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'm Dr. Todd Binkley, board certified doctor of non-force chiropractic and practitioner
of functional medicine.
Functional medicine means using standard diagnostic tests to identify whether or not your body
is functioning normal, identifying places where your liver, your kidneys, your heart,
your immune system, where the function of them is no longer at its peak.
So these are a separate range.
Anytime I do blood tests on a patient, number one, I always order more of them than you
typically get on a standard visit to your general practitioner, your primary care provider.
They're typically going to do a brief chem panel, your lipids, your cholesterol, some
liver enzymes, basic kidney and liver function tests.
If you're lucky, a CBC very infrequently, I often see people that they don't even do
a blood count.
You know, 10 or 15, a dozen tests, I order a 55 point blood panel on most of my patients.
And the reason most doctors don't order this is because it's literally medically unnecessary.
Well, what does that mean?
What is medically unnecessary?
Is it good or not?
Medical necessity is defined by whether or not it is necessary to confirm a diagnosis
of a medical problem, a problem that needs medical intervention.
So insurance companies only pay for things that are medically necessary.
If you have a condition that your physician, after doing a good case history and exam on
you, he suspects you have high blood pressure or type two diabetes or heart disease or,
you know, increased risk of kidney or liver disease and recommends some kind of pharmaceutical
treatment or referral to a specialist.
These are all things that insurance, these are what insurance companies mean by medical
necessity.
A doctor does an initial workup, suspects the disease, confirms it with medically necessary
tests.
Well, my 55 point panel, therefore, by that definition is medically unnecessary because
I'm not looking to confirm a suspected diagnosis of a disease.
I'm doing that.
Oftentimes, I already suspect you have diabetes or cardiovascular disease.
Patients walk in and tell me they already have that.
They're already on medication for some of these things.
But I also want to find out is your liver and your heart and your kidneys and your immune
system, are they working at their peak function or at least as well as they should be for
your age?
Because if not, then you identify those deviations from normal function, places where normal
function has been lost, you can often restore it with better food, exercise and supplements.
So the last couple of episodes last week and the week before, we were talking about how
dementia is inextricably linked to heart disease and diabetes.
If you have diabetes and or if you have heart disease, you're going to have dementia.
Anything that type 3 diabetes is what dementia is being called now because of the devastating
effects of increased blood sugar damaging nerves and blood vessels everywhere in your
body, especially your brain.
And any kind of cardiovascular disease is number one going to be present in the arteries
of your brain.
If you've got hardening of the arteries anywhere, you've got hardening of the arteries everywhere
in your body, including your brain, narrowing blood flow to your brain, impairing your brain's
ability to get the nutrients it needs to heal and repair itself.
And nerve tissue was once thought to not be able to heal at all.
If you lose nerve cells, you can never get them back.
Well, fortunately, we now know that's not true.
You can replace brain cells that have become lost, but it's a very slow process.
And you know, it takes certain things that you have to identify on testing and certain
nutrients, usually just eating better food and exercising alone is not enough, although
that's a key component.
So I finished the last week's episode talking about some things anybody can do to avoid
damaging their brain.
And this is using artificial sweeteners.
All artificial sweeteners are bad.
They are excitotoxins, meaning they jangle your nerves, and they interfere with your
appetite suppressant hormones.
So they basically have been shown to make fat.
Many of them have been shown to make fat people fatter.
They're not a good substitute for sugar.
There are much better substitutes.
If you have a sweet tooth, that tooth is in your gut, not your mouth.
It's your gut that's causing you to crave those things.
And the most important thing, well, I usually don't mention this on the show because it
just overwhelms people.
But there is a way you can eliminate those cravings in four months.
So email me if you want to know how to do that.
But some other things you can do are just avoid taking these horrible artificial sweeteners,
like all the things that come in the packets in restaurants, the yellow packet, the pink
packet, the blue packet, saccharin, sucralose, Splenda, Equal.
All of those things are excitotoxins.
Don't take those kind of artificial sweeteners.
What's the difference between an artificial and a natural sweetener?
Artificial sweeteners are manufactured.
They're made by huge multinational corporations like Cargill and Coca-Cola.
They're designed to make things taste good really cheaply and they ignore the fact that
they screw up your hormones and your nerves.
So better alternatives are Stevia.
I talked a lot about Stevia last time.
Stevia is not an artificial sweetener.
It's a plant.
You can buy it and plant it in your own garden.
I have it in my garden.
You can get Stevia seedlings at Green Thumb in the local nursery here in Ventura.
It's a tiny little shrub with little leaves and you can chew on them and it's amazing.
They're super sweet.
It's kind of nice to throw them in a salad.
But if you've ever had Stevia in packets, you know, powdered Stevia usually tastes terrible.
It has an aftertaste that is not good.
