29 WORST Heart & Artery Foods To Avoid [🔄 REVERSE Clogged Arteries!]

This is Tom Bradake, and today I'm going over a massive guide of the 29 worst foods for your arteries and your clogged arteries, including the big lies that you have been fed regarding what foods are bad for you. And we're starting right now. I am very inspired. I read a great book. It's called The Lies My Doctor Tells Me by Dr. Ken Berry. I'm sure a lot of you guys already watch his YouTube channel. I link that book below. It's all the problems about how doctors are not taught a lot about diet and how the food industry essentially funds all these studies. In a cruel twist, artery disease is now present in 50% of people over 40 years old. And what happens is this impairs your energy level. It puts you at risk for heart health. You can see the plaque building up, increasing, and then eventually narrowing the artery. And CART disease is now the number one killer in the United States and probably around the world because your arteries get clogged. But we have guides. We work with great vascular surgeons. We work with the best diabetic specialists because diabetes and artery disease is very related. It's important to take care of your diabetes with this guide too. Prediabetes and diabetes now are present in one third of people around the Western world. China is actually number one. They have a massive percentage of people with diabetes. 40% of people in China are prediabetic or diabetic. That means massive numbers. That's not a small country. India has 17% adult diabetes. It's said to be 135 million people in India by 2045. Those are insane numbers. A blood clot's a little bit different than atherosclerosis. A blood clot is when you actually form like a clump of platelet cells that plug the artery. If you have a red swollen calf or thigh, or if you have difficulty breathing, make sure you call your doctor immediately and get checked out. But if you want to learn more about blood clots that can actually plug the blood vessel, I have some videos on that below. What we're talking about is plaque and arteriosclerosis. So arteriosclerosis is the actual narrowing of your artery. When your blood flows down to your toes and your fingers away from your heart, that's an artery. These are big, thick muscular vessels. They then go down to capillaries. Capillaries are small little vessels where oxygen gets deposited to your cells, nutrients get deposited to your cells, and then waste products get taken into the capillaries. So capillaries are very thin, very small, but then as they start to get together, veins develop and veins actually come back to your heart. Arteriosclerosis can happen away from your heart. Those thick muscular vessels can narrow and how that happens is you can develop rough edges, you can get cholesterol, you can get inflammation, you can get bacteria, you can get some damage, some plaque. So bad conditions in your body essentially lead to that inflammation, scarring, fat development, plaque buildup. That's what arteriosclerosis is. A blood clot can plug the veins. If a cut or some type of damage happens and a blood clot actually shoots up, that's called a pulmonary embolism and that's where a clot is dangerous. So clots happen in your veins, arteriosclerosis happens on the way down to your feet. What can happen from arteriosclerosis? You can essentially develop a stroke, you can essentially get coronary artery disease, you can get chronic kidney disease, you can get peripheral arterial disease, which is cold hands, cold feet. So this is what we're trying to prevent. This is why these seven things are so important. And a plaque is made of cholesterol, fatty substances, calcium, fibrin, white blood cells. And another thing to remember is arteriosclerosis is related to low density lipoproteins and high density lipoproteins. LDL and HDL are like shuttles that essentially carry cholesterol through your body. LDL is bad. That's a lot of buildup of bad cholesterol that can narrow your arteries. And HDL is good. You want HDL. Those are essentially shuttles that pick up loose cholesterol and take it out of your body. And I'll go over specifics later, but the HDL can actually pick up cholesterol from around the arteries and get bigger. And then that HDL molecule returns the cholesterol to the liver and takes it out of your arteries. So it is possible to reverse it to a degree. So the number one thing that you can do to improve your arteriosclerosis is seeing a doctor like me and vascular surgeons that we work with. And if there's concern in the office, we would actually check the pulses. So for your posterior tibial artery, your anterior tibial artery, and the idea is we check for the strength of the pulses. So if it's a bounding pulse, it's probably normal. If it's hardly beating at all, then it's probably some blockage. And how quickly do your toes refill? We can check that with a computer and monitor it. And the trick with this is if you reach certain values, we can run more advanced tests to try and see exactly where that blockage is. And this is a test called an arterial Doppler. We compare how strong your pulses are in your feet compared to the rest of your body. That might then let us take some toe pressures to see, hey, is there very little blood flow coming down? We could take arterial Dopplers to find out where those blockages potentially are and see that on waveform. And that could then help plan procedures such as taking a 3D angiogram. So essentially this is dye that's injected into your vessels and you can see where the blockages actually take place. This would help both us and the