Rheumatoid Arthritis & the Heart: The Hidden Inflammation Link

Board-certified cardiologist and electrophysiologist Dr. Royce Bargas (Bargas Wellness) returns to unpack how chronic inflammation—from stress, trauma, leaky gut/leaky brain, seed oils, oxidized LDL, and omega-6:omega-3 imbalance—drives heart disease. 

She walks through the 7 pillars of functional medicine, why integrative cardiology looks at the whole matrix (mitochondria, detox/biotransformation, assimilation, transport, structure, communication/hormones, immune/inflammation), and the advanced cardio-metabolic panel she uses (lipoprotein fractionation/NMR, inflammatory markers, oxidation, omega 6:3 ratio, cholesterol balance).

What you’ll learn

• How leaky gut → leaky brain can show up as anxiety/ADHD and raise cardio risk
• Why oxidized cholesterol (and industrial seed oils) matters more than total cholesterol
• The surprising RA–heart disease connection (and what “inflamm-aging” means)
• Labs to discuss with your clinician for a deeper risk picture
• Practical starting points: whole foods, fewer ultra-processed oils, targeted coaching
  
  

About our guest
Dr. Bargas runs Oklahoma’s only truly integrative cardiology practice and offers telemedicine. Learn more: bargaswellness.com

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Listen hear or watch the full episode on YouTube here!: https://youtu.be/1mA2Jfj30os

Visit UltraBotanica.com to learn more about us and how you can get a free sample of our products.

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Chronic stress. Talk about a source of inflammation. It affects every single area of the matrix. And then if you have leaky gut that's not in the center of the matrix, but leaky gut causes leaky brain, which then leads to depression, anxiety, adhd, that sort of thing. And then you know, there's psychological trauma. So many people have trauma even from birth and early childhood. And it's a really difficult, destructive world we live in. And that trauma can cause leaky gut later in life or cause you to have chronic ankle pain because of this trauma you suffered as a child that you never really dealt with.

0:00:47 - (Josh Bellieu): Hey everyone, welcome to Ultra Life. Today we have a very special treat for you today. This is the 2.0 version, the return visit of Dr. Royce Bargas of Bargas Wellness. I'm one of your hosts.

0:01:01 - (Adam Payne): I, Josh bel you, I'm the other guy, Adam Payne. And I'm actually really excited to have Dr. Bargas back with us today.

0:01:07 - (Josh Bellieu): What I like to say about Royce is she's very circumspect, she's practical, she's intense. She tells you you can do the work, but guess what, she'll also tell you you can get well. And I love that she makes that promise because she know it's a partnership between her and you to do your work and she's going to get you there. Dr. Royce Bargas, she is an electrophysiologist, she's a doctor of osteopathy, she's board certified in cardiology, and she has a functional medicine discipline as well.

0:01:36 - (Josh Bellieu): And it's a joy to welcome you once again, Dr. Bargas to the broadcast.

0:01:40 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Thank you, Josh and Adam, I'm honored to be back.

0:01:43 - (Adam Payne): So let's just do kind of a recap for everybody because last time you were with us, you shared kind of your life's journey, how you were, you got into electro cardiology, kind of becoming the expert or an expert in the electrical functionality of the heart. And then there was a transition moment and you found that there was a whole new world of medicine that's functional medicine. Maybe just recap for us what that little bit, what that journey was like.

0:02:14 - (Josh Bellieu): And especially the part where it was a super long journey. It was a hard journey. You were determined, you were persistent and then you became disillusioned with what you thought was going to be your life work in this world of electrophysiology which turned out to be glutted with hundreds of electrophysiologists right when you graduated.

0:02:36 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yes, yes. I'm not really sure how to short recap it but yeah, 12 to 16 years of medical training into the electrophysiology profession came out of fellowshipu employment which basically meant that a hospital controlled my life and how I practiced medicine. That was not really my mojo. And so I did that for about six years and became more and more and more disheartened. So I left employment and went into private practice.

0:03:06 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): And through that practice and that journey, I discovered functional medicine. What was taught about functional medicine and became passion with it. It really is the true medicine and why I had gone into medicine in the first place. So then I began my, I guess about three year certification journey with the Institute for Functional Medicine. And now I have the only truly integrative cardiology practice in the state of Oklahoma.

