How to Prevent the Leading Cause of Death

February 26, 2019

The leading cause of death in the U.S. is heart disease and it’s not only preventable, but avoidable. How can we know if our coronary arteries are inflamed? On this week’s podcast, Dr. Hotze discusses the importance of a heart scan and how early detection of heart disease can help you do a 180 and take charge of your health. Find out what you can do prevent and reverse heart disease naturally.

Podcast Transcription:

Stacey B.: Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. I’m Stacey Bandfield here with Dr. Steven Hotze, Founder of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. And if you have not done so yet, then please go to HotzePodcast.com, that’s H-O-T-Z-E-podcast.com, to download all of our wonderful podcasts on how to achieve health and wellness naturally. Now today, very important topic, very serious topic about the leading cause of death in the United States and how you can prevent it. Dr. Hotze.

Dr. Hotze: Thanks so much, Stacey. I believe that you and everyone needs a doctor, and a staff of professionals to coach you on a path to health and wellness naturally, so as you mature, you enjoy a wonderful quality of life, brimming with energy, full of vim and vigor and enthusiasm, and you’re healthy, and you don’t get ravaged by the diseases of old age.

And we’re going to talk about today the most common cause of death in America, which is heart disease. And it’s preventable, it’s avoidable, and yet, it’s the leading cause of death, both in men and in women. Now heart disease is caused by inflammation in the coronary arteries, or other arteries in the body, but it primarily settles in the coronary arteries. Now when we talk about heart disease, this may involve heart attacks, congestive heart failure. It can be caused by, or it can also involve strokes, too, as well, and any other cardiovascular problems. Aortic aneurysms, problems with blood flow to the kidneys, and other parts of your body. But most commonly, when we think of heart disease, we think of heart attacks. And heart attacks are caused by inflammation in your coronary arteries.

So let me ask you a question. Do you have coronary artery disease? Do you have inflammation of your coronary arteries? Oh, you don’t know. How in the world could you find out? Well, the most safe, effective, and non-invasive way for you to determine whether or not you have coronary artery disease is to do a heart scan. That’s right a CT, which is a Computerized Tomography heart scan. We have it here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. And it’s so very important because it’s the only test that can tell us definitively whether or not you have any disease in your coronary arteries.

So let me explain. Coronary artery disease is caused by inflammation of the coronary arteries. That can be caused by chemicals in the environment.  Things you breathe, drink, eat, or slather on your body contain petrochemical products, and they can inflame your arteries, and it settles in the coronary arteries because the coronary arteries are under a tremendous amount of pressure. They’re being stretched and pulled and compressed 70 times a minute. Every time the heart beats, the coronary arteries are being stretched and compressed. And if they’re inflamed, they’ll begin to deteriorate.

Now when they deteriorate, the body wants to heal those. When you have this inflammation, the body wants to heal it. The natural way to heal it is using collagen. Collagen is a protein that is made by the body that holds our cells together, but it also lines the inner lining of the arteries, and if you have adequate amounts of vitamin C then you can make collagen, and that will keep your arteries healthy and clean. If you don’t have adequate amounts of vitamin C, then inflammation causes deterioration in the artery, and the body has to have a back-up mechanism, which is the laying down of a type of cholesterol called lipoprotein.

And it Band-aids the inflammation in the arteries, and it causes plaque or a buildup of this cholesterol-type material, which attracts calcium and becomes calcified. So now you have a calcified artery or a hardened artery, or in medical terminology, you have atherosclerosis in your arteries. So the artery begins to narrow, and as the artery narrows and becomes hardened, then if you flick off a plaque upstream, it can go right down into the artery and plug it up, or you could have a clot to plug it up, and that cuts off blood flow to certain areas of your heart.

When that happens, you have an infarction or a killing of the heart muscle or tissue and that’s a heart attack. It’s called a myocardial infarction. That’s a fancy word for myo, meaning muscle, cardio, meaning heart. Heart muscle infarction, death. And when that happens, that’s bad news because when you have a heart attack, the first time you have one, half the people would die from a heart attack. It kills half the people – a first time heart attack kills half of the people that have it.

Now coronary artery disease doesn’t happen overnight. It takes about 20 or 25 years to cook a heart attack. You have this inflammation that develops in your heart, you get the laying down of the cholesterol,  which is a natural process. Your body wants to heal that artery. So cholesterol isn’t the cause, it is the solution that the body has, but it’s a back-up mechanism that ultimately can lead to problems.  You want to get rid of the inflammation in your arteries…

Stacey B.: Right, and Dr. Hotze and I, not to interrupt, but I’m so glad that Dr. Hotze’s explaining this because very often, you’ll go to your doctor, and they’ll say, “Oh, wow. You have high cholesterol.”

