Today’s podcast is on heart health. You may be surprised to hear that many of things I recommend to help keep your skin clear and glowing, also protect your heart health. To tell us more about how to keep a healthy heart I invited Dr. Joel Kahn as my guest today.
Dr. Joel Kahn is a plant based cardiologist that has launched a campaign to prevent 1 million heart attacks through healthy living. He teaches early detection, prevention, and reversal of heart disease. He is the founder of the Kahn Center for Cardiac Longevity. He is a graduate Summa Cum Laude of the University of Michigan School of Medicine and is a Professor of Medicine. His books, The Whole Heart Solution and Dead Execs Don’t Get Bonuses are both #1 bestsellers. He is co-owner of GreenSpace Cafe in Ferndale with his son.
On Today’s show, Dr. Kahn shares: the causes of heart disease, tests to determine if you are at risk, diet and other lifestyle choices for the heart that also help skin, and how to actually reverse heart disease. Enjoy…
I hope you enjoyed today’s podcast. To learn more about Dr. Joel Kahn visit his website here.
If you have not done so already, I highly recommend that you get your customized skin profile here. It’s free – Based upon your answers, it will give you great tips for glowing skin and vibrant health.
Also don’t miss out on all of the latest tips to get glowing healthy skin from the inside and out, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. And join the conversation! Thank you and we’ll see you next time!
TRANSCRIPTION
| Trevor: | Hi there, I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Welcome to the Spa [Doctor 00:00:09] Podcast. Today’s podcast is on heart health. You may be surprised, or not, to hear that many of the things I recommend to help keep your skin clear and glowing also protect your heart. To tell us more about how to keep a healthy heart, I invited Dr. Joel Kahn as my guest today. Dr. Kahn is a plant-based cardiologist that has launched a campaign to prevent one million heart attacks through healthy living. He teaches early detection, prevention, and reversal of heart disease. He’s founder of the Kahn Center for Cardiac Longevity, he’s a graduate summa cum laude of the University of Michigan’s School of Medicine, and is a professor of medicine. His books, “The Whole Heart Solution” and “Dead Execs Don’t Get Bonuses,” are both number one bestsellers. He’s also co-owner of Greenspace Café in Ferndale, Michigan with his son. |
| On today’s show, Dr. Kahn shares the causes of heart disease, tests to determine if you are at risk, diet and other lifestyle choices for heart that also help your skin. How to actually reverse heart disease. Please enjoy this interview with Dr. Joel Kahn. Joel, it’s great to have you on my podcast. | |
| Joel: | I couldn’t feel more mutually excited, and as darn about the time, it’s a gray, cold, and rainy day in Michigan, and you’ve probably got blue skies out there in Utah. At least you got blue eyes, that we know for sure. |
| Trevor: | Yes. Absolutely yes. It is a beautiful blue sky day in Park City. We’re talking today about heart disease because this is your specialty. This is your thing, this is your space. Let’s talk about this. What are the causes of heart disease? |
| Joel: | I just want to say you’re the skin spa queen and we call that the epithelium. I’m the heart doctor and I talk to my patients about the endothelium. We’re basically talking about layers of cells and keeping them as glowing and healthy as we can. I just try and keep them glowing inside. It’s a little harder to determine that. We learned it was felt that heart disease was an inevitable consequence of aging as recently as fifty, sixty years ago. Then a rise in heart attacks started occurring worldwide. The United States, males, huge in the 50s, and also Finland. People were dying left and right. Big strapping lumberjacks in Finland. A lot of research went on and we came up with the big five risk factors that are taught in medical school. Smoking, sugar diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and a family member very close to your brother, sister, mother, father that had heart disease, stroke, heart attack, bypass, or death early in life. If grandma was ninety, sad for grandma, it doesn’t put you on risk. |
| Those are the big five, but there’s at least fifteen or twenty more that are now easily checked in a [inaudible 00:03:10] center. We check them all. We also know we needed to make it more practical because those measurements are probably going to be done with the healthcare practitioner. We know certain steps you can take that make your chance of not getting heart disease eighty to ninety percent better than if you don’t do them. There’s five that have come out of research studies. Don’t smoke, walk thirty to forty minutes every day at a minimum level of activity. More if you want to work out more. Eat more than five to six servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Keep your waist trim, men under forty inches, women under thirty-five is what the research says. The trimmer the better. Seven hours of sleep at night. Then the fun one, which is an alcoholic drink on a pretty regular basis, not to excess. Those five or six steps have fallen out of studies. | |
