor in the country. I mean, I ask Quest, who is our lab testing partner in Function Health, how many cholesterol tests use the right cholesterol test, which looks at the quality and the size and the number of your cholesterol particles, not just the weight of them, which is what you get with your normal cholesterol test,
Starting point is 00:05:15 but the quality and the size, whether they're small or big, whether they're dense or not, and how many of those particles do you have? And you know what they said? Less than 1% of their test do this. The second big aha that came actually since I graduated from medical school, probably in the late 1990s, maybe early 2000s, was the insight, particularly from Harvard and the scientist Paul Rittaker, who wrote a very seminal paper in the New England Journal of Medicine
Starting point is 00:05:46 that it was inflammation, inflammation that was causing heart disease, not cholesterol. Even showed that if you had a high cholesterol and low inflammation, your risk was pretty low. But if you had a high cholesterol and a high inflammation, your risk was high. higher. Even if you had a high inflammation and a normal cholesterol, your risk was higher. So the inflammation is what's going on. So your arteries are inflamed and that's what caused the cholesterol to get deposited. Chlestral isn't bad. It's bad when it gets oxidized or turns rancid. When you look at the date from Harvard, Cleveland Clinic and these large meta-analysis, actually the CRP, this is another test, your doctor's own check, and it's on
Starting point is 00:06:23 the function panel. This high-sensity C-reactor protein is important, maybe more important, than LDL in predicting heart disease. So what is causing this inflammation? And this is what most people don't realize. Aside from a certain subset of the population who has a genetic cholesterol disorder, which is independent of your metabolic health and who do get heart disease, and that's a very small number, maybe it's 10%. The real problem is what we call metabolic dysfunction. This means prediabetes, insulin resistance, anywhere along the spectrum where your body is not dealing with sugar and insulin very well
Starting point is 00:06:56 because you're eating high starch and sugar diet and you're not exercising or you have extra belly fat. I mean, you have a little bit of belly fat, you're starting to get. get this problem. And you get high insulin resistance, and that means your cells don't respond to insulin, so you need to be more and more and more to make it work. And that causes what we call atherogenic dyslipidemia. And that's a mouthful. But what it means is athero means plaque. So atherogenesis means plaque, atheroscorotic, basque disease, hardening the arteries, whatever you call it, clogs in your arteries from plaque from cholesterol deposits. That is caused by these small, dense cholesterol particles. It's not the cholesterol itself. It's one there when you have
Starting point is 00:07:38 insulin resistance and that drives inflammation. Now, what's really important to understand is that LDL is an LDL. There are different types of LDL. There's large, there's medium and there's small sizes, and then there's the number of particles. So think about like, you know, the weight of a cholesterol would be if you get your cholesterol number of 100 or one LDL 130. And that just means the weight of your cholesterol, but it doesn't tell you how many LDL particles that is made up if it could be a thousand small particles or it could be a hundred large particles, but you don't know that unless you do the right test. And that's really, again, why we did function help. Now, we have to understand it's not just cholesterol as a simple problem. It's nuanced. And there's many different types of
Starting point is 00:08:19 cholesterol, there's different sizes. There's different ties of HDL and LDL. And so you have to really have a more nuanced understanding and what's causing it. But the real take home here, is that here's the headline. It's sugar, not fat, is causing you to die of heart attacks. It's sugar, not fat, that's the problem. And that's why I wrote a book called Eat Fat Get Thin, why I wrote a book called The Blood Sugar Solution,
Starting point is 00:08:45 why I've written and a detox. Sugar is the boogeyman, not fat. Now, that doesn't mean that some people don't respond well to fat, they don't. Some people don't. So there's a lot of variation in the population. But in general, this is the big issue. It's a metabolic dysfunction that affects 93% of the population.
Starting point is 00:09:00 is causing this heart attack epidemic. So it's not that cholesterol doesn't matter. We're just asking the wrong questions. All right. So what is the new science? What's really causing heart disease? Now, one of the friends of mine sent me this email, he's an older guy, he's like 78,
Starting point is 00:09:20 and he sent me this email like, hey, this great new discovery, this new lab test that you can get that tells you your risk of heart disease. It's more predicted than any other testing possibly you could get for heart disease. And I'm like, wow, this is interesting. I wonder if I'm going to learn something.