vascular surgeon coordinate which arteries are blocked, which ones are narrowed, and where do we need more blood flow? So for example, this is a foot. You could see that this particular patient can have some narrowed vessels as you come down to the feet. This could cause cold toes and lead to the pain and ulcers that they are having. Veins are different than arteries. If you have varicose veins or spider veins, I have that linked below. So check out those free videos below. A bypass procedure or an angioplasty. So this seems like a good idea, but an angioplasty, that's essentially like a Roto-Rooter. Colleagues of mine called vascular surgeons make a small little poke in your thigh and or up in your body if it's other spots, but they go down with a wire and on that tip of the wire is a balloon that expands and opens the artery. And then they can choose to place a stent. They use dye to see where it's narrowed and then they balloon it open and then place a stent. The danger is you can't just balloon everything open because it could rip the artery and then you're bleeding. That's called the hemorrhage. So you don't want to do that. So what happens is the excellent vascular surgeons I work with, they essentially work their way down and I've gone to lots of surgeries with them and they essentially expand that artery and place a stent if it's closing back down again. Now this is a pretty quick in and out surgery. Generally they do this in less than like 24-48 hours and you're out of that hospital. So these things are amazing. They basically go into the artery, they're smooth, they can flex, they can bend. The problem is blood clots can build on top of these because they're not your natural blood vessel. But the problem is this is a foreign substance. It can last six months to like two years on average but then clots start to develop and it can collapse and plug. If the vessel is completely blocked and this happens where a full blockage develops, they actually have to cut that artery before and after and create a new vessel that goes around. That's called a bypass. That is a very serious and dangerous surgery but has slightly better long-term outcomes. So frequently when I see people and they have purple toes or cold toes, I send them right away to one of my colleagues in vascular surgery and they can do an angioplasty or a bypass and blood flow within a week or two is going perfectly down to the toes. The person can use their feet, their hands again extremely well and you can do this in other parts of the body as well. I've got videos below on your heart, your arteries, your diabetes, pre-diabetes. It's all free. It's all below. It's all for you. Now let's get to some solutions. We're going to start off with salt. Is salt really that bad for you? It can be but it's actually a pretty important part of your diet. It's only really at risk for people that already have heart issues, kidney disease and are at risk for high blood pressure. Now I'm not saying to go crazy, eat a moderate level. You don't need to get rid of salt completely. This is one thing I kind of knew but everybody's always like, hey limit your salt intake. The reality is if you're pretty healthy people and you're not at risk and your doctor didn't evaluate you for having risks, probably not the biggest deal. The next one is nitrates. Nitrates are used as a food additive to stop bacteria from growing on food. So this is like hot dogs, things like that but the difference is these are already processed foods and what happens is they're already low in nutrients, high in fillers that don't add anything, high in fats, high in sugars. The thing is nitrates we make them in our saliva so our own saliva would be poisoning us if this was the case and that's usually not the case. Obviously you don't want to eat processed foods but the nitrates aren't really what are horrible for you. It's the processed food. Eat real meats. The next thing is, and this is kind of the big one, is animal fats. The big thing now is carnivore diet. It's true. The big sugar lobby has essentially funded all these studies showing why fats are bad. So we're going to go over this today. In the Journal of American Medical Association they found that sugar industries funded the vast majority of the studies blaming fat for heart disease. Not really true. Ends up it was sugar. We're going to start off with number one on the list, reduced fat salad dressings. Reduced fat salad dressings is actually high sugar salad dressings so it's even worse. Like realistically it can ruin the healthiness of the salad. Number two, fat-free packaged snacks. You know what fat-free means? It means high sugar. It doesn't mean it's zero calorie. It means there's no real nutrients in fat-free snack but it does mean that it's still high calories, more likely to make you a diabetic. Fat-free peanut butter. Same kind of thing. Fat-free means high sugar. So look at the back of that peanut butter jar and those condiment jars and check how much sugar. It's probably all sugar and this is what's horrible for you. Realistically you want peanut butter with two ingredients. Peanuts and salt. Cereals. If you're eating oatmeal or some granola then you're probably in good shape but 95% of cereals now have at least eight to nine spoons of sugar. Take a look how much sugar is in a serving. It's insane. You're basically eating pure sugar and then pouring skim milk on it which is also high in sugar and low in fat. You're not really feeling full. You're getting more of a craving and it's bad for five. Milk. So skim milk, milk flavors. These are not regular milk that we grew up drinking. This