#27 Boots Knighton interviews Dr. Jack Wolfson, a renowned cardiologist focused on finding the root causes of health issues. They discuss the importance of eating well, living well, and thinking well to enhance heart health. Dr. Jack emphasizes the need to remove chemicals from food, eat organic, gluten-free, and nutrient-dense meals. He also recommends holistic practices like chiropractic care and holistic dentistry. The conversation touches on the importance of quality sleep, physical activity, and avoiding toxins. Dr. Jack discusses the interconnectedness of the medical and insurance industries, urging individuals to invest in their health and support holistic healthcare providers. They conclude by highlighting the value of community support and prioritizing healthy food choices.

Excited and interested in some of the products that Dr. Jack mentions? From Cardiology Coffee to Liver/Heart Bison Complex or Cardio Multivitamins- there are lots of options that can be supportive of your health and you are able to search by your specific health needs. Best of all Dr. Jack has offered an affiliate link to The Heart Chamber podcast - so any purchases you make through this link - https://shop.naturalheartdoctor.com#theheartchamber

give a little bit back to the cost to produce this podcast and help make these episodes possible.

If you are looking for something specific - here's where you'll find it:

07:41 Understanding the why and root causes.

09:18 Focus on importance of well-rounded healthy lifestyle.

14:02 How to utilize the health benefits of coffee- while still looking out for your heart.

16:50 Importance of Live Well: Sleep and disrupted sleep patterns.

18:57 Importance of chiropractic care and holistic dentistry - avoiding toxins.

20:46 Chiropractic: benefits, neurologic flow, nervous system

23:23 The challenges of our current medical system how pharma and insurance intertwine.

30:17 Congenital heart disease the differences between detection and prevention.

35:27 Diet & challenging are excuses.

40:21 Optimize health using remote testing and virtual care.

A Little More About Today's Guest

Dr. Jack Wolfson is a board-certified cardiologist, best-selling author, husband and father, and the nation’s #1 natural heart doctor. For over two decades, more than a million people have experienced the transformational power of his courses and events on Natural Heart Health. He is named one of America’s Top Functional Medicine Doctors and is a five-time winner of the Natural Choice Awards as a holistic M.D. His book, The Paleo Cardiologist: The Natural Way to Heart Health, was an Amazon #1 best seller.

Dr. Wolfson’s work has been covered by media outlets across the United States including NBC, CNN and the Washington Post.

How to connect with Dr. Jack

Website: https://naturalheartdoctor.com/ & https://shop.naturalheartdoctor.com#theheartchamber

Join the Patreon Community! The Joyful Beat zoom group is where you'll find connection and hope that you aren't alone in your journey.

If you just want to support the show as a one-time gift (thank you), go here.

**I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice. Be sure to check in with your care team about all the next right steps for you and your heart.**

How to connect with Boots

Email: Boots@theheartchamberpodcast.com

Instagram: @openheartsurgerywithboots or @boots.knighton

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/boots-knighton

Boots Knighton

If you enjoyed this episode, take a minute and share it with someone you know who will find value in it as well. You can share directly from this platform or send them to:

Open Heart Surgery with Boots

We feel it is important to make our podcast transcripts available for accessibility. We use quality artificial intelligence tools to make it possible for us to provide this resource to our audience. We do have human eyes reviewing this, but they will rarely be 100% accurate. We appreciate your patience with the occasional errors you will find in our transcriptions. If you find an error in our transcription, or if you would like to use a quote, or verify what was said, please feel free to reach out to us at connect@37by27.com.

Hello. Welcome to The Heart Chamber. I am your host, Boots Knighton. Welcome to episode 27 with Dr. Jack Wolfson. Have you ever met someone and you just knew you found your person? Like, I have my husband. I have my friends, and those are all my people for different reasons. But Dr. Jack Wolfson, he's my heart person. I've only met him once, and it was to record this episode. And when I hung up with him, I was like, I have found the Dr. I've been looking for who just gets it. And when I say gets it, meaning mind, body, soul, and how they all work together on behalf of the heart. I cannot wait for you to listen to this episode. We are going to talk about so many important things related to the heart and your overall health. And we are now offering as an affiliate with Dr. Jack Wolfson, opportunities to support this podcast, so be sure to go to my website, theheartchamberpodcast.com, where you can buy his coffee, his supplements. He has vetted everything, and it is the highest quality. I only offer up people and opportunities and supplements and other things of purchase if I have used it myself. And he is the real deal, and we have to be stewards of our hearts. And he has vetted everything he sells and believes in. So, without further ado, I am so excited to bring you Dr. Jack Wolfson.

