Eat This Daily to Clean Out Your Arteries — Transcript

Dr. Eric Berg explains how daily habits can clean arteries, reverse plaque, and why cholesterol isn't the main cause of heart attacks.

Key Takeaways

Heart attacks result mainly from rupture of soft plaque and immune clotting, not just cholesterol buildup.
Small dense LDL particles are more harmful than large buoyant LDL and cause artery inflammation.
Lifestyle and environmental factors like diet and smoking damage artery lining and promote plaque.
Statins do not fix the root causes of plaque and come with potential risks and side effects.
Focusing on upstream causes and improving habits can reverse artery plaque and improve heart health.

Summary

Eating certain foods daily can help clean arteries and reverse plaque buildup.
Heart attacks are often caused by rupture of unstable soft plaque, not just plaque accumulation.
There are two types of plaque: hard (stable) and soft (unstable), with soft plaque causing most heart attacks.
Cholesterol is often wrongly blamed; small dense LDL particles cause artery damage, not total cholesterol.
Endothelium damage from smoking, high insulin, and processed foods triggers inflammation and immune response.
White blood cells (macrophages) consume oxidized LDL, forming foam cells that contribute to soft plaque.
Most people with heart attacks have normal LDL levels, showing cholesterol alone isn't the root cause.
Excess carbohydrates increase triglycerides and small dense LDL, fueling plaque formation.
Statins reduce cholesterol but don't address immune reactions or root causes and may have side effects.
Improving one's environment and lifestyle is key to preventing artery damage and heart disease.

Chapters

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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You want to eat this every single day if you want to clean out the arteries and prevent plaque from building up. And even if you have plaque, what I'm going to share with you will actually help not just minimize the plaque, but reverse the plaque.

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I just need to clear up the biggest confusion that people have with heart attacks. That a heart attack is caused by the artery filling up with plaque. That is absolutely not what happens. What typically happens is you

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have a small amount of plaque, but it's a certain type of plaque because there's two types of plaque. There's hard plaque, which has been calcified, it's more stable, and then you have soft plaque, which is very unstable. And so, you

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literally can have even 20% of the plaque that builds up right here, and then it ruptures, and then what happens, your immune system comes in and creates a clotting reaction, and the clot creates the heart attack. And of course, cholesterol

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usually gets the blame, but you're going to find out it's not the cholesterol at all. And it's so important to understand the basics of this because what most people end up doing is going to the doctor, and their cholesterol is high,

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they're put on a statin, and they get a lot of side effects, but the statin never gets rid of the root cause. So, let's first talk about this entire chain of events that occurs. Over here, you have something called downstream. This

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is when you get the plaque building up. This is when you get the symptoms, and this is where you eventually have the heart attack, and you might die. Well, this problem has been brewing in the oven for 10 to 20 to 30 or more years,

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okay? What happens before that is something called upstream events. And the reason why this is so important is because it's missing in medicine.

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Medicine does not study root causes. They don't get into them. They're so focused down here managing the symptoms.

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So, the best way to really understand this is in the arteries, you have this very thin layer inside the artery called the endothelium. And that endothelium is so vitally important to keep the blood flowing and protect anything from getting inside the wall of

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the artery. And there's something in there called nitric oxide, which actually helps the contraction relaxation of this artery. But of course that coating can be destroyed over time.

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Just picture someone coming in there with sandpaper and roughing it up. And that sandpaper is either smoking or chronic high insulin because that person has chronically high blood glucose. But it can also come from the ingredients in ultra-processed foods.

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All of that irritates this inner very thin fragile area of the inside of the artery called the endothelium. So over time we go into the next phase. And this is where we have inflammation and damage in that little endothelial wall. It's like

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this little wound that happens in the inside of the arteries. So we have inflammation, which then tells the immune system, the white blood cells, to come in and start repairing it. Now this is where I want to bring in this

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cholesterol thing, right? Because when you go to the doctor, you get your total cholesterol tested, you get your HDL and your LDL. And a lot of times people talk about LDL as being bad and HDL being good. The HDL is taking cholesterol from

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the tissues and bringing it back to the liver, okay? But the LDL is depositing cholesterol in certain parts of the body. You need to know there's two types of LDL, okay? There's the large one, it's called large buoyant. You have the

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small one right here. This is called small dense. So when you get a typical blood test and they measure your total LDL, it really does not tell you what's going on between this and this. And that is why it's so important to ask your

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doctor for an advanced lipid profile to be able to assess the particle size. Why? Because the big ones don't invade the arteries, okay? They just float through. They don't cause damage. The real damage with LDL is the small dense particle size. It

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gets stuck in the arteries because it's small. So, if you're getting these stuck in that wall, you're going to get inflammation. And so, what comes to rescue this is the white blood cell. The specific type of white blood cell, not

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that you need to know this, is called the macrophage. It's going to go in there and it's going to start eating up these guys right here. And it doesn't know when to stop. So, it'll just keep eating and eating and eating. And when

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they look through a microscope at what's happening, it looks like it's all foamy, okay? And that's why they came up with the word foam cells, which are basically bloated white blood cells because they've eaten too much of this oxidized

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LDL cholesterol. And then they die. Over time, when we're talking about soft plaque, underneath that very tiny cap, you don't just have cholesterol. You have a graveyard of dead white blood cells. And yes, you do have some cholesterol, but you also have calcium

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that comes in there that helps act as a band-aid. So, when you get your cholesterol tested and the doctor says, "We need to lower your cholesterol with a statin." That doesn't address the immune reaction, the foam cells, the

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graveyard. So, this idea that cholesterol is causing your heart attacks is completely false. There was a massive study by UCLA involving over 135,000 people who had heart attacks.

