Shownotes
Today, we share a modern-day story of David and Goliath with Dr. Baxter Montgomery.
In 1997, Dr. Montgomery opened Montgomery Heart and Wellness in Houston, Texas right in the shadows of the powerful and world-renowned campus of the Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest medical center.
As a board-certified cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist, Dr. Montgomery has treated thousands of patients with severe cardiovascular diseases, but he started to notice something.
Even though he employed state-of-the-art procedures, interventions, ablations, and medications, his patients continued to grow weaker and sicker.
Montgomery, instead, started researching nutrition’s role in disease reversal and found that - you guessed it- PLANTS were the common denominator in determining wellness.
Today at Montgomery Heart and Wellness, Dr. Montgomery helps patients achieve optimal health and wellness through various nutrition programs. His goal? To get his patients to think beyond the script, improve their health, and reverse these chronic lifestyle diseases.
He truly is a modern-day David fighting a giant Goliath medical system, but much like David, he’s ready, willing, and able to slay the dragon of lifestyle disease.
Episode Timestamps
6:00 Why he was inspired to take a different approach to medicine
12:45 His own personal journey back to health that inspired his nutrition protocols
16:45 Just do this for seven days!
22:50 The results are astounding
24:30 Changing the Health Care Paradigm - “Heart and Souls of a Champion” upcoming program
29:50 Is his facility and in-patient center?
31:20 What’s an LVAT?
32:40 What is Lipoprotein a?
35:00 Are his colleagues on board, or still resistant?
39:00 Dr. Montgomery’s 3 pillars of optimal health
41:50 How can the human body heal itself so quickly?
45:35 Moderation is like running through quicksand.
47:40 How do his patients respond to his protocols and advice?
49:00 Why does he prescribe raw foods only for his patients?
57:00 All about the upcoming four-day Open House and Red Carpet Gala
1:02:00 How he is living his God-given passion
1:05:00 Bonus - Dr. Montgomery’s take on A-Fib and PVCs
Episode Resources
Montgomery Heart and Wellness Website
Learn More About Montgomery Heart Open House and Gala - October 19th-22nd, 2022
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Transcripts
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Dr. Baxter Montgomery:I had a patient suffered cardiac arrest right in my lobby a number of years ago. We resuscitated the patient, we shocked him.
By the time the ambulance got there, paramedics got there, he was awake and talking, had an IV in, et cetera. I put him in my hospital. One of my colleagues did his Cornell angiogram. They didn't have any significant blockages.
We implanted a fibrillator, but while he was in the hospitals on a raw detox diet that should be an adjunct to the therapy. So yes, the technology is needed in many people's cases, but the problem is that we are ignoring the foundation of health.
The foundation of health is optimal nutrition.
Rip Esselstyn:I'm Rip Esselstyn and welcome to the Plantstrong podcast. The mission at Plantstrong is to further the advancement of all things within the plant based movement.
We advocate for the scientifically proven benefits of plant based living and envision a world that universally understands, promotes and prescribes plants as a solution to to empowering your health, enhancing your performance, restoring the environment and becoming better guardians to the animals we share this planet with.
We welcome you wherever you are on your plan strong journey and I hope that you enjoy the show Today I'm going to share with you the story of David and Goliath. Okay, not that story exactly, but. But a modern day version with today's guest, Dr. Baxter Montgomery.
In:And throughout the years he has treated thousands of patients with severe cardiovascular diseases. And here's the thing.
Even though he employed state of the art procedures, interventions, ablations and medications, his patients continued to grow weaker and sicker.
He started researching nutrition's role in disease reversal and found that, yes, you guessed it, plants were the common denominator in determining wellness. Today at Montgomery heart and wellness, Dr. Montgomery helps patients achieve optimal health and wellness through various nutrition programs.
And his goal, to get his patients to think beyond the script in order to improve their health and reverse these chronicles lifestyle diseases.
I was fortunate enough to grab an hour of his time in between seeing patients to talk about his career, his groundbreaking nutritional methods and his exciting upcoming events, including an open house at his facility and a new docu series entitled Heart and Soul of a Champion. So if you hear a little background noise is just a busy man at work who took some time to speak with us about the good news about plants.
Oh, and you'll want to stick around to the very end because after we finished the official recording, I was able to ask him a couple more questions and you don't want to miss his answers. Dr. Baxter Montgomery, thank you so much for coming on the Plan Strong podcast. Appreciate it.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. I look forward to it.
Rip Esselstyn:I do too. I do too. So I would love to, you know, I've had other cardiologists on on the show. I've had, you know, Columbus Batiste, I've had Kim Williams.
I'm sure these are friends of yours, not cardiologists, but Dean Ornish and my father, Brian Aspel.
And I love gleaning something different from each and every one of you cardiologists that have taken this, I'll say, high road where really you're seeking prevention as opposed to just the myriad amounts of pills and procedures that are so prominent in that profession. I'd love to know about a Baxter, your upbringing and why in the world did you decide that you wanted to become a physician?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Well, this is a one hour show, so that's quite a bit to chew on.
But here the upbringing part is pretty interesting, is that it reminds me of a John McDougal asked me years ago is, you know, what contributed, what your background contributed to what you were doing. And I recall when I was very young, probably seven years old, we were building a house.
And long story short, as a little kid we were living in an apartment and my dad said, let's go and see the lot where we're going to build a new house. And so I just heard new house. We drove out there and we got out of the car and I just saw this lot with weeds.
And I got out of the car and said, well, where's the new house? And so as a young kid I saw a lot with weeds develop into a house. My parents, they built it cash. We were all general contractors.
So the point I'm making is that that building of a house made a big impression on me. Fast forward to where I'm now in my private practice reflecting back on that. We did things very unconventionally.
Building a house was not the conventional way of doing it. People would take out a 30 year mortgage, et cetera. We didn't do it the conventional way.
And that has impacted the way I do things now unconventionally.
And I was know trained in the traditional way of medicine, medical school, internship, residency and internal medicine, general cardiology, chronic electrophysiology. And I started my practice. But in the back of my mind my mindset was always looking to do things unconventionally.
Not just for the sake of doing things unconventionally, but always looking outside the box when the things in the box were not working right.
And so when I started seeing patients, and the difference when seeing patients in the private practice compared to seeing patients when I'm in training is that you get a longitudinal perspective of your patients.
What I mean by that is when I start seeing Mrs. Jane Smith or Mr. John Smith, and I see them on day one and then you know, year one, year two, year three, I get a perspective in terms of what their health is.