Starting point is 00:09:33 I click on it. And I'm like, oh, okay, well, I've been testing this for 40 years. Well, probably 30 plus years. And this is called APOB. Again, it's not part of a regular cholesterol panel, but it is the most reliable marker of your risk of heart attacks. Why? Because it's a surrogate marker for poor metabolic health,
Starting point is 00:09:55 meaning insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, bloodshure issues, belly fat, this is what goes up when you have some degree of this, and it shows you all the bad cholesterol particles in your blood almost in the same time. Now, in 2023, 2024, the guidelines for cardiology have finally recognized, I've been doing this for 30 years, guys, finally recognize APOB is a causal factor for heart disease. It's not just associated with it. And the beautiful thing about it, you can do the lipoprotein fractionation, which is important, but I think it's also important to track APOB, and we do that with function. these APOB really shows you how many of these damaging little cholesterol particle to small,
Starting point is 00:10:34 dense LDL particles like BBs that go and damage the lining of your arteries and allow the cholesterol to deposit. Another really important test that I mentioned earlier called lipoprotein little A or LP little A. One in five people, which is 20% of the population, have an elevation in this particular number. It's a genetic problem. There are drugs coming that can help it. There are ways to lower it through lifestyle supplements and certain. other treatments, but when you have it is really important to regulate and address all the other
Starting point is 00:11:05 heart disease risk factors, your blood sugar, your blood pressure, obviously don't smoke, got to exercise, there's any sugar, starch, get rid of belly fat, get your cholesterol numbers optimized through a whole set of definite interventions we're going to talk about, but really, really important because you can't directly change it right now very well. So, but it is a very strong independent risk factor of heart disease, and it's especially worse if your cholesterol is abnormal. medication is coming, but metabolic and lifestyle health are really the key. But as I said earlier, the real problem, the real problem causing our epidemic of heart disease is not a high fat diet. It's sugar. And it's insulin resistance that results from eating a lot
Starting point is 00:11:43 of starch and sugar. When I say sugar, I mean anything. Like anything that's got sugar or starch, it can be bread, it can be rice, it could be potatoes, or though they're not so bad if you eat the little small ones, anything is starchy. If you are someone who's susceptible and most of us you can get insulin resistance. I mean, I'm pretty healthy. My body fat's about 10%. I exercise every day. I eat pretty good.
Starting point is 00:12:04 Occasionally have a cookie or ice cream, but it's not my staple, and I'm pretty lean. But when I went to Italy, you know, last summer, I kind of went crazy, and I had, you know, wine, and I had lots of pasta and whatever bread,
Starting point is 00:12:17 and I gained like five or ten pounds, and it went right to my belly. And then as soon as I came home and went right away, because I went back to my basic habits, but most people don't do that. And when you look at the data, this is from Tufts, 93.2% of Americans have some degree of metabolic dysfunction.
Starting point is 00:12:33 And it shows up as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or abnormal cholesterol, high blood sugar, having had a heart attack or stroke, or being overweight or obese. That means that only 6.8% of Americans don't have that. Think about it. Research shows also that insulin resistance is a problem, even if your cholesterol is normal. And I kind of want to just touch this for a minute. And I talked about this study in my book, Eat Fat, Get Thin, but it was a very interesting study where they mentioned where they took 136,000 people who showed up in the ERs
Starting point is 00:13:01 across the country for heart attacks. And they measured their total cholesterol, LDL, triglycerides, HDL. And what they found was really fascinating. 75% had normal LDL, but almost nobody had normal triglystorides or HDL. And the higher triglycerides and the lower your HDL, the more you had a higher risk for heart attack. Now, what do those numbers mean? Those numbers are a great and simple way to test your degree of insulin resistance. Your triglysteroide divided by your HDL. Your HDL should be over 60 ideally, over 50 if you can manage it. Your triglyceride should be less than 100, and even under 70 is better. And if your ratio of triglycerides to HDL is one, that's great. If it starts to go to two or three or four or five, that's bad. So if your triglycerides are 150 and your HGLs 30, that's a ratio
Starting point is 00:13:49 of five to one. That's a disaster. Even if your total and LDL cholesterol are perfectly normal, you will have an extremely high risk of having a heart attack. You wouldn't take a prescription without knowing the problem, right? But that's how most people approach nutrition. They try keto, paleo, plant-based, fasting, just hoping something sticks. In my practice, I've seen it over and over. Diet isn't the issue. It's the missing data.
