I’m Dr. Andy Kaufman, recovering physician, plandemic whistleblower, natural healing pedagogue and legal code talker. You can call me the Truth Doctor. I’m here to shift your paradigm as I perform a radical forensic dissection, discerning fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, medicine from poison, law from legal fiction, and individualism from collectivism. This is your channel for unraveling the truth about health and science. This is the Healthy Living Livestream. Hello everyone and welcome to the Healthy Living Livestream. As usual, I’m your host, Dr. Andrew Kaufman. So today I am going to talk a little bit more about heart disease or cardiovascular disease and the role of minerals or metals in cardiovascular disease.

Now I want to just give a few introductory remarks because the context is extremely important when talking about this and I think most professionals out there and experts who talk about heart disease don’t really provide the proper context. So this is the somewhat shocking news that heart disease or cardiovascular disease with heart attacks is a modern disease. In other words, it didn’t exist in the past. So for example, in the United States, the first report of heart attack in the medical literature was not until I believe 1905. So in the 1800s, for example, there were no heart attacks among US residents.

This of course lends itself to seeing that the causality is related to something that occurred in the 20th century. And in other words, it’s not our own biological fate to develop arterial and heart disease. This is something that is part of modern industrial society. And my analysis has identified a variety of different toxins that are man made chemicals that were not readily exposed to prior to the 20th century and the industrial forces that existed in that time in the food industry and in many other industries. Now, in parallel to this very interesting history about heart disease that is little known among the general populace today, we also have the story of minerals in health.

And we have what are called essential trace minerals or trace nutrients. And then we also have non essential, which really another word for toxic heavy metals. So what is the effect of these particular substances on our health? Because these are also things that we were not exposed to before, or at least not nearly in the amounts that we were exposed to. And then the issue of what about having the appropriate minerals. Now the research in this is I would say in its infancy stages because it’s known that most of the proteins and no one has a firm number, but of the over 100,000 proteins in the human body, at least a majority of those necessitate the involvement of certain metals that are present in small amounts.

And there are many examples, and I’m going to go through some examples in today’s lecture. But this is not well characterized. In other words, we don’t know exactly even what minerals are essential and we certainly don’t know the optimal amounts of those in the diet. But we do know that modern agricultural practices have essentially taken many of these minerals out of the food chain for us. So we have all developed deficiencies of one or another of these minerals without realizing that this is a problem because it’s seldom talked about in the health and medical community. So I’m going to go through some evidence today that can help us figure out a little bit more about what may be going on for real with heart disease.

You know, what is the true underlying cause, the root cause, not blaming things that happen along the way of the disease, like for example, oxidized lipids or cholesterol, because that is a result of the disease process, but often attributed as the cause. But no one explains why that would occur in and of itself. So in order to shed some light on these issues today, going to go through two research papers. One paper, the first one is a review looking at a variety of different types of heart or cardiovascular disease and the role of both essential and non essential minerals, in other words, toxic heavy metals as well as essential trace minerals.

And then we’re going to look at a study in rats that induced heart damage and tested whether shilajit, a source of a wide spectrum of cherries minerals, could have a protective effect on the heart. And as I go through these papers, I’m going to try to highlight a few points of how I evaluate this research. In other words, the discernment that I use to say, you know, is this information I’m reading actually true? Is it partially true? What’s the value of the evidence and what conclusions can I really draw from it? So I’m going to make it kind of a double lesson today.

So we’re going to start with this paper, the role of trace elements in cardiovascular diseases. Now, this is done by a group out of Austria and it is a review type article. So they’re going to go through a volume of research literature on this particular topic and highlight what they feel are significant or important studies. And this is, you know, closer to what you might find in a textbook. It’s not a primary or original research paper, but it cites primary research papers. So we can review this paper and then we can go and find the individual sources of the articles that it’s reviewing and then we can scrutinize those individual research studies or experiments to see what kind of value they might contain.

So we’re not going to go through that exercise today because it would take too long. But as we read through this article, I’m going to point out some things about what we can actually take away realistically from this, because as we know, most of the medical and scientific research that’s published out there is a very poor quality and may not even contain the essential elements to certify it as even a scientific experiment. So this paper, as a review paper is certainly not a scientific paper, but it is a summary of scientific papers, or hopefully many of them are actually scientific.

So we’re going to go past the introductory material and look at this paper, and what it does is that it reviews the essential trace elements and then goes into the toxic or non essentials. So this is going to start at the bottom of page two here, and we’re going to review a number of trace minerals to see what this paper says about their general function and how much is actually known. And interestingly, these particular minerals, I think, are pretty well known to general people, that they have some importance in the body. But what do we actually really know? Now, the first one here on the bottom of this page is selenium.