0:03:33 - (Adam Payne): I know it's really phenomenal to have that resource here. I've been sending people your way, people that than you. I won't name names for confidentiality purposes.

0:03:44 - (Josh Bellieu): I'm actually trying to send people to you from out of state just to do video work with you because they don't know anyone like you where they are.

0:03:52 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): We are few and far between for sure.

0:03:54 - (Adam Payne): So you know, at the normal aging human body. So I actually I worked in an area of cardiology that's interfaces with rheumatology. I had a grant with the American College of Rheumatology, one of the biggest grants with the president of the American College of Rheumatology. Boy, her name is escaping me right now. And we were looking at how rheumatoid arthritis affected cardiovascular disease. And we were measuring hundreds if not a couple thousand patients, looking at the intermedial thickness of the carotid artery and looking at calcification scores of of the heart and then looking at biomarkers of inflammation and cardiovascular activity to see if we could understand the specific biomarkers and the specific morbidity that comes with anybody that has rheumatoid arthritis and how it affects the cardiovascular system.

0:05:05 - (Josh Bellieu): And you learned some horrifying things. Some statistics that you threw out to me were so scary.

0:05:10 - (Adam Payne): Oh my gosh. I mean, in general, if you have rheumatoid arthritis, your life expectancy is cut by seven years. Just fact out the door, you're going to die seven years earlier than everybody else, statistically speaking.

0:05:22 - (Josh Bellieu): Wow.

0:05:22 - (Adam Payne): And one of the biggest contributors to that is how inflammation leaks out of the joints and actually affects everything in the human body. So that these activated cytokines don't just stay in the synovium and around the joint, they're expressed by cells. All these cells are calling 911 saying send the army and those signals actually leak out. And when we were able to see how profoundly cardiovascular tissue was affected by what we called at that point subclinical inflammation and how it then affected not only the heart, but the arterial supply, the venous supply profoundly, it created just a profound respect for me how important it is for us to not just in the last 20 years of our life to focus on our cardiovascular health, but to think about it earlier in life.

0:06:29 - (Josh Bellieu): Preempttive strike.

0:06:30 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yeah, abso absolutely. And inflammation in general. I mean we could have a whole podcast about that. It'you know, it affects the entire body. And I would argue that it probably isn't inflammation leaking out of the joints and getting into the cardiovascular system, but that it's systemic inflammation in general that causes symptoms of rheumatoid and cardiovascular dis and disease in every organ and quite frankly cancer.

0:06:57 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): It inflammation is bad. It affects everything. It is the root cause of many, many things and it's best to stamp it out as early as possible. Yeah, we had inflammaaging.

0:07:09 - (Adam Payne): Now a functional oh, that's beautiful term. Do you know there's a key opinion leader in the American College of Nutrition guy named Dr. Shalesh Kauchel. Have you heard of him? Hes s a really interesting guy. Hes like the key opinion leader of key opinion leaders. He gathers the kols together to talk about different things. One of the things that he was when we had him here talking about this, he said, you know, Adam, in his beautiful East Indian accent, inflammation is responsible for 99% of human disease.

0:07:49 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): I agree, I agree. We always have to find the inflammation. If you're going to look for the root cause, what is causing the inflammation.

0:07:56 - (Adam Payne): But we need it. I mean without the inflammation system are we got to live in a bubble.

0:08:02 - (Josh Bellieu): Right percent it's Howes athletes go through that unique cycle of inflammation to be able to get better and better and better.

0:08:09 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): That's right. That's right. It does strengthen you, but in moderation.

0:08:13 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah. So can you recap for us because you have this unique and beautiful practice. You have this side of your practice that is very much for an individual that is only familiar with conventional medicine and that conventional paradigm. You have what we kind of deemed on the last podcast, the insurance side of your practice where you practice cardiology in a way that most people would at least find palatable and they understand at least some level of it.

0:08:42 - (Josh Bellieu): But then Adam asked you the question last time. You know the difference between functional and integrative and within Your discipline, the. The courses that you took over three years. Can you remind us what those. I think. Was it six points of integrative.

0:08:58 - (Adam Payne): Oh, wasn't it seven? The stor.

0:09:00 - (Josh Bellieu): Seven.

0:09:00 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Okay, seven.

0:09:01 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay. Can you remind us of that and then kind of tell our audience and how that might take someone that comes to you that's got this traditional facing understanding of how they integrate with their doctor and then how you can help shift them towards something that's much more preemptive strike, preventive.