| You want to know your cholesterol, your blood sugar, your blood pressure and such, but lifestyle can prevent without doubt eighty percent of these tragic heart attacks. We can prevent the majority of them with fairly simple lifestyle checkups. I go deep and we may want to talk about how do you go deep to know for sure. | |
| Trevor: | I think we should definitely go deep on those. I think it’s interesting that a lot of what you’re talking about also is what I talk about with helping people have healthy skin. Healthy lifestyle helps us in so many different ways. It helps protect the heart, it also shows up on our skin. When our skin is healthier, that could be a really good indication that other things are going on well within the body. I just wanted to point that out that it’s really interesting that for you and I, it’s not a surprise, but for some people, I just want to make sure in pointing that out, that there’s more one reason to exercise regularly. To get a good night’s sleep, to eat healthy, and to pay attention to these things because it impacts our health in so many different ways and on many different levels. Yeah, lets go ahead and go deep on those different things. |
| I’m really particularly interested in what you said about the alcoholic drink. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that. | |
| Joel: | Yeah. That particular topic is, and you’ve got to be very careful when you’re commenting to the public that there’s health advantages to have alcohol in your life because there’s clearly a down side and there’s clearly both the addictive and the driving and the liver. There is probably a spike in cancer amongst drinkers versus non-drinkers, but heart disease is such a big elephant in the room, much bigger than breast cancer in women. It may be a bit of a trade-off, and this isn’t said in any way to be insensitive. When you look at global statistics, people that drink as much as a drink a day or less, three or four a week, have a clear heart advantage and survival advantage over non-drinkers. Now still, you hear a back and forth in the media recently, but it’s pretty clear, strong data. |
| If you’re enjoying a glass of red wine, pinot noir, my favorite. There’s a wine from Sardinia called Cannonau. Sardinia, an island off of Italy, happens to have about the longest lifespan in the world, one of the top five. Some people credit that particular wine, which is frankly not very expensive at local wine shops. It’s not an exclusive thing to drink. Cannonau. There’s much more important ones. Fruits and vegetables, and I agree. I make your dermatology analogies because I wish heart disease was as easy to detect as wrinkles or a new mole, but heart disease is such a silent process. | |
| What I teach based on science, what I write about in my books and stuff, is don’t fall victim to waiting until you feel bad to know you have heart disease, because too many people the first clue they have heart disease is either the massive heart attack that alters your lifestyles, your quality of life, or you’re dead. Dead’s pretty bad. Pretty hard to enjoy life when you’re dead. At least from my understanding of what’s going on. We’ve moved the needle to where now, for example, of course many women will get a mammogram or a thermogram, even though they feel fine, but look for the actual problem in the breast. Age fifty, you might choose to get a colonoscopy, a rather standard recommendation I’d endorse. Make sure you don’t have a silent polyp. There’s no such procedure for the number one killer in the world, heart disease. There is, it’s just that it’s not incorporated into what most people do. | |
| There are two ways to know for sure. It’s something I advocate for non-stop in my writings in “The Huffington Post” or whatever. There is a CAT scan that was developed of the heart about fifteen to twenty years ago that was simple and able to detect silent heart disease. It’s called a coronary artery calcium scanner, or a coronary artery heart scan. It’s just about a one minute lie down on a gurney, roll into a CAT scanner, go home. No IV, no injection, no iodine, no exercise. Because of the advances in technology, the amount of radiation has gone way down because CAT scans are fast. Now it’s on par with about the amount of radiation women get from a mammogram. When this came out fifteen, twenty years ago, there wasn’t a lot of research. There was not any insurance reimbursement and many places were charging about a thousand dollars. Oprah would talk about it, people would do out and get it. | |
