Prepare to have your health questions answered here on Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions
with Dr. Todd Binkley, owner of Binkley Healing Center in downtown Ventura.
Now, here's Dr. Todd.
Good afternoon.
I am Dr. Todd Binkley, practitioner of functional medicine and non-force doctor of chiropractic.
It's February, which is always Heart Disease Month.
Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the US and most countries in the world
for a whole lot of reasons, which we'll talk about.
I'm going to present an amazing case study of a man who had open heart surgery and then
four months later was basically left for dead by his cardiologist.
I wouldn't say something that harsh if it wasn't true.
It was literally true.
I'll describe the details of that a little bit later.
But first, I want to talk about a question I had come in about what is the difference
between nutrients, between supplements, the things that I recommend, and drugs.
This is a common question that comes up, so it's really important to address.
Drugs are essential when you need to intervene now and get a quick, specific, controlled,
reliable response because you have a crisis situation.
Drugs work by altering and manipulating cell receptors and biochemical pathways.
That's why they work instantly.
The problem with that is that all drugs are also toxic to the body precisely because they
interfere with normal human physiology.
The normal control mechanisms of your body are overridden when you take drugs.
You no longer have control when you take drugs.
Consuming too much or too many drugs can easily kill you 100,000, it goes up and down, but
it's always around 100,000 people a year in America die from properly prescribed medications.
Not medical errors, not where the pharmacist couldn't read the doctor's handwriting, just
normally prescribed drugs because of the tremendous side effects they have.
Because despite the best training, if you go to the Mayo Clinic or UCLA or Boston General,
the best physician in the country with the best training in the country, human disease
is complex.
You're as different on the inside as you are on the outside.
Many people get prescribed the wrong drugs.
Obviously, that's going to have a lot more profound effect than if you get prescribed
the wrong vitamins.
So the difference, an important difference between nutrients and drugs, are that nutrients,
supplements are basically foods that our bodies have evolved the ability to assimilate and
utilize for sustaining life.
Nutrients are foods that our bodies have developed the ability to absorb and use for healing
and repairing tissues that are required for sustaining life.
They provide the raw materials for building and maintaining living cells.
They are non-toxic because they support normal physiology.
When you support normal physiology, as opposed to trying to disrupt it to save your life
in a crisis, which is often important, if you start early enough and where you can safely
rely on just supporting normal physiology, then your innate control mechanisms remain
intact.
Inate control mechanisms, which maintain the health of all of your organs and tissues,
are really important.
No doctor is as smart as your own body.
There is no source of information in the universe as smart as your own body for what it needs
right now.
If you wait too long, then you will need the advice of people who can try and figure out
why your body can't figure out how to heal itself.
But your body is really smart at healing itself.
The best thing about the difference between nutrients and drugs is, you know, drugs kill
people if you take too many of them or if you take the wrong ones.
But if you consume more than you need of most nutrients, if you take too much vitamin C
or too much B12 or too much of most of the fish oil, most of the nutrients that I recommend
to most of my patients, if you take too many nutrients and your body doesn't need them,
it will simply excrete them.
Just as it will if you eat too much food, if you eat too much hamburgers or too much,
you know, any other kind of food.
If your body doesn't need that to heal and repair its tissue, it has a very effective
system of elimination to flush out stuff that you consumed that it no longer needs or didn't
need in the first place.
We're on this subject.
It is important to get quality supplements.
If you're going to take supplements, don't buy cheap crappy supplements.
Don't buy supplements from Costco or any pharmacy or most of the ones from Trader Joe's.
You can get good supplements at Whole Foods or Stroud's or Lassen's.
The best place to get supplements depending on your situation, right?
So when someone comes into me, I want to recommend something that I know is going to do the job.
And I always tell people that the supplements that I stock in my office are not the only
ones that work.
There's lots of other great supplements that I don't stock.
I often find out about good products when people bring in their bag of supplements that
they're taking and they ask me, you know, what do I think about this?
And I check it out.
And oftentimes they're horrible and sometimes they're fantastic.
And I add that to the list of the things I might recommend to other patients.
But there, you know, there's a limited number of really good top quality products.
Manufacturers of top quality products that I trust among them, chief among them, are
Ortho Molecular Products, Designs for Health, Thorne Research, and a number of others.
