Unclog Your Arteries Naturally With These 5 Foods Recommended By A Heart Surgeon

So, today I want to talk about foods that can unclog your arteries. I'll tell you an interesting story about garlic. So, garlic has been known in folklore, besides protecting you from vampires, as very protective to blood vessels. And aged garlic has been shown in clinical trials to lessen the chance of coronary heart disease. I have a longtime patient who really doesn't follow my advice. And he's a big guy. He's got insulin resistance. He's got a gut. And one day I got a call that he was in the hospital with chest pain. I knew it, you know, here it comes. And he was going to the cath lab to get a coronary angiogram. And so, I sauntered over. And lo and behold, this guy's blood vessels were perfectly normal, smooth as can be, not one plaque anywhere. And quite frankly, I was flabbergasted. So, afterwards, I said, what the heck? And I don't believe what I just saw. He said, well, I've never told you this, but I eat two raw cloves of garlic every day. And I've been doing that for as long as I can remember. And I'm going, that's interesting. And so, yes, it's a case of one, but I've been using garlic in my regimen as supplement ever since I started supplementation 30-odd years ago. And it's this active compound in garlic called allicin that really does the job. This may surprise you. In my upcoming book, Feed Your Brain, you'll be shocked, surprised about the benefits of seaweed and components of seaweed. Now, one of the things that isn't mentioned very often is the Okinawan diet. And the Okinawans, the older Okinawans, were some of the longest lived people in the world. And they're rightfully one of the blue zones. And at that time, about 80% of the Okinawan diet was a purple sweet potato. And I'm a huge fan of purple sweet potatoes. The purple color comes from the polyphenols. But the other part of the Okinawan diet that really does not get its due is they're huge seaweed eaters. In fact, Okinawans eat more seaweed than any other Japanese people. And as you probably know, the Japanese eat a ton of seaweed. Well, so what? Well, it turns out that there are compounds in seaweed that not only improve the gut microbiome diversity, but improve the wall of the gut permeability, in other words, repair it. But they also really improve the glycocalyx that lines our blood vessels. Now, that's an unfamiliar term. The lining of our blood vessels is actually a bunch of sugar molecules that is called the glycocalyx. And it's this collection of sugar molecules that really is the first line of defense against penetration to the lining of our blood vessels. And compounds in seaweed, particularly one called fucoidin, has been shown to actively repair this glycocalyx. In fact, there's another product with another seaweed-based product that's actually been shown to reduce plaque in not only animal studies, but in human studies. So now when you look back, or I look back at the Okinawans, it's these compounds in seaweed that are really important for unclogging your arteries, but it's keeping them from clogging in the first place on multiple levels. So eat your seaweed. It's much better for you than you might think. If you've read any of my books, particularly The Plant Paradox, you may be well aware of Big Ed, who was a gentleman with literally completely clogged up coronary arteries, who in a span of six months unclogged 50% of all the blockages in his arteries. Now I can assure you that when I saw this, I was dumbfounded because that's not supposed to happen. And yet it did. And as you're probably well aware, it certainly changed my career path and my perspective on the power of food and supplements to do something as crazy as unblocking arteries. And there are reasons why this happened to Big Ed, and I've published many papers and written many books about the underlying mechanisms. I want to go through a few of them with you today. First of all, my number one way to have healthier arteries is extra virgin olive oil. Now, if you've noticed, there's a trend on social media of taking a shot of olive oil every day. You may not be aware, but I started popularizing this in 2015, over 10 years ago, that a shot of olive oil a day is a great way to improve your health. And finally, like everything else I've talked about, people are catching on. So, olive oil. Now, years ago, we were convinced that olive oil was so good for you because it was primarily a monounsaturated fat called oleic acid. And if saturated fats were bad for you, then a monounsaturated fat was probably better than a saturated fat. And correspondingly, maybe polyunsaturated fats were even better than a monounsaturated fat, but that's actually not the case. And it's true that study after study after study suggests that olive oil has some remarkable properties. One of the most famous is the PREDIMED study out of Spain, where they took people who were 65 years of age who had recently suffered a heart attack and had gotten a bypass or a stent, and they were randomized to three groups. One group was given a liter of olive oil per week and asked to consume it. Now, they actually had to bring back their empty liter once a week to the clinic and get it refilled. The second group was asked to eat the equivalent calories in mixed nuts, primarily walnuts. The third group was put on a low-fat diet, like the American Heart Association diet, and they were followed for five