| In my community, and most communities now, the amount of radiation has really come down. The research is huge that this is the single best test. You’re forty-five years old, you’re a little worried your cholesterol’s up. Your doctor’s starting to talk to you about taking a statin medicine like Lipitor. In my community, it costs as little as eighty dollars. You’ll pay on your own. In Texas, everybody gets one free as part of a legislative act in the state of Texas. It’s well accepted in the medical community. What you want to find out is you’re a zero. You want to know that your heart arteries have zero calcium in them, which again will take less than a minute, and that predicts for about a decade that your risk of heart attack or any surprise like that, or maybe you’re eating dinner and you get a couple little funny feelings. You can say, “I’m a zero so I probably don’t need to worry about as opposed to the person that comes back.” | |
| If it’s not zero, it could be one, it could be a hundred, it could be a thousand. It could be two thousand. I have many patients that believe they were totally healthy, playing squash, golfing, traveling the world, recently retired, and found out that their arteries were rotten. We have a program. The good news is we have a program to unrotten them. Some that’s going to be lifestyle, some that’s going to be supplements. It’s always going to be healthy eating and good attitude. It could make a huge difference. There is also, if somebody really doesn’t want to go for a CAT scan, and it’s not a claustrophobic CAT scan, you can do a specialized ultrasound of the neck, the carotid artery, and you can get an age, a fifty-year-old man or woman can find out if their arterial or biologic age is forty, which would be wonderful news. It is sixty and they’re aging too quick. | |
| There was an English physician in three hundred and fifty years ago who said, “A man is as old as his arteries.” That was dated and he omitted women, but I flip it. You’re as young as your arteries, and if you will check accurately and specifically, either a heart artery age by calcium or a carotid ultrasound, all the CIMTU, you can know your real age and you can work to focus on avoiding. If you do those lifestyle features, if you get the correct blood tests, and you get this advanced heart check at least once in those middle years, you should never, ever, ever have a heart attack. | |
| The interesting, just to conclude, because I’d like to talk about this topic, there’s a statement out there, if you have a heart attack over age eighty, it’s the will of God. If you have a heart attack under age eighty, it’s a medical failure. That’s a provocative statement because many of us know somebody under the age eighty that had a heart attack. That’s a medical failure. That was a statement from the 1950s by the head of the American Heart Association. That’s not a new concept. He recognized, Paul Dudley White, he was President Eisenhower’s cardiologist, said, “We know what causes this problem and we know what we need to teach the public.” He didn’t know about CAT scans in the 1950s. The idea that we can cut back on America’s number one killer with lifestyle, certain testing, and then reacting to it in an appropriate way, as not even a new idea, but it’s still not one implemented enough. It’s great that we’ve had this little platform for me to speak about it because it’s what I get passionate about. | |
| Trevor: | Yeah, and I think it’s so important to talk about these things and to be proactive on our health. What age did you say that people should have the CAT scan? It’s starting at … You mentioned forty-five, but is that a good time to start? |
| Joel: | Maybe even age forty. The American College of Cardiology, I’m not radical in this, they’ll endorse that, this idea of this CAT scan or carotid. State of Texas has endorsed it with actual reimbursements. I’m not speaking about something that doesn’t have a good foundation. It’s just not well-known in the community and it’s not often recommended by primary doctors. The American College of Cardiology says if you have a risk factor. Your blood pressure’s up, your cholesterol’s up, which is going to be a huge portion of the population. You’ve got the family member or the blood sugar, or you’ve been a smoker. Yeah, I would do it as early as forty to forty-five. If you’re a person that answers to that [inaudible 00:12:33], “I don’t have any of that,” it gets a little less clear the benefit. I would clearly do it though between forty-five and fifty for that one minute, eighty to a hundred dollars, and very low radiation risk. |
| If you eat a big green salad with the red peppers and antioxidants when you go for a CAT scan, it actually probably helps. There’s some science behind that. It may actually help make the radiation exposure even less of an issue. It’s pretty much not an issue anyways. | |
| Trevor: | Okay, let’s talk a little bit about blood work. You mentioned that blood work is something important to do as well. What are the blood work tests that you usually run on your patients? General screening or are there any other ones that you run in addition if they have certain risk factors? |