is all the fat which makes you full. It's cut out and you're getting a lot of sugar. This is no different than drinking like energy drinks or drinking sodas except instead of the carbonation you get a little bit of protein which isn't a ton anyway. You're basically drinking sugary milk on top of sugary cereal. Studies now show that calcium isn't even good to supplement anymore. You don't need it in your diet. Watch this video to learn about the specifics and see what you should be taking instead. Fried food and meat. So the meat can be healthy. So I'm not bashing the meat here. It's the fried food. So the seed oils specifically which it's cooked in. Seed oils have been shown to raise your omega-6 fatty acid levels and lower your omega-3 and they have done studies where high levels of omega-6 in a ratio of about five to one or more compared to omega-3. High six, low three leads to inflammation, leads to arteriosclerosis. The more you're eating that you're basically eating a small piece of meat in the middle with fried grease on top of that. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows that that's really raises your risk for coronary artery disease and the oils specifically. Here's another one too. Butter. That's an animal fat. It's not that bad. A 2016 study found that there's very little link between butter consumption and heart disease and there's a lot of great videos like Dr. Stan Ettberg. He eats like 100 portions in a week and does his blood tests before and after. Not a lot of bad results. Instead margarine was pushed in the past but now margarine recently is a villain because of all the additives and saturated fat and trans fat in there. Now it's thought that butter is better than margarine. Although with margarine now they got rid of trans fats so it's hard to say. This was two years ago where trans fats were banned. So it's hard to say. Maybe by the time you watch this there's newer studies coming out. Number seven is trans fats. So trans fats are like poison. They've been banned in 2020. It shouldn't really be in stuff anymore so I'm not gonna dedicate too much time on this but it's a huge thing because this is an evil food that industries were allowed to put in. Essentially now it's banned so I'll give a little clap. Politicians they came through and did good for you guys and for me too you know because we don't want trans fat and this protects us so thank you. But it used to be in eight foods. It used to be in baked goods, cakes, cookies, pies, shortening, microwave popcorn, frozen pizzas, refrigerated doughs like biscuits, rolls, french fries, donuts, non-dairy coffee creamer, margarine. So you want to avoid all of those. Number nine is french fries. Same kind of thing. Potato is probably the least healthy vegetable and now you're cooking it in those bad seed oils which raise your inflammation and your artery inflammation. This can lead to increased rates of type 2 diabetes and not really have you feeling full. Ten is potato chip. The New England Journal of Medicine actually states this is the single worst food in the American diet right now. Roughly 15 chips are 160 calories. You could eat a whole handful of nuts which is about the same amount. That keeps you full but you will not stop at a handful of chips. You will go through the whole bag because there's no fiber in there. You won't feel full. There's no nutrients in there. My big tip is if you can eat some nuts instead of potato chips that's like the secret to losing weight for me. Number 11 is fruit smoothies. Fruit is good for you because it has nutrients and phytochemicals but what juices are missing is the fiber. You will never feel full and it's a more liquid sugar version which raises your blood sugar but doesn't give you the satisfaction of fullness. You could basically guzzle down the sugar of 20 fruits without the fiber to make you feel full. That's going to lead to heart issues, inflammation, and diabetes. This is why fruit get bashed in the comments now sometimes is because people eat too much juice or drink too much juice I should say and they don't get enough fiber and they don't eat it in the proper amounts that we were designed to handle. But let me clarify these are the types of low quality juices with the high glycemic index that I'm talking about. If you actually take good fruit in a blender and mix it up like this studies do show that 100% real fruit blended does not correlate with bad diabetes. So just like eating good fruit eating 100% fruit smoothies that are blended is actually good for you. So apologies to fruit. Number 12 fruit and sugar flavored yogurt. Greek yogurt is amazing for you. So Greek yogurt is great especially no sugar added but once you add sugar like look at some of these doses it's like eight spoons of sugar in this. It's insane. That's not good for you. Granola same kind of thing. Granola is safe but when you add six seven eight spoons of sugar per serving it's not really granola it's sugar baked into it that's going to give you diabetes. This is why so many people in America have diabetes and are obese right now. Fourteen coffee drinks. I love coffee. If you drink black coffee completely healthy for you. I could go over studies on that all day. Fancy coffee drinks like some of these Frappuccinos at Starbucks are like six seven eight hundred thousand plus calories a whole day of calories in one drink. That's insane. It's jam-packed full of sugar. It's like taking eight pieces of bread. Take eight pieces of white bread and stuff them in your mouth. That's like a Frappuccino. I love Frappuccinos but the reality is they're not that good for