Welcome to The Heart Chamber. Hope, inspiration, and healing, conversations on open heart surgery. I am your host, Boots Knighton. If you are a heart patient, a caregiver, a health care provider, a healer, or just looking for open hearted living, this podcast is for you. To make sure you are in rhythm with The Heart Chamber, be sure to subscribe or follow wherever you are listening to this episode. While you're listening today, think of someone who may appreciate this information. The number one-way people learn about a podcast is through a friend. Don't you want to be the reason someone you know gained this heartfelt information? And if you haven't already, follow me on Instagram, 2 different places, at Boots. Knighton or at The Heart Chamber podcast. You can also find me on LinkedIn as well as Facebook. But enough with the directions. Without further delay, let's get to this week's episode.

Dr. Wolfson, thank you so much for coming on to The Heart Chamber podcast. As I have told my listeners, the whole point of my podcast is to provide hope and healing and access to well thought out, reliable, credible information on how we can be our own best advocates and to thrive no matter what we are facing with the journey of our heart. So, Dr. Wolfson, thank you so much for coming on.

It's an absolute pleasure, Boots. Thank you so much. And, yeah, you know, it's about thriving, not just surviving. And I think way too many people in the United States and around the world are really just struggling to survive, and it shouldn't be that way. It shouldn't be that way. So, I'm excited again to be on and share my message.

Well, thank you. And will you just kind of introduce us to you. Tell us about your background and how you came to be who you are in this present-day moment.

Sure. I am a board-certified cardiologist like my father before me. So, I like to say that I was literally born into the world of cardiology and or even actually before that while I was in utero, listening to my father, I'm sure, and, you know, listening to his conversations he would be having with my mother or maybe his colleagues that I would have been around in utero and then, of course, after being born. And my father was my absolute hero. I couldn’t wait to become a cardiologist just like him. And as I was achieving that level of success after 10 years of medical training and then joining the biggest group in the state of Arizona, as a hospital-based cardiologist, my father, at the same time, was getting sick, and he was getting sick of a Parkinson's like illness. And eventually, the Mayo Clinic would diagnose him with something called progressive supranuclear palsy or PSP for short.

And the Mayo Clinic tells my mother and I and my siblings, we have no idea why, you know, your father is sick and dying, and we've got no treatment for him, and he will, you know, die most likely in the next 3 years. Well, serendipitously and simultaneously at that time, was introduced to a young woman, and, she is a doctor of chiropractic. And she told me all the reasons why my father is sick and dying because the way he eats, the way he lives, you know, so on and so forth, and really getting down detailed on that. And she said if you don't change your life defend everything about you, you're going to suffer the same fate. And if you really want to help people, you're going to become a DC. And I said, wait a second. You want me to become a DC or doctor of chiropractic? I just spent 10 years in medical training and 3 years on the job, and I'm making all this money and success as a conventional cardiologist. And she said, no. Not become a DC, doctor of chiropractic. You need to become a DC, doctor of cause, and that's what I did.

I don't ever hear that in the medical world. Like, when I go to the doctor, no one's wanting to get to the cause of anything. Like, when I was diagnosed with all my congenital defects and why they all of a sudden started to become a problem at age 42. No one could come up with a cause. They just wanted to immediately operate and then told me to go live my best life, and that was that. No nutritional education. Nothing. It seems like you're probably one of the few that operates from this standpoint. I mean, I've been to some more, naturopathic doctors in recent years that have similar thinking. But are you, kind of, on your own in the medical world?

Yeah. There are not many cardiologists who think the same way, and that's for a whole variety of reasons. It's just the way that we're trained from day 1 to push pharmaceuticals and procedures. And then, of course, we're kept in line by the, you know, state governing bodies and the professional organizations and by our colleagues and, ultimately, by reimbursement. So, we're kept in line, you know, from that. So, you really need an incredible epiphany moment to take you out of that medical matrix. And as we would look at some of the things regarding you and some of the things you shared before our call is the way I would look at anybody as we decide why. Now you can also say, well, listen. You know? Okay. The why is interesting, but where do I go from here? There's nothing I can do about my past. How do I go forward? And I can't wait to share all that information for you and everybody else listening about how to go forward, but I think that part of the healing process in general is understanding the why this happened to someone. It’s like if someone has significant coronary artery disease well, part of that why would be they were around second-hand smoke, or maybe they were exposed to smoke in utero or, of course, the way they ate, the way that they drank, the way that they lived, the way that they slept, that sunshine exposure, environmental toxins, chemicals, all these things that go into it that create the person we are at this very moment listening to this podcast.