Too many to mention right now.
Please email me if you have questions about any particular product you're taking or considering
taking.
The only way I know to tell if a product works well or not is to give it to a few thousand
people or 10,000 people.
Obviously, I've not given a product to 10,000 people on my own.
I have given products to thousands of people, a couple thousand, two or three thousand people
over the years.
Alpha Base is my favorite multivitamin from Ortho Molecular Products.
I've given that to thousands of people and it gets the results.
How do I know that?
The only way I know to see, to tell whether a product works is to give it to a few thousand
people and test them before and after to see if it achieves the desired result.
Every time you give a product to someone and do blood tests on them before and after, that's
a case study.
That is legitimate evidence that a product had the desired effect.
I've talked a lot about the various seminars that I go to to maintain my knowledge and
expertise in the various research that comes out every year, but I also teach.
I taught anatomy at a local yoga studio for several years.
I taught neurophysiology at a local massage school.
I was really surprised at the level of detail that they wanted in their neurophysiology
training, but it was really fun to train that.
If you really want to know something, teach it.
I also had the privilege of doing a seminar for a group of women physicians.
In my local area, there's a group of women physicians and a member of that group was
in my rotary club.
She asked me, it's interesting, I was really excited about it actually because this women's
physicians group mostly gets together once a month and has a representative from some
pharmaceutical company come and educate them on the latest drug.
I said, wow, yeah, fantastic, I'd love to do that.
I made a presentation, I did a number of things, but I'm going to fast forward to the part
that I was most looking forward to getting a reaction from them.
I presented a bunch of cases and how you can get results with nutrients and no drugs and
they were very interested.
I even got one of them became a patient of mine after it.
The most important part was I presented this slide.
I said, okay, prospective study, which means something where you're looking to see what
would happen.
A randomized controlled trial of 10,000 people aged 55 to 65 years old, 30 pounds overweight
on average with blood pressure of 140 over 90 with triglyceride levels of 200 to 240
or total cholesterol of 200 to 240 and an A1C level of six to eight.
Basically, these are people that everyone sees every day.
Every doctor sees patients in their 50s and 60s who are 30 pounds overweight, have slightly
elevated blood pressure, slightly elevated triglycerides and cholesterol and are pre-diabetic
or full blown diabetic.
They all know how they would treat those people.
On my slide, group A is they're given the common medications for those conditions.
Lipitor, a statin drug to lower your cholesterol.
Metformin, the most commonly prescribed drug for diabetes.
Lisinopril, one of if not the most common prescribed drugs for high blood pressure.
A diuretic, so they start you on lisinopril usually or sometimes a beta blocker or a calcium
channel blocker or some of the kind of... You have high blood pressure.
Everyone's situation is different.
It's really important.
If any doctor ever tells you to take drugs for blood pressure, it is essential that you
take them because you only get one heart unless you get a heart transplant, but no one wants
that either.
It's important.
But the problem is people think, oh, I got high blood pressure.
Okay, I'll take the lisinopril.
I'll be fine.
Well, that usually doesn't last very long.
Then they add a diuretic, hydrochlorothiazide or they'll add one of the other classes.
There's several classes of blood pressure drugs.
Anyway, group A in my perspective study that I described to this group of women physicians,
it was about 25, 30 physicians.
Lipitor for cholesterol, metformin for diabetes, lisinopril and a diuretic for blood pressure.
Your dietary advice is to count calories, cut fat and avoid salt.
I thought some of them might be a little insulted by that, but they weren't.
This was a few years ago, by the way.
Physical advice has improved a little bit on that, but standard conventional advice,
not a lot.
So group B is my...
Here is group B in my perspective study.
Group B, give them three grams of fish oil, a hundred milligrams of coenzyme Q10, 5,000
IUs of vitamin D, some digestive enzymes to make sure that they're getting all the nutrients
from their food that they need.
A folate and B12 supplement.
Most people over a certain age are deficient in folate and B12 and this shows up on a CBC.
A probiotic because most people eat crappy food that feeds the bad bacteria in their
gut and doesn't provide the nutrients that the good bacteria need.