you. They're high sugar loaded with bad creams loaded with not the best fats. That leads to some issue. But number 16 black coffee completely healthy. Don't use the fat-free creamers. Number 18 pastries and baked goods that are high in fat sugar and white flour. This is not the healthiest for you. Arteriosclerosis has been proven. Skip that. Number 19 energy bars and granola bars. If you had like a pure peanut bar of real peanuts that would be healthy for you. But it's not. It's a ton of sugar in there. It's basically a sugar transport bar that raises your risk of arteriosclerosis. Five grams per sugar is kind of the cutoff if you have less than that. But some of these have like 20 plus grams even though the nuts can give you some omega-3 fatty acids. Why not just eat the actual nuts themselves? And that goes with candy bars. The Journal of American Medical Association found that these were one of the biggest criminals for heart health. You know it's really the sugar in a lot of these chocolate bars that causes an issue. Number 21 here is another big lie. This was on a lot of that I saw. Red meat. This is a hot debate. There was a great study recently in 2019 in the Annals of Internal Medicine that said it's okay to eat red meat. They basically found through a large meta-analysis looking at all the studies that red meat's actually not that bad for you. Where it is bad is if you're eating extreme amount. This is kind of where people on the carnivore diet come in. They're taking stuff to the extreme. Meat is good for you but eating just meat? Why deprive yourself? Like I understand because protein and fats make you feel full. And yes they are good for you. What if one year two years ago was by? You're not getting a diverse diet even though meats are good for you. So I love meat. The studies are now apologizing to me just like they're apologizing to butter. It's really processed meats that should get a bad rap. The studies have been contaminated by processed meats. Sausages, hot dogs, salami, ham, cured bacon. This is stuff that's sugared, salted. The nutrients are removed. There's a lot of added junk. There was like trans fat added to this stuff before. That's what's bad. But healthy red meat like steaks, good healthy chicken that's good. Number 22. White rice and white bread. Pure sugar, low nutrients. That's all that needs to really be said. 23. Sports drinks. Unless you're running a marathon you don't need electrolytes. If you're eating food you're getting electrolytes. What this does is add like 35 grams of sugar which is multiple spoons of sugar in your drink. They're marketed as being healthy for you. They're not healthy for you. No one's gonna deny that except for the commercials. Energy drinks. So listen the caffeine is good for you but they also load it with sugar. Lots of stuff that puts stress on your heart and they're expensive too. You're paying like five dollars per can for what should be like a quarter expensive coffee. 23. Soda. The American College of Cardiology did a meta-analysis and found sugary drinks are one of the single most big causes of arteriosclerosis. Huge risk of diabetes, arteriosclerosis, heart disease. The bottom line is sodas and sugary drinks are poison. 24 is diet soda. This one isn't as bad. If you're going to drink soda or diet soda go with diet soda. Studies show diet soda can mess up your GI tract bacteria, give you some gassiness. Number two is diet sodas essentially sweeten you. So they make you crave and eat more and the studies show people essentially eat more afterwards. You know what go with some water if you can especially if you're on a diet trying to get healthy. 25. Pizza. Pizza these days is mostly bread so especially cheaper pizzas it's mostly bread. It's lots of seed oils so you're getting that omega-6 and low omega-3s and realistically there's the occasional vegetable on it but how much is it? It's hardly any. So then I mentioned seed oils. The omega-6 and omega-3 they're associated with inflammation. I go over a chart here on what kind of seed oils are good for you. This is a list of good fats. This is by Dr. Kate Shanahan so her website's drkate but she does a pretty good breakdown. This is a board certified physician who analyzed this. You got some good ones right here. You got your bad ones. I looked at like 10 to 20 different charts. All are by physicians or specialists or people certified to talk about this kind of stuff. The lists kind of flip-flop back and forth for different reasons. There's good fats. There's bad fats. Stuff burns in heat. There's a lot of different reasons why you should and should not eat these oils. The best bet in my opinion is to avoid them altogether. 27 alcohol. People with especially nerve pain, joint pain, chronic pain. Alcohol is related to inflammation. So studies show that men should not drink more than two to three drinks per day. So no more than three I would say and 15 per week. Studies also show that women should not drink more than two drinks per day on average and no more than 10 drinks per week. I love to go to parties and enjoy myself socially but that's a lot of drinks. You can definitely cut that down especially if you have cold hands, cold feet, if you're feeling fatigued, if you're feeling lazy. Cut that alcohol down. It'll make a big big difference and health agencies do recommend cutting down on the alcohol. It can make a big difference in the inflammation in your arteries and help over time unclog your arteries. And I'm going to include this as a bonus. Smoking. If you're smoking, cut it out. Obviously a bad thing. What about vaping? They try to market themselves