But as it relates to anyone, and I think about congenital heart disease and I think about people with, you know, myocardial bridging, people with deemed, you know, small vessels and stuff like that, let's get to the root cause of why. And the why of everything is because of, in utero, violations of eat well, live well, think well by your mother, behaviors of your father while you were in utero and how that could have exposed and led to that, and, of course, after you're born, all those things. But even we know that certain behaviors of the woman before she gets pregnant leads to significant changes in fetal, you know, outcomes. Outcomes of the babies and how they grow up. So, again, I guess what I'm saying is that whenever I look at anyone, I look through the lens of these violations of the eat well, live well, think well, and then we can use that to gain better understanding of our past, but then, of course, we can use that to gain much better understanding about how we're going to proceed in the future.

Okay. So much to unpack there. Let's talk about that eat well, live well, think well for a moment.

Okay. So, let's talk about this as it relates to going forward, how do people go about those things, and then we can say that the lack of this as we think about these things, then we can talk about how they caused previous health issues. So, if we talk about in order of eat well, live well, think well, and I do want everyone to understand that the eating well is just as important as the living well and the thinking well and all the way around. Right? Thinking well is just as important as the others. Now the eating well conversation gets the most publicity, and there's so many different diets that people have out there. But when I think about eating well, I think about our ancestral diet and bringing it to a modern world. So, if we can all agree on one thing for sure, it's to get the chemicals out of our food.

Eat organic food. Eat free-range grass-fed meats. Eat wild seafood, but get the chemicals out of our food, artificial ingredients, flavors, you know, colorings, artificial sweeteners, get rid of that stuff. Get the pesticides out of our food. They're highly correlated with disease in every way, shape, or form. So, making sure that no matter what diet you follow, vegan, vegetarian, paleo, keto, carnivore, Mediterranean, South Beach diet, whatever it did, chocolate chip cookie diet, just make sure it's organic. Just get the chemicals out.

I've been missing out. Chocolate chip cookies?

There are some people that you probably know who are following that particular diet.

I have not even heard of that.

If you're, like, listening to us talk right now, Boots and me, you're like, oh my god. Wolfson mentioned ice cream. Okay. If you're going to eat ice cream, which so many people obviously do, I'm not advocating it, but if you're going to, just get organic ice cream, Strauss's free-range grass-fed ice cream. You know? The vanilla flavor has 5 ingredients, and they're all organic. You know, so, you know, do it the right way if you're going to do it. The next thing I would say in that category is to eat plenty of seafood. The people who eat the most amount of seafood, the people with the highest levels of omega 3 fatty acids in their blood have the lowest risk of everything, so enjoy high quality seafood.

The next is nose to tail animal foods, like bison, for example, bison liver, heart. Those organs are just so nutrient dense, so packed, full of all the proteins, vitamins, minerals that we need to exist. And then I'm a big fan of gluten free eating and not so much of, like, oh, turning to all these gluten free foods and recipes. Although you can, but I've just seen so much devastation from gluten. We do a lot of third-party testing with intestinal hyperpermeability panels, gluten sensitivity panels, and people just come off the charts. So, those are kind of my dietary strategies. I would also say really quick too, obviously, quality beverages. I am a fan of organic, mold mycotoxin free coffee. I am not a fan of alcohol, although I love the taste of alcohol. I personally like the way that I feel after a drink, I grew up as a drinker. My father was a drinker. The only sob story to his drinking, because he was the joke teller, the storyteller of everything. The only sob story about his drinking is that he's dead. So, that's the thing there. And then let me wrap up, eat well as far as intermittent fasting. I believe that a lot of people with coronary artery disease will do well in the fact of clearing out some of those blockages through the process of extended duration intermittent fasting, like, 72 hours, you know, at a minimum.

That's a whole podcast episode in and of itself, just the eat well. And I want to touch on coffee because I've been reading about your coffee, and I'm such a coffee lover. And I believe in the power of the morning cup, and it's just the way you start your day. Can you unpack a little bit for us the concerns around coffee and why you started, you have, like, your own coffee company or label. It's a really cool story.