0:09:21 - (Adam Payne): Yeah. And then I want to get back to this very maybe oversimplification idea I'm sure you have. If. If you were go. Going toa, like, leave people today with, hey, these are the three things you want to consider for your health. Right. And do for your general cardiovascular health in terms of managing inflammation. I want to get back to that later, but please address Josh's question, if you don't mind.

0:09:47 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Okay, so I think you're asking about the seven pillars of functional medicine. Seven systems, or the seven corners of the matrix. So in the conventional world, like Adam, you were talking about how you were kind of surprised how rheumatology somehow then overlapped with cardiology. And you're only surprised because in the conventional world, they're so separate. I mean, how can your joints have anything to do with your arteries? Right?

0:10:16 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): But as we learn in osteopathic school, the body is a unit. Everything's interconnected, everything's interrelated. And that's what functional medicine truly is, understanding the systems of the body in a different construct than conventional medicine, where we have to separate out the joints from the heart, from the kidney, from the lung. And I mean, that is all driven by the PA source, like, how are we going to get paid?

0:10:42 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): And insurance, where functional medicine really does look at the body as a whole. And so we look at things like your ability to detoxify, which we call biotransformation, your mitochondrial health, which your mitochondri build every molecule of ATP. That is the energy currency of the body. And so much of our world destroys the mitochondria. And in the conventional world, the only time you ever hear about mitochondria are these, like, one in a million super rare mitochondrial disorders.

0:11:12 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): We look at assimilation, our ability to get our nutrients from our environment and what we eat. We look at transport, like, how are those nutrients in the building blocks and everything we need transported around the body. We look at structure, which isn't just your bones and your muscles, but your whole fashion, the entire structural system that brings it all together. We look at communication which is really sort of likened to the endocrinology system because it's really. How does one system communicate with another? And it's through hormones and so Horm.

0:11:49 - (Adam Payne): Yeah. The cytokines and the chemokines and all that stuff.

0:11:52 - (Josh Bellieu): Right.

0:11:54 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): I think. Was that seven?

0:11:56 - (Josh Bellieu): It was seven.

0:11:57 - (Adam Payne): It was seven.

0:11:58 - (Josh Bellieu): Did it? Yeah. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Hold the calls. We have a winner. Right.

0:12:03 - (Adam Payne): So I mean, I'm just listening to that. It's fascinating because each one of those is. You're talking about the human body as a whole living unit, not a separate operating organ systems.

0:12:12 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yeah.

0:12:12 - (Josh Bellieu): And as you're mentioning those, I literally see how one thing being off here creates this cascade and domino effect of all these other things. And so how do you balance, how does one go about balancing these seven things? Can you actually put your finger sometimes on one thing and then have it affect multiple things to make them better?

0:12:31 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yes. And so that's exciting. That's kind of how functional medicine works, is working through those seven pillars of the matrix and finding the deficiencies in correcting abnormalities in each of them and understanding that one can totally affect another. And then what's we didn't mention as in the center of the matrix is our psychological, mental and spiritual health. And that really, you know, like chronic stress.

0:12:57 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Talk about a source of inflammation. It affects every single area of the matrix. And then if you have leaky gut that's not in the center of the matrix, but leaky gut causes leaky brain, which then leads to depression, anxiety, adhd, that sort of thing. And then, you know, there's psychological trauma. So many people have trauma even from birth and early childhood. And it's a really difficult, destructive world we live in. And that trauma can cause leaky gut later in life or cause you to have chronic ankle pain because of this trauma you suffered as a child that you never really dealt with and got the trauma out of your system. And so everything is.

0:13:38 - (Adam Payne): Is that a separate pillar? I mean, kind of. That's really talking about the, the psychological, social, spiritual part of our'it's like the.

0:13:48 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Foundation of functional medicine. The matrix is kind of like this hexagon and in the center of the matrix is this three legged stool. Psychological, mental.

0:13:57 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay, here we go. Great segue because I really want to plumb the depths of this. So we're going to be right back. This is Ultral Life Today. I'm Josh Bell, you, We're here with Dr. Royce Spgas and I've got Adam Payne down here.

