A Functional Medicine Approach to Heart Health | 008

Dr. Fab Mancini: Hi. This is Dr Fab Mancini, and I'm so excited that you're here with us, because today we're going to talk about ending chronic disease. But primarily I want to tackle cardiovascular disease, and I brought one of my favorite doctors in the world, somebody that has mentored me, personally, somebody that takes care of millions of people around the world, somebody that's becoming very famous because of his not only education, but his approach towards health, especially as a medical doctor, that has expanded his knowledge towards being very effective in functional medicine. So Dr. Michael Turner, it's so great to see you again.

Dr. Michael Turner: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. That's very kind introduction of you fab. And I love what I do. I love to educate and inspire people you know to take care of themselves, so I'm looking forward to that today.

Dr. Fab Mancini: Well, let's start a little bit with that journey, because I'm sure that as you started your career and you decided that you wanted to be a medical doctor, you went to some of the finest schools out there. Tell me a little bit about what was your driving factor in becoming a doctor in the first place, and how did you got yourself more into the functional space, not becoming rapidly increasing within the medical doctor education and many doctors are now becoming functional metaphysics doctors get to the root cause of the problem. Yeah, phenomenal.

Dr. Michael Turner: Well, I had a strong interest in health that started especially in high school. I took a health class, and I started learning about the body, and you know, how the heart works and the lungs and the muscular system, nervous system. It's amazing. It's a wonder, you know. So I was pretty motivated. I started getting rid of some of the candy bars and the chocolate milk at school, I started running, you know, in my neighborhood, and I started lifting some weights downstairs in the garage. Tried to get some abs and some biceps and things. So my personal health was starting to really get going. I went through college. Initially, I was interested in medicine. Long story short, I changed after I ended up working at a summer camp for kids with medical problems. This is actually the one of the camps started by Paul Newman. So all the Paul Newman's products, this is the original camp that they were set up to fund. So I was there. I saw the doctors. I started thinking about medicine as being for me, and to your question about functional medicine, I guess I didn't carry around that phrase in my mind, but that's essentially what I was doing from that point forward, because I was trying to take great care of myself from a preventative and naturalistic perspective, going to Harvard Medical School, learning all these amazing things about health and wellness and how the body works, going to the Mayo Clinic, learning more things, and so I just carried it along like, you know, there's nobody said I can't go to Harvard and also do a yoga class At the end of the day, or take some vitamins. So I just started combining the best for myself and then sharing it with others. Of course,

Dr. Fab Mancini: You know, that's one of the things that I think, is what allows you to be a successful practitioner is the fact that you don't look at things from a box perspective. You go outside of the box, and maybe sometimes you even remove the box completely away, because what we have to do today in order to be able to solve this chronic disease epidemic, we noticed that 90% of the crop the cost of healthcare is chronic disease, and we noticed that it's impacting most of our loved ones. And I don't mean just one sees a lot of people that are struggling now with multiple disease processes all at once, and leaving, typically by medication alone, you know, having to take all these medications to get through the day. So let's talk a little bit about and I know that you are very well known in many different areas, but today I wanted to talk a little bit about cardiovascular we know that it's still our number one cleaner. We know that there's a lot of people struggling out there, not really understanding what, or even thinking what got me here in the first place. They just see them struggling maybe with a potential high blood pressure, high cholesterol, maybe a stroke that came out of nowhere. It could have been mine being serious, a little bit about how you have learned to look at the cardiovascular system, and what is it that you think we need to know as patients as to why this system is so critical?