The story kind of, you know, if I may preface the story about coffee, there's a lot of people who love coffee. Right? 175 million Americans in the United States, they love coffee. Yet if they go to see their traditional medical doctor, they will often be told to get rid of it. Even some natural doctors, you know, natural practitioners will tell people not to drink coffee, but I, you know, said, well, what's really the data behind that? Because I grew up as a coffee drinker. My father was a coffee drinker. Of course, back then, it was big tins at Hills Brothers and gas station coffee and coffee in the nursing station, how that developed. And then I was asked when I met my wife and she was all into organic, then it became organic coffee, and then there's a certain coffee company that asked me to be a medical, you know, scientific adviser to their company as it relates to coffee.

And so, as I start combing through all this literature about all the benefits, really, of coffee and let me say here really quick. If you don't like the way you feel on coffee or caffeine, then don't drink it. But if you do, I want to give you the medical, you know, authority and prescription, if you will to do so. But if you look at all the literature about what it does for blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, heart rhythm disorders like atrial fibrillation, recovery after a heart attack, longevity, brain health, anticancer. There's a lot of literature that supports that, and then I also want to create something that not only was free of tested pesticides, so we third party tested my coffee, and then the other thing is that we wanted to make sure that it was free of mold mycotoxins. Then I know that that's something near and dear to your heart as well, so as it is to mine. So, it had to be a mold free coffee. Now Bulletproof and Dave Asprey, they made the mold story very well known, but I don't think he took enough attention to the detail of was it truly organic coffee. Because sometimes organic coffees may be moldier because they're not sprayed with chemicals, so you really got to make sure that you're getting something that doesn't have the chemicals and doesn't have the mold mycotoxins, and that's where, you know, my brand was born.

Incredible. And I'll have in the show notes how listeners can go find that and find you, obviously. And I hadn't thought about how the lack of pesticides could contribute to more mold, so thank you for that awareness. And so, do you continuously monitor your product for mycotoxins? Like, how do you check that?

And, actually, what we do with ours is that we do a benevolence campaign to a group called Friends of Honduran Children, and I vetted that organization to make sure that they were getting, the right things sent, and done for those children as opposed to, you know, pharmaceutical donations and stuff like that, which is not what I wanted to contribute to. So, 5% of all sales, sales, not profits, but sales go to that organization. So, there you go.

Incredible. It's like a 1, 2 punch for good. I love that. Thank you. Okay. So, live well. So, we've covered eat well, which has so many important nuggets, but tell me about live well.

Yeah. So, live well is incredibly important as well, and it's a much bigger category as far all the different components of what it means to live well. When I think of living well, the first thing I think about is sleep and getting high quality sleep. To go to sleep shortly after the sundown and a waking up before the sunrise, that's what our ancestors did. Now the average time people go to sleep in the United States is after midnight. It's midnight because it was the middle of the night, but now it's when most people go to bed. And that's catastrophic on so many different levels, artificial lights and EMF and disrupted sleep patterns and destroying melatonin and all these things that are so important. So, we want to try and go to bed as shortly after sundown as possible.

You know, the wintertime, northern hemisphere, if you're getting to bed 8, 8:30, I think you're probably doing better than most. Trying to minimize the use of technology after dark is also critical. Number 2 is sunshine, making sure that we get our solar panel, our skin, out into the sunlight. Whether it's sunny outside, natural light, taking off those sunglasses. I haven't worn sunglasses in 15 years unless I'm doing some kind of sporting activity to protect my eyes, and even then, I tried for clear lenses. I got to be careful about these streams of consciousness that I get into about getting down these different rabbit holes. But even the clear lenses block out UVA and UVB, which a problem. Our eyes actually have photoreceptors for UVA and UVB, which is why I don't wear sunglasses.

As far as sunscreen, I'll put sunscreen on my face sometimes if it's going to be prolonged exposure or if I haven't been out in the sun in a while. Sunburn, bad. Sunshine, good. Again, the skin is a solar panel, makes vitamin d, nitric oxide, and those natural light behaviors help us to make the components that will become melatonin when we go to sleep. So, we got sleep. We got sunshine. We got physical activity, movement. Every study shows that the more you move, the better off you are. Burst activity, high intensity interval activity, is always good. Push ups, pull ups, squats, lunges, stand up paddle boarding, kayaking. My favorite thing in the world activity wise is mountain biking. So, those factors there. Next one, everybody needs to be under the care of a chiropractor. And not just because I married 1, but because they are the real neurologists Boots. They are the real neurologists in the recovery phase. And, you know, for someone who's had open heart surgery and they've had, you know, sternotomy, any chiropractor is going to take a good history, a good physical examination.