0:14:09 - (Adam Payne): Thanks for joining us. Stay tuned. We'll be right back. Our mission is to take nature's most beloved botanicals and enhance them with our liquid protein scaffold technology. This helps it reach your cells faster and better with exponentially enhanced bioavailability. You'll feel better every day. Ultra Botanica the feel Good Curcumin.

0:14:44 - (Josh Bellieu): Welcome back to Ultralife. Today we are here with Dr. Royce Spgas. You probably know how you would be able to connect with Dr. Royce Spargas. She has a really cool practice in Edmund, Oklahoma, but she does telemedicine like other people do all over the United States. The best way to get a hold of her is bargaswellness.com comm that's B A R G A sellness.com she'll do a discovery call 10 minutes free to kind of have a meet and greet with you and kind of answer some questions so that you can know that you can trust this lady with your health journey and to take you from point A where you are now, which is probably not good, into that place of homeostasis and wellness. So again, bargasellness.com.

0:15:33 - (Adam Payne): Hey Josh, that's quite a mouthful that you're just putting out there Y and quite a big promise that DrBargas can deliver.

0:15:39 - (Josh Bellieu): Well, you know, if you go to her website, she hits you in the face basically with if you come to me and you do the work, we're going to make you well.

0:15:47 - (Adam Payne): Wow. Wow.

0:15:49 - (Josh Bellieu): I love that she like throws down the gauntlet. So.

0:15:53 - (Adam Payne): I got to imagine.

0:15:54 - (Josh Bellieu): And by the way, Dr. Vis. Bargas and Adam Payne on the hand.

0:15:57 - (Adam Payne): Here, Dr. Bargas, I got to imagine you have this like these tools that you kind of use to map out the seven pillars for the patients. And, and maybe you don't. Maybe it's all in your head, but how do you. So somebody's coming in and they have issues. Where do you start?

0:16:14 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Well, the history taking in functional medicine is the most comprehensive you would ever see. My patients are always like, what? I have to fill out this 22 page document. But I.

0:16:28 - (Adam Payne): And that's just the start, right?

0:16:30 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): That's just the gathering.

0:16:31 - (Josh Bellieu): And behind the scenes you're spending four hours reviewing that, right?

0:16:34 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): I'm spending many hours reviewing it. And we also obtain tons of prior evaluation medical records on the conventional side or if they've ever had functional testing, I review all of that. And so a big part of functional medicine when I meet somebody is to tell them their story. And so I have to have spent all this time in their history to kind of Summarize all that for them in the clinic and tell them because especially in the conventional world, people have an angiogram and get a stent and they don't even know what happened.

0:17:08 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): And so, you know, or they have heart failure. Super common that people have heart failure and they don't. Like nobody's even said the term heart failure or explained to them what does that even mean. And so I basically, you know, in the first hour that I spend with somebody, I'm conducting a very comprehensive nutritional exam and I'm in a full physical exam that includes a nutritional exam. And then I'm summarizing their life story as I see it and have them fill in gaps that have been lacking through my history taking.

0:17:39 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): And then sometimes in the first hour, our first visit, I don't even get an opportunity to tell them what I think, where the problems are and where we're going. That's all like typed up in a different document after they leave. Because some people's history is really complicated and it's really important to tell them their storyies so that they can understand how I them as a whole person and how things in their life have gotten them to where they are and things that they might think are completely unrelated or contributing to where they are. And it's also important to understand statement.

0:18:13 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yeah, if you've had like chronic GI issues since you were 7 and you're 70, you are not goingna get better in a week. And people need to understand, like, it can be a very long journey back to health if you have been sick your whole life.

0:18:29 - (Josh Bellieu): But it's possible.

0:18:31 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): 100%.

0:18:31 - (Josh Bellieu): You see it? Yes.

0:18:33 - (Adam Payne): I'm imagining the medical history. And then you have test and test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. To get more information.

0:18:45 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): I do a lot of testing. I think that might be a little overboard because I.

0:18:51 - (Adam Payne): Well, compared to what? Normally you go in, get to a CBC with the doctor, or maybe some other things. My sense is that you do a lot more.

0:19:00 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): My testing is much more comprehensive, but I also pace myself and the patient because with every very advanced, comprehensive functional test I do, there come a lot of protocol changes and a lot of recommendations. And so what I really try to stay away from, and this comes from experience of things not going well, is doing three different humongous tests. And then there are like a hundred changes a person has to make. And I only have an hour, which, you know, quite frankly is over 10 times longer than any other physician spends with their patients.