And one thing I recognize with my patients is that despite the advancing technology of procedures and devices that I learned to implant in patients or prescribe for patients, the patients continue to get sicker. And so that's when I started to look elsewhere outside of the box.
And that led me to plant based diet as well as other unconventional things that we use in our practice.
Rip Esselstyn:I love that story about your parents and what they did to build that build their house. And they paid cash and they were the general contractors. Where did you grow up? What city?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Houston. Born and raised right Here, more like one of these oak trees. Deeply rooted.
Rip Esselstyn:I love it. And so. But why the love of medicine? What steered you in that direction?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:You know, in ninth grade I was in class and one of my classmates said, hey, I want to be a doctor. They make $90,000. I thought to myself, hey, I'd like to make $90,000. I guess I'll be a doctor too. So I never thought again about it.
So that was step one in medical school again, I mean undergrad medical school. I decided that I want to be a cardiologist. That was based on some research that I was doing between my first and second year medical school.
So that then led to me going into cardiology. Of course had to train in internal medicine before that.
And during my internal medicine training I decided I wanted to sub specialize in cardiac electrophysiology. And you know, again, once I set my mind on it, I never looked back. And so that was my path. It wasn't anything early on that was so profound.
I enjoyed sciences, I enjoyed interacting with people and I guess those two things were a natural marriage for medicine. But it wasn't like I said, oh, I want to cure cancer, anything. It was just that, hey, this seems to be a nice thing to do.
It's fascinating and you know, it involves science and people. So I went in that direction. So I think it was more or less a God driven directive and it's truly my passion today.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah, and when did you. So when did you open up your own kind of private practice?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Immediately out of training, I never worked for anyone, so I. And that was the other part about that building of the house, you know, it taught me that I can build things myself.
I didn't have to go to anyone else to get a job, etc. So really the only job I had was when I was a kid working part time jobs. I worked in college, I worked in medical school.
So I had those jobs during training. But when I, you know, got, when I completed my training, I opened up my practice on day one and never looked back.
And so it was early on, it was a conventional practice. You know, I was busy as a cardiac electrophysiologist.
And the electrophysiologist, we are actually the consultants, the cardiologist, they send patients to us, we have rhythm problems. And so I was maybe probably the first one of the first non electrophysiologists in Houston in private practice.
It was a very new field at the time and so I was very busy. I had hospital privileges that probably somewhere between 11 to 15 hospitals scattered throughout Houston And Houston has a very large footprint.
For anyone in your audience hasn't been here, you can drive 50 miles from one part of the city and still be in the city limits. And so it was quite a busy practice.
I was taking emergency room call, I'd be up any hour of the day seeing patients, doing corneal angiograms, doing device implants, ablations. And so that went on for the better part of two decades. However, in the back of my mind, I always wanted to do something in the area of wellness.
I didn't know exactly what that meant. So as time progressed, as I said, I noticed my patients health getting worse.
I had some episodes, issues with some family members that I worked with that shone the light on this whole health issue. But then my health started to decline. My cholesterol went up, my blood pressure went up and the like.
And so I started looking outside of the medical literature, you know, started reading the lay press and you know, you read a lot of things about, you know, this snake oil, you know, potion, etc. But the common denominator was a healthy diet. And the common denominator of the healthy diet was plant based foods.
And that was one thing that I noticed. And out of some strains, for some strange reason, I happened to take this raw vegan chef course.
I took a weekend crash course to become a certified raw vegan chef. And in that crash course I was introduced to plant based nutrition. We learned how to make wonderful raw dishes.
And I was also introduced to a gentleman named John Rose in Houston. And he was well known for doing detoxes juice feast detoxes. And so I signed up for his program and did a 33 day raw juice detox.
And my life turned around in an amazing way. I felt 18 years old now, somewhere around 39, 40 at the time. And that introduced me to this world of plant based nutrition.
I not only continued that lifestyle, but I started applying it to patients.
Rip Esselstyn:What year is this? Baxter?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery: in: Rip Esselstyn:So this is before the China Study and my father's book and some others. I mean there was a couple, maybe McDougall's books were out there, but you probably hadn't read those or even.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery: hear about them until around: And in fact it was: been doing conferences since:But anyway, back when I did the Juice Feast and started changing my life over and then started applying to patients, what I noticed that applying this natural food diet to patients had an amazing impact on their lives. These patients, I mean, the patients I see are, they range from being in the ICU to barely out of the hospital. The hearts are beating at 10%.
They've had bypass, they've had stents, they have devices. And so these were the patients I was managing. So I remember in particular one lady who had an ejection fracture of 10%.
The heart normally should beat about 55 or 60%, hers beating at 10%. She had had four vessel bypass, three stents since the bypass. She was a diabetic. She was had arthritis, in a wheelchair and on oxygen.
When her husband wheeled her into my office, she was on 21 medications. And so it's not pretty. No, it's not pretty. And she wasn't looking too good.
So I looked at the medication list and I thought to myself, well, my goodness, you know, am I going to add medication number 22, 23, 24? And so I asked them one question, said, do you have a juicer? And they said, yes. I said, great, here's what we're going to do.
Then I started writing out these juicing recipes. So don't eat for the next 10 days, do this raw juice detox. And I would call her and check on her and we adjust medication over the phone.
But she came back in 10 days, walking, talking, no oxygen, feeling great. This is just 10 days. And I applied this approach, raw plant based diets, salads, various things.
I was writing my own recipes, everything from scratch and, you know, and I would type them up. I built a little booklet. It was one patient at a time, seven days at a time. Go seven days, come back and see me. Seven.
Another seven days, come back and see. Because I knew it was a very aggressive regimen. I couldn't give it to him and say, come back in a month or three months. Yeah, yeah.
I say, just do this for seven days. I didn't talk about the rest of their lives.
Rip Esselstyn:And you'd say, do this for seven days. And how much time would you spend with them?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Well, it varied, but usually quite a Bit of time because, you know, I would go on and talk to them and I have a team approach. I've always had a team approach and even more so now.
And so, you know, my mid levels go and do the vitals and I would go and talk to them and I would come out of the room while they're getting their testing done. I would go in and type in some recipes and I'll go back in and talk to them some more.
So when patients come to our office and you know, they spend a little time with us, there's a lot of testing that they do and the like. And so I tend to spend a fair amount of time in private practice.
It's tricky because, you know, because of reimbursement, you know, you don't have that much time. But yeah, we manipulate things here to where the time the patient is spending.