| Joel: | Thank you for asking that. I don’t own a lab, so these are all medical answers. There’s been huge advances, but again, for reasons I don’t understand, they’re not being promoted to the public as much as I think they should. Again, for about fifty years, you should know your fasting blood sugar. You should have a fasting cholesterol panel, your HDL, your LDL, your triglycerides. About fifteen to twenty years ago, pretty routinely we added in a test, HSCRP. There are certain lifestyle features and diseases, like obesity, sleep apnea, psoriasis, gum disease, that will cause chemicals in your blood that are inflammatory to be circulating all the time, and not good for your skin and not good for your heart. Not good for your brain. Not good for your cancer risk. You can check all those. |
| That’s the basic bare bones that you want. Now but in my office, we’ve been able to go way beyond that. There’s advanced cholesterol panels where you learn your LDL particle number. LDL size that are much more advanced. You can check antioxidant levels. You can check other inflammatory markers. I like to know genetics on patients. If you tell me your father or mother had a heart attack at age fifty, we can do a test called apolipoprotein E that you would really want to know what you’ve gotten from mom and dad. It’s a form of cholesterol, and this may sound a bit unwieldy for some people listening. There’s one called, I would absolutely recommend people get one called lipoprotein a. Not apo. Lipoprotein a, or LPa it’s called in some worlds. It’s a genetic form of cholesterol. In Europe, it’s routinely checked. It’s recommended to be checked in Europe. In the United States, we ignore the fact that twenty percent of the population is carrying around a high risk cholesterol abnormality. A few dollars to get it checked. It’s not even all that fancy. LPa, or lipoprotein a. | |
| Inflammatory markers like the C Reactive protein. APOE, a genetic marker for heart disease. One of the most interesting one, and I’ll just [inaudible 00:15:22], there’s a new one in the last five years that’s got four letters: TMAO. “T” as in Tom, MAO. It’s a new molecule in the blood. It’s not new, it’s newly described. We can measure it now, and when it’s elevated, it’s been shown to direct the, not just correlate developing any heart disease, but it seems to actually cause plaque in your arteries, like we learned cholesterol fifty years ago might do that. Now we’ve to TMAO. It’s interesting because it’s a combination of something I know you probably do in your practice. It’s what you eat and what your microbiome and your bacteria are doing because if you eat a meat and egg heavy diet, and you happen to have a certain mix of bacteria, you’ll make this chemical, and it’ll put you at risk for heart disease and actually kidney disease. The literature around is exploding, although it’s not routine yet to get checked. I do it on my patients.
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| If you eat eggs and meat, but you have the right kind of microbiome, you just don’t make it and you’re lucky. If you eat only plant-based, you won’t make it ever because it requires some of the constituents in eggs and meat. An interesting newer research people can read about, but you probably won’t find it yet at most practitioners in your community. | |
| Trevor: | This is really, really interesting. Thank you for sharing all those details on labs to order. Let’s talk a little bit about cholesterol because there’s some information out there that having your cholesterol checked is not important. I usually still run cholesterol and I also run a panel called VAP, which I think has a lot of the things that you just mentioned. It doesn’t have an HSCRP, but what do you think about these people that are saying cholesterol is not important? |
| Joel: | You asked a very hot question, and I don’t think it should be a hot question, but it is. Again, going back fifty or sixty years … No actually going back over a hundred years, now that I think about it, 1913, a Russian researcher named Anichkov identified that the constituents of plaque in arteries was to a large part cholesterol. He also found when he fed mice very high cholesterol foods like butter and eggs, saturated fat-rich and cholesterol-rich, he could create plaque in mouse arteries, heart arteries. From 1913 to the present day, there have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of animal and human studies that relate the higher your blood cholesterol, the higher your risk of getting clogged arteries throughout the body and such. |
| When I was in Dallas, Texas, a rare genetic disorder called familial hyperlipidemia, or acquired inherited cholesterol disorders, and these would often affect little children. I had a ten-year-old patient with a cholesterol of a thousand. She had already had bypass surgery and needed balloon angioplasty, and ultimately didn’t make it until she was fifteen. It’s just purely a disorder where your cholesterol is five hundred, seven hundred, nine hundred, or a thousand. It makes it so obvious that at the extremes, there is no debate. We need to work hard to bring it down. When you look at one of the classic examples, when you look at Japan, Japan in its native state before Kentucky Fried Chicken invaded Tokyo, they had an average cholesterol levels of a hundred and twenty amongst the population of Japan. They would eat their rice and their vegetables and some fish and tofu and such, and they had very low cholesterol. Both breast cancer and heart disease were nearly unheard of. | |