Starting point is 00:14:13 And that's where function comes in. It gives you access to over 160 lab tests for your heart, hormones, metabolism, nutrients, toxins, and more for just $365 a year. So you can be precise and you can choose a foods that actually address what your body needs because food is truly medicine. Get tested at functionhealth.com, track your data, and then make your plate. Let's talk about the other piece here, the inflammation model. Why is there inflammation?
Starting point is 00:14:41 There's a lot of reasons. Environmental toxins, your microbiome, stress, infections, lots of reasons. The main reason. The main reason. Sugar. I mean, I know. sound like a broken record. But this is the problem. The biggest driver of inflammation in our society is our starch and sugary diet. 60% of our calories is junk food. The average American eats about a pound
Starting point is 00:15:06 of sugar, 133 pounds of flour a year. That's almost a three-quarters of a pound of flour and sugar, her person per day. Now, I'm not eating that much, so some of y'all eat in a lot more. The key is, if you eat that, it's going to drive the deposition of belly fat, visceral fat. We call visceral adipose tissue. But this is angry fat. It's not just regular fat holding up your pants. It's angry fat and it's inflamed fat and it's spewing out tons of inflammation. When you have inflammation, guess what happens? You oxidize the LDL. Like, you know, when your oil goes rancid or nuts go rancid, that rancid fat is dangerous and is harmful. It's oxidized fat. It's like a car rusting. And that causes damage to your blood vessel lining, and that leads to the ability for the cholesterol to
Starting point is 00:15:58 enter the arteries and form these plaques that end up causing heart attacks. Now, there's a lot of other markers of inflammation that you can see. HSCRP, we talked about, baritin, something that can go up in certain people, particularly if you have severe and resistance, IL-1, which is a cytokine, homocysteine also can be elevated. So a lot of clues you can get for inflammation. So just to reiterate a little bit of diet, there are. are people who are sensitive to saturated fat. And I want to just be clear that not everybody responds the same to the same diet. We're all different. But on the whole, if you're overweight,
Starting point is 00:16:32 if you have belly fat, you're more likely to do better on a high fat diet than a low fat diet. You're more likely to do better on a low sugar starch diet than a low fat diet. Really important. And large studies have shown this. Large met analysis, the pure study, framing hem data, show that dietary saturated fat is not the primary driver of heart disease. I think there was a study I reviewed in my book. There was like 72 different studies. There were randomized control trials, population studies, they looked at blood levels of fats.
Starting point is 00:17:00 They look at dietary intake. It was really quite an extensive study. And they could show no correlation at all with saturated fat. Transfat, for sure, increased the risk. That's hydrogenate fat. And omega-3 fats lowered it a little bit. The saturated fat were neutral. Now, that doesn't mean for some people,
Starting point is 00:17:17 it's not a problem, but it's in general, that's the case. Now, as I mentioned, the thing that's far more dangerous is refined starches and sugar. So bottom line, you know, think of sugar as a recreational drug. That's what I do. Okay, so what do I think now? I think now that heart disease is primarily for most people, without these genetic lipid disorders, is primarily a metabolic, meaning blood sugar regulation and inflammatory disease first. Cholesterol is just a bystander in this whole process. And what matters most to check for you now is something called apo-liproproteen B or APOB and what we call lipoprotein fractionation, which we do on function health panel, and lipoprotein Lill-A, which we do on the functional health panel, and H-SCRP, which we do on the functional
Starting point is 00:18:02 health panel, and measure of insulin resistance, which we check fasting insulin. Again, I ask a question how many tests that you get from doctors around the country include insulin. It's like less than 1%. Never checked. Almost never checked. It's probably the most important. It's probably the most important test for understanding your health and longevity. There's an even better test we offer through function, which is an insulin resistance score, which uses newer technology to get a very predictive result that's better than even taking a glucose tolerance test. The other thing I mentioned, you want to look at triglyceride-to-h-h-l ratio. That's your triglycerized H-chel. Should be one-to-one or even less. And then there's a really easy test. It's the tape measure test. You basically
Starting point is 00:18:42 get a tape measure, and you remember measure around your fattest part of your belly, and it If it's too much fat there and you're not, and waste isn't good, you're in trouble. And there are some benchmark numbers we can give you. But basically, you know if you got that in there. It's just, you can use the mirror test. You don't even need a tape measure. Just jump in front of the mirror up and down.