In a clinic, my time may be interrupted, but I may go and talk to them for a few minutes, you know, up front I may have a mid level or MA go and talk to them about something else. And we have handouts. Now at that time it was very difficult because it was just me.
I didn't have a trained staff but, but I spent the amount of time it was necessary.
But the fact that they knew that one, they were feeling ill, two, I was giving them a potential solution and three, we were going to see them back in seven days. So I didn't have to work too hard to convince them because it's just going to be seven days, at least in their minds. And that's part of the trick.
So they come back in seven days and they had a rough time, but they noticed they're feeling better, they're on fewer medications. Then they said, well, when can I eat? So no, give me another seven days. And I would do that successfully maybe three times in a row.
And what would happen in that period of time?
There was not only a clinical improvement in the patient, a physiological and biochemical improvement in the patient, but it was a psychological improvement in the patient. Because even though I had them on a very, very stringent regimen, extreme by some people's definition, it was extremely effective.
And so the patient on one hand, struggle with the fact that, hey, I'm only eating lettuce, grass and water, if you will, but I'm feeling amazing.
And so it was, it was, I was chipping away at their, you know, inability to make lifestyle changes because they had a huge impact with an aggressive change. So then when we come up with a moderation program, say moderation meaning that it's 100% plant based, but then now you can steam your broccoli.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Begging to have some bean soup. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. So. So the aggressive approach helped make the, you know, 100% plant based approach seem very easy for them.
And then we develop boot camp classes and our patients started wanting to buy the food from us so we didn't have to open up a restaurant in our building. Now we have a restaurant, grocery store, and we're getting into growing foods. It's gotten into, as John McDougall says, it's the food.
And that's been the core part of our intervention. Now we do other things like sauna therapy.
We're starting a program called Heart and Soul of a Champion that I'll share with you later, which puts all of it together and we bring in exercise and the like. But the food, it starts with the nutrition and the body has to cleanse and heal first and foremost.
And this is something that we learned, you know, over two decades ago.
Rip Esselstyn: ou know, back back in the mid:And at that point in time, was there, was there much out there? Did you, did you look, scour the literature or not?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:You know, there wasn't a lot in scientific, a lot of scientific data.
I, I mean, when I started it, you know, again, I was reading, you know, lay books and so they didn't have, you know, control, prospective control studies. You know, they were just talking mostly anecdotal and also theoretical. However, my personal experience was the first.
I mean, so I guess I had a data point of one so that, that, you know, really started things out. And so, but it was so dramatic. And then when I started applying to patients and, and see, the thing is that.
So to answer your question, no, there's no data. However, the empirical evidence I had was patient after patient after patient after patient. It was 100%.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:And it wasn't 100% mild change. It was 100% drastic changes. Now I work in the world's largest medical center. I've been working the world's largest medical center for 25 years.
We have three heart transplant centers and walking distance. There's, you know, there's few places in the world has a technology equal to or greater than what we have here.
So I've seen the best that medicine has to offer.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:The greatest that medicine has to offer from the traditional standpoint. So. And my, my center is just four miles south of that. I refer to them as, as, as, as Goliath and with David.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:And so for me to have the impact on these patients lives who had gone through everything that the world's largest medical center had to offer was very impressionable for me.
Not only that, over the years I've had a number of patients who were too sick to get bypass surgery, too sick to get interventional cardiology procedures. I've had in those patients we've been able to turn around in the hospital with detox.
Some patients for hospice with heart failure, we turn around with detox.
I had a patient on life support intubated on the ventilator with a chronic lung disease and heart disease with the kidneys failing and her family refused dialysis. We put on a detox. She walked out of the hospital. So the impact factor of this intervention is very strong.
When we published our data, gosh, five, six years ago, we had a group of about 31 patients with hypertension, hyperlipidemia. And we applied the intervention with this patient group and, and we had amazing results in a very short period of time.
So for example, the hemoglobin A1c was reduced by 3.4% in this population. Now this is not a population of diabetics. This is a population people with the selection criteria was hypertension, obesity and hyperlipidemia.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:So the average hemoglobin A1C was 5.9. So that's just barely in the pre diabetic range. But we had a 3.4% reduction in just four weeks.
And that, that's a huge impact with, you know, statistically significant impact. And similarly, we were the first to show a reduction in lipoprotein level A, which is an atherogenic molecule, in just four weeks.
16% reduction just for weeks. Statin drugs doesn't affect that. So the impact of this intervention is quite strong.
Rip Esselstyn:So there's a lot I want to unpack about what you just said here.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Okay.
Rip Esselstyn:For starters, I love your analogy with your David and you know, and you got Goliath just a couple miles down the road and you know, in reading through your website and looking at your goals for, I should say, yeah, your goals and kind of mission as the Montgomery Heart and Wellness center, one of them is contributing to a needed paradigm shift in U.S. healthcare.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Yes.
Rip Esselstyn:And you are absolutely doing that. So huge, huge kudos to you. For that.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's something that we have to.
So it leads to a current project we're doing and if that's essential, the links, I imagine in the notes. But we currently have a program, it's Heart and Souls of a Champion. And for years we did these boot camp classes.
And your dad used to tease me about boot camps. Why you call it boot camp class a military boot camp, but it was along the lines of boot camp because it's sort of like two days football.
Boot camp is an intense training period for a finite period of time to accelerate, in the case of boot camp and two a day football to accelerate your physical fitness. In this case, we're doing an intense nutritional training for a finite period of time to accelerate your nutritional fitness. Yeah.
And so we would put people, as I used to say, grass and water for four weeks, raw fruits and vegetables, and we arbitrarily chose four weeks. It came out of my initial clinical experience.
But anyway, in:And he saw the things we were doing and he was telling me about these NFL players, you know, after retirement or, you know, suffering chronic illnesses. I said, well, let's go and, you know, bring some and detox them.
And so I went to a local chapter meeting, we talked about it and got some of the guys came and. And we actually filmed it. And we had a professional film crew, et cetera. For a lot of reasons, we didn't get the project finished.
You know, the platforms then were not available then, were not available then as they are now. But I always thought back about that and said, look, you know, I want to do this project again. So fast forward to now.
I was speaking at a vegfest in Fairfax, Virginia and I was introduced to Darrell Green and some other guys and I shared with him my desire to do this. And he was really eager to do this. He had the interest in sort of revitalizing his fitness level. And so we put together heart and soul of a champion.
I'd already started working with some professional athletes and already. So we had a group to come through. Now this program is more than just a detox.