I mean, it's no worse than the aftertaste of the other stuff in the packets, but it's
not great and a lot of people don't like it.
I've asked people all the time, have you ever tried adding a little Stevia to your water
for different issues?
People have sores in their mouth, people have heartburn, people have anything that's irritating
their mouth or their throat, adding a little Stevia to their drinking water is a good thing.
And if they're diabetic or overweight or having brain, heart, cardiovascular issues, any number
of signs of inflammation to their body, and they're using sugar in their tea or their
coffee, then I recommend they switch to a specific brand of liquid Stevia that tastes
really good.
And that brand again, I mentioned it last week, is Sweet Leaf Sweet Drops Vanilla Flavored
Liquid Stevia.
You can get it in some stores, you can get it on Amazon.
Sweet Leaf Sweet Drops Vanilla Flavored Liquid Stevia.
Why vanilla flavored?
They have a bunch of different flavors.
They have a plain one.
Plain one's gross.
It tastes like cotton candy.
It's just blech, streaky.
The middle one tastes the best in my humble opinion.
Try it, try a couple other ones, you know, get what you like.
But it's a really great product to try.
The liquids are so much better than the powdered versions.
The other great natural sweetener is Alulose, spelled all you lose.
A-L-L-U-L-O-S-E.
It is not an artificial sweetener.
It is naturally derived mainly from monk fruit and most of the products that you can buy
to use as an alternative sweetener.
It's in a few other foods and the body produces small amounts of it by naturally breaking
down fructose and fruits and some other foods.
But most people have never heard of it as an alternative sweetener.
And the same thing applies.
You can get it.
It doesn't taste as bad.
Of the powdered alternative natural sweeteners, even compared to the artificial ones, it tastes
much better.
You can use it in baking instead of sugar.
It's about half as sweet as sugar.
So you have to use a lot of it.
It's not one of these ones like, you know, these artificial sweeteners is the reason
people, the other reason people use them is because they're cheap, but they're also hundreds
of times sweeter than sugar.
So you can use tiny amounts of them.
Stevia is also much, much sweeter than regular sugar.
Alulose is less sweet than sugar.
So you have to use more of it than you would, about double the amount that you would compared
to regular sugar.
But it comes in a syrup, which tastes much better than the powder.
You can get an alulose syrup that actually tastes a little bit like honey.
And the brand is My Normal Keto Alulose.
My Normal Keto Alulose.
I just get it on Amazon.
It's probably available in stores.
I haven't really checked, but it tastes really well.
I have it.
I keep it in the office to let people taste it because it's really important to find some
kind of, if you're going to put something sweet in your tea or your coffee or anything
else that you're consuming regularly, it's a really good idea to have options other than
sugar and alulose tastes great.
It has basically no aftertaste.
It tastes almost exactly like sugar.
It is the closest one, closest alternative sweetener to sugar that I have ever found.
I'm Dr. Todd Binkley.
You're listening to Safe, Effective, Natural Solutions to Almost Any Health Challenge.
I'm still talking about the health of your brain and the effect on it of cardiovascular
disease and diabetes.
If you have either diabetes or cardiovascular disease, even in a mild form, then you're
going to start getting mild damage to your brains.
Loss of circulation from cardiovascular disease and efficient distribution and provision of
nutrients that your brain needs.
Brain tissue does heal and repair itself, but very, very slowly.
So even small disruptions in the supply of nutrients to those cells is going to result
in faster breakdown of those cells and the resulting, mainly, dementia is the most common
result of that.
So what else can anybody do to minimize their risk of that?
Well, here's one.
Don't take statin drugs.
Statin drugs are almost like a religion for mainstream medicine.
The pharmaceutical marketing is so prevalent and they've got a couple of weak studies,
most of which have been done by the pharmaceutical companies that make statin drugs, follow the
money.
It's a huge, multi-billion dollar industry, one of the most commonly prescribed class
of medications.
Cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease.
Inflammation causes heart disease.
Cholesterol is a component of the formation of plaque.
So if you have high cholesterol, you have an increased risk of heart disease.
But statins are not the only way, and certainly not the best way, to reduce cholesterol in
your body, and reducing cholesterol isn't the most important way to prevent your risk
of heart disease.
Lots of, half the people, a study of 55,000 hospital admissions for heart attacks and
strokes showed that half of those people who showed up in hospital with a heart attack
or a stroke had normal or low cholesterol.
Well, that's pretty conclusive that cholesterol isn't causing most heart attacks and strokes.
It's associated, it's strongly associated with heart attacks and strokes.
But statin drugs are not the only way to lower your cholesterol, and lowering your cholesterol
by any means is not the only way to reduce your risk of heart disease.
So here's another great study.
I love it when studies like this come out, and a lot of my patients do as well.