Starting point is 00:19:00 If your stomach jiggles, you probably have this problem. All right. So let's kind of reiterate. The things that make the most important are the quality of the diet you're eating, whole foods, low glycemic, anti-inflammatory, good fats, exercise, managing stress, getting up sleep. All those things are critical. Those matter. What matter in list than we thought is the total cholesterol, is your LDL alone in the dietary fat intake is not as important as we thought. The cholesterol and your food is certainly not important in 2015. The dietary guidelines committee said, listen, guys, we got it wrong. What did they say? It was kind of a funny determination. They said, cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concern, meaning eat your eggs. Don't worry about it. So in functional medicine, we don't really treat the numbers. We treat the whole body. We treat the system. And this.
Starting point is 00:19:46 The system that drives heart disease is your metabolic health. And people who have poor metabolic health have heart disease. You know, guys, there's always more studies coming out, but there's an amazing study in 2024 looking at metabolic cardiology. And they showed that metabolic syndrome, pre-diabetes, increased your heart disease risk by fourfold. That's 400% independent of your LDL cholesterol, right? We're always focused on LDL cholesterol, but your doctors aren't checking your insulin.
Starting point is 00:20:13 They're not checking your A1C. They're not checking your blood sugar. They're not looking in some resistance scores. They're not looking at triglystriety H.O. ratio ratio, CRP. They're not looking at all the things that matter. And again, that's why I co-founded function help because people need to get access to their own biology
Starting point is 00:20:27 and know their numbers and know their data, and they're not getting that from their doctors, sadly. Next thing I learned, which I think is really important, is that people think, oh, if you're normal weight, you're fine. But there is a problem that we call Toffee, been on the outside, bad on the inside. or I like to call it skinny fat. You look skinny on the outside,
Starting point is 00:20:48 but you're fat on the inside. And this means you can be normal weight. Your body mass index can be normal, but your body composition is bad, meaning you have more body fat than muscle, particularly belly fat. So 20% of people who are normal weight have insulin resistance
Starting point is 00:21:08 and have the same heart disease risk as obesity. And that is why we see the data that 75% of Americans are overweight. When we check their blood tests, 93% of Americans have poor metabolic health, meaning they're insulin resistant. That's the 20% right there. So it's really a problem.
Starting point is 00:21:26 Now, the good news is we have new technologies that can help us understand what's happening with their metabolic health and blood sugar, like a continuous glucose monitor. I really love those because they can help you understand what's happening and how different foods affect you. And everybody needs to do this, at least for a short period of time, because when you understand what your body's doing and
Starting point is 00:21:47 how it's reacting different foods, then you can modify your diet. Then you'll say, well, you know, if I eat an orange, it's fine, but if I eat a plum, it goes way up. Or if I have this bread, I'm fine, but if I have that bread, I'm not fine. So you can actually see how your body response. And it's much better predictor of heart disease risk than just a static blood sugar. All right, So what can you do about this today? First thing you do is get the right test. Tests, don't guess. You can ask your doctor for these tests,
Starting point is 00:22:14 and they may or may not do them, but you can get all of them on your basic panel at function help.com. So just to reiterate, the test you want to get are apo-lipotene-B or apoprotein B, lipopr-a-h-S-C-R-P, H-S-C-RP, fasting insulin, of course you want to know your triglystrient HDL ratio.
Starting point is 00:22:32 And also, I would really recommend a lipoprotein fractionation. It's part of the basic panel function. It looks at your particle size, particle number, quad of your cholesterol, really important. And then a calcium score, which I think is important for most people as a baseline. Again, we offer that through function health,
Starting point is 00:22:47 through our partner, Ezra, which you can do imaging. It's very cheap, very quick, very safe, and you get a quick idea of whether or not you have plaque development, and then you can manage it. Because, you know, cholesterol is just a surrogate marker. It doesn't tell you if you have the disease.
Starting point is 00:23:01 You have to actually image to see if you have the disease, right? It's not like if you have high blood sugar, really you know you have diabetes. That's pretty black and white. We have had cholesterol. I've had people with the worst cholesterol profiles you could possibly imagine. And they have completely clean arteries. So you have to actually image to figure out what's going on.
Starting point is 00:23:24 When you test, you have to remember you want to track your trends over time, not just one point in time. And that's what's so beautiful about a function membership is every year, the dollar a day, you track your numbers over time, You get twice your testing and you see what's going on. And you can modify things. You can change things. You can adjust your diet, lifestyle, see what changes happen.
