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ROBYN: Hello everyone. And thank you once again for being part of month two of the Self-Care Revolution where our theme is all about the power of the breath and the power of the heart. And this is our first time that we’re welcoming back Roy Heilbron and Jim Healthy who were speakers in our first month, which was ‘Thoughts andFood asMedicine’. They gave such a great talk that many, many people wanted to have them come back. We just talked very briefly about how powerful food is, in terms of our overall health, and now, again, at the heart. So today, I’m co-hosting with…
KEVIN: Kevin Snow.
KRISTIN: Kristin Kurtz.
ROBYN: And my name, I always forget to say. My name is Robyn Benson. I’m a practitioner of Chinese Medicine and Founder of Santa Fe Soul Health and HealingCenter. I just want to say this is our seventh week of the Self-Care Revolution. It’s been an amazing experience to engage with so many of you. We thank you all for filling out your assessments so we get to hear what you’d like to see in this 12-month series.
We just want to let you know that tonight there is a live event with the Self-Care Coaches. You’ll be getting a link after our next call, to find out about that. So, you have the opportunity to interact directly with ten of the Self-Care Coaches and practitioners at Santa Fe Soul. Again, we’re going to be focusing on this topic of breath and heart matters. And so, know that you will have that opportunity to join us this evening.
Also, I want to let you know, all the full-time members of the Self-Care Revolution, we have several intensives that are going to be offered in the next few weeks, as we go into the third month, which is all about transmuting and releasing trauma. We have amazing events planned for the month of March, ending on March 27 with a Global Release Trauma Day. So stay tuned, we’ve got much to share about that day.
For right now, I want to introduce one of our two speakers, Jim is on his way, Roy Heilbron, who is actually affiliated with Santa Fe Soul. Thank you again for being here.
ROY: Thanks, Robyn. Thanks for having me.
ROBYN: Roy Heilbron is one of the original National Institute of Health researchers for the TACT, which is the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy study. He is an award-winning board-certified Cardiologist, board-certified in Internal Medicine, board-certified in Nuclear Cardiology, a Diplomat incardiovascular disease at the American Board of Internal Medicine, a Diplomat of the American Board of Holistic Medicine and a certified Chelation Therapist. Dr. Heilbron is also a co-developer and researcher of the well-known South Beach Diet, in collaboration with Arthur Agatston. He is also the winner of numerous awards and citations, including the Genentech Research Award and the Paul Furlong Clinical Medicine Award.
Wow! So, here you are, so grateful to have you here. This is your month, all about the heart. So, why don’t you give us a little bit of background about how you got into cardiology and what has brought you to what you’re practicing today in 2013?
ROY: I trained in traditional medicine, internal medicine, when I was Chief Resident at Mount Sinai one year. Then I did cardiology and practiced traditional cardiology for about seven years. Then actually, my wife started to get into Holistic Medicine, as well as her uncle. And through that, I started to see the results that they would get. Meaning, sometimes a patient coming in on all these vitamins and things and I would say, “Go see Dr. Hart.” And then, they’d come back much improved.
And then, the other side of it was that when you practice as a Cardiologist, there are times when a patient will have a heart attack or will have a stroke and you’ll go back and look at the chart and say, “Wow, he was on all the right medicines. He should have been on and everything was perfect. Why did it still happen?” And it turns out that actually, when you look at the statistics is that 77% what’s called risk residual. That means of people over a five-year period, 77% will have an event during that time, on all the right medicines.
ROBYN: Wow.
ROY: So, when I started to realize that what we were doing, though it helped, wasn’t really curing anybody, then I started to look into some of the alternative therapies, starting with chelation. Chelation was the first thing we really looked at and started treating patients with.
ROBYN: Can you go into more depth about what chelation is?
ROY: Yeah. So, chelation is an IV treatment, or nowadays, it can be oral also. It’s a mixture of ten components, mixed in an IV bag that goes in over three hours. What we wanted to look at in the big trial we did was to see how effective it was in preventing heart attacks and death and stroke. What we were able to prove in TACT was that chelation was, in effect, number one, it is safe. So, before we started the study, there was a big controversy of whether it was safe or not. Number two, is it effective? So, we proved that it is very effective. That was a very exciting time, after 50 years of controversy in chelation.
ROBYN: Wow, that’s exciting. Can you tell us a little bit more about what’s in the chelation? A little bit of Vitamin C? A little bit of…
ROY: Chelation is a mixture of ten components. The most important or active part is EDTA. We use up to 3 grams of EDTA, based on a patient’s weight. Vitamin C is the second most important component. There’s usually 7 grams of Vitamin C. There’s magnesium, up to 2 grams. Potassium bicarbonate, thiamine, prodoxine, pantothenic acid which are vitamins, procaine, a little bit of heparin and sterile water. Actually, the mix of things.