I get most of the patients that come to see me, that's one of the main reasons they're
coming.
My doctor said I need to take a statin drug.
I heard that you had another option.
Yes, I do.
There are several other options to reduce your risk of heart disease without taking
statin.
So this study showed that statin agents play a major role in secondary prevention after
you've had heart attack or a stroke, but is not indicated in all patients who've had ischemic
stroke or the most common type of stroke, or even TIAs.
National guidelines recommend statins for patients existing arteriosclerosis, hardening
of the arteries in larger small vessels and existing coronary artery disease, but the
potential effect, the adverse effect, the burden of statin overuse in the remaining
patients who don't have pre-existing documented arteriosclerosis has not been well delineated.
So that's why they did this study, was to evaluate the effects of that.
So the results were, and this is data that was from 63 randomized clinical trials and
enrolling 155,000 patients in statin therapy was associated with increased risk of six
conditions.
Statin therapy in 155,000 patients from 63 randomized controlled trials increased the
occurrence of diabetes, myalgia or muscle pain and weakness, myopathy to damage to muscles,
liver disease, renal insufficiency and eye disease.
That's not good, especially if it's not necessary for you.
Across 55 large series enrolling 53,000 patients, the rate of stroke due to these criteria was
only 45%.
So the remaining 55% of patients didn't need statin drugs and they're at these increased
risk, 65%.
And there was another study that I talked about in a previous episode that was closer
to 70, 75% of patients who are given statin drugs do not have the basic criteria that's
been determined to recommend their use.
In other words, you don't need a statin drug and it's likely to do you more harm than good
and cause increased risk of diabetes, muscle damage or weakness, liver disease, renal insufficiency
and eye disease.
So if you're looking for an alternative to statin drugs to lower your cholesterol, I've
been helping people with that for many, many years and the products that have been out
keep getting better and better.
Things like pantothene, niacin, if you can tolerate it, is the most expensive route and
works the best for some people.
But for most people, the best product I've found is called Bergamot BPF from Orthomolecular
Products.
It's not cheap.
It costs about $80, $90 a month for the dose that you need to start out with and then it
gets a little bit less expensive over time.
But I've had people routinely drop their total cholesterol and their LDL bad cholesterol
by 25, 30 points or more.
Some people 50 points.
One patient in her 70s who dropped her total cholesterol, 70 points on this product and
the basic nutrients that I recommend for everyone.
So there are many, many other options to lower your cholesterol.
And again, I always have to stress, lowering your cholesterol is not the most important
thing to lowering your risk of heart disease.
There are other tests that can evaluate for heart disease risk like erythrocyte sedimentation
rate which measures your blood viscosity, how thick is your blood.
If your blood is thick, it is because it has inflammatory debris, the results of systemic
inflammation.
There are other markers for inflammation like C-reactive protein, sophisticated cardiovascular
panels for a couple hundred bucks.
You can measure a whole host of even more finely detailed for people who need it, risk
factors for heart disease and then use those as benchmarks to flood your body with nutrients
for three to four months usually and then retest and make sure that's working.
This is a way you can document, you can know exactly where you are, what your real risk
is because just you're getting your cholesterol tested tells you nothing.
Identify your real risk with a little more sophisticated testing.
Might cost you a few hundred dollars out of pocket, but then you can take some nutrients
and retest again and confirm that you're on the right track, that these numbers are improving
and that you're doing the best you can to reduce your risk.
That study that I was just reviewing was published in the American Heart Association Journal
Stroke by Elena Mina-Sung MS and Jeffrey Saver MD in June 2024.
I had a really exciting patient who came to me, a stroke victim a few months back, maybe
a little over a year ago, late 50s.
He came to me three weeks after he'd had a stroke.
They put him on statin drugs of course, even though I've just cited a good research that
makes that a bad idea for most people and a couple of other medications which were important
for him to take for a short term to recover from the stroke, but he had loss of about
70% function in his left arm, his left face, side of his face was drooping a bit and he
had a limp in his left leg.
He was really worried about it obviously.
I put him on a, and he wanted to not take any of those medications.
I said, well you actually should take a couple of these.
You want to take your blood pressure medication until your blood pressure returns to normal
without it.
They had him on a special medication for his heart which I felt was important for him to
keep taking.
I told him that I don't, yeah we can definitely give you something better than the statin
drugs but I'm not going to tell you to stop taking that either.
You have to go discuss that with your cardiologist and tell them this is your plan.
You want to do this instead.
That's your choice.
I can't make that for you.
But anyway, that's what he did.
After about three weeks, the function in his hand had improved about 50-60%.
His facial droop was gone and his limp was improving.
After about six weeks, he reported that he felt about 95% improved.
This was all with just basic nutrients, same things I describe over and over again on this
program to reduce inflammation in his cardiovascular system, reduce his cholesterol levels.