Starting point is 00:23:41 And that really helps you manage things. So you've got to really understand what you're doing in order to manage it. I think some investor dudes said, you know, what gets measured gets managed. So if you don't measure, you can't manage it. The second thing you want to do is eat in a way that lowers inflammation and helps to correct insulin resistance. How do you do that? Cut out the biggest source of both, which is sugar and starch. refined starch eat more whole foods,
Starting point is 00:24:05 eat more anti-inflammatory foods, lots of colorful fruits and vegetables, lots of omega-3 fats. Get rid of ultra-processed food. They're not even food. Food is defined as something that supports the health and development and growth in an organism.
Starting point is 00:24:17 Ultra-processed food does the exact opposite. So it technically isn't even food. We shouldn't be eating it. It looks like food, but it ain't food. Next, you know, work on your lifestyle. Exercise, building muscle. It really important. I was in the gym this morning for an hour.
Starting point is 00:24:30 That was really painful. My trainer was crushing. me, but I know it's helping me. And it helps to build muscle. It helps to lower APOB, corrects insulin your muscles become a better sync. Also, strength training is not the only thing. Cardio is also important. They're going to regulate stress because that can also affect heart disease risks. Sleep, really important. All those things are really important. And I just keep going moving throughout the day. Get your steps in. Now what about supplements? Well, I want to be really clear here. If supplements are not one size fits all, they're not a replacement, they're called supplements for a reason, not replacements.
Starting point is 00:25:01 and you really don't understand what's going on to get a personalized prescription. What you need depends on your health history, your medications you're taking, your labs, your unique biology, your genetics. So not medical vice here, but you should basically check with your doctor before starting anything new, but there's some basic principles that are pretty safe. First, you want a good, high-quality omega-3 fish oil to lower your triglycerides and inflammation and your blood pressure. I recommend omega-3 rejuvenate by Big Bold Health. I'm an investor in the company, transparently. It's started by my mentor, Jeffrey Blaine,
Starting point is 00:25:33 who's the father of functional medicine, extremely high quality, very pure, really important to get the right one. Next, you want a good quality, multivitamin and mineral, cover all the gaps, folate, zinc, magnesium. Co-Q10 is also really important for heart health, really supports mitochondria, vascular health,
Starting point is 00:25:49 really helps blood pressure, mitochondria. Magnesium, really important, helps relax your blood vessels, helps with insulin, blood sugar regulation, your heart rhythm also has helped by that. I like magnesium glycinate, or if you're constipated, you can use magnesium citrate.
Starting point is 00:26:03 There's also plant compounds that work really well. Fibre is great, plant sterols. Also, are other compounds that come from food like soy? It can be very helpful in lowering LDL cholesterol and just balancing your lipids. And you can get fiber as a supplement or just eat more fibrous foods, which I do. Now, I've changed my mind about cholesterol
Starting point is 00:26:22 because the science has changed. And the truth is, when we look deeper, when we look at things like inflammation, insulin resistance, APOB, metabolic health, we actually are finally getting a clear picture at what really causes heart disease. It ain't cholesterol by itself. It's all these cascading factors.
Starting point is 00:26:38 Here's the most important part. By understanding your numbers, by knowing what's going on with your biology, you have the power to change your heart health right now. You're not really at the mercy of your genetics or your numbers. You can understand your biology. You can take charge of it. And sometimes, yeah, you might need a medication,
Starting point is 00:26:53 but you can regulate everything in such a powerful way. using these foundational principles. So I'm sure you know someone who's out of heart attack or has heart disease, please share it with them. Share it with anybody who's worried about their cholesterol who's on a statin. The more we understand the whole picture, the health you are all going to become, the better our society is going to be.
Starting point is 00:27:11 And obviously, we're going to lower health care costs and everybody's going to do better. Thanks for joining me for office hours. I love diving into these topics with you. Remember, you are the CEO of your own health. and every choice you make can move you closer to healing and vitality. I want to keep these episodes as relevant and useful as possible, so tell me, what do you want to explore next? What questions are you wrestling with?
Starting point is 00:27:38 What breakthroughs are you chasing? Share your ideas in the comments on social media or through the link in the show notes. I'm listening. Until next time, keep taking charge, keep asking questions, and keep showing up for your health. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out.
Starting point is 00:28:03 I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center. at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest's opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my
Starting point is 00:28:32 guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. and if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultraweilnesscenter.com, and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed health care practitioner
Starting point is 00:29:03 and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public, so I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.

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