So we put in time restricted eating, the raw diet, plus we have our restaurant now. So we provide all the food. We do infrared sauna therapy and other types of therapies that improves cardiovascular fitness. And then we added exercise.
So we started with this group. I Brought in a film crew, director from Hollywood. So we put forth Heart and Soul of a Champion.
Heart and Soul of a Champion is both our elite intervention program now, but it's also an art form. So we've started the makings of a docu series.
And the purpose is to take this intervention and put it on different platforms so people see it over and over. So the first season is going to be with athletes. Subsequent season will be the next season two will be chronic illness in women.
We're going to have people of all walks of life because everyone is a champion in their own right and they need to revitalize the championship. And so this is the approach and the goal is to take this approach to health and put it before the everyday citizen and normalize it.
When people think about eating a hundred percent plant based diet, it seems extreme or weird when you think about exercising rigorously. So people go and walk a mile, but exercise, we'll get 85 year old ladies. I get people who's had strokes on walkers.
We get them out of the walker, get them out of the wheelchair. I get an MA on one side, we'll have them do lunges right here in the office.
One of the patients, 85, she was a cancer survivor, you know, diabetes, she was doing lunges. Now she can barely hold herself up. We helped balance her, but she did about five or six lunges.
And on the following appointment she was laughing, she said, look, I've been doing these at home against the wall. He said, I've been sleeping much better. And so what heart and soul of champ is going to do is we're going to.
People in every walk of life, they come in wheelchairs, they're going to wheelchair to the walker, walk to the cane, cane to the, to the level ground. We're going to walk them up the hills, roll them down the hills.
But the point is that we're going to take patient every walk of life and give them the opportunity to get to the next level, whatever that next level is. And one thing we've seen with what we've done so far is that the psychological impact on these patients is just amazing.
And it's the old saying, you're creating an animal. We want to create animals out of these patients.
We want them to be rigorous toward their health and confident that they can get up and move and nourish their bodies properly and move their bodies properly. So heart and soul of a champion is going to take this process and normalize it.
Because when you see someone else on the screen doing it Then you're going to know that I can do it, too.
Rip Esselstyn:So tell me your facility there. Is it a facility where you have beds, where people spend the night, or is it just day only, or how does that work?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Right now it's just day only. So we have patients flying from all over the country, and we have extended stay facilities that we have some relationships with.
So we, you know, arrange for them to stay in extended stay places for, say, six weeks. So, you know, we get patients out of, you know, New York, East Coast, west coast, and, you know, everywhere else.
And they'll come in, spend some time. There are a lot of different stories. There was one patient who was in a hospital in North Carolina, some small.
Well, not too small at the time in North Carolina, but he's on the heart transplant list. And his. The docs would tell him he needs an lvad. And so he looked us up online and he got in touch with my integrated care coordinator.
And he ordered food from our restaurant because we ship throughout the 48 contiguous states. And so we were shipping to the hospital, and then he got out of the hospital and we shipped it to his house. And so people find us by whatever means.
There's another story. Guy who was in a Harlem hospital, and he looked us up, and his surgeon was about to go on vacation. So I'll be on vacation for two weeks.
When I get back, I'm gonna put an LVAD in you. So he's in the hospital bed looking at his, you know, YouTube on the phone and, you know, look at the work we're doing.
And he checked himself out of the hospital and came down to Houston.
Rip Esselstyn:For people that don't know, including myself, what's an lvad?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:I'm sorry? LVAD is acronym for Left Ventricular Assist Device. So what happens is when the.
The essential part of cardiac function, you have two, four chambers, you have, you know, the two upper chambers, the left and right, and the two lower chambers, the left and right. The left lower chamber, the left ventricle, as we call it, supplies circulation to the body.
So that, I mean, all of the ventricles are important, but that's the one that gets most attention, because when that one fails, then total body circulation fails and you get a lot of trouble. So what happens that when you have heart failure? We're usually referring to the left ventricle.
And so when the left ventricle fails, then it needs assistance by whatever means. And so one surgical approach short of transplant, because people are not always ready for transplant for the lack of donors most of the time.
So they've come up with mechanical device. Now the full mechanical heart has not panned out technologically, but you can mechanically assist the left ventricle, the left lower chamber.
So that's called the left ventricular assist device or the lvat. Got it, got it. Good.
Rip Esselstyn:You also mentioned a little bit earlier, in addition to bringing down the, those A1C levels in those 30, 30 something patients, you also were bringing down the lipoprotein A. Will you explain to our, our audience what exactly is lipoprotein A and how important is it for us to know our lipoprotein A marker?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:So lipoprotein A, it's a molecule that's very similar to LDL cholesterol molecule, but it's an atherogenic moiety. So essentially it potentiates clot formation. So think of it as an LDL like molecule that potentiates thrombosis or clotting.
And so if it's elevated, people can have an elevated lipoprotein A and normal cholesterol, quote, unquote, total cholesterol, and still be at risk for heart attacks or stroke. It's probably in part influenced by underlying inflammatory mechanisms as well as perhaps other mechanisms that we don't understand.
But we do know that lowering the lipoprotein level A is helpful.
Having said that, you know, there are a lot of the many biomarkers that, that we know that are signs of underlying biochemical and physiological imbalance. Have there other biomarkers we've yet to discover?
And what I like to emphasize with people is to look at the totality of your health as opposed to focus on one or two biomarkers. We know that LDL cholesterol being high is not good, total cholesterol being high is not good.
But these biomarkers are not only signs or risk factors for heart disease. But in the China Study, Colin Campbell found that elevated cholesterol is associated with increased cancer.
So when I see elevated cholesterol, I think of a metabolic imbalance, I think of hepatic metabolic imbalance. And so I look at it in its totality, not just from the standpoint where you got too much cholesterol in your blood now.
Rip Esselstyn: lly, I'm dying to know. So in: Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Kind of a.
Rip Esselstyn:Whole food plant based lifestyle can do to help mitigate heart disease, do you find that your colleagues are getting on board with this or are they resistant?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:You know, it's. I don't know I'm allowed to say on this platform. But anyway, it's. Here's the thing.
Rip Esselstyn:I think you can say whatever you want on this platform.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Here's the thing, the. My colleagues, whom I respect greatly, and many of my colleagues who I work with locally, you know, they're wonderful people.
I have a lot of patients. I still work at a hospital here in the medical center. I have patients there.