ROBYN: Wow, three hours. And how many of these do most of your patients receive?
ROY: The typical treatment is 40 treatment bags. They can do it up to five times in a week or three times in a week or once a week. This is how the usual protocol goes through.
ROBYN: And then also, you are offering dietary advice?
ROY: Yes.
ROBYN: What’s your whole feeling about how 90% of diseases are related to the heart? Can you talk a little bit about that?
ROY: When we started chelation, the study, 12 years ago, we didn’t really know how it worked. We knew it seemed to work and some people called it the Drano for the arteries. But what we’ve found since that time is that most people do have toxic metals. EDTA is a known chemical to remove lead, especially, as well as other toxic metals such as arsenic, cadmium. The removal of these metals is very important for cardiovascular health. That’s what we’ve actually found. So now, we’re able to measure levels before. We’re able to adjust the chelation based on what the person’s levels are and then finish, depending on how many they need, based on how much toxin they have left in them.
ROBYN: Many of our listeners have probably never even heard of chelation. Now that our second speaker has arrived, Jim, welcome!
JIM: Thank you very much Dr. Benson.
ROBYN: I’m going to pause here and introduce you to our listeners. Jim is the Founder of JimHealthy.com, an online coaching service that inspires, educates, and motivates people on how they can reverse various medical conditions simply by upgrading their diet and lifestyle and by awakening and realizing their deeper aspirations for a more satisfying and rewarding life.
Jim is also the creator of Jim Healthy Publications and the co-author of ‘The 30-Day Diabetes Cure’, the bestselling book with more than 200,000 copies sold, that shows people with Type 2 diabetes how to improve and reverse their conditions by making smarter choices in how they eat, think and live.
So, we’ve been talking to Dr. Roy about chelation and the importance of that. Can you also differentiate like this is not really a heart problem? Could you go into really what causes the need for this, besides the heavy metals? And then maybe, we can follow up with you. The need for chelation, just so people really understand. What is this? What’s causing the clogging?
ROY: Lead or any of the heavy metals damage the lining of the artery wall. And that damage is repaired, sort of like a callous or a scab, on the artery wall, which is plaque. And as that plaque builds up, after repeated insults on the artery wall, eventually it closes off. That’s what a heart attack is, if it’s in the heart or a stroke if it’s in the neck. What chelation is able to do is to remove what’s actually aggravating the artery wall, or damaging the artery wall. By removing that, then the artery wall will be able to heal.
ROBYN: The reason that we’re bringing Jim and Dr. Roy Heilbron together is that they’re collaborating on several books and really demystifying a lot of myths out there about health. Maybe Jim, you might want to join the conversation here.
JIM: One of the biggest myths out there is that high cholesterol causes heart disease. And that the best way for us to protect ourselves against heart attack and stroke is to keep our cholesterol low. You know, we’ve heard this for almost 40 years. And of course, the best ways to keep our cholesterol low is to eat a low fat diet and to take statin drugs because statin drugs suppress the production of cholesterol in the liver.
Well, after following this advice for almost 30 years, we’re finding heart disease levels have not diminished. The rate of heart disease is just the same as it was in the 1980’s. Of course, fewer people were dying of heart disease but that’s because we have better treatment. We’re getting people to the hospitals faster and we have better emergency procedures. But the incidence of heart disease is not diminishing.
The other thing that’s not diminishing is this idea that cholesterol and a high-fat diet cause artery disease. And there are so many studies that show this is fallacious. We’re just waiting now for this to precipitate into mainstream thinking, because it takes about 20 years for a new concept to become adapted.
I was just at my doctor’s yesterday for a checkup and I got the same thing. He wanted to put me on a statin drug because my cholesterol was like 220, my overall cholesterol’s 220. They really want to get your LDL cholesterol down below 70.
Well, cholesterol’s not the problem anyway. What we’re really talking about, the problem is lipoproteins. These are the vehicles that carry cholesterol. Cholesterol is actually extremely beneficial for the body. And if you didn’t have cholesterol, you wouldn’t be alive. There’s a large percentage of cholesterol in the brain. Cholesterol also is responsible for the integrity, the stiffness of your cell walls. So, things don’t squish together inside your body. And maybe Roy could speak more about this because he’s, obviously, a cardiologist.