They're not going to come up to someone fresh out of surgery or many years after surgery and all of a sudden, quote, unquote, crush, you know, their spine or their, you know, sternum. And the number of times I saw someone come into the hospital with a chiropractic complication was zero. So, and I worked in the hospitals for 18 years. So, chiropractic, holistic dentistry is very important to take care of your teeth in a holistic fashion. The literature there is very strong about periodontal disease, gingivitis, root canals, very, very, very destructive, so we got to fix that. And then something I know that you're passionate about, and it is like those the toxin category. So, avoiding environmental toxins comes in under the lifestyle factor. And first and foremost, in that area is mold, mycotoxins and bacterial toxins from a water damaged building.

Wow. So, I'm good on the sleep and the sunshine and the physical activity. I do not have a chiropractor, but I do have a holistic dentist. And I recently had my cavitations operated on, and I learned so much. I plan on bringing that dentist on to the podcast in the coming months because he is just such a wealth of knowledge here in Eastern Idaho. I want to spend a little bit more time on the chiropractic side. That's the first time I've heard of that. Why? Can you go a little more in-depth as to why that is so important for postoperative healing, if that's the angle you were meaning.

Well, I think chiropractic is great for all things health and wellness. For prevention, for the treatment, for the reversal of health-related conditions. And, I say that because they are phenomenal with musculoskeletal issues and headache and neck aches and back pains and stuff like that. But the way that chiropractic really works is by using the bones as levers in the body and by moving bones and moving joints in particular, there is innervation to those joints. And when you move that joint, now you create this wave of neurologic flow from the joint back to the brain and from the brain back into the body, and that's all controlled in many ways through various parts of the nervous system. But first and foremost, we can talk about what's called the autonomic nervous system. Sympathetic, which is fight or flight or freeze, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which is rest, digest, procreate, sexual activity, stuff like that. So, as we look at the way the world is today in sympathetic overdrive, we're just in fight or flight, or what do you think the status is of your neurologic system after you come out of open-heart surgery? What do you think that is? Do you think you're in the rest-digest mode or you're in fight or flight. Your body, right? Your paleolithic cave person body is looking at this, and they're like, what just happened? What just happened, you know, to me? And that is absolutely tremendous. So, again, as we look at that, we just want to make sure that went under the care of a chiropractor for all these different reasons.

I believe chiropractic for children, you know, these ear infections, strep throats, people with gut issues. I just, I think the world of chiropractic. And, listen, I also I tend to come across as very bashing on the medical community, and I'm not apologetic about that, but I will give the caveat that listen. God bless the men and women who work in emergency rooms and trauma centers, you know, and who do open heart procedures on the people who need it. But for truly the prevention, that reversal for the treatment of chronic diseases, the medical community has nothing. They have nothing in this area. And, it’s unfortunate because there's so much, we can do to really end the suffering, and that's one of my missions. So, I do appreciate you having me on.

Bullen. As I was saying to you before we started recording, you know, I refer to it as the sick care industry. Right? And that anything that has helped me thrive post open-heart surgery has not been covered by insurance. I don't understand why I'm paying for this health care. I put that in air quotes. If anything, that's actually benefiting my health is not being covered. I don't find that acceptable. I find it criminal.

It's lunacy, and it is past time that those changes. And the only way I can think to help contribute to that is to have important conversations like this and get people to think differently about what they're choosing to invest in. Because every time we spend our money, whatever that is for, we are saying we are giving the green light to that. So, if I'm buying nonorganic crap food, I am telling that industry I continue to approve of that.

Yeah. That's a great, great point. You know, voting with your pocketbook, and I think that the revolution only will come from the people. It's only going to come from people like you and I shouting from the rooftops, hey. We're only going to eat organic food. We're only going to drink organic, you know, natural beverages, and we're only going to support holistic health care providers. And I do feel your pain, and, obviously, I've seen thousands of people and talked to a lot, a lot a lot of people online and just seeing the message, you know, loud and clear about how people struggled to financially, cover this kind of out-of-pocket expenses. And, listen.

We're up against a $1.5 trillion a year pharmaceutical revenue generating, juggernaut. The insurance industry is totally in bed with pharma, and therefore, of course, the medical doctors, you know, this is all just one nasty, incestuous, in a relationship, and I don't see it coming to an end anytime soon. That's for sure. All political parties are bought and sold, you know, by the and by the pharmaceutical industrial complex, including insurance companies. So, it really is a problem. Just to get a little bit detail as far as giving people some practical advice, there are some great companies out there, Christian Share, you know, programs, Liberty Health Share programs. I think supporting and looking into those are fantastic. I also look at, you know, the status of health savings accounts, high deductible health care plans where you're on the hook for a catastrophe, but you're only on the hook for, say, the first 5 or $10,000 of very high deductible plans, low monthly premiums, which are phenomenal, I guess, when you say you're healthy and now someone comes along and like, well, I'm not healthy, and I have to pay for all these pharmaceuticals.

