Stop Blaming LDL: Oxidation, Seed Oils & Heart Disease

Functional cardiologist Dr. Royce Bargas (DO, EP, Board-Cert Cardiology) returns to unpack the real heart risks most panels miss: oxidative stress, oxidized LDL, APOB, seed oils, AFib, and post-infection/post-vaccine myocarditis. If you still only watch LDL/HDL, this episode will change how you think about cardiovascular prevention.

In this episode:
* Why APOB is more predictive than LDL for atherogenic risk
* How oxidation (not just “high cholesterol”) damages arteries and fuels plaque
* Seed oils vs. olive/avocado/coconut/butter: smoke point, oxidation, and safer cooking choices
* AFib 101: causes, triggers, ablation vs. meds, and can it remodel back?
* Myocarditis/pericarditis: what inflammation in heart muscle means long-term
* COVID & cardiac health: why stacked inflammation (infection + shots) can compound risk
* Practical labs Dr. Bargas orders (advanced cardiometabolic panel, oxidation markers, fatty acids)

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

If you found this helpful, like, subscribe, and share to help someone you love avoid a cardiac event.

Also, feel free to watch the full episode on YouTube here!: https://youtu.be/UO0EUXCcE-Q

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): You should not cook with olive oil because it has a very low smoke point and it too is oxidized. If you put it in a frying pan and fry vegetables in it, saute vegetables in it. So olive oil is not meant for that. Olive oil is what you pour all over your salad, maybe your vegetables at dinner to make them yummier. Get a really super high quality expensive one, tastes delicious. You can high heat cook avocado oil.

0:00:24 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): It has a much higher smoke point so it will not be oxidized and you can do the same with coconut oil.

0:00:39 - (Josh Bellew): Welcome back to Ultralife Today. Guess what? This is week two with Dr. Royce Vargas. Dr. Royce Vargas from vargaswellness.com barges wellness.com guess what? An electrophysiologist, a doctor of osteopathy, doctor, board certified in cardiology and in functional medicine. Last week we were kind of jenning things up and ended on a note related to maybe a specific panel of tests she may recommend and then baby step changes related to diet.

0:01:12 - (Josh Bellew): She has a in her practice, I believe you actually have someone that is a dietary health coach, right. That kind of holds the hand and helps an individual walk down that road.

0:01:22 - (Adam Payne): How is that different than a clinical nutritionist health coach?

0:01:25 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Well, Sue's actually not even a nutritionist. So health coaching is training on how to motivate people. So sue is an RN and she had worked in a functional medicine practice before coming to my practice. And she certified through the functional coaching Academy, maybe the health coaching institute that's been promoted by the Institute for Functional Medicine. And so it really there is a lot of nutrition and many, many health coaches are also nutritionists.

0:02:01 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): She is not, but she has been certified through the coaching academy, which means she's had specialty training on basically motivating people and motivational interviewing and helping people implement change in their lives, which quite frankly is not something I'm great at. I might use the scare tactic, you will die. You're gonna do everything sue says. Or a, B and C. Very good.

0:02:28 - (Josh Bellew): Third party.

0:02:30 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): That's a whole separate service provided by my office.

0:02:33 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah. You're listening to Dr. Royce Vargas of Bargis Wellness in Edmond, Oklahoma. Adam Payne, CEO of Ultra Botanica is on the end. I'm Josh Bellew. This is Ultralife Today. Adam, you had mentioned on the break this interesting idea of helping people understand a little bit more about oxidative stress, how that works, what free radicals are, what a person can do to mitigate some of that. But then, you know, spoiler alert here. We're going to move into talking about Something in the later segments here, myocarditis, pericarditis, something that is running rampant worldwide right now. Relationship, obviously, to individuals that have had COVID infection maybe multiple times or even have had COVID infection and MRNA vaccines. And so you wanted to set up this segment about the oxidative system.

0:03:22 - (Adam Payne): Well, I think most people, when they think about their cardiovascular health, they think about ldl, hdl, and maybe triglycerides as a component. But it goes a lot deeper than that. And I think there was a guy named Peter Lopavic who worked at the Oklahoma Medical research foundation for 50 years, and he went into looking at oxidative LDL as really being the culprit for cardiovascular disease. And triglycerides. Oxidized triglycerides is also.

0:03:54 - (Adam Payne): And he Talked about this Apoc3 kind of lipid particle and how it, if a white blood cell, a monocyte, digests oxid lipids, that it turns into foam cells. Right. And so can you maybe educate us on this? Because I'd only have a rudimentary understanding of it. But there is this incredible connection between oxidized lipids and cardiovascular disease and how that's really more the culprit than this generalized idea of ldl, HDL and LDL cholesterol and kind of reduce the amount of cholesterol that we're taking into our.

0:04:42 - (Josh Bellew): Gut, and maybe you'll do some myth busting here. I'm looking at what, what Adam was saying and looking at your face. It'll be interesting.