Yes, we did that sophisticated cardiovascular profile on him and basically showed that he
had a genetic condition that would have resulted in statin drugs having no benefit for him
anyway.
But we lowered his cholesterol with bergamot and a couple of other things, controlled,
mostly controlled inflammation with a host of nutrients to reduce the inflammation throughout
his body.
That his heart and brain, his blood vessels and brain could heal.
Some important nutrients for brain cell repair.
And he was about 95% better at a few, I think it was about six or eight weeks.
I forget exactly when that was.
And at that point, I told him, you know, there's no guarantee that you're going to get to the
other, you wanted to be 100%, right?
And there's no way to guarantee that it's going to happen.
I recommend that he do something called hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
So hyperbaric oxygen therapy is a way to flood oxygen to every cell in the body, even places
that it can't get to when you've had a blockage from a stroke.
And he did that for a few weeks and got back to 100% recovery.
No effect, no total restoration of his arm function, limp, gone.
And he felt as good as new.
Who do you know that's had a stroke or had a cardiac heart attack or any other cardiovascular
incident, or has been diagnosed with cardiomyopathy or congestive heart failure where your ankles
start swelling up and fluid backs up into your lungs or atrial fibrillation where you
get this flutter that increases your risk of stroke.
Any kind of cardiovascular disease is huge.
There's always a huge opportunity to improve the outcomes in the life span and life enjoyment
of a patient like that with proper diagnosis of things that are very commonly missed and
by eating better food, getting a little bit better exercise, and especially several targeted
supplements.
But what else could you do all by yourself to reduce your risk of getting these things
in the first place?
Well, everyone knows that regular exercise is important for your heart.
Anything that benefits your heart, including and especially cardiovascular exercise, improves
your brain, every aspect of your brain.
It's great for mood disorders.
It reduces anxiety and depression and obsessive compulsive disorder.
It can dramatically reduce your risk of dementia and Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative
diseases that are the result of breakdown of tissue in your brain.
But oh, you know, it's just hard to get out and exercise.
So here's a great study.
I love this.
I'm a cat person myself, but I like other people's dogs.
Here's a great way to get your regular exercise.
You guessed it.
Get a dog.
Well, that seems kind of obvious.
If you get a dog, you've got to walk it.
That's going to force you to get your exercise pretty straightforward.
Lots of people have already made the choice to do that.
But if you're on the fence, if you've ever considered getting a dog and are, you know,
how big of a deal, if this would push you over the edge, obviously having a dog is a
commitment of 10 to 15 years, maybe longer.
But that's part of the benefit because it's going to establish a habit for you to get
into the routine of getting out and getting your exercise along with the dog.
That's obvious.
But in a paper published from Univadis Italy on Medscape, they're actually documenting
some really important benefits that you might not realize.
And I really like this paper because it covers the basics.
Just to review, regular physical exercise is well known to reduce all cause mortality.
Hello.
It can reduce your risk of dying from any cause, as well as from cardiovascular disease
and cancer.
Regular physical exercise is considered an effective treatment for numerous chronic conditions,
including depression, hypertension, cognitive decline, osteoarthritis, and type 2 diabetes.
Physical inactivity is the second most important cardiovascular risk right after lousy diet.
Physical activity is more important than high cholesterol, hyperglycemia from diabetes,
high blood pressure, obesity, thrombosis, smoking, renal dysfunction, and genetic or
familial hypocalesterolemia.
So this is fantastic.
This is just such a great overview, even though it's an article about getting a dog.
I'm going to review that.
The following things are less risk.
Physical not exercising is a bigger risk for cardiovascular disease than high cholesterol,
diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, smoking, kidney disease, and genetic or familial hypercholesterole.
If you have a family risk of hypercholesterole, all of those things are less risk factors
for cardiovascular disease than physical inactivity.
So exercising a little bit will be more important than all of them at reducing your risk.
And they've studied this.
So people who have a dog have a fourfold greater chance of meeting the physical activity guidelines
to dramatically lower their risk for cardiovascular disease.
Studies show that dog owners have lower average blood pressure.
The stress reduction associated with it is documented to improve mood and their emotional
states that can reduce depression and yield positive effects on well-being, particularly
single people, women, children, and older adults experiencing the loss of a spouse or
a divorce.
Wow.
How huge is that?
For many years, service dogs have been used for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder
in people with all types of post-traumatic stress disorder events.
But there's a lot of research on that in returning soldiers.
Dogs become a member of your family, and that attachment produces changes in oxytocin and
cortisol levels and creates long-term changes that last.
We're out of time.
Thank you for tuning in.
As always, do something to be healthier this weekend than you were last, including considering
getting a dog.
Have a great 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
Dr. Binkley 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.