Well, then that really is the prerogative to get off the pharmaceuticals. Do everything you can to work off the pharmaceuticals. And I'm telling you, I've been very successful in marching off pharmaceuticals in just about everybody that I've encountered. There are a few indications for certain pharmaceuticals, but my mission is to reduce and eliminate pharmaceuticals. And let me say one more thing too. I believe my company; Natural Heart Doctor, is the worldwide leader in cardiovascular health. Now you may say, wait a sec. What about Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Texas Heart Institute? Well, those are the worldwide leader in cardiovascular sickness or the worldwide leaders in cardiovascular health.

So, what about someone like me who has, you know, had the myocardial bridging, but also has a bicuspid valve and tiny coronary arteries. Like, how do I walk the line between the 2 worlds? Because what I'm hearing as patient right now with you, Dr., is okay. I have these anatomical things going on. Right? And how do I manage the healthy lifestyle and the need of monitoring as I age.

Well, the way that you would monitor a bicuspid aortic valve is typically going to be with an echocardiogram. So, I don't have a problem with echocardiograms. They can also be cash-based tests where a doctor like me gives someone like you a prescription for an echocardiogram, and then insurance may cover that test or, you know, I guess, in certain cases, they may not. In that case, they typically do. But even for someone who didn't have insurance, then you go to a local hospital and you say, I have a prescription for an echocardiogram. What is the cash price for this particular, you know, test? And then they come back and they say, well, it is $2,000, and then you say, I would like to pay you $800. Is that acceptable to you? And then they say yes or no.

And oftentimes, I'm telling you, Boots, that these places will all negotiate. Everybody wants money. Everybody gets a financial person. Everybody has their bottom line. That's one thing with that. What I would also say to someone like you or anyone who's listening, what if the goal right now is to improve or preserve your current status and prevent things from getting worse. So, what is the best approach to do that? Is that in the pharmaceutical, medical mainstream model, or is it through the concept of eat well, live well, think well? And then our extension onto that is test, don't guess, so we personally do the most advanced blood, urine, stool, salivary testing whenever needed. And, yes, those tests, if you do a lot of them, can become expensive.

And then we also get into evidence-based supplements, which, of course, insurance doesn't cover, and then biohacking strategies. So, that could be, red light therapy, sauna therapy, IV therapy, ozone therapy, lymphatic therapy. There's a lot, a lot, a lot of different biohacking strategies. And as I think about this whole process, being a conventional medical doctor is real easy. You know? Here's your pharma. Here's your surgical procedure. Here's some tests you probably didn't need, and, well, we'll see you back real soon. The conversations we have right now are extensive. They're lengthy, but they are the answer.

That's so overwhelming for me because I mean well, first of all, I'm 45. I didn't learn of any of this till I was 42. So, it was shocking. Right? And no one has educated me on how to preserve my heart. Basically, just this real negative view of, oh, we've got to monitor this every year because eventually it's going to become a problem. That's been the only conversation. Like, I've asked for nutrition. I've asked for, is there any evidence-based approaches to, like, preserving a bicuspid valve? Like, surely there's got to be something. There's just such a disconnect. I know I have a lot of congenital heart listeners, and there just has to be an easier, softer way than just monitor and ring our wrists every year. That just doesn't compute with me.

You're totally correct. So, for anyone who's listening with congenital heart disease, again, I applaud the heroic efforts of surgeons who did what they did at the time to you of which there is an infinite number of congenital abnormalities. And I do want to reiterate again, there's something you were born with, but it's likely from environmental toxin exposure in utero and actually prior to conception. I do want to put that out there. But how does everyone listening lead their best life? Like you said, is it just, okay. We'll retest you in a year. Take care. And you're like, that's it? That's not the prevention strategy. That's the detection strategy for when you're going to tell me when I need to have my bicuspid aortic valve replaced or my aorta, you know, repaired, surgery on a mitral valve or, you know, pulmonary artery, you know, atresia, you know, cases, tetralogy of Fallot, you know, whatever it may be. So, there are a lot of strategies we can do to preserve the bicuspid aortic valve. We know that people with bicuspid aortic valve disease, when they are exposed to environmental toxins and synthetic foods and even poor sunshine exposure, vitamin d levels, those people progress. So, we try and make sure that we eat well, live well, think well. Test, don't guess. Vitamin K2, for example, wonderful strategy to prevent treating reverse coronary artery disease and aortic valve calcification and disease in a bicuspid patient.