0:04:49 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yeah. So, I mean, there's no one thing that's like, this is the problem. Oxidation is one of many problems. Ldl, like that number, quite frankly, isn't even on the list. I review it with patients because they want to know that number. But if you're thinking about, quote, bad cholesterol, apoliple protein B is a way better marker. It costs the exact same, I think, roughly, to do that test. It's just not done in the conventional world because it wasn't tracked in studies looking at drugs that lower cholesterol.

0:05:25 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): We use the ldl. And so that's the thing that everybody wants to know. But that's the least predictive marker of what is your risk for cardiovascular disease.

0:05:32 - (Josh Bellew): Mythbusters.

0:05:33 - (Adam Payne): The least predictive marker, least predictable predictive myth processing.

0:05:36 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): It's better than your thyroid stimulating hormone. But when you're thinking of lipids and fractionating lipids and looking at the particle, the ldl, I care little about that.

0:05:48 - (Adam Payne): So help us understand what is really happening in our bodies that Is the progression of cardiovascular disease what's really going on?

0:05:58 - (Josh Bellew): I know it's not complex at all.

0:06:01 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): I'm not going to really get into the weeds of all of the cellular biochemistry. But basically, your cholesterol can be in these large, fluffy particles which just bounce around inside the vasculature and never make their way into the arterial wall. Or you can have these teeny, tiny particles of varying compositions, some of which are particularly atherogenic, and they make their way into the arterial wall, which is where what is called the plaque, which gets more and more and more, and the artery gets more narrow and narrow and narrow, and you ultimately will have symptomatic angina.

0:06:40 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Now, that's not what causes a heart attack, which is the second myth buster. A heart attack is when you have typically, most commonly, like, 40 to 60% blockage. It would never cause you any symptoms in your normal life, even if you went out and tried to run a marathon. But then there's some sort of stress in that artery, most commonly from blood pressure, and then it causes a teeny, tiny tear, and then your clotting system goes wild, and a blood clot comes there, and bam. That's what causes.

0:07:09 - (Adam Payne): So that's the blockage. It's not the fat blockage necessarily that could contribute to it.

0:07:15 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yeah, I mean, you usually.

0:07:16 - (Josh Bellew): It's the tear associated with the clotting. Right.

0:07:18 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): It's the tear. It's the sheer stress and damage and disruption in the endothelium of the artery that then activates the blood clot, which then is the heart attack. So these are two very different processes that people don't understand. And that's. I'm not going to get on this soapbox either, or spend a ton of time on it. But that is exactly why stents do not prevent heart attacks. And people always come to me all the time, and they're like, oh, my doctor saved my life because he put a stent in.

0:07:48 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Unless it happened in the throes of an acute heart attack, where you have a blood clot blocking your artery, he did not save you ever from having a heart attack.

0:07:57 - (Josh Bellew): Mythbuster 3 within a minute and a half. Wow. This is so good. This is great.

0:08:01 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yes. So let's get back to your question. Oxidation.

0:08:05 - (Adam Payne): Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:08:05 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): So oxidation is occurring all the time in our system. And again, a little bit of oxidation is normal. Kind of like we talked about with inflammation, it strains the system and makes it stronger.

0:08:15 - (Adam Payne): So the mitochondria, as they're making ATP, they create this exhaust.

0:08:20 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): They create Free radicals for sure.

0:08:22 - (Adam Payne): Absolutely. And that's normal. That's part of that's normal. Right.

0:08:26 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): But it's not normal to have a lot of your cholesterol be oxidized, or it's not normal to have a bunch of free radicals, which is basically, again, not to get into the nitty gritty of biochemistry, but it's an oxygen atom that doesn't have something neutralizing it. And oxygen by itself is a negatively charged particle, and it's dangerous. It damages DNA. It breaks down cell walls. It's a problem. And so what our basically always doing is turning these things into water.

0:08:58 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): And so you have to have a capacity to do that. And so if the fat in your blood gets tagged with these dangerous oxygen particles and cannot be neutralized, they're very, very damaging to the arterial wall. And so things that we do in life which causes all these free radicals that we cannot deal with, are to expose ourselves to too much oxidative stress. And so even pollution in the air causes free radicals.

0:09:26 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Eating oxidized oils, which are, I don't Even know, probably 90% or more of the oil that is consumed in the United States is oxidized, is already fully.

0:09:38 - (Josh Bellew): Oxidized, even when it's sold as olive oil. I hate to say that unless you find it in Tunisia, unless you find Tunisia, Moroccan oil, you're basically getting olive oil that's tainted with other oils. Very sad. Yep. We can talk about that on another show.

0:09:52 - (Adam Payne): No, no, no. I want to talk about this now. So what, I mean, where is a safe haven then? I mean, literally, can you give us a safe haven here?

0:10:01 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): I cannot. It's very hard to find a safe haven.

0:10:04 - (Josh Bellew): It's tough to navigate.