Dr. Hotze: Right.

Stacey B.: Without saying why you have high cholesterol, and then they put you on a…

Dr. Hotze: They put you on a cholesterol-lowering medication.

Stacey B.: Right.

Dr. Hotze: Which doesn’t prevent coronary, it doesn’t prevent the inflammation and the deterioration…

Stacey B.: Mm-hmm (affirmative), so that stays the same.

Dr. Hotze: Right, of your coronary artery, and you continue to get progressive heart disease with that. So what we need to do is find out whether or not you have coronary artery disease. And we find that out doing a heart scan. You do a heart scan, and that will show up on the scan whether you have any calcification in your coronary arteries. You have the main coronary artery, left anterior descending coronary artery, right coronary artery, circumflex artery, and posterior coronary arteries.

And these are all looked at in a heart scan to see if they’re calcified. If they’re calcified, that means you have plaque build-up, and that means you have inflammation in your arteries. And you can change, so here’s what you have to do if you have coronary artery disease, you want to arrest it and reverse it, which can be done with proper eating habits.

So what we do is we get you to eat a high plant-based eating program, minimize your meats, have some, eat good healthy oils and fats, but eliminate your simple carbohydrates because it’s the simple carbohydrates, the wheat, pizza, pasta, bread, cookies, cakes, rolls, cereals, all these things that are made from grain products that are simple carbohydrates, that are quickly converted into sugar. And sugar in the body creates inflammation, it causes the production of inflammatory products that inflame the arteries. And so you want to eliminate that altogether, so you get on a good healthy eating program, get your blood pressure down, make sure your blood pressure is low, and that can be done naturally using magnesium. If you have to use medication, it can be used, but we prefer to get your blood pressure down naturally by weight loss, by using magnesium.

And then to help heal your arteries, we use copious amounts of vitamin C. I look and others have looked at coronary artery disease, inflammation of the arteries, and the deterioration is caused by low levels of vitamin C because you have to have vitamin C to make the collagen to heal the arteries. And if you don’t make enough vitamin C in that area of your body where it’s being used quickly, then you have low-grade scurvy. And scurvy is a vitamin C deficiency, but you may have it in your arteries, and remember, other mammals don’t have heart attacks. Animals don’t have heart attacks, human beings do. And that’s because all other mammals, with the exception of monkeys, and guinea pigs, and humans, all other mammals make vitamin C, 1,000 milligrams per 25 pounds of body weight.

So the key is for you to get yourself on a good healthy eating program, take copious amounts of vitamin C. We recommend 1,000 milligrams per 25 pounds of body weight. Magnesium citrate or glycinate to help with dilation of your arteries to help blood flow and to lower your blood pressure. Also, to regulate your heart rhythm. And then those are key, and then if you have calcification, then you want to take some additional proline and lysine, which help you make the collagen, as well as help extract the calcium from the coronary arteries. Vitamin K-2 is also important in that.

So, and then we also recommend natural fish oil. I recommend cod liver oil, a tablespoon a day is very good for you. It contains key natural omega-3 fatty acids that are important to keep your blood thin, keep it from being sticky. You don’t want to have clots forming in your blood, so vitamin C helps lower that, so does the fish oil. It also gives you some key omega-3 fatty acids that are important for your cell membranes, and also for the brain function, and for your thinking process.

So my recommendation to you is, in fact, I would insist, if you’re a guest of ours, get yourself a heart scan here to find out what shape your heart is in. Then, if you know that, if you find out you have coronary artery disease, you can get on a program to help detoxify your body, eat healthy, take the right vitamins, minerals, and nutrients, and the right hormones, that will help you arrest and reverse your heart disease, so you don’t end up with a heart attack. A silent heart attack, which as I mentioned earlier, 50% of the time will kill you.

Stacey B.: Well, and Dr. Hotze feels very passionately about this because he’s had many loved ones and friends that he’s convinced that they get a heart scan, only to find out that they did have that calcium build-up. And who knows what would have happened?

Dr. Hotze: Right, if we hadn’t have found it, and they…and that made them serious about getting on a regimen of health and wellness, rather than going on their current path, which was leading them down the road to poor health, and heart disease, and eventual heart attack. So we want to prevent that, and you can prevent it. What you have to do is do a 180 and take charge of your health, and that’s what we encourage you to do here at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center.

Stacey B.: Absolutely, so get that baseline, get that heart scan, and also remember those supplements, the vitamin C, the magnesium, and the fish oil, and of course, you can always get the high quality vitamins and supplements here, at Hotze Vitamins. You just have to go to HotzeVitamins.com. Thank you so much for joining us here today, on Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution.

Categories: Blog, Blog English, Heart Health

Tags: Heart Disease, leading cause of death

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