And then dietary advice, instead of count calories, cut fat and avoid salt, my dietary
advice is to eat mostly vegetables, some meat, some protein, whatever kind of protein you
like.
If you're vegetarian, that's fine.
Eat plant.
It is better for most people to eat plant-based protein.
If you'll do it, but if you're not going to do it, then it's important to eat some other
kind of protein like chicken or fish.
And then most importantly, reduce grains, starch and sugar.
And listeners of this show probably get tired of hearing me say that, or maybe if you're
still confused about what I mean by that, grains are wheat.
Starch is potatoes and corn.
Sugar is soda and beer and sweet fruit.
So anything that has sugar or starch that's going to instantly be converted into sugar
in your body.
So the evidence is in, but unfortunately these doctors mostly work for corporations, for
medical groups, for hospitals, for other organizations with corporate directors that are interested
in maximizing profit at the expense of your health.
Obviously that's never going to be the best solution.
It's going to give you the best result you need.
Of course, as I've mentioned previously, a lot of physicians also realize that even if
they want and have the research to give them the confidence to recommend some of the things
I talked about in this presentation, they know that they could actually be penalized
by doing, by recommending food, supplements and exercise instead of drugs because they
work, most doctors are employees.
They work for corporations with boards of directors who are interested in maximizing
profits for that physician group or that facility.
Or the problem is medicine is corporate, it's run by corporations with boards of directors
that are interested in maximizing profit.
And that's a problem.
It's fine.
There's nothing wrong with corporations.
But if you have a problem and you want the best solution for your body, then some corporation
determining what's best for you is not what's best for you.
The best person to determine what's best for you is a doctor who knows what they're doing,
who does competent testing on your body because you're as different on the inside as you are
on the outside.
You need individualized care.
No corporation is ever going to provide you individualized care.
That's just not what they do.
So the most fun thing that came up is these physicians are inundated by misinformation,
by the medical press about, oh, nutrients, just eat a balanced diet and you'll be fine.
Well, no one ever defines what a balanced diet is.
And their most standard conventional medical education suggests that all nutrients are
the same, all macronutrients, protein, fats, and carbohydrates are the same.
And micronutrients are widely available if you eat just a tiny amount of vegetables.
And that's just not true.
The evidence of that has been in for decades.
So I got a little pushback on that, some questions about, well, what's so important about these
nutrients you're talking about?
So I said, well, are all apples and tomatoes the same?
Humans had disgusting red delicious apples and tomatoes that taste like plastic.
Is all cheese the same?
Quality supplements are not isolated chemicals.
There's a difference between a list of ingredients and a finished recipe.
The difference is how they're made.
The difference matters.
So don't buy cheap supplements.
I've said it before.
I've said this to these medical doctors.
Inferior, the reason there's a difference between high quality nutrients that work from
some of the companies I've mentioned, again, they're not the only companies that good,
but the difference between crappy supplements that get all the bad rap that you hear on
news stories is because they're usually made from inferior or even stale or even inert
source materials.
Their poor processing depletes potency of those nutrients.
Cheap capsule fillers and tablet binding agents prevent the absorption of the nutrients that
you're paying for.
And the amounts of many important ingredients are just insufficient to achieve the desired
effect.
And most importantly, what's on the label of any supplement and what enters your bloodstream
and then further enters your cells are never the same thing.
So it doesn't matter what the bottle says.
What matters is what it's going to do when you swallow it.
So human studies on common nutrients are hard to find because they can't be patented.
So there's little money available for expensive trials.
No one can make any money off patenting another trial on the benefits of broccoli.
So our available human studies often show poor results because they test only one nutrient
at a time, ignoring diet and other health habits.
So I promised I'd present a case about a really successful case.
I love this man.
He was a wonderful patient that I'd seen for many years.
He had been coming to me once or twice a month for several years because he had severe arthritis.
He had a hard life, you know, physical, had some injuries.
His neck was as stiff as a board.
And it just worked for him to come in every two weeks to get his neck loosened up and
his hips and they were tight.
And then suddenly, three, he stopped showing up and he had told me that he was going on
vacation to Minnesota and a couple of months went by and I tried to reach out, didn't hear
back and figured, all right, he's busy, whatever.