0:10:05 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): There are. I can give you a resource where you can find your safe haven would be Dr. Mark Hyman's book, what the Heck Should I Eat? It's my favorite book about food. And he does have this entire chapter on oils. It's super enlightening. It's very science oriented. So, you know, I like the geeky stuff. Yeah, you will love it, Adam. A lot of people can't really tolerate that level of science, but there is this summary that's basically like, eat this, don't eat this.

0:10:33 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): And so. And he, I believe, if I recall correctly, does go through a couple of vendors that I think he named some.

0:10:40 - (Josh Bellew): Names that they vested.

0:10:42 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yeah, you can trust.

0:10:43 - (Josh Bellew): They vetted.

0:10:44 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): I'm sorry, their coconut, their olive. But you plant seed oils. First of all, they're not plants. It will say that it's vegetable Oil, it is not a vegetable. It is highly refined and oxidized seed oils, soybean oil, canola oil, vegetable oil, rapeseed, grapeseed, corn. You should never, ever consume these. And they're in every restaurant you go into, and they're in every box and bag that you buy at the store.

0:11:12 - (Adam Payne): It's everywhere. I mean, so I should what then? Which oil should we consume? I mean, seriously, if everything is tainted, I probably walk into Walmart and you'd say, well, none of this stuff go do maybe a Target. And you thinking, none of that stuff.

0:11:33 - (Josh Bellew): Believe it or not, you can find one oil on the shelf at Walmart. I actually did it yesterday. It's a Tunisian oil that you can get. It's not in a glass bottle. I don't like that it is dark. But there's one Tunisian and one Moroccan that you can get there. And I've got a friend that kind of vets those sources.

0:11:51 - (Adam Payne): So why is the Tunisian and Moroccan oils, okay?

0:11:57 - (Josh Bellew): Because the oils coming out of Spain and other countries are actually mixed with these seed oils, unfortunately.

0:12:06 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): And they don't put it on the label.

0:12:07 - (Josh Bellew): And they don't put it on the label.

0:12:08 - (Adam Payne): Aren't they supposed to. I mean, it says, it's supposed to say 100% virgin olive oil.

0:12:14 - (Josh Bellew): I don't want to get into the oil cartel, the worldwide oil cartel.

0:12:20 - (Adam Payne): We've had Ed Fletcher on, who is a botanist, and for example, echinacea, right? The world only produces 25% of the global consumption of Echinacea, which means 75% of Echinacea that's out on the shelf is not really echinacea.

0:12:38 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Oh, wow, that's horrifying.

0:12:40 - (Adam Payne): I know, it's. I mean, so. I mean, this is as horrifying as what I'm learning about oils. So Tunisian, Moroccan oils.

0:12:47 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): I'm going to go through the oils, what I tell my patients. All right, you can use first cold pressed virgin. Sorry, extra virgin olive oil from first cold pressed. First cold pressed extra virgin olive oil. The same for avocado and coconut oil. You should not cook with olive oil because it has a very low smoke smoke point. And it too is oxidized. If you put it in a frying pan and fry vegetables in it, saute vegetables in it. So olive oil is not meant for that. Olive oil is what you pour all over your salad, maybe your vegetables at dinner to make them yummier.

0:13:21 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Get a really super high quality, expensive one, tastes delicious. You can high heat cook avocado oil. It has a much higher Smoke point. So it will not be oxidized. And you can do the same with coconut oil. Coconut oil is a saturated fat and the myth is, number four is that saturated fat has never, ever, ever been proven to cause cardiovascular disease. Quite the opposite. But saturated. Hold on.

0:13:44 - (Adam Payne): Really? The opposite?

0:13:45 - (Josh Bellew): Absolutely.

0:13:46 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yes. There's been many studies.

0:13:47 - (Adam Payne): So saturated coconut oil actually can help reduce.

0:13:51 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): It can reduce. The exception to that is that if you have APOE 4 genotype, you can not do well with saturated fat. And you have to kind of minimize your consumption of saturated fat.

0:14:05 - (Adam Payne): But we could learn about that if.

0:14:06 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): We got a test to simple $75 mouth swab. So there are certain subtypes of people that I worry about saturated fat, but not because of its known cause of cardiovascular disease. So coconut oil and then butter, grass fed, pasture raised butter is much healthier for you than eating.

0:14:25 - (Josh Bellew): Bring on the Kerrygold. Really?

0:14:27 - (Adam Payne): Kerrygold? So Kerrygold's okay?

0:14:29 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yeah. I'm not sure if I eat Kerrygold myself. I think they're grass fed.

0:14:34 - (Josh Bellew): They are.

0:14:34 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): There. It's gonna be a little bit more inflammatory than using purely like pasture raised cows. But yeah, you can use butter. You can high heat butter. And then this new thing that I'm super excited about is this oil. You guys are gonna love this. They are making oil from fermenting sugar cane. And sugarcane is like this unlimited crop. I know, it's the craziest thing.

0:14:59 - (Adam Payne): So they're transforming the carbohydrate into a lipid.

0:15:03 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yes.

0:15:03 - (Josh Bellew): And it's a byproduct. So there's tons of this byproduct.