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75% of them had normal LDL. So, how can you say the cause was cholesterol? The problem with the whole medical system is they're not looking earlier. They're not looking upstream. You are a fish living in an environment that's very toxic.

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Welcome to planet Earth, where everything around us is engineered for dependency or addiction. From the screens that we watch to the food that we eat, I developed a program that works in the exact opposite. It focuses in on

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your environment, the water in the tank, not the fish. Because if we can change your environment and make the good habits easier and the bad habits more difficult, then you don't have to rely on willpower and discipline because

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focusing in on the environment first allows you to focus on the real problem. Click the link down below, take the quiz, and find out the key changes in the exact environment to make a huge difference in your health. The big

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question is what allowed that cholesterol to get there in the first place? We had the small dense lipoprotein. What causes those?

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That would be a good question, ask, right? Well, if we go earlier, it's excessive triglycerides from carbohydrates because excess carbohydrates turn into the storage form, which is triglycerides. When the liver is overloaded because the person had too many carbohydrates, then you start

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developing excessive amounts of small dense particle size LDL. That is at the root cause. These little guys get oxidized because they hang around a lot more, creating an immune reaction. This is the missing piece of the puzzle right here. If you're going

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to take a statin, you have to consider the recent study put out on statins that said that, "Oh, they're much safer than we thought. There's only a 5% risk of getting muscle problems, right?" Well, let's just bring that up for a second

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because there's several really huge holes in that study. Number one, the CTT, which is an organization involved in this study, will not release the raw data of that study despite years of trying to get that data. And this is the problem with

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research is that you can't see the raw data until it creates a problem and years later you end up in a lawsuit like with many medications that were supposed to be safe and then all of a sudden they find

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out they're actually very deadly. Well, the CTT also happened to take a lot of money from Big Pharma. I'm talking $200 were donated to the CTT organization.

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So, we have conflict of interest right there. Observational studies show that there's a much greater risk of getting muscle damage and other side effects.

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But, the biggest thing that jumped out in stud

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It's a trick. Okay? Before they even randomize these people, what they'll do is they'll have everyone on the drug and they find out who reacts to it and then they will take those people that couldn't tolerate the drug

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and remove them from the study. So, now we have a layer that is kind of hidden from the average person. They don't realize they're screening out the people that are going to react up front and removing them from the study. Well,

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guess what that's going to do? That's going to alter the study big time. When you take a statin, you're blocking the production of cholesterol, you are reducing LDL, but you're also blocking coenzyme Q10, which is a very important

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nutrient for your mitochondria. But, what is this remedy that we need to talk about that you can help to reverse this soft plaque? Here it is right here. Aged garlic extract. Now, this is really interesting because there's two

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randomized controlled trials with aged garlic using 2,400 mg per day. I mean, this is huge because they used angiogram studies and they found that it not just stabilized the situation, it reduced the soft plaque. Just to differentiate between soft plaque and hard plaque,

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hard plaque sometimes you can't actually get rid of it because it's calcified and it's stable and it really is not going to cause a problem for most people. It rarely creates a problem.

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It's the soft plaque that most people need to be concerned about and guess what? Aged garlic helps reduce the soft plaque in a significant way. It also can help lower blood pressure moderately.

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It also acts as an antioxidant. It also can help thin the blood. So, this is why you have to work with the doctor if you're on a blood thinning medication.

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Now, what about regular garlic? When you crush it and you take it, well, that's really effective for blood pressure, thinning in the blood, clotting, but it does not have the powerful effects of reducing soft plaque. It might, it's just never been studied

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before. So, a lot of people ask me, what supplements do I recommend? Now, of course, I'm not biased of my own high quality supplement line, but if you go to Amazon and type Dr. Berg supplements, you'll find more information. Now, of

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course, I'm also going to recommend exercise. It can also increase nitric oxide, especially if you're outside in the sun, super important for the inside of the arteries and blood flow. Then we have magnesium, completely essential. Magnesium is the

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cofactor to help the mitochondria, the heart, and the arteries. And also magnesium controls excess calcification, super important.

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Fish oil's also been known to help reduce soft plaque, not to the level aged garlic can do it, but it can actually help. I would recommend cod liver oil because it has vitamin A and vitamin D as well. And of course,

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intermittent fasting will reduce inflammation and also reduce that insulin resistance, which is at the heart of this whole problem. And of course, go on a low-carb diet because, again, we want to get the sugar out so we don't form too many

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triglycerides that then turn into the small dense LDL. If you're doing all these things right here, you're going to lower the small dense dangerous LDL that we've talked about. The next most important thing that you need to understand is the details of how to do

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a healthy version of the ketogenic with intermittent fasting. And for that information, this is the video that you should watch right here. Check it out.

Topics:artery healthplaque reversalheart attack causescholesterol mythsLDL particle sizeendothelium damageinflammationstatin riskssmall dense LDLDr. Eric Berg

Frequently Asked Questions

What causes heart attacks if not just plaque buildup?

Heart attacks are mainly caused by the rupture of unstable soft plaque, which triggers an immune clotting reaction that blocks blood flow, not just by plaque accumulation.

Why is cholesterol often misunderstood in heart disease?

Total cholesterol levels do not differentiate between harmful small dense LDL particles and harmless large buoyant LDL; it's the small dense LDL that causes artery damage.

How do lifestyle factors contribute to artery damage?

Smoking, chronic high insulin from blood sugar, and ultra-processed foods damage the artery lining (endothelium), causing inflammation and promoting plaque formation.

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