| When they moved to Hawaii in migration to work in some of the sugar cane plants, the same people that had been, cholesterol went up fifty, seventy, eighty points as they started to get a mix of Western diet. Then they were tracked, and this was work done in the 1960s, to California, because many of them migrated all within the same generations. We’re not talking about any possibility of genetic change. Their cholesterol would be up in the two hundred range, started to eat food that was typical of California in the 1960s, early 1970s, and diabetes, heart disease, and obesity would just rise. In my view, there’s no controversy that there’s a relationship and you need some cholesterol in your body as a backbone for sex hormones and vitamin D and membranes in your cells. The question is how much? | |
| There are, again, genetic disorders where you naturally run a low cholesterol your whole life. Those people have a side effect of a naturally low cholesterol. They live about ten years longer than the average American. Yet, what’s happened in the last few years is there’s been confusion about the issue of dietary cholesterol influencing heart disease and maybe even high cholesterol’s better. I have patients that have been given cholesterol tablets by integrated docs, and I have to very carefully try not to explode in a reaction. I don’t think we’ve lost focus, at least in the cardiology world, that there are many factors that cause heart disease. Cholesterol’s only one. You’re better off, and it’s almost rare to see heart disease with a total cholesterol under a hundred and fifty. Yes, you can do it if you smoke heavily. Yes, you can do it if you’re a diabetic. It’s generally a disease where there may be one or two factors, but it’s almost always a cholesterol over a hundred and fifty. | |
| I would eat wisely, I would eat plant strong. I would moderate the amount of saturated fat in your diet. I would not view eggs, butter, cheese as heart friendly, artery friendly foods. I know we’re in a period where that’s a bit confused right now, but I think the classic statement, “If you forget history, you’re doomed to repeat it.” I think we’re going through a cycle that we’ve cycled through every few decades, and now there’s just a lot of commercial interests that are beating this up and benefiting from it, unfortunately. | |
| Trevor: | Yeah. I agree with you on that. I think that we’ve swung an extreme … At least for some people. You’ve mentioned some things to help prevent heart disease, but what about if somebody already had heart disease? Can it be reversed or is it hard to reverse it at that point? |
| Joel: | Yeah, that is why I could stand again on rooftops and shout that how exciting data that is not new, but is not stressed, emphasized, and taught. It’s a whole failure of the medical system because the doctors don’t teach it to their patients. Yet, thank God for the internet because a lot of people will come across on their own. There was an interesting observation during World War II, Norway, Sweden, particularly Norway, you would anticipate, my God World War II, all this stress. Heart attack rates must’ve gone off the roof from just stress. Indeed, heart attack rates plummeted to super low levels during World War II in many of these countries that could track it. The feeling was take away animal products, fat, and sugar, and you’re left with basically a foraging forest root vegetable diet, and heart attack rates went down tremendously. |
| That observation was published in after the end of World War II. A few very bright people saw that data and asked the question, “What if we reproduce that diet in people with heart disease?” The first one was an internist in Los Angeles in the late 1940s, published charts. “This is what I want you to eat and not eat.” He took away the cream, he took away the butter, took away some of the pastries and sweets, and showed that his patients lived twice as long if they followed that diet that didn’t. This is 1940s, he published the data in 1951. There was an engineer who saw that data named Nathan Pritikin, got excited about it, started working on his own diet, and brought his cholesterol from three hundred down to a hundred and twenty. Was able to show that he reversed his own heart disease based on his stress test. He’s the famous engineer that set up what is now the Pritikin Longevity Center in South Beach, and a series of hospital-based programs called Pritikin Cardiac Rehab to reverse heart disease. | |