I have patients that get procedures that have things they have to have done. So everyone's not able to make the changes that they need to make to turn things around. So patients need hospitalizations and the like.
But my colleagues, I don't think are equipped enough to be able to make those changes. I think that's probably the best way to say it. And by that I mean the following. You know, medical school training is not just a training.
I mean, that's one level you have education is up here and that's your thought. You're taught to think, or you're taught to debate and look at data and analyze and come up with a conclusion based on empiric data set.
Then there's a training where you are given skills, et cetera. But then there's a lower level than training, which is indoctrination.
And unfortunately, what we call medical training is more of an indoctrination than an education or even a training.
And when one has been indoctrinated, unfortunately, there's an impediment toward your looking outside of what the indoctrination, the direction doctoration led you to. So unfortunately, too many of my colleagues are not equipped, despite how high of a level they are in academia. I don't say it as a criticism.
I have all due respect. They're very bright people in many regards.
And there's a lot of benefit to medical technology because a lot of people need it because of the status of our health condition and lifestyle condition. But unfortunately, they only apply that and not apply the lifestyle. So, for example, let's take someone who is very ill, who has a very weak heart.
They're in the hospital and they need, maybe they need valve surgery, or maybe they need bypass, or maybe they have a left vein and the heart is weak and there's some benefit. Or maybe they're having a heart attack. Let's use that. So they're going in a heart attack, a cardiac arrest.
Well, they will go and resuscitate the patient. Do the Medical procedures, et cetera, and, you know, put them on a standard American diet.
I had a patient suffered cardiac arrest right in my lobby a number of years ago. We resuscitated the patient, shocked him. By the time the ambulance got there, paramedics got there. He was awake and talking, had an IV in, et cetera.
I put him in my hospital. One of my colleagues did his corneal angiogram. They didn't have any significant blockages.
We implanted defibrillator, but while he was in the hospitals on a raw detox diet, that should be adjunct to the therapy. So, yes, the technology is needed in many people's cases, but the problem is that we are ignoring the foundation of health.
The foundation of health is optimal nutrition. So I have a saying, first and foremost, optimal nutrition.
And you can probably modify that statement to optimal lifestyle because exercise and proper sleep goes in there. But let's say optimal nutrition. Next is nutraceuticals as needed. Last is pharmaceuticals as a last resort.
So optimal lifestyle nutraceuticals as needed, and pharmaceuticals and medical therapies as a last resort. That should be our attitude, but unfortunately, we have that upside down.
Rip Esselstyn:When you say nutraceuticals, what exactly does that mean?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:That would be vitamins, minerals. I mean, lots of people need a B12. You might need, in some cases, vitamin C. I use Coenzyme Q10 for some of my heart failure patients.
So these are isolated supernatural magnesium, for instance. So these are isolated nutrients.
They're not foods, but they're isolated nutrients that have been shown to have some benefit as an adjunct for people who have advanced health issues.
Rip Esselstyn:Are you. Are you friends or do you know Eric Adams at all?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Yes, Eric Adams. I'm. I'm quoted in his book. And we're going to invite him to our gala in October. We hope to have him and Rip Esselstyn sitting gala.
We're sending you an invitation pretty soon. We're just now getting.
lunch together, gosh, back in:He knows my aunt, who's a retired New York state senator, and so they had worked together up there for years. But, yeah, a very, very, very nice man. Down to earth, man.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah. Well, you brought up how the first people after they have heart surgery, Right. They should go on the detox or some sort of a.
More of a whole food plant based Diet instead of burgers and fries. And I think he's initiated a something in New York state where the hospital's there.
The, you know, the default diet that you get in bed is a heart healthy, whole food plant based diet, I believe.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Wow, I love that. I love. Here I need to check on the details that I love to have him come and talk to us about that. That's great.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah, yeah. And, and, and there's also at Montefiore Hospital with, I don't know if you know of Dr. Robert Osfeld.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Robert, I know Osfeld. Yep.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah, he.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:And he's been doing good work up there.
Rip Esselstyn:Manifer, very similar work there. Wonderful stuff. Absolutely. So, I mean, you mentioned that you're seeing people coming back in seven days with these staggering results.
I mean, explain, explain to our, the listener how can the human body get that healthy in that short a period of time that almost seems impossible?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Yeah, you know, the human body, I think Psalms 137, whereas you're fearful and wonderfully made somewhere thereabouts, the human body is an amazing, an amazing design. The miracle isn't that the body gets better in seven days on a raw plant based diet. That's not the miracle.
The miracle is that the body can tolerate all the atrocious foods and terrible lifestyle and terrible things we do to it for not only seven days, but decades. That's the miracle. The miracle is that all these people are walking and talking. You talk to them. So I eat trash all the time.
I drink too much and I smoke and you know, you're 30, 40, 50 years old. That's the miracle. I see people walking in the office and you know, they're talking, they're sick, but they're still talking and breathing.
Wow, that's a miracle. I mean, seven days of raw plant based diet and getting better, that's nothing.
I mean, just think if somebody's choking you and they got the arm, you got a noose around you, somebody's choking you blue in the face and that's for decades. And all of a sudden somebody cuts the rope out and you start breathing. Whoa, what a miracle. So no, that's not the miracle. The miracle.
You've been choked for 30 years and you're still walking.
People are literally physiologic and biochemically choking themselves with the bad food they're eating, the lack of fresh air, lack of sunshine, lack of exercise, poor sleep, all that's a manifestation of what they're putting in their bodies.
But to answer your question more directly is the following biochemically when we're putting in these bad nutrients in our system, these abnormal molecules we refer to as free radicals, creates an imbalance of free radicals to antioxidants.
So you have what's called oxidative stress, this oxidative stress, to give you an analogy, if you bite into an apple and sit it on the counter, you see it turn brown, it oxidizes, the apple's exposed to oxidative stress. And so you see it deteriorate and wither away after several days. The human body does a similar thing at the biochemical level.
This happens at the cellular level. The other component that's interrelated with oxidative stress is increased inflammation.
Again, these bad foods, the dead animal flesh, the carcass, I mean, you're putting in your system, you develop increased inflammation intracellularly between inside the cells, between the cells, inside the tissue, and the body's slowly deteriorating. When you, you do two things.
When you go on a plant based diet, particularly raw plant based diet, there are two things that happen, more than two things, but the two fundamental things. One, you're removing the insult, okay, when you stop eating bad food, that's the first.
And I tell people the first, the, the, the first step to optimal nutrition has to do with what you don't eat, as opposed to what you do eat. So the absolute total removal of the bad food is the first and foremost step to optimal nutrition. So you're removing that. So that's a big impact.