Now, selenium is quite interesting because until the 1950s, I believe it was considered to be a toxic substance and had no known biological role. But then additional research showed it to be actually quite essential. In fact, selenium has been implicated even in illnesses like cystic fibrosis. So it is part of necessary function for an enzyme that we may have heard of, glutathione peroxidase, and that is part of our own body’s antioxidant system to essentially be able to quell a chain reactions from free radicals or what are known as reactive oxygen species. So this is particularly one role that may be important because glutathione peroxidase can essentially combat the peroxidation of lipids, which occurs in the arteries in cardiovascular disease.

So we can see that a deficiency of selenium may reduce our body’s ability to heal from the oxidation of the fats in our blood and in our arterial system. And we know that these oxidized fats build up in the walls of the arteries and are somehow involved in cardiovascular disease. If we go to the next page, it starts with zinc, and it mentions here that we already know that at least 300 different enzymes in the body require zinc in order to have Optimal functioning. And they mentioned specifically their catalytic function, which is the ability to speed up the reactions of the enzyme so that they can happen in a time scale that’s biologically meaningful.

So catalysts are really key for a lot of biochemistry. And it mentions many other roles involved with protein synthesis, for example, as well as regulating gene expression. So there is some evidence of a deficiency in zinc associated with some stiffening arteries, but this is relatively weak in terms of specifics. Iron can be very different when it’s in different oxidation states, like rust versus wrought iron. And the same thing is true for chromium. So chromium in the wrong oxidation state, like chromium 6 is very toxic. But chromium 3 is necessary for lipid and protein metabolism. It also is involved with insulin.

And there are a lot of issues related to both deficiency and toxicity from the wrong kind. Let me also mention iron. Now, I’m sure everyone is familiar with iron in hemoglobin, but it’s used in several other proteins as well. And it is the most abundant of the trace elements. And we may be familiar with a rare disorder called hemochromatosis, where there’s a buildup or overload of iron. And one of the known problems from that is actually heart failure due to infiltration of iron into the heart muscle and causing stiffening of it. Then we have molybdenum, something I’ve mentioned before as well, and it is a co factor in several enzymes.

And then we have nickel. And nickel is interesting because nickel is pretty much known to be an essential element, but it’s also known to have certain toxicities, like people may have skin sensitivities, for example. So part of this depends on the form of nickel that we’re exposed to and also may be due to the levels. So these trace minerals, although they are essential, they are known as trace minerals for a reason that we only need them in small amounts. And there are some conditions, some of them may be, you know, due to our own metabolism, something like Wilson’s disease, where there’s an accumulation of copper, the body is somehow unable to excrete copper, so it accumulates and causes problems.

Problems. But I think that by and large, we are generally deficient in these minerals. And the deficiencies are much like more likely to be causing health problems than having too much of these. Okay, so then it goes to talk about the non essential or the toxic trace elements, beginning with cadmium. Now, cadmium may be the most important, important of these toxic metals in terms of heart disease. And we’ll get to that later. But there certainly is a lot of toxicity known with cadmium. Now, let me also say with respect to these heavy metals, that the acute poisoning or toxicity of these metals is well known, and you can find studies that characterize it.

However, chronic toxic exposure at lower levels is not very well understood. So that’s most likely what we’re talking about really with heart disease, which is much more of a chronic condition. Now, I’m not going to go through this section in detail because of time constraints, but I will review some specific evidence lower down with respect to heart disease. Now, it mentions aluminum, which is the third most abundant element in the earth’s crust. And aluminum is not thought to be essential at all, although there is a little bit of debate about that at very small levels. But aluminum became far more ubiquitous in terms of human exposure through modern mining and industrial practices.

And then we have lead, and lead is pretty ubiquitous in the environment, and it has a lot of toxicity across different systems. But I want to mention with respect to lead, one problem that is well known that actually can be overcome. But there is an issue where our body will substitute toxic metals when we are deficient in the appropriate trace minerals. And this will result in impaired or reduced functioning of the protein that substitutes the heavy metal. Now, with lead, it’s been well characterized that it can substitute for zinc and calcium in proteins in the body.

So if we’re in a zinc deficient state, or we have an inability to use calcium appropriately due to a deficiency of fatigue soluble vitamins like A and K2 and D, and that is a separate discussion, then the body can substitute lead and have dysfunction as a result. And then arsenic and mercury are mentioned. Now, mercury is not really implicated in research with cardiovascular disease in any significant way, but we know that it has a lot of toxic potential and that we’re exposed in a variety of food sources, especially in some of commercially farmed commercial fish or ocean seafood.