| Our government pays for two plant-based dietary programs for heart disease reversal. That’s the only programs they pay for because the data’s so strong. The real famous name, just to conclude, is Dr. Dean Ornish, lives in Sausalito, California. He’s still a man in his early 60s, but when he was very, very young undergrad medical student in the late 70s, early 80s, he knew this data and he said, “What we need to do is bring technology. We’ll never convince the world unless I can show you pictures of clogged heart arteries that get better.” He did such a study. Incorporated walking, he incorporated some yoga and stress management, but the primary focus was a diet rich in plant-based foods, very low in added oils, and documented that peer reviewed, best research you can do, that heart disease can be reversed and heart attacks can be decreased, and chest pain and leg pains can go away. | |
| The interesting thing is everything I mentioned to you is five, six decades old. Yet it took until 2010 that we finally got Medicare to grant approval and payment for at least two of these programs. A movie like “Fork Over Knives,” in my practice you can’t come see me a second time if … You don’t have to quit smoking because I realize that’s hard and we’re going to work on that, but if you’re not willing to watch a seventy-five minute video called “Forks Over Knives” that describes the lifestyle that can reverse heart disease, adult diabetes, obesity, we’ve got a bit of a conflict there. You got to put in your effort, I’ll put in my effort. It’s absolutely a reversible condition. | |
| If we’ll get out of the way of our bodies, our bodies can repair themselves. I’m sure that is true for glowing skin as it is for internal aging that’s going on. | |
| Trevor: | Absolutely. I’m so glad to hear you say that. I think it’s important for people to know that it’s not too late. It’s always great to prevent, but if we’ve already gotten to a point where we made some poor choices with our diet or we’ve been dealt a bad hand with genetics, then it’s good to know that we can do things. I know that you are a vegan. In fact, weren’t you just voted the sexiest vegan? |
| Joel: | Okay, let’s have a vote. Everybody watching right now. No it’s true. Somehow somewhere, PETA.org has a … They actually have a different sexy celebrities and all, but they have a vegans over fifty sexiest male, sexiest female in the world, and somehow my name got submitted, and somehow this week, I won the male award. For the next year, I’ll be wearing the banner and carrying the roses and the tiara, and hopefully standing next to Pamela Lee Anderson as much as I can. We’ve talked a lot about diet for healthy hearts, healthy bodies, heart reversal. You have young children, I have children. We also have to eat for the planet. Perhaps we should care about eating for the animals and the way food industry has transitioned. I’m proud of the fact that when you eat more and more plant-based, you are also voting for better oceans, better forests, better oxygen, and the rest. |
| It’s the most profound and hopefully your listeners know that, but in case they don’t, driving a Prius is awesome and driving a Tesla is amazing in terms of consumption of carbon fuels, but what you do with your food three meals a day is much more profound in terms of keeping the planet green and fresh for our children and grandchildren. PETA’s always been a big advocate of that and particularly the animal rights. There are clearly nice examples of sympathetic and kind farmers that have humane treatment, but ninety-five percent of the food produced in this country is outrageously cruel and over the top. It’s okay to talk about it. Your listeners are amongst those seeking out the better sources or maybe not even eating animal products. At least meatless Monday, do that for the world, if nothing else. | |
| Okay, the sexy vegan got a little philosophical there. I apologize. | |
| Trevor: | No, no. It’s good. No, I think it’s important for people to remember why it’s good to … If people choose to be vegan or vegetarian, or if you eat meat, to do it responsibly. If you eat animal protein, to make sure that you’re choosing the ones that are … They’re raised properly and that have good farming practices, those sorts of things. I think it’s so important. I’m glad that you bring it up. I’m not a vegan myself. I do know that some of my followers are vegans, and with my book that’s coming out, I talk about modifications that people can make. I’m just curious to know what you recommend for being a healthy vegan, because I see a lot of unhealthy vegans out there. |
| I think a lot of people say, “I’m just going to take out meat.” I especially see this in younger people. Teenagers, people in their 20s, they say, “I’m going to save the planet.” We’re talking, which is important. “I want to do my part and I’m not going to eat meat,” but that’s all they do. They just take out the animal protein and then they forget about the rest. Will you talk to us about how to be a healthy vegan? | |