But, you know, again, for anyone who's listening, the best way forward is not just to sit and wait. It's to be very proactive. Eat the right foods, avoid the wrong foods, live the right lifestyle. Avoid the environmental toxins. And then, so the think well category, it really comes into these various things, passion, purpose. You know, Boots, I mean, I don't know much about you except for the fact that you started this podcast for all the reasons you said you did. But, I mean, that's a passion statement.

It's a passion. That's a purpose. You're helping so many people who are struggling in this arena. Spirituality is obviously incredibly important. We know that people who believe in God, people who do have “religion and spirituality”, they live better. They live longer. That's in the literature, and, obviously, it's common sense.

Gratitude, self-acceptance. Hey. You know what? I was born with this. I have this. I have this procedure. I accept who I am, and I will, you know, work to continue to make myself the best I can going forward. Immunity is another thing that's very important inside of live well. So, what you've created here, Boots, with your community here is obviously important, but community could be faith based. It could be work based. It could be community based. It could be politically based, of which there are so many different things in community, but having community, which includes family and friends and people who are like minded, that’s all very important as it relates to health and wellness. We know that people who don't have community, who identify themselves as socially isolated, they die much earlier. And then finally, as I would wrap up the think well, which is not everything, but, because it's such a big category of which the medical doctors have zero training. And you could say, oh, what about a psychiatrist? And they really give zero training on the things there. I mean, that's just total pharmaceuticals.

But last but not least is safety. Right? Safety, security in your home. Do you feel safe at home? Do you feel secure at home? Do you feel safe and secure at your workplace, or around other people or financially secure? These are all big things. And, ultimately, maybe, Boots, what I would say is thinking well is all about finding you're happy. Just find your happy place. Happy people live longer.

Beautiful, very succinct, and I can't agree more. Another heart patient talked about the importance of the CaringBridge community and meal trains. And so, if you are going through a heart issue or any issue in life, CaringBridge. It basically takes your community and puts it online that's easier for you to access. And then the meal train is an incredible way for people to engage, to care for you with the basic need, which is food. Obviously, you would hope for clean, fair, healthy food. But, you know, you can always make that request, and people can either choose to bring you a meal or not. So, when I was going through my heart surgery, we had a meal train, and it was just invaluable to my husband and I.

Can I add to that? You know, it's, when one is feeling down and out for any particular reason, right, we have these comfort foods. But unfortunately, the comfort foods do not help people heal. Maybe mentally. I guess in that sense, you could say, well, it did, but it's just not good enough of a reason. So, if we're healing with foods like liver and heart, how do you repair a heart? You eat the heart. I don't make the rules. It's just common-sense stuff.

So, and there are encapsulated products as well that are organs in a capsule, food is medicine, so you could do it that way. And the organs tend to be a lot cheaper. Like, most people, they want the fillet of the steak and stuff like that, the fillet of the cattle, but, you know, beef liver, bison liver, those tend to be a lot cheaper and much more nutrient dense, so they go a lot further. And then also the seafood. So, you know, sardines, anchovies. These are not expensive, and they're very nutrient dense. Even wild salmon is nutrient dense, although varieties can be expensive. But, you know, I would also challenge people too, and I don't mean to pass judgment on people, but, this is kind of like hashtag no excuses.

You know, a lot of times, on average, we hear people say that they can't afford it, you know, whatever it may be, but it you know, they seem to be able to afford the Starbucks Crepe, Frappuccino on a daily basis, you know, along with a croissant, you know, for $12, you know, in the morning. Some of these women who are in their mid, you know, 50s and 60s and 70s, they tend to show up with beautifully styled hair and nails and, you know, carrying some kind of fancy purse, maybe it's time to downsize on your car or on your home or the place that you live and really work to pay yourself with food first. Again, there are a lot of people who are really struggling, and I do not mean to, you know, denigrate them. And, you know, it's interesting that, back in the day, a lot of the hospital systems, right, you know, New York Presbyterian, Lutheran General, these were all faith-based institutions. They were the churches who ran the medical care and the hospitals, and that's where it was. And somehow the insurance industry coopted the whole thing. It was really taken out of the hands and now into the hands of the third party. And I think that if there was a return to a lot more of that charitable giving to those institutions, as opposed to, well, what happens now is that we get taxed, and we pay Medicare and Medicaid and so on and so forth.