And then we have arsenic, which may be present in drinking water and also is in various agricultural products like especially rice. And we’re all familiar that arsenic has significant toxicity. I want to jump ahead here to the section where it talks about the research of minerals with respect to specific types of heart disease. And it’s going to talk about abdominal aortic aneurysms, thoracic aortic dissections, aortic valve sclerosis, and stenosis, which is heart valve disease, as well as heart failure. Now, suffice it to say, with the first three conditions here, what we have is changes in the vessels in terms of either the valves or the aorta.

So the. The valves being kind of similar to vessels, right, as they’re kind of like tubes that connect to the heart chambers. And also, we’re specifically talking about the aortic valve, right? So that is between the heart and the aorta. So it’s essentially part of a blood vessel. And with the aneurysms, right, There is a weakening of the wall of the artery. So we could see that if we have impaired collagen synthesis, for example, from copper deficiency, that can be a contributing factor. And if we have lead substituting for copper, that may be a problem as well.

But I want to focus on heart failure because there is quite a lot of evidence with respect to cadmium. Now, for many of these conditions, I would say that the level of evidence is really only at the hypothesis generation stage. So we can see abnormalities like, for example, deficiencies of selenium in certain conditions. So we can come up with a hypothesis, and then we could do further experiments to show that. But with respect to cadmium toxicity and heart failure, I think that we see studies at different levels that all validate each other. And while this is not definitive evidence, it’s the most comprehensive or the strongest evidence of what may be contributing to heart failure.

So, for example, we have epidemiologic evidence, and this is from a study of over 4,000 participants who had heart failure or atrial fibrillation versus not having those conditions. And they showed a significant association between blood levels of cadmium, which is not the heart level, and the various outcomes, including fibrosis of the heart. Sorry, that is a different study. So they found an association between the cadmium levels in the blood and the incidence of heart failure. Now, they also did animal studies looking at genetically modified mice, which, you know, is problematic in and of itself, but they had objective outcome measures like the development of scar tissue and the death of cardiac cells at biopsy and found significant toxicity from cadmium.

And then we also have studies looking at cell lines of cardiomyocytes and find similar outcomes. So, in other words, we have animal studies, we have cell culture studies, and epidemiologic studies, all with similar results to each other. And there are a number of studies. There are even additional studies looking at biochemical pathways, trying to get at underlying mechanisms. But I think there’s enough here to conclude that at least cadmium is significant in terms of heart toxicity, Especially with respect to heart failure. So now we kind of have a picture of how both deficiencies in the essential trace Minerals, as well as exposure to some of the toxic minerals, heavy metals, especially cadmium and probably lead, can contribute to heart disease.

Now are these the primary underlying factor or not? I think there needs to be additional research because we have other types of toxins also that have associations with heart disease, such as seed oils, as well as lipid soluble persistent organic pollutants. So we have to consider those as well. But we see here that for sure lead and cadmium are at least contributing factors and maybe potentially a primary cause for at least some people with those serious health issues. So I found a clinical study. Now it is in experimental animals that I thought was interesting to look at testing.

Oops, sorry, that’s the same article kind of testing what happens if we replace the minerals. Now also, this study was done from the context that the largest growing incidence of serious heart disease is in developing countries, which generally are poor. And in fact it points out how poverty and lack of development correlate with the levels of heart disease. And so it’s suggesting that use of traditional medicinals is actually a cheaper and cost effective and what people in these developing countries actually do. So let’s ask the question, could these traditional therapies actually have a benefit? So this study is from Iran and it is a clinical research study looking at rats.

And what they do in this experiment is that they’re going to give rats different doses of shilajit and then they’re going to expose the rats to a toxic chemical, isoproterenol. And interestingly, isoproterenol used to be a routine drug used in cardiac procedures and even for lung conditions like asthma, tax as a bronchodilator. But now it’s known that it causes direct toxicity on the heart and it may still be used in some capacity, but in this study it is to induce injury of the heart muscle and then they’re gonna say, does the shilajit have a protective effect? So let’s look at the most important part when evaluating a primary research study, which is the experimental methods or procedures.

Now I want to point out a couple of things from the outset. One is that we’re going to see is this actually a scientific type of study? Now it’s not purely scientific because we’re not measuring something that occurs in nature here we’re using a man made substance to induce heart damage. So it can only kind of simulate a scientific experiment. But in terms of the validity of the results, we have to have two clear things. Is one an independent variable, which is what we are testing here, which is the exposure to shilajit. And then we need to have valid control experiments where everything is the same in the experiment except for the independent variable.