| Joel: | Sure. A lot of us went into that transitional or the fake baloney or the fake hot dogs were easy transitions. You can do all kinds of foods and call it vegan, whether it’s pizzas or Skittles or chips. There’s a lot of foods out there that … Coca Cola. You’re not going to be healthy, but you’ll be not harming animals either. A lot of writers now use the term “whole food plant-based diet” to stress that we’re talking about the produce department, we’re talking about the farmer’s market. We’re talking about making big bean chilis and casseroles, and good that involves real food, not processed food, because you can be a highly processed junk food vegan, like you can be the majority of America highly processed junk food omnivore. You may move the environment and animal rights issues ahead, but you may not move your own health. |
| That’s it. Eat apples, eat carrots, eat celery, eat salads, and make nice, beautiful smoothies. You want to throw in a little bit of tofurkey here and there and fake hot dogs here and there, and that’s all fine, but you better get the same five, six, seven servings of fruits and vegetables a day that everybody else needs to get. It’s easier if you’re focused on whole food plant-based. B12, absolutely. Vitamin D, absolutely, but that’s true of most of the public. I check those levels in plenty of omnivores and plant-based eaters, and many, many people need supplementation. I’m a supplement-friendly cardiologist. I don’t find it a problem that a diet that might make you less prone to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer requires a couple pills a day that make it optimal and balanced. It’s just silly to risk not getting enough Vitamin B12 particularly. | |
| I don’t measure anything. I don’t count anything. I just eat of this salad bar and I happen, perhaps you know this or not, I happen to own an elegant vegan restaurant in suburban Detroit. It’s pretty easy for me to eat well and share that with three or four hundred people. The Detroit area, come visit me. I’ll be at the bar giving wise heart advice over beautiful food. | |
| Trevor: | How long have you been vegan? Yeah, I do want to hear more about your restaurant and what kinds of things you serve there. |
| Joel: | Yeah. Me it’s been about forty years. It’s been a long process. I walked into undergraduate University of Michigan, Ann Arbor the first day and I went into the cafeteria, and I said, “Salad bar. It’s the only thing I’m going to eat.” It just was a reaction. Happened to be a super good salad bar and everything else was disgusting. Along the way, there are little bits of medical data that were available, even back in the late 70s, early 80s, and they had interested me. I went off and became a hardcore macho cardiologist, three in the morning, treating heart attacks, and shocking people’s hearts, but I was eating a very rabbit-like diet after that. As more and more data, I just stuck with it. It’s been a very long journey. |
| Yeah, the restaurant is a fun place. If anybody’s been out to LA, there’s a big restaurant called Sage or Gracias Madre, and we’re in tune with those. It’s way over a hundred seats, full liquor license, big bar. Probably the only place in Michigan you can get organic beet juice mixed with bourbon and turmeric-infused vodkas, and cardamom-infused gins. A fun bar with a lot of lentil burgers, flatbreads. Actually, half the menu’s gluten free. It’s almost all organic. Big bowls, Mexican style bowls, Indian curry bowls. Chana Masala. A lot of ethnic influence for flavor, spice, and beautiful appeal, but we make everything in house. We’re not using any products, although a couple neat ones are coming down the road that … A possible food burger that’s supposed to look and feel pretty much exactly like a beef burger that you can get in LA, but we’re angling to try and be the first in Michigan to have it. | |
| Trevor: | Great, I love it. Next time I’m in Michigan, I don’t know when that’s going to be, but I’ll definitely come to your restaurant. I look forward to trying it. |
| Joel: | Thank you. |
| Trevor: | Yeah. |
| Joel: | Greenspace Café. I don’t have anything that says it. |
| Trevor: | Greenspace Café, perfect. I wanted to ask you about oils because I know that that’s a question that people ask me, vegans. What kind of oils do you recommend that people get in their diet? What are the safe, heart-healthy oils? |
| Joel: | Yeah. In that body of data I won’t go through again, starting in the 40s, reproducing that World War II Norway experiment, the research model was take away animal products, take away high fat foods, and take away most oils. When you talk about work done by this Mr. Pritikin or Dr. Dean Ornish, or Cleveland Clinic research projects, and heart disease, diabetes, weight loss, blood pressure, they tend to be whole food plant-based no added oil diets. That’s not to say every vegan needs to do that or every human in the world needs to do that, but the science is if you’re going to make a serious attempt to reverse established heart disease, adult diabetes, that is where the strongest body of data is. When my patients who have heart disease come to me, I do educate them that lard, butter, even ghee and all, I advocate the most of you avoiding, but even olive oil and such, if you’re a serious heart patient trying to reverse heart disease. That’s a little different than the general public.