Dr. Michael Turner: Yeah, absolutely. Well, as you mentioned, it's the number one cause of death and disability between heart attacks and strokes. And if you think about it, not only that, every organ in your body in order to do its job, it needs enough circulation, right? So poor circulation means all of your organ function drops, including, for example, your brain function. So brain, you know, fog and cognitive impairments and dementia and things. In fact, there's a movement to consider Alzheimer's as atherosclerosis of the brain. Essentially, there's a strong, you know, reason and scientific rationale why that might be so. So I just want our people to understand a couple things about your heart. The first one is that it likes to work hard. Okay? It likes to sweat. It likes to exercise. It likes to sit in. The sauna and get very hot. Okay, that's fun for it. I want you to think of your heart like a racehorse, okay, a million dollar racehorse in Kentucky. You can't leave it in the barn all day. You have to get it out. You have to run it hard. It likes to run. It needs to run. It's in its nature. That's your heart. Your heart gets stronger if you use it like other muscles. I mean, you know, that's not new news, but it's worth remembering also your blood vessels. You can grow new blood vessels in your heart. So even if you've had a heart attack and you can get new blood vessels, which are essentially natural bypass. That's already been proven. So we want to take the heart out of the barn every day. My goal is 30 minutes. Let's say, you know, break a sweat. That's my the simplest rule of thumb, and make it feel fun. It doesn't have it can be anything. It could be a Zumba class. It could be walk with your wife in the neighborhood, right? It could be chopping wood in the backyard. It could be doing a yoga class, you know. So make it fun. Take your heart out of the barn every day. That's the most important thing, keeping it simple. And the other thing I would say about our heart, what's, what's really important to know, is, you know, the basics of how to eat in a healthy way. What you eat can affect your heart and blood vessels, literally, 20 minutes later, right? There's even a phenomenon of people eating, like, big, fatty, greasy meals. Imagine, like a triple level, you know, hamburger, cheeseburger and a shake, and then having a heart attack immediately afterwards. That's a known phenomenon. It's been written about in the medical literature, because your body tried to deal with that much volume of fat, and saturated fat and sugar becomes so inflamed and the lipid levels rise acutely, it's actually a risk factor. So to keep it simple, cardiovascular diet side is minimizing sugar. Sugar is pro inflammatory. First of all, and inflammation helps drive cardiovascular disease. And number two, minimizing saturated fat. Saturated fat is fatty meat, fatty dairy. Saturated fats also inflammatory. It raises LDL levels. Now there's some ongoing debate about how important is LDL, small versus large, LDL and hard plaque versus soft plaque. And some people are saying, you know, saturated fats not so important, like it's it's up for discussion, but it's definitely not a good thing. It's not doing you any favors. All right, there's nothing that saturated fat does that's great for you. So you want to move to healthier types of fats. So that's the basics. And then, you know, trying to eat more fruits and vegetables. Everybody knows that it's a little hard to do. My favorite Act is a smoothie. So I tell people fall in love with making a smoothie. If you can get a NutriBullet, you can throw a bunch of stuff in there, you know, put some stevia, or some monk fruit or some cinnamon, make it taste good, put a little whey protein powder, and in 20 seconds, you have a salad, you know, and drink that on your way to work. So that's my my starter.

Dr. Fab Mancini: Well, I love the way that you make it very practical. And you cover, of course, the importance of exercise and moving our hearts. You cover a little bit about the diet. Let's talk a little bit about supplementation, because, you know, you've been in this space, and you feel there are some patients out there that are very heavy into supplementation, and they understand the amount of things, like CO, Q, 10 and others, but there's others out there that really have no idea of what is the value of supplementation for a healthy heart. What would you say?