But if we took the government out of that equation and we were able to directly support the hospitals to take care of people and to do so in the right way. Like, I personally I would love to take part in meal train and stuff like that, and I would gladly with God as my witness right now, I would gladly support people that are bringing only organic food to people. Only free-range grass-fed products, only the wild seafood. I will contribute to that, but I will never be a contributor to the sickness model. One could say, well, come on. They need food. They're down and out. They just had surgery. What's the big deal if we bring them Subway? You know? They need something to eat.

I, and you mentioned this earlier, I and my family will never support that. We will never give money to that ever.

Right. Standing by your integrity. That is another thing I want to point out. I mean, we've just recently met, and it is just very clear you're in your integrity. You are standing in your truth, and you have been in this long enough to know what works, what doesn't, what's broken, what's effective. And I just appreciate your generosity in sharing all of this with us. Now you're 1 in a million in the United States. How does someone like me up in Idaho or someone in Alabama, I'm thinking of a heart patient there that became a friend of mine, my new heart friend in Brooklyn, New York. Like, admittedly, I feel like I'm pretty far along on your eat well, live well, think well model. And I still have so much to change. I'm overwhelmed. I have a cardiologist locally who does not think like you. I'm currently having new issues. What do we do as heart patients? Like, I can't just hop in the car and run down to Arizona, and you likely don't have an appointment anyway. How do we move forward? I'm exasperated.

I understand. But I think that if we continue to really work through really dialing in the possibilities of how we eat, how we live, and how we think. And we're making sure all those are firing on all cylinders to the best of our ability. And then if we look at test, don't guess, so we do, in particular, cell testing remotely so people do get the testing locally, and then they get the opportunity to review the results either with a coach or one of the other doctors on my team at Natural Heart Doctors. So, that's the way, personally, the way that we operate. Now my long-term vision, which hopefully is not the long term, it's the short term, is that we get offices and clinics in cities and towns all around the country to make it easier for people to show up in person. But the reality is, virtual, you know, meetings and virtual technology is already here. Everybody is already doing it. There's no reason not to do it, and that truly is the future.

No. And open-heart surgery is nothing to sniff at. We could go on for hours, but if there is one piece of advice for today, for this episode. If you wish that people would make one immediate change, what would it be?

Well, as I speak to you right now, I am outside recording. So, I'll say this. The more time you spend outside, the longer you will live.

Yeah. The sunshine, the fresh air, the exercise, the grounding on the earth, all of it.

All of it. But it's not easy. You know, when you're up in Eastern Idaho and the weather, you know, come wintertime is this, this, this, and I'm a Chicago guy for 30 years, you know, so I get it. But there are healthier places to live, quite honestly. But I used to bike ride out of a store in Chicagoland, and their motto was there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes. So, get the good clothes and get outside.

We're going to leave it there for now. I'm already going to invite you back. For listeners, you will find all the ways in the show notes. Something I have found particularly helpful is Dr. Wolfson's TikTok videos. They're short, easy to digest, and give you a lot to think about. Yesterday, I was binging on and help me with this, Dr. Wolfson, the 10 different tests for a healthy heart. Am I reading that right? It was really, really interesting.

Yeah. Thank you. I mean, there's just so much detail and in-depth knowledge you can get from testing that, obviously, most medical doctors don't test for a whole variety of reasons, but, you can really get a lot of good information from those tests.

So, if you aren't on TikTok, I would say it's actually worth getting an account just to follow Dr. Wolfson. If you are a caregiver, a medical provider, or a heart patient, it is worth your time. It is worth getting on and pushing through all the noise and BS that's on TikTok. So, Dr. Wolfson, I can't thank you enough for your generosity today. You're a very busy man. You're changing the world one heart at a time, and my heart has benefited from you today.

Well, thank you so much for having me on, Boots. Thank you.

Thank you for sharing a few heartbeats of your day with me today. Please be sure to follow or subscribe to this podcast wherever you are listening. Share with a friend who will value what we discussed. Go to either Apple Podcasts and write us a review or mark those stars on Spotify. I read these, and your feedback is so encouraging, and it also helps others find this podcast. Also, please feel free to drop me a note at Boots@TheHeartChamberpodcast.com. I truly want to know how you're doing and if this podcast has been a source of hope, inspiration and healing for you. Again, I am your host, Boots Knighton, and thanks for listening. Be sure to tune in next Tuesday for another episode of The Heart Chamber.