So let’s look at the methods and see if we have that here. Now, I just want to mention the first thing. One of the first things they mentioned is that the shilajit they used in this experiment, which they call mumi, was suspended in tap water. Now, most tap water, I’m not sure if this is absolutely true in Iran, is going to be chlorinated. And one thing you don’t want to do is mix shilajit with chlorinated water, because there can be chemical reactions that occur that can damage the quality of the shilajit. So if that occurred in this experiment and it was poorer quality, then we might hypothesize that the effects might be greater if it were reconstituted with a pure water that was not chlorinated, if that were the case.

Now, it goes on to describe the animals. And this research was done on Ystar rats. Now, these are albino rats that were bred to be used in research, so they don’t exist in nature, but they were not genetically modified by modern methods. Now, they were selectively bred for certain attributes that lend themselves to doing research experiments. So, you know, given that, we can decide, you know, how much do we trust the results in these rats. And also, of course, rats are not human. So if we’re going to apply these results to humans, we have to, you know, take a leap of faith across species.

However, the research is still meaningful because it’s done in actual animals, living organisms, rather than in a petri dish. And so let’s see if they followed the scientific method. So they had three main groups, the control group who received no shilajit, and then two other groups that were different doses of shilajit. We’ll just call it low dose and high dose for the moment. And then what they did is they took those three groups and divided them each in half to make three control groups. So this is an excellent strategy and really does increase the validity. Now, interestingly, that it mentioned with the dosing here that it cited another study which showed that 5,000 milligrams per kilogram per day were not toxic.

Essentially, there were no histopathological effects on the heart or other organs, and there was no lethality or clinical illness. Now, if we just extrapolate that to the human dose, for example, that would be approximately, I think I calculated to be 350 jars, 15 gram jars of arnu authentica shilajit. So that would be like a two and a half years worth would still not kill you, according to this research. So that certainly speaks to the high degree of safety of this material. Now, they chose 250 mg per kg per day and 500 mg per kg today per day.

And those doses are substantially higher than what is generally recommended for a serving size on the consumer shilajit that is out there. Now, what they did is they gave these rats either shilajit or no shilajit for seven days, and they did it through a gavage or gastric lavage. So in other words, they put a tube down their nose into their stomach and injected the water. Either it was just tap water or it was tap water with one or the other dose of shilajit. So they did a good job of simulating the exact experiment with each control group and experimental group observing the scientific method.

Now, of course, putting a tube down and injecting the fluids is not natural. Right? They would just drink it in nature. And I may not have chose this design, but they did it because they could tell you exactly how much each rat got by doing it that way. Then, on the seventh day, they gave the toxic drug isoproterenol to induce cardiac damage. And then after that, they sacrificed the animals with a lethal dose of thiopental. And then after. Sorry, they didn’t sacrifice them first. First they cannulated their heart, so they put a special catheter to measure their heart function.

Then they sacrificed them and looked at the heart tissue under the microscope. Now, what they found is very interesting. Now, they looked at a number of parameters, but I’m going to focus mostly on the biopsies, because that is the most objective and significant. But what they. I’m going to present two different outcomes that were both significant in this study. So one is in Figure 1 here, and we have these bars going up and then these gray bars going down. And what these represent is on the top, the darker bars are the maximum velocity of contraction of the heart, and the bottom is the maximum velocity of relaxation of the heart.

So how fast does the heart fully contract and how fast does the heart fully relax? And these are important parameters for normal functioning. And we can see here that the second set of bars is smaller than the others. And that is the group that did not get shilajit, but got isoproterenol. And you could see by the asterisks there that it was statistically significant that this group was different from all the other groups. So, in other words, shilajit protected the maximum velocity of contraction and relaxation. When the rats did not have it, they had a reduced magnitude of those velocities which signify impaired heart function.

But that is not as impressive a finding as what we see on this page here, which is the results of the microscopic examination of the heart. Now, on the left side we see are the control groups. So the top box is the control with no shilajit, then the middle dose, and the bottom is the higher dose shilajit. So we could see that the heart muscle tissue was normal in all of those control groups. But if we look at the top right, that is the group that got the isoproterenol without shilajit. And you can see that the damage is far more extensive than the lower dose and even way more extensive than the higher dose shilajit on the bottom right.

So this shows the protective effect of shilajit on the heart muscle tissue due to this chemical injury. And I think this is quite an impressive finding. And we’ve seen other studies, for example, with cilantro also showing a cardio protective effect. So what can we take away from all this information? Well, I think one thing is that we can hypothesize that the protective effect we’ve seen from the shilajit is potentially a real effect that we could see even in humans. Because the way that we would understand this is that deficiencies of certain trace elements are implicated in heart disease and increase vulnerabilities to toxins like isoproterenol.