Dr. Michael Turner: It's of tremendous value. I take many supplements every day, specifically for my heart. They can make a big difference. I'll just give you a striking example, which is fish oil, aka omega three fatty acids. I remember when I was at Harvard, one of my buddies was doing a research project, and he's like, You won't believe what we're finding out on the lab. This is exactly what it's telling me. And he's like, I'm taking fish oil every day. Now, you won't believe what we're seeing in this lab. I'm like, What? What are you guys doing? He says, we take rats and we tie off their carotid artery. Okay, on one side, we're trying to give them a stroke. We're literally creating a full occlusion, complete blockage of the carotid artery. We were trying to give them a stroke, but where the animals are pre treated with enough omega threes, they don't get a stroke. They keep functioning just fine. We tied off one of their arteries, and the animals walking around, running on a wheel like nobody did a thing to it. And so I was like, Oh my gosh, are you serious? So anyways, that was the first little inkling. Fast forward, yeah. Omega three fatty acids, amazing for the cardiovascular system. They prevent sudden cardiac death, they lower blood pressure, they reduce inflammation, and they're tremendously good for the brain. They also have anti cancer properties. So omega threes are something that every human being should be on period every human being should be on omega threes and vitamin D and a couple other key supplements, but that's an important one. I'd say another amazing supplement for cardiovascular health is nattokinase. A lot of people haven't heard of that, N, a T, T O, K, I, N, A S, E, nattokinase is interesting. Comes from Japan. In Japan, they've eaten this fermented soybean product called natto n, a T, T O, and they've claimed it as health benefits. Turns out that it does. And as we study, the reason is the fermented soybeans contain this enzyme, natokinase. Nattokinase is like cardiovascular, you know, Miracle substance, basically, because it does every good thing you would want. So it thins the blood it also directly dissolves blood clots. Okay, it's actually used as stroke therapy. Over in Japan, they'll give you IV of this stuff, it directly dissolves blood clots, reduces blood pressure, and then it changes blood cholesterol levels in three healthy ways. So you have three numbers that we care about, LDL, HDL, triglycerides, nano kinase touches all three of those. It sends all three of those in the right direction, and it's inexpensive and extraordinarily safe. Bonus to all of that, it dissolves the COVID SPIKE protein. Okay, so therefore it prevents COVID infections and it helps treat vaccine injuries and long COVID So that's a key one. Well,

Dr. Fab Mancini: I love it. Let's talk a little bit about diagnosis, because many times we go to the doctor, we do a blood work, we do maybe a urine What do you think so the key factors that we should be understanding about our heart health on an ongoing basis. I mean, we have all these gadgets with our phone and watches and many other technology that is coming abroad. Tell me a little bit about what are the key indicators you hear about heart rate variability, you hear about those kind of things. What do you think are the numbers that we should know on an ongoing basis to actually make sure that we are in check with how healing serve heart and our cardiovascular system is working?

Dr. Michael Turner: Yeah, that's a great question. Fantastic. Well, I'll start from the most in depth and maybe complicated way and work backwards, but there's overachievers out there, like myself, you know, and people that we know, fab. So if you want to really go for it, definitely a fitness watch or a tracker is vital, like an aura ring, a whoop strap, you know, a Fitbit, whatever. Those are amazing. They'll start to give you some data. You talk about heart rate variability. That's helpful. It's helpful to know, you know, your total time spent in motion, and you know calories burned, and you know resting heart rate. And it'll even give you an estimate of your VO two Max, which is a very important number. We could come back and talk about that if you want. But it relates to exercise, and that's the most important metric of cardiovascular health, is, what is your VO two max? So a watch will show you most all of that. Therefore quite helpful. One level below that in terms of technology and such, would be thorough set of labs, including some things you can check at home, like blood sugar and blood pressure, right? You can check those at home. Everybody you know, doctors been talking about blood pressure since forever. Why is that? Well, it's the number one risk factor for having a stroke. Let's just start there. The number one thing we had to strip everything else out and just say, what's the single biggest contributor to having a stroke? Contributor to having a stroke? It's high blood pressure. Your blood vessels are delicate. The inner lining of your blood vessels is very thin. Think of it like Saran wrap. It's actually one cell thick. It's called the endothelium. It's very delicate. It's very thin. It's like Saran wrap in there. And some of your key arteries are not that big. So for example, the arteries that feed your heart. Your heart is a muscle. It squeezes, but it has to have its own blood supply, right? How does it do that? Well, it siphons off some of its own blood, and then when it relaxes like a sponge, it sucks up some of the fresh blood through the little recirculating arteries, right? Well, those arteries are not that big, fab, as you know, I mentioned in this last event, they're about as big as a headphone jack. So if you plug a headphone jack in your Walkman, you know, from way back when we grew up, then that's, that's the width of your coronary artery, about 2.5 millimeters. It's not huge, right? And so you got to protect that thing if you want to stay alive. So we have cardiovascular health, and knowing blood pressure, for example, and knowing blood sugar is something you can do simple at home, but then into testing, the simple test that your PCP would do is typically a fast and cholesterol panel. That's not great. I mean, it's something's better than nothing, but it's not great. Within that you'd want to pay attention to, HDL, LDL and triglycerides. Better than that is something called NMR, lipoprotein profile, and then also other advanced cardiovascular tests that I do with patients. We don't have to name them all, but things like fasting insulin and homocysteine and high sensitivity CRP, et cetera. So if all you've had is a basic cholesterol panel, I would say there's a whole lot more lab work that needs to get done, and do some research, or come find a practitioner. We can organize that for you. The third thing that I'm a big fan of is a coronary artery CT scan. This is an image of the arteries of the heart, right? What if we could take a picture of these little arteries that are recirculating back in the heart? What if we could take a picture of them and then rotate it in three dimensions and look at the arteries and see, you know, is there any calcification of those arteries, or are they nice and soft? That's what a coronary artery CT scan does, and that has been shown to predict cardiovascular risk over the next 510, 15 years. Is very well validated, and it's not that expensive. You can get a coronary artery CT scan done for 200 $300 probably, and it takes you all of. Five minutes. You don't have to sit in a big tube like an MRI. It's a big open donut. So I'm a big fan. I get one every couple years.