years. Now, the good news is both the olive oil group and the nut group actually had reduced new events. The low-fat group actually had increased events. And it gets better than that. The walnut and olive oil group, despite aging five years, improved their cognitive abilities. The low-fat group, as you might expect, had decreased cognitive abilities five years later. So, here's a great example of the power of olive oil. Well, was it the monounsaturated fat? No. It turns out that it was the polyphenols in olive oil that made all the difference. And one of the things we've come to learn through the years is that polyphenols, those kind of bitter compounds in olive oil, are actually a prebiotic for gut bacteria. Prebiotic means something that gut bacteria eat. And the more prebiotics in polyphenols, the happier gut bacteria are. Now, what's more and more interesting is that some of these polyphenols, like hydroxytyrosol, for example, when gut bacteria eat these compounds, they produce postbiotics, or they actually activate the polyphenols. Years ago, I was the consultant to a company who developed a test which simplistically looks at how sticky the lining of our coronary arteries is. And it's variously called the plaque test or the LP-PLA2 test. And it's a test that your doctor can order. And we saw a lot of patients with sticky coronary arteries. And so, I started these patients on two polyphenols. One was called grapeseed extract, and the other's got a hilarious name called pycnogenol. It was actually French maritime tree bark. It was actually ground up tree bark. And I presented many papers that showed that that combination, along with fish oil, made the arteries slippery, lined with Teflon that used to be sticky. And I can assure you that if you like the cholesterol theory of heart disease, which I don't, but if you like it, you have to have two things happen simultaneously on the lining of blood vessels. One, you have to have sticky blood vessels. And number two, you have to have oxidized cholesterol. It has to be rusty or rancid. Otherwise, it has no interest in sticking to your blood vessels. So, it's that combination. And interestingly enough, polyphenols limit the oxidation of cholesterol. So, getting back to olive oil, it's not the oil. That's just a delivery device for polyphenols. And so, the more polyphenols in olive oil, the better it's going to work. And it's no surprise then that that's why I created polyphenol-rich olive oil, which has 30 times more polyphenols than any olive oil tested. On top of that, this oil has been compared to regular olive oil in a placebo-controlled trial. The important thing to take about olive oil is you don't need a lot of this stuff. This stuff is not to, you know, mix your salads with. It's not to cook with. You need to think of this type of olive oil as a medicinal shot of olive oil. So, you only need about a tablespoon a day to get the full benefits. All right, how about walnuts? Well, walnuts are a pretty decent source of a short-chain omega-3 fat called linoleic acid. Now, the long-chain omega-3 fat is called DHA. And the good news about DHA is your brain is about 60% fat, and half of the fat in your brain is DHA. It's that important. But omega-3 fat, the short-chain omega-3 fat, has its own benefits. And as I've written about in the last couple books, like Gut Check and The Gut-Brain Paradox, this omega-3 fat, linoleic acid, is very effective at preventing LPSs, lipopolysaccharides, from getting through the wall of your gut and causing trouble. There's a very famous study out of Lyon, France, called the Lyon Heart Diet, sometimes called the Lion Heart Diet, where people who had had a heart attack or a stent or bypass were randomized in a five-year study to two diets. One was essentially a Mediterranean diet. The other was the American Heart Association low-fat diet. And they were randomized. The study was supposed to go five years. And the object of the study was to see a new incident of heart attack, stroke, needing a stent or needing a bypass. How did the two diets differ? Well, the group in the Mediterranean diet had to use a margarine that was made up of linoleic acid, omega-3. Now, the base was rapeseed oil, which is very, very rich in this omega-3 fat. The other group didn't get that. The study was stopped at the end of three years because the group that was getting the omega-3 margarine had dramatically less new heart attacks, strokes, than the American Heart Association diet. And it was considered unethical to continue the study. Unethical because it was so much better. Now, here's the punchline. When they looked at every factor that made the difference between these two groups, the only factor that was different was the amount of alpha-linolenic acid in the blood. Those who had it had the effect. And that was the group that was getting the rapeseed oil margarine. The other group didn't have it. So, that's how potent alpha-linolenic acid is. And that's why walnuts are a great source. By the way, ground-up flax seeds are a great source. And this is what shocks everybody. Another great source of alpha-linolenic acid is organic canola oil. Canola oil is up to about 20% alpha-linolenic acid. And fun fact, the rest of it is mostly good old oleic acid. Yes, the same stuff in olive oil. So, organic canola oil is way up there on a way to get this wonderful alpha-linolenic acid. And then chew some seaweed with it, and you'll activate the result.