as a healthy alternative but studies show maybe it's a little bit healthier. There's some toxins taken out but overall not healthier at all. It's kind of like trading cocaine for crack or meth. They're both horrible for you. Doesn't matter which one's better for you. So just stop both. Is marijuana bad for cardiovascular and vascular health? Well you'd think it would be bad but the studies don't actually really prove it. That being said, the delivery methods definitely can cause vascular disease and are generally not healthy. Marijuana does have a lot of benefits but they're not thought to be cardiovascular in nature. So there's a lot of downside, probably not a lot of upside. Stress relief. People can seem like they work a stressful job. Really what I'm talking about is emotional stress, family stress. If you need help, if you need to change your family life, you have to start doing that kind of stuff. I know this isn't an easy answer but it's not just quit your job. It's really find time for yourself. Find time to relax. That can mean a whole host of different things but if you need help from community support, from family, reach out to those around you. Not only will it make a big difference in mental health but also it will help unclog your arteries over time. Get that stress level down. Stress is related to inflammation and more inflammation means more LDL protein. That means more buildup, more plaque, more stress. The less stressed you are, the more HDL you have. Now the good part is HDL can actually reverse time and remove that plaque from your arteries. That's the crazy part. You can reverse time because that HDL will float through your bloodstream actually scooping up cholesterol like a garbage truck. This isn't a big secret but studies have shown that even decreasing your weight three to five percent including your BMI makes a huge huge difference in lowering your LDL levels and increasing your HDL levels. So body weight is a huge marker. The more you can cut down your body weight and we have a lot of great videos linked below on just how to do that. Number six. Move more. There was a study just this year in the British Journal of Medicine which basically shows that over 20 years when they looked at almost a hundred thousand people, people who did this single thing had a 20% less chance of death and that single thing was weight lifting. Now that doesn't mean you need to lift heavy weights like a bench press. This could mean any type of weight lifting like sit-ups, push-ups, wall push-ups, picking up a book in front of you, air squats like going up and down can make a big difference. Simply starting a beginner workout program makes a huge difference. This study gets even better because people who strength train at least two days a week if they combine that with cardiovascular exercise which is like walking, bike riding, jogging. If they combined it with that then it was 40%. That seems almost too good to believe. Make sure you get strength training two days a week and cardio at least two days a week. Now this isn't huge amounts. We're talking like five to ten minutes or more. Like everybody's got an hour a week to basically cut down your mortality 40%. Are you too unhealthy to exercise? The answer is almost absolutely no. You can always exercise with the proper physical therapy help and this is what this video goes over. There are solutions. We also review treatments for joint pain, nerve pain. So don't use that an excuse. Get moving. It's one of the single best things you can do. This will help unclog your arteries. It'll help keep your blood flow better. It will raise your HDL. So your HDL molecules will go through your blood system and collect that bad cholesterol and make you significantly healthier. And number 29 added sugar and high fructose corn syrup. That's number one. In America for far too long the food lobby has funded these studies. They have led to people accepting no fat diet foods which are actually instead loaded with added sugar and high fructose corn syrup. This keeps them from going bad on the shelves. The studies are universally in agreement. This is the number one cause of being overweight in America. It's a big billion dollar maybe even a trillion dollar probably is a trillion dollar industry that leads to heart disease, diabetes, fatty liver disease, dyslipidemia. That means bad cholesterol. Don't get depressed. There's six easy things you can do. You know choose whole fresh produce most of the time such as fresh fruit, fresh veggies. Fruit is not the devil. Fruit in moderation is amazing for you. Limit processed foods. So limit your processed meats. Limit anything with added sugar. So always check the back. If it's mostly sugar don't get it. It's not good for you. Avoid sodas, fruit juices, electrolytes. Drink water or tea is kind of the bottom line. Instead of cereals and granolas with sugar get some oatmeal stuffed with low sugar that's not added and snack on whole foods. My number one thing is instead of chips get some dried nuts, dried fruits and raw veggies. Don't just look at the calories. This stuff fills you up. It has nutrients and skip buying desserts out. You know get your desserts at home. Make them at home. It'll be a little bit safer. It makes you work a little bit harder. So make them from scratch. If you think you are a pre-diabetic check this video out. We go over skin tags, skin folds, thin skin, cold toes, veins. Do you have any of these things? We'll tell you about the signs and what to do. If that stuff helped there's a lot of great great things you can do for your arteries. So we go over some of those here.