Dr. Fab Mancini: Wow, that's amazing. Because I think it's important for individuals to understand that they are they need to be engaged. They need to be aware of what's happening with their bodies. And now we have no excuse a little bit. We started with the technology that we all use on a daily basis. But we also seen in the healthcare space, this movement called biohacking, where is bringing some very fancy technologies into our space, from Red Light beds to cold plunges to molecular hydrogen hyperbaric chambers. What would you say? In your opinion, are maybe two or three. Well, the biohack technologies that you feel have actually helped a lot of people improve their heart and cardiovascular conditions.

Dr. Fab Mancini: I love it. Yeah, you know, you've been, you've done a lot of lecturing and and speaking about, potentially, during the COVID pandemic, but also the long COVID What some of the things that we need to be aware of when it comes to our heart health, especially once we were exposed to the virus. And maybe some of the people that may be listening potentially got the vaccine based on what we've seen in the science, what is the things that we need to pay attention to, and what should we do about it?

Dr. Michael Turner: Yeah, well, it's a big deal the COVID as an infection or the vaccine, even worse, is very hard on the cardiovascular system. This is why we hear about stories like sudden cardiac death. You know, there's even a movie made about it. You we hear stories about myocarditis, right? I have patients who call me like my I had these chest pains that started, and I go the ER, and they tell me, nothing's wrong, and my heart looks fine, and I know there's a problem. The answer is, there is a problem, but it's what we call a micro vascular problem. It's not a macro vascular problem. A macro vascular problem is the traditional, you know, arterial sclerosis, hardening of the arteries, calcium, maybe a big blood clot hanging out there, that stuff. They can detect micro circulation you can't visualize in the emergency room. There's no There's no easy, quick test for that. But we know for a fact that COVID Because of the spike protein keywords, Spike protein, right? Let's just think about that. That's the keyword to focus on. That thing promotes blood clots, and it promotes damage to the lining of the blood vessels. That's very thin and delicate, as we mentioned, it promotes clotting and clumping of the platelets, so the spike protein gets loose in our bodies and is a disaster for the cardiovascular system, and it starts affecting mostly the small vessels. When they've done the studies in patients with long COVID And they go looking for these little, micro vessel problems and small blood clots. Everybody has them. It's 100% of the long COVID People have some problem with micro clots. So what that means from the treatment side is we need to get rid of the spike protein. We need to dissolve any micro clots, and we need to restore the health of the endothelial lining, that little saran wrap, delicate lining. We need to calm down inflammation within that so that has a set of strategies on. The lifestyle side, I'm a big fan of fasting and sauna. Both of those will boost what we call autophagy, a, U, T, O, P, H, A, G, y, that is a cellular internal reprocessing and recycling and reclensing process. So basically, when you go into a sauna or you're doing intermittent fasting, it kicks in some genes and some activity in your body relating to turnover. That turnover is good because more turnover is going to mean you get rid of the spike protein faster. So that's great. The second thing would be some basic supplements towards thinning your blood and restoring health in the endothelial fish oil is in top one. I'm also a big fan of nattokinase, as I mentioned. I'm a big fan of quercetin, also EGCG, which is green tea extract. All those things I just mentioned do a good job of dissolving or binding the spike protein and restoring health to the endothelium. So that's the first place to start. I mean, it also damages our mitochondria. But short way to think about it is when that spike protein gets loose, it's creating havoc in the blood vessels. It's acting like a little splinter, and just like a splinter lands and causes redness and swelling and pain, you have these microscopic splinters in your bloodstream now, including in your heart muscle, worst case scenario, or in your brain, causing inflammation and damage, and we need to clean that up.