0:19:37 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): But it's also important that I interpret all of these results. Like what does this mean and how did we get here and where are we going? And I can only, I can only cover one test discovered.

0:19:52 - (Josh Bellieu): Royce, is there one or two tests for an individual that's coming to you with a cardiology issue? Is there one or two tests for you that it kind of almost out of the shoot? You always do because that gives you at least somewhat of a broader look rather than just like pinpointing, you know, like a high powered rifle. Is that common for you or not?

0:20:16 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Necessari? Yeah, it's not a test, it's one panel. So I do advanced cardiome metabolic testing and it's probably one of the most common things I do in my practice. And so that's fractionation of lipids. So that's doing nmr of your lipids and really breaking down your quote, bad cholesterol particles and seeing what those look like. Checking your fatty acid balance, looking at your omega 6 to 3 ratio, which is a direct correlate to inflammation in the body.

0:20:45 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Do I look at several inflammatory markers that tell me about systemic inflammation, vascular inflammation? I look at oxidation. I do a battery of tests to look at your metabolic health and how.

0:20:57 - (Adam Payne): Exciting hmones y I mean're like you're getting this immense beautiful palia of information and I'm sure each test is telling you a story about where, I mean, if it's out of balance this way, you're like that's interesting, but it could be out of balance that way. Are there more similarities in what you're seeing do or is it quite variable when you end up testing people?

0:21:21 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Oh, it's a highly variable. Highly variable and interesting. Like some of the people that I think would be the most inflamed for whatever reason, they're not by the markers that I test. I firmly believe that there's actually inflammation that goes on that we don't even know how to look for yet.

0:21:42 - (Josh Bellieu): So I want to frame something up for viewers. What you mentioned just now, you went through this long list, but does that fall under that one panel that you say is something you always do? So sort okay, because here's what I want to say. Some of these tests, our viewers are so used to the insurance pay thing $5 coay no coay $10 copay but imagine being able to learn what Dr. Royce Bargas just spoke about.

0:22:11 - (Josh Bellieu): And would a test like that be 500, 400 doars, $300 out of pocket. What might it cost someone to do that particular panel.

0:22:20 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): With some reproductive hormones thrown in. I think that's. I also do a cholesterol balance panel which tells me do people produce or absorb too much cholesterol?

0:22:31 - (Adam Payne): Which is interesting, super helpful when it comes toow. I didn't even know that you could look at that know.

0:22:36 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): It's very cool. So that whole panel, if I recall correctly, cash pay through my office is under $800.

0:22:45 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay. So I mean, I just want to put that in perspective. You may have lived all your life, now you're getting older like I am. I'm not going to put Adam or Roy and that I'm getting older too.

0:22:57 - (Adam Payne): Josh, don't leave me out of this, okay?

0:22:59 - (Josh Bellieu): But all of a sudden you realize you've never actually taken a deep dive into your health, your heart, which is, we kind of know when you talk about almost any physician, they'll generally go, yeah, if your heart's like messing up, you're kind of screwed, pardon my French. And so think about being able to spend that amount of money to then have this unique opportunity for a comprehensive roadmap to longevity, to health, to avoiding a cardiac event, to avoid being in the hospital and having the people coming around and trying to serve you. And figure out what do we do now with mom, dad, brother, sister.

0:23:36 - (Josh Bellieu): That's special because I've cared for family members of mine on and off now for the last 18 to 20 years. And I'm here to tell you it would have been fantastic if they had gone to see someone and they would have gladly taken that 700, 800 or $1,000 to pay for something that would have allowed them to still be around hanging out with me, my children, my grandkids today.

0:24:02 - (Adam Payne): Well, you're really putting it in perspective, aren't you? Just.

0:24:04 - (Josh Bellieu): But it is. I've lived this now for 18 to 20 years caring for individuals that needed me to be with them hours a day in grocery shop for them and hold their hand and go pick up medications and all the things it can. Your wellness can absolutely create harmony in far reaching circles of your family if you'll take, be proactive about it.

0:24:25 - (Adam Payne): I meanally, I mean I feel like so really everybody needs to do this. We all need to get the kind of wisdom that comes from this panel so that we can understand and address any of these risk factors that we are predisposed to or might not be. I mean we can measure. You can go to a cardiologist and you can go to a hospital and get a, a coronary calcium score, which is kind of a surrogate marker for how advanced your cardiovascular disease is.