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| To answer your question, I’m not a fan of animal saturated fat. The majority, even though we live in this world as you said, the pendulum is butter is back. I say butter is back in the corner, butter’s back in the cemeteries, is my cardiology perspective. I don think butter is back. Again, it’s also a matter of quantity, but certainly not a lot. I would advocate not at all. Olive oil’s wonderful. We’ve got the Mediterranean diet experience, extra virgin olive oil. Are there pieces of data that you could argue it’s not all that special? There are, but overall, it’s a substitution for lard or butter, it’s better, and actually vegetable oils are too. | |
| It’s unpopular to speak well of vegetable oils nowadays, but it’s more of a matter if you’re going to take something out of your diet, like you said, if a young person decides not to eat meat, they’re probably not going five hundred calories a day less. They’re going to put something in with it, and if they’re putting in chips and Skittles and a lot of low level soy-based hot dogs, it’s not necessarily been a good transition. Same thing if you’re taking butter and lard out of your diet, the issue is probably you’re putting something in. An organic vegetable oil, whether it be the lowly canola oil, which actually has a lot of Omega 3 in it and has cardiology data that favors it, extra virgin olive oil, those would be the two that I think I most favor. There’s some issue about cooking in the high temperature with the olive oil. Cooking in the high temperature with organic canola oil, but small amounts. Some people don’t favor that, but I think the science says not a bad choice. | |
| Trevor: | Okay. Great. All right. Thanks for sharing that. Tell us how we can learn more about you. Tell people how they can find your … I know you do have a PBS special, “The Whole Heart Solution,” right? Tell us about the PBS special and how people can find you. |
| Joel: | Yeah. I’m at Twitter all the time @DrJKahn at D-R-J-K-A-H-N. Play around Instagram, but most of what I do is on a Facebook page, Dr. Joel Kahn, and a website, drjoelkahn.com. D-R-J-O-E-L-K-A-H-N.com. You’re right, I’ve written three books. I’ve got a fourth book I’m working on right now, will be out in early 2017, on plant-based medicine. My first book continues to gain attention, “The Whole Heart Solution,” and our local public television station approached me about making it into an hour and a half long special teaching about integrative heart disease, holistic heart disease, which I favor. I do a whole broad approach. A lot of it is, again, we could talk at length about so many of the things I recommend that you probably would recommend too for overall health. Good sleep and stress management. Then of course, diet. |
| That is out as a PBS special in Detroit. It’s gotten good reception and then it’ll start touring the country late 2017 as a pledge show for public television to raise money, as all of us have seen when you turn that channel on. I’m excited about that. I get to visit some stations around the country and talk about heart disease with the public, which is always one of my great passions. | |
| Trevor: | Excellent. Joel, thanks so much for your interview today and sharing this all great information about heart health. I really appreciate it. |
| Joel: | Thank you for all you do because it really is all one giant, wonderful human body system that we share so much common messaging. Again, big fan of everything you’re doing. Thank you. |
| Trevor: | I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr. Joel Kahn. To learn more about Dr. Kahn, you can visit my website, thespadr.com, go to the podcast page with this interview, and you’ll find all the information and links there. Also, while you’re there, I invite you to join the Spa Doctor community on my website, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you get your own customized skin profile at theskinquiz.com. It’s free, based upon answers, just a few questions. You’ll get your own customized skin report. Just go to theskinquiz.com. Also, don’t miss out on the latest tips for glowing skin and vibrant health to just join me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram. Join me at any of those or all of them, and join the conversation. Thank you and I’ll see you next time in the Spa Doctor podcast. |
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