And the next thing is you're replacing it with optimal nutrition. Foods that bring energy, that bring life, they alkalinize the blood, they essentially put out the fire.
These foods are loaded with antioxidants that stabilizes these free radicals. So you're reducing oxidative stress, you're reducing and eliminating inflammation, and the body's coming back to life.
And this happens in a matter of minutes, hours, days to weeks.
Rip Esselstyn:So you're, it is, it is such an absolutely beautiful thing. So I think it's fair to say then, you're not a fan of moderation.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:That's correct. Your dad said it right. Moderation kills. But, you know, it not only kills, but it tortures.
So let's say, for instance, if I were an evil person and you come to me and you say, Look, Dr. Montgomery, I eat fried chicken three times a day, seven days a week. I love fried chicken. And my cholesterol's up, my blood pressure's up, and I need to do something. My lifestyle. I say, okay, wonderful.
I tell you what, I'll Do. Let's get off the fried chicken for six days a week, and one day of the week on Sunday, you have all the fried chicken you want. Great.
Six days a week, you. You know you're suffering. You want fried chicken, you can't have it. You're getting better blood pressure getting better on day seven. Great.
I'm having fried chicken. Well, the fried chicken on day seven is going to destroy all the benefits of the first days one through six. That's number one.
It destroyed most, if not all. That's one. Wow. Two, it's going to reinforce your addiction to fried chicken. And so after that, day seven, day one comes back around.
You can't have fried chicken. You're suffering. Day one through six until day seven comes again.
So I'm basically only feeding into that addiction, making life worse than what it was. At least when you were eating fried chicken every day, you were feeding the addiction. At least you were getting some pseudo satisfaction.
Now I'm torturing you while at the same time impeding your improvement. So moderation is sort of have you running in quicksand. You're running, but you're going nowhere.
When you go all the way, yes, it's difficult at first, maybe the first day, the first week, the first month. But while you're going through that struggle, you're making progress. That's number one.
Number two, you're getting your addiction to whatever these bad foods are, because I tell my patients, look, your issue is not heart disease or high blood pressure, diabetes or stroke. Your issue is your addiction to bad food. I need to cure your addiction to bad food.
Once I cure your addiction to bad food, then the diabetes and high blood pressure, those things just naturally go away.
Rip Esselstyn:That's a great explanation for it, too. And how do you. How do the vast majority of your patients respond when you deliver that message to them?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:You know, they. They're very receptive to it. And what. What we've learned over the years is that when the person has their mind made up, then they're ready to go.
And so it's. Our role is to help them get to a point of renewing the mind. I saw a patient the other day, unfortunately has an autoimmune disease.
And, you know, she had some issues and I've been seeing over the years, and, you know, she's gotten to a point she can't walk anymore. And so I've been coaching her.
But, yeah, I saw the other day she said, look, I'm not at a point where I'm ready to go all the way, you know, I just want to take baby steps. And it was, it was very sad because she is going all the way, just all the way in the wrong direction.
You see, the thing is that what people don't understand is that you will make a lifestyle change. It's going to be on your terms or on the disease stage terms, but you're going to make a lifestyle change.
And if you're, if you're in your mind not able to make those changes toward improving your health, then you're left to make those changes to deterioration of your health.
Rip Esselstyn:A lot of wisdom there. A lot of years you dealing with different patients. Tell me, tell me, tell me this.
I, you've said several times this detox system that you have, you know, juicing raw foods. I, I am, you know, personally a huge fan of a combination of raw and cooked. So are you not a fan of cooked?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:So it's not about being not a fan of cooked or not. I mean, cooked foods have, they're delicious.
What, what we found is that, and again, the patients I see are really, I mean when you have somebody who's on hospice and she's, her heart is very weak, she's on this medication drip that's keeping her together and when you turn it off, she's going to die. And you got seven days to get it turned around. You've got to hit it with the best.
And so these people, I see the best, we know when one says cooked, there's a broad spectrum of cooked. And we know that, you know, deep frying and, and, and that type of thing is not ideal cooking.
So then if you go from the extreme cook part to steaming, okay, steaming's okay. But then you say okay, when you say steaming for how long? Eight hours. That's not okay. Okay, how about seven hours? That's not okay. How about one hour?
Probably too long, still five minutes, two minutes. So there's a spectrum, you know, even within cook that you say, well, we got to draw the line somewhere.
So number one, when people allowed to cook it, it. I don't know where they're drawing the line. And, and there's a lot of psychology here.
So someone, I say, okay, you get a whole food plant based diet, you know, etc. Steam, boil, okay, great. That a restaurant, they say, okay, give me the vegan option. Well, the restaurant may put oil in. They might think about that.
So that's, that's a, that's more of a political thing. But it's, it's. So that's, that part of it.
But there is scientific evidence showing that even cooked foods and cooked in my ways can trigger inflammation. That's one too.
We haven't formally studied it, but in our clinical experience, we, when I have like especially my patient with heart failure, advanced heart failure, my patient with advanced systemic inflammatory conditions, I will start them out on a 30 day raw diet, they'll get better. And when I put them on a cooked plant based diet, they start to regress. And we've seen that before.
We haven't had time to formally study it, but we have a pretty strong clinical experience that shows that patients need to be on, depending on how systemic the illness is, et cetera, would benefit from a raw diet for a long time. An example, a patient I saw who is a gentleman, had a history of aortic aneurysm and dissection probably about six, seven years ago, was operated on.
Then fast forward to recently. He presented to the hospital with chest pain, was found to have a heart attack, and also had another dissection.
Now dissection for your audience to know, is where the inner lining of the blood vessel separates. So instead of blood going through the natural lumen of the vessel, it can go through the walls and tear the wall apart of the vessel.
His wall was being torn apart from the aortic arch all the way down to the kidneys. He had a dissection. They call it, I think it's a type A debakey. But anyway, in this, normally would be operated on.
However, it came in the setting of a heart attack.
And so the surgeon cannot operate on it because that's the most dangerous surgery to do in the most dangerous setting to do it in in the setting of a heart attack. So they just observed him stabilize and discharge them. They came right to our center.
They had seen us online and I put them on a raw diet 100% for about a year and a half. And we just now allowed him to eat a little bit of steamed veggies, maybe a meal or two a week. And that was only after you.
I mean, he's, I mean, his wife is cooking some of the most delicious gourmet raw. He's got stuff from us, et cetera. But the point I'm making is simply this.