ROY: You know, I think those are definitely good points. There are two giant mistakes in the understanding that most people have of cholesterol right now. Number one is, like you said, that what is a high or a low cholesterol? At the beginning of the cholesterol story, normal was less than 300. And then it was 260 and 240 and 200. Soon, it’ll be 180. They keep adjusting it to put more and more people on the medication. The way it is right now, 50% of the population of the United States would be on a statin.
JIM: Oh, and there’s some talk about putting it in the water. Doctors are so over the moon about statin drugs that they think everybody should be on a statin drug, everybody.
ROY: Now, the mistake is if you even read the insert for the actual statin drug, it says first, rule out secondary causes of elevated cholesterol. And cholesterol is the building block for all your hormones. If your hormones are out of balance, your cholesterol starts to go up, because if you’re missing a hormone, the body will produce more cholesterol to supply the missing hormone.
The second thing is that HDL especially, they call it the good cholesterol, as that goes higher and higher, that’s a marker for toxicity. What we found is by balancing people’s hormones and by detoxing them, they’re able to completely normalize their cholesterol. So, cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease but it is a marker of something else being off.
One of my favorite cartoons I ever saw was it says that every accident you went to investigate, a care accident, you saw tire marks. That’s what cholesterol is to heart disease. It’s like the tire marks. The tire marks didn’t cause the accident, but they’re always there.
ROBYN: Wow!Right.
JIM: The body uses cholesterol and blood fats to heal the harm that’s done in the very delicate lining inside the arteries. And this harm is done by a number of things. Uncontrolled high blood pressure can cause it because the lining is only one cell thick, so it’s very delicate. But what we’re finding is that what really damages, in addition to the heavy metals Roy’s talking about, are very small lipoprotein carriers.So, it’s not cholesterol. Forget about cholesterol. In fact, there are several studies that show that for menopausal women, high cholesterol is extremely protective. So, women out there, if you’re post-menopausal and your cholesterol is high, do some research. Your cholesterol is actually very protective and in most cases, you don’t need a statin drug.
Getting back to what’s really disturbing and damaging the lining wall, there are these very tiny little carriers of cholesterol and triglycerides called lipoproteins. Basically, most cardiologists and doctors, they’re still measuring for total cholesterol, LDL and HDL. And this is science that’s at least 20 or 30 years old. And there’s not even good science back then.
What people really should be measuring is the size of their lipoproteins. LDL lipoprotein comes in a couple of sizes: very small and large. And so does HDL lipoprotein, large and the small one. It seems now that the large LDL, what we’re calling the good cholesterol, but these are basically carriers of cholesterol and triglycerides, blood fat. These are actually protective. You can think of them as big cotton balls, if you want. They roll through the bloodstream and they actually pick up these small dangerous carriers. There’s some evidence that they actually regress the soft plaque in the artery. The real culprits are these very small lipoproteins.
What causes these very small lipoproteins? Well, we’re finding that it’s sugar and carbohydrates. This is like the big secret. We’re talking about it more and more, but doctors don’t want to talk about sugar and carbohydrates being the culprit in heart disease, and not just heart disease; diabetes, Alzheimer’s, kidney disease, hypertension. There are very few diseases that sugar and carbohydrates don’t either cause or make worse.
ROBYN: This just brings me to the medical disclaimer that we have on our website, as we bring up information like this. Just so that everybody knows. Be sure to visit our website, And just so you know that part of the ignition of the Self-Care Revolution is we’re bringing in over 70, probably 80 speakers by the end of the year that are sharing their views, their expertise when it comes to this issue of self-care, the big issue of reversing diseases and saving millions of lives by reclaiming our own health.
And what you said Jim, earlier, that it takes 20 years for a new concept to really take hold. Part of using the word ‘revolution’, our definition is that it is a fundamental change in mindset. We’re saying we don’t have time. Things have changed so rapidly in terms of our food, water, air. We’re trying to do our part earnestly and urgently to help people change their mindset about how they’re choosing what they eat at the end of their fork every day and their thought.
JIM: One thing that we have to remember is that doctors are, traditionally throughout history, the most or one of the most conservative professional groups that we have. They are so slow to change. They are very invested in these mainstream ideas for a lot of reasons. There’s politics, there’s ego, but there’s also a lot of financial investment and tide. The pharmaceutical industry basically is granting or courting or influencing, financially or with gifts in trips, etcetera, 80% of the doctors in this country. If you look, 80% of the doctors have some kind of financial tie, whether they’re running studies, whether they’re performing lectures, to drug companies.
This is one of the reasons why ideas move so slowly. I’ll give you a perfect example. Remember the old food pyramid in the 1980’s? The bottom of the food pyramid was the foods that we were supposed to eat the most of, and what were they? Heart-healthy whole grains. Bread, baked goods, carbohydrates, cereals.