0:25:01 - (Adam Payne): You can get an ultrasound of intermedial thickness of your carotid artery. Again, that's after the fact plaque is already there. But we don't. Without the kind of testing that you're doing, we really don't know what's really going on with the patient. Is it going to fast progress? Is this bad inflammation? Is this bad a process that's going to end up with a lot of morbidity, which is bad stuff, Right?

0:25:26 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah. Royce, from the panel that you just discussed, what are some of the things that you commonly learn about a patient relative to their cardiovascular health that can immediately allow you to say, you know what, here's some very proactive steps you can take, baby steps you can take immediately that are going to begin to slowly change the profile of your cardiovascular health.

0:25:53 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): I would say the presence of inflammation, be it systemic or vascular, metabolic disease is nearly 100% controllable with diet and nutrition. Y and I would say oxidation. People don't even know what that means.

0:26:10 - (Josh Bellieu): What does it mean?

0:26:11 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Ro well, oxidative stress is basically having more free radicals, these things that damage your cell membranes and DNA, which come from breathing the air. In the, you know, world in which.

0:26:25 - (Josh Bellieu): We live, environmental exposure, bad water, everything.

0:26:28 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Stress, sun comes from food, eating, you know, oxidized oils.

0:26:32 - (Josh Bellieu): Like, yeah, all the seed oil.

0:26:34 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): That could be a whole other conversation. But, yeah, like, seed oils have been promoted through even the American Heart Association. It's so tragic in their. They're all 100% oxidized before you consume them and oxidize. So oil in your body oxidizes your cholesterol, which is incredibly inflammatory and atherroenic and is the cause of cardiovascular disease. And nobody ever looks for it. And it's in my basic panel. I look for oxidation, and I can look for it in a couple of different ways, but you can very easily see is the cholesterol oxidized.

0:27:05 - (Josh Bellieu): Okay. With a couple of minutes left. You did mention diet, and I know that's always the thing that people go, wa wa. And they kind of their head lowers down. Right, Right. So one of the things I always say to people, and I don't know how. And again, you're one of those. I think that you might say to people you're on a forced march because you're walking down a road of death right now, and you might be that person.

0:27:29 - (Josh Bellieu): I always say to people, if you try to make them eat the apple all at once, they basically, you might even lose them. As a patient because they're overwhelmed. So do you try to give them baby steps? And like, would the first thing for you be, hey, you know what if you can't pronounce that ingredient on the back of whatever this package you bought, just don't buy that. You know, in other words, processed food or do you say just McDonald's needs to be a thing of the past. Don't ever go through another drive through.

0:27:56 - (Josh Bellieu): How do you start people on that Y give it.

0:27:59 - (Adam Payne): So we're, we're ending our kind of our second second here.

0:28:02 - (Josh Bellieu): We've got about. We want to kind of set up into this.

0:28:04 - (Adam Payne): We want to leave people today with a teaser or maybe a couple of thoughts. What can we do?

0:28:12 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): You can eat whole foods, mostly plants. Although I would say that I do not ever advocate for a vegan diet. But again, if your great grandparents couldn't recognize it, you should not be eating it. Fast food is not food. You need to eat whole foods from a nutrition standpoint. And yes, it's very hard to change it. And I would say, you know, I kind of bow out of that conversation because I am not a health coach. I do have one of the only functionally certified health coaches in the state. So my job is to give you your meal plan and to tell you these are the things you can eat, these are the things you shouldn't eat.

0:28:50 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): But as far as the baby steps to get to your end goal, that's where you need the hand holding from a health coach who can and very astutely identify what can you do if you can't do all of this? What is the one tiny baby step you can do today and then next week and the week after that and slowly work yourself into optimal nutrition for longevity.

0:29:14 - (Adam Payne): So with that with baby steps, we'been this has been ultral life today.

0:29:18 - (Josh Bellieu): Yeah.

0:29:19 - (Adam Payne): And we've been talking to Dr. Royce Bargas about cardiovascular health and we're going to come back next week. Josh, unless you had some other question.

0:29:27 - (Josh Bellieu): We Willeah Just contact Dr. Bargas at bargaswellness.com. that's B as in boy A R G A S wellness.com do.