There's situations where you want to make sure that the patient's getting the absolute best. I cannot afford to have them go and eat something that steam or have a little oil or whatever the case is.
That's one, two, even if it's steam without the oil. I've seen lots of patients with advanced disease on a whole food plant based diet. No oil, no salt, very regimented cooking their food.
And it's only after we put them on raw that they turn around. We said it over and over and over and over and over again.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah, that's really fascinating. What now? How do you eat?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:I've been for the last two years, 100% raw. I was mostly raw much of my time. When I got on this regimen, let's say 18 years ago, I went vegan.
Then I went from the spectrum of junk food vegan to raw. And every year I do a raw juice feast. And I felt different. I said, well, there's something different in the spectrum of this food.
So that's about five years of nonsense. I started pushing more raw, and I finally got to the point we said, I'm eating all raw. Our restaurant does a lot of gourmet raw stuff.
And just so that your audience will understand, you know, if you're on 100% raw diet, there are a lot of things that you can make that's very delicious. For instance, we have a delicious raw meatloaf sprouted rice with a raw vegan gravy that will knock your socks off. We have a raw enchilada pie.
We have raw.
You know, so there are a lot of things that you can do in the gourmet raw area that gives you the satisfaction and savoriness of whole foods that you normally get from cooked. And so when people, when I say raw, people think just, you know, salads and, you know, maybe wraps here, there. But there's a lot that you can do.
There's, you know, some work and effort you have to put. Put into it, but there's a lot that you can do.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah, well, when it, you know, when, when your life's at stake here, it makes sense. What did you have for breakfast today?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Oh, gosh. So I had two green drinks and I had some raw granola and some sprouted wild rice.
And normally I'll have, like, a salad by this time, but I was between patience and getting ready for this.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Event. So.
Rip Esselstyn:But yeah, so you have a chef on your. On your team. Chef. Chef India. Is she still with you?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Well, so chef India, we brought her in as a guest chef. She's not on our team full time, so we brought her in. She's in Belize. And so we brought. We contract with her.
She came in and worked with us on our, our menu. So she'll bring in, come in, and. And so I, I worked with her And Chef India is incredible. I mean, she's raw.
You know, a lot of these raw chefs, they use, you know, too many cashew nuts and, you know, too much oil and all that stuff. When she came in and said, okay, we want nothing with oil. We, we go, we like, we prefer seeds over nuts in our recipes.
So a lot of our recipes are not with the cashews and things. We don't use peanuts. So our meatloaf has walnuts and pumpkin seeds and we'll use other hemp seeds for other things. But yeah, we use seeds.
So she's able to follow our strict criteria and she's done a great job. We have a quiche salad with broccoli kale. There's a pumpkin seed sauce. We have an enchilada pies. I mentioned, we have a number of wraps.
We made a raw naan that we use. It's a pizza crust and we have a pizza that's off the chain. It's, it's very, very good food. You know, next, you're not too far from using.
You need to come down and try our stuff. In fact, when you come to the, to the event, when we see an invitation, hopefully you'll find time.
We'll, we'll show you the site and I think you, I think you're gonna have a great time.
Rip Esselstyn:Tell me, so tell me about this event that's coming up.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:So the event, if your audience goes to events.montgomeryheart.com It's a four day open house and red carpet gala. Day one is going to be October 19th and we will start with an open house. People will be able to tour our facility.
We'll also be open for consultations.
Now, these aren't traditional health consultations where we come up with a diagnosis and treatment, but we'll talk to people about their health goals and their health journey and challenges and discuss ways that one of our programs can help them out. We have online coaching, we have an online community, we have meal plans, grocery plans. We ship, people can pick up, deliver, and we give guidance.
So we help people in many different ways with many different support tools. So the consultation program will help you understand how you know in what way we can probably help you.
On day two on October 20th, I'll be leading a group on shopping rounds. We go to a local health food shopping store and we'll talk about reading labels and making wise decisions in the supermarket.
Even some of the healthiest supermarkets can be landmines. And then we'll go on a nature walk. You know, the Houston Arboretum is a great place and we try to encourage our patients.
You know, when I talk to them about exercise, I emphasize exercising outdoors, getting outdoors, going on nature walks. And so we're going to have a nature walk. I'll be leading the pack with some of my assistants and going, doing that on.
Day three is going to be the evening of the red carpet gala. It's going to be an evening time starting at five. It's going to be quite a long event.
We'll have the keynote speakers be Dr. Pam Popper, Dr. Kim Williams. We're gonna have David Carter, the 300 pound vegan and John Salley will be there speaking. We'll have a panel.
I'll go out on the limb and said Rip Esselstyn is going to be there in the audit. So greeting people and. But it's going to be a great event and we will, it will be the premiere of our docu series.
We'll show the, we will show the trailer and episode one of season one and then we'll have a discussion of that. Also Wednesday Evening on the 19th, we'll have a sneak preview of the docu series and then we have the premiere, formal premiere on that Friday.
And then Saturday morning will be a brunch, a celebrity send off brunch will be again at our facility and we'll be showcasing a lot of the food that we prepare in our kitchen. In fact, you know, our gala is being held at the Rice University Faculty Club and they have a rule that they have to prepare the food.
And we had to meet with them because, you know, they, they prepare vegan food but you know, it has oil and you know, whatever's in it. So I met with them, my chef, my kitchen manager and two of my chefs, my kitchen manager, myself.
We went, met, we went through the details of how everything was prepared. We gave them some of our recipes, looked at their recipes, made.
So we went to, and we met for over an hour, hour and maybe 20 minutes going over the intricate details of how everything was to be prepared. Because we said, look, we have a strict criteria and this has to be met. And then they did a great job. They stepped up to the plate.
We toured their kitchen. But I said that to say this again, you know, there's a very precise approach to this.
As a physician, you know, as I said, I'm a cardiac electrophysiologist and we place catheters on electrical pathways that I cannot be off by a millimeter. I have to be very precise. When I put that catheter, I have to map out that electrical pathway. It has to be within a millimeter of precision.
If I go in the wrong direction, you may need a pacemaker or have some other problem. So I have to apply that level of precision in my electrophysiology career. Guess what? I have to be very precise.
When I prescribe a food, diet and a lifestyle, we have to be precise. What kind of exercise do you do? We have to be precise about lifestyle prescriptions as we are precise in medical and surgical prescriptions.