But then he finally, actually his daughter contacted me and she said, when we were visiting
family in Minnesota, dad had a heart attack with a double bypass surgery and he finally
came back in, but I didn't actually see him for five months.
And when he finally came in, he looked like he was on his deathbed.
He was pale and weak.
He couldn't drive anymore.
His wife had to drive him.
His ankles were swollen.
His ankles were swollen to the size of his calves.
And he, I'm going to talk about a blood test that I'll come back to that.
But the problem was his cardiologist told him this was five months after he'd had this
surgery, a little over four months after he'd had the surgery and he'd been back relatively
recently to see that cardiologist.
And the cardiologist said, well, you're old, get used to it.
This is as good as it gets.
We successfully treated your heart attack, but you're going to have to slow down.
Just enjoy the rest of your life.
Well, he wasn't enjoying his life again.
Before this month, a few months before this, he used to always wear shorts.
He had fit thighs.
He was ripped.
He was in 75 years old, but he was in great shape.
He walked all the time.
He always had a smile on his face.
He was feeling great.
He drove everywhere.
He didn't have any disabilities or weaknesses of any kind.
And a little over four months after his surgery, when things should have been healed, or at
least healed as best as they could, his ankles were still swollen the size of his calves.
And I asked him, I said, did you have a BNP test done?
I've mentioned this before.
I'm going to keep mentioning it.
B as in boy and as in Nancy Paulus in peptide.
BNP actually stands for B type or brain type natrietic peptide.
So natrietic just means it affects the kidneys and peptides, the protein fragment.
BNP tests for turnover in heart cell muscle.
Your heart muscles are constantly being built and destroyed.
Your heart never stops beating.
So it's normal that some of those cells are going to break down and going to need replacing
when they break down.
One of the things that is sloughed off by that cell turnover is BNP.
So his BNP was 382.
After his surgery, it was 1600, which that's fine.
He's just had surgery.
But five months after his surgery, his BNP was still 382, nearly four times the upper
limit of normal.
And his cardiologist told him, just get used to it.
You're old.
That's as good as it gets.
Slow down.
And fortunately, most cardiologists don't know that it's very simple to address elevated
BNP levels and elevated damage to heart muscle by putting people on high doses of coenzyme
Q10.
I put him on a dose of 1200 milligrams and some other nutrients, but 1200 milligrams
of coQ10.
It's expensive to take that.
But he was being left for dead.
He looked like he was about to die in a couple of weeks or a little longer than that.
And in two months on this high dose of coenzyme Q10, his ankle swelling was reduced by half
and he felt much better.
So I reduced his coQ10 down from 1200 to 900 milligrams.
Four months, his ankle swelling and fatigue were gone.
He was driving again.
He looked and felt better than before the surgery.
And his BNP had dropped down to 132.
So this is almost unheard of by cardiologists because they don't give people coQ10.
They just give them drugs.
They think it's really unusual to get anyone over 70, 75, 80 with a heart condition.
They think it's impossible to get someone's BNP below 200 because all they do is do surgery
and hope that the body heals itself.
Well, the body heals itself a lot better if you give it the nutrients it needs to heal
itself.
So this man just completely eliminated all of those symptoms, stood up straight again.
His paleness was gone.
His ankle swelling was gone.
And he went on to live another eight years of a healthy, happy life and then died peacefully
in his sleep.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
I'd love to help you or someone you love prevent or reverse heart disease.
This is Heart Disease Month.
Please tune in next Friday at 4 p.m. for more information on how to prevent that.
Please send your questions in to me.
I look forward to an opportunity to help someone you love prevent or reduce their risk of heart
disease.
Please tell friends and family members that you know and love to check out the past episodes
of this show on my website, binkleyhealingcenter.com.
I very much look forward to the privilege of speaking with you next Friday at 4 p.m.
right here on KDAR 98.3 FM.
Have a fabulous weekend.
You've been listening to Safe, Effective Natural Solutions with Dr. Todd Binkley.
If you have a health question you want discussed on the show, email your health questions to
drbinkley at binkleyhealingcenter.com.
Take advantage of this opportunity to ask questions for yourself and for your loved
ones because our health matters.
Join him next Friday at 4 p.m. for Safe, Effective Natural Solutions right here on 98.3 The
Word, KDAR.