Well, I agree with you. I've always been a big fan of working together with other medical specialties. And, you know, traditional medicine as regards cardiovascular health, has some tremendous benefits. It's literally life saving. If you're having chest pain and you go the er, I mean, I had a friend of mine who was a pastor that happened to him a couple of times. They saved his life, right? I mean, it's tremendous. And so, and it's got tremendous value in assessing your heart, you know, the echocardiograms, the EKGs, the coronary artery, CT scan, the MRI of the heart that we can do the lab testing, and we can look for, you know, clots, or lately counts and so many things. So the diagnostic acumen is very strong within traditional medicine, and the most at the most aggressive life saving end. It's also very strong in terms of stents and strong medications and bypass surgery, etc. But where it's not strong is prevention and like earlier or moderate disease, and again, I don't see any conflict in that cardiologists can't be experts in everything, right? You know? I mean, we all have a niche and a focus, so the more aggressive high level triage, things are handled well over here in traditional medicine on this side, this is where your functional medicine or naturalistic approach needs to really kick in, right? As I said, if, if all you're doing for your cardiovascular system is seeing your PCP and they just check a regular, you know, fasting cholesterol once a year, that's woefully short, right? So now we're in the realm of prevention and education and health promotion, and there's a lot of people over in this space, and there should be this. You know, prevention is better than cure, of course, right? So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, we say. So let's get over on this side. Let's focus. Let's work together. This side, over here, ultimately, is going to involve some behavior change. That's where this is difficult. But yes, you if you want to get strong cardiovascular system, you're going to have to do some things differently. There's no way, right, like you're gonna have to stop some things, and you have to start some things. And there is behavior change. So it's it takes work, but it gets more into psychology and, you know, behavior change, habits, things like that. Well,

Dr. Fab Mancini: you know, I'm glad that you ended it with that, because to me, I boiled down after 38 years being in this industry to realize that as much as I can learn about the health and the human body potential of healing, I have no control over what that patient does. The only one that can actually help that patient heal is themselves. So of you that are listening, I want you to understand all of this information is geared to help you make a better choice, because at the end of the day, that's what it boils down to, the choices, the little choices, the small choices that we want daily basis, they lead to where. You end up not only tomorrow, but next week, next year, five years from now, 10 years from now, and what I noticed is that the mindset lays tricks on you, in which you will talk to yourself out of doing something healthy, thinking, Oh, it's not going to make that much of a difference if I don't do this now. But you know what? Maybe not as much if you just do it one time, but what if you do it the next day too, and then the next day too? Pretty soon, all of a sudden, you're like, Wow, all this extra weight is gone. All of a sudden, I feel like I can breathe harder, I can hike, I can move, I can run. I feel like better than I felt 10 years ago. So these are the things that we are trying to share with you and bring you some of the top experts like Dr Turner. The beautiful thing is, you can go to his website and have a consult by him. I do that because he's my to go personal whenever I have a challenge with one of my patients or something, I know his background is so good that he has found solutions where most people are still struggling. So if you go to Michael charter md.com which you'll see right here next to his name, Michael charter md.com you can actually gain a lot of information from his website. But also I encourage you to set up an appointment, spend some quality time, if you're really right now listening and you're struggling, go ahead and find some potential solutions by somebody that's really been an icon in this space, and I'm just honored to call him a friend. But Michael, thank you again for being with us. Of you that are listening, remember to end chronic disease you must make a better choice every single day than the one that you made yesterday. If you do that, every day, you will be healthy. You will reach your health potential, and more importantly, you will have the life that you seek and that you want and mean, by maybe my opinion, that you deserve. So God bless you, and I will see you on the next show.