Rip Esselstyn:Well, you know what's incredible to me in spending the last hour with you, Baxter, is how your passion for everything you're doing is just gaining momentum. It's not like waning whatsoever. And why do you think that is? I mean, you got, I mean, you're going as hard as you've ever gone.
You're introducing all kinds of new modalities. You're doing galas, you're doing a docu series. What's that all about?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:You know, it's interesting and it's a great question. I like that question because it's, it's, it's the long and short is this.
I recall looking at a interview with Jeff Bezos and he said something quite interesting.
He said, you know, if you have a job, that's great, if you have a career, that's even better, if you have a passion that's supreme, that's even much better. And the way he said, I'm paraphrasing of course, but he says your passion finds you.
And when he says your passion finds you, it's almost a biblical aspect of that, because as a scripture in the Bible says, delight in the Lord and he'll give you the desires of your heart. And it's not the sinful desires that he'll give you, but he will impart desires in your heart that are godly desires.
And he will in essence give you your passion. And so it's the passion, I see it as a God given passion that's driving me.
It's a force that's greater than I am, that is giving me what I need in terms of getting me to where I need to be. So it's a God given passion that I see that's empowering me. It's a force greater than me that's empowering me to do the things that I do.
And that's the best explanation that I have.
Rip Esselstyn:Well, I'm a fan. I'm a huge fan. And I listened to an interview that you did probably a couple years back with Terry Mason. Wonderful, wonderful. Human being.
At the end of the interview, he thanked you for being such a pioneering, you know, not only physician, but also just human being. And I. I want to say the same thing. Thank you for all the incredible pioneering work that you're doing and continuing to do.
And I'm a fan, huge fan, and I just can't appreciate you enough for coming on the Plantstron podcast and sharing your passion and what you've created in your life, in your world, and all the people you're helping. Thanks so much.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Well, thank you. Thank you, Rip. And thank you for the work you're doing. I mean, again, it's. You know, I consider you one of the pioneers. I mean, you're.
Again, the work you're doing and sort of putting this on another level, not only with your podcast, but all the things you've done in the past. So it's a joy to be a partner with you in this whole mission. I mean, this is a heavy lift that we're all trying to carry out.
And so I really enjoy and have confident knowing that I've guys like you there. So I really appreciate that as well. Yeah.
Rip Esselstyn:Yeah. All right. Hey, can I get a little plant strong?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:There you go.
Rip Esselstyn:All right. I could have talked to you for another four hours. Serious. I want to know about vitamin C and thermal imaging and, you know, your take on afib.
I find more people these days that are having AFIB issues, you know, and I'm like, what's going on with that?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:That. And, yeah, AFIB is a systemic illness. And, you know, I, as electrophysiologist, I used to do AFIB ablations. You know, that's. It's a very.
It's one of the more. Well, it's one of the more challenging position procedures to do. It's still a fairly complex procedure. You have to do a double transseptal.
You get two holes in the heart from the right side to the left, and then you have to map out the pulmonary veins. You isolate the pulmonary veins with electrical catheter, so you burn a ring around the pulmonary veins.
Now, the old ways, they were doing it back when I was doing. They would just stop burning inside the pulmonary veins. Now used to call pulmonary stenosis. Pulmonary vein stenosis.
And we started burning outside the pulmonary vein, just right around the ossium of it. And so that would electrically isolate the pulmonary vein.
So the theory is that there's some electrical signals that come from inside the pulmonary vein. That goes into the atrium to irritate it, and that triggers a fiber.
But that's not the only thing, because what happens is that you have degeneration of the atrium. So with inflammation and increased oxidative stress, you develop. It's sort of like potholes in the street.
So, like, you drive it in the street, you see a large pothole, you try to detour around the pothole. Well, electrical signals do the same thing. So if it sees a piece of scar patch, it'll detour around the scar patch.
But when you detour, when you go around it, an electrical signal can. It goes around, but then it can circle. So you can go up this way, you go around, but then you can go around in a circle. Well, that's called reentry.
And so if you go here, then here, then you go like here, and then that's a reentry, and it'll take over the electrical circuit. So just think you have like a thousand of these little pothole scar patches, and you got signals going and just doing this.
And that creates atrial fibrillation. Now, there's a spectrum of atrial arrhythmia as you go, atrial tachycardia, multifocal atrial tachycardia, et cetera. Yeah.
And so a lot of these people that have atrial fib don't have atrial fib that originate from the pulmonary veins. They have atrial fib due to electrodistortion in the atrial tissue itself. Well, how do you treat that? Well, I just said inflammation and scarring.
So if you do things like reduce oxygen stress, reduce inflammation, you put the body in physiological balance, the autonomic nervous system balance, scar patches are suppressed, et cetera, and you can probably quieten down these. And we have anecdotal evidence showing that atrial fibrillation is reduced with a raw detox diet. Wow.
Rip Esselstyn:What about PVCs?
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:Similarly, PVCs, but again, oftentimes people have electrolyte abnormalities. Magnesium deficiencies and things like that will contribute to PVCs. But again, you can have irritable foci. You can have electrical abnormalities.
Again, if someone has scarring in heart due to a heart attack, then that's what we call an electrical arrhythmogenic substrate. So you have a scar that disrupts the normal electrical signal.
The electrical signal has to make a distorted move around that scar, and that's a distortion. So one loop is a pvc. Infinitely many loops is vt. And so, so you. You have that situation where you have to stabilize that electrical pathway.
So, yeah, we implant devices to shock the heart, but we also have to nourish the body to erase some of the scarring to suppress some of the scarring and stabilize the electrical signal.
Rip Esselstyn:Fascinating stuff. Really, really. Well, hey, I don't want to be a hog with your time. I know you got patience out there. But hey, thanks for this.
And I'm seriously, I know we'll be seeing each other soon.
nd,:To learn more about this event, visit events.montgomeryheart.com and I was thrilled to know that Montgomery Heart offers tons of online classes and resources, plus they ship their delicious food and meals across the country. Of course, I'll be sure to put a link to this and all other resources in the show notes@planstrongpodcast.com thanks so much for listening.
And as always, keep it Plantstrong.
Dr. Baxter Montgomery:The.
Rip Esselstyn:Plantstrong podcast team includes Carrie Barrett, Lori Cordowicz, Amy Mackey, Patrick Gavin, and Wade Clark.
This season is dedicated to all of those courageous truth seekers who weren't afraid to look through the lens with clear vision and hold firm to a higher truth. Most notably my parents, Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. And Ann Krile Esselstyn. Thanks for listening.