And also that there may be toxic metals that may be involved that could be replaced by the shilajit, once again, decreasing the vulnerability of the heart. So this would kind of think of the heart damage as multifactorial. So the heart repair mechanisms could be damaged and could not repair from an insult like isoproterenol without attaining the proper levels of those minerals. And then it can regain function and either heal more rapidly from the damage or prevent the damage from occurring in the first place. So we certainly need much more research looking into the relationship with the essential minerals and heart disease, as well as with toxic heavy metals.

We need a lot more research to determine exactly how many and which trace minerals are needed and what types of bodily functions they have the greatest effect on. But in the meantime, I think it’s quite prudent to make sure that you get an adequate complement of trace minerals in your life to kind of make sure that you have what you need to prevent the contributing factor of these deficiencies. Not Only to heart disease, but to a myriad of other health problems since they’re so widely utilized in the body. And of course, shilajit is one of the best natural sources of these minerals because it contains a very wide spectrum of these minerals in combination with fulvic acid, which not only helps deliver the minerals to your body’s tissues and cells, but also can chelate the toxic minerals that have been substituting and help remove those from your body.

All right, thank you, everyone, and I’d be happy to take a couple of questions. All right, Logan Hazan asks, does, and if it does, how does strophanthus help the heart? I really have no idea, to be honest with you. I would suggest that you inquire with the new biology clinic overrun by, supervised by Dr. Tom Cowan, who is the expert on stropanthus. But in the future, I would like to look into that further and perhaps I will dedicate, dedicate a Healthy Living livestream episode to that topic. All right, Susan from Florida asks, doesn’t sugar and refined carbs contribute to heart issues? Well, you know, they contribute to metabolic disease, which contributes to heart disease.

But I don’t think we can simply say that sugar and carbs are the primary underlying cause of heart disease. And we don’t really know exactly how the metabolic perturbations with diabetes and insulin resistance, for example, affect heart disease mechanistically. And my suspicion or hypothesis is that there is a common root cause to both metabolic and cardiovascular disease. All right, old biker asks, what causes abdominal aortic aneurysms? Well, it is not known for sure what the underlying root cause is. However, one thing that I feel is a major importance is impaired collagen synthesis leading to weaknesses of the arterial walls.

And this has actually been demonstrated in scientific studies that there are different issues with cross linking and other weaknesses demonstrated in the walls of these blood vessels where aneurysms form. And what is the factor that leads to these abnormalities in collagen? So, you know, could it be one just a deficiency of the nutrients that our body needs to synthesize collagen, which really are difficult to get from plant foods, much easier to get from meats. But the type of meats that are rich in these nutrients, like the bones and the connective tissue, are something that we avoid in the western diet.

But so deficiencies of amino acids like glycine, as well as minerals like copper and other elements required for collagen synthesis could certainly be a factor. And then on the other side, we have what types of toxic substances can weaken or damage the walls of the arteries. And I think we have a lot of candidates here, but certainly lead is substituting for copper and exerting the toxicity could be part of the issue. We have, you know, lipid peroxidation and other types of toxins that may be involved. So we really need more research, you know, to know for sure.

But certainly through detoxification and optimal nutrition, we can overcome most of the most likely causes and have healthier blood vessels. All right, this will be the last question from Natalie Geer. Are we getting most of these in Celtic ancient salts? So that is a good question. And there certainly are different mineral salts that are available that have trace minerals in very, very small amounts. So I think one I’m not sure if there’s adequate or the right minerals and you’d have to look product by product at the testing results to know for sure. But what I’ve looked at, I don’t think you can get enough trace minerals from salt.

And aside from the sodium, the other minerals are there in very tiny quantities, maybe even too small for our trace mineral requirements. And then there are other issues with salt such as heavy metal contamination. I think you can find some recent independent research done on that topic looking at different brands of salt. So I do think you need another source of minerals to get your adequate requirements for optimal health. Once again, this has been a another healthy living live stream. We have talked about some very interesting topics and I’m going to be talking a lot more about trace minerals going forward because I think this is one of the real big neglected areas.

And it’s not only neglected in the research as I was talking about earlier, as well as in mainstream medicine, but even in the alternative and natural healing spheres, there is not enough information about the role of minerals in health and disease. So I will continue to be your source for the latest comprehensive information on that topic and I look forward to seeing everyone again next week. One quick announcement that we are having a Cyber Week sale on our newly launched authentic Ashiela Jeet. So please click the links and check that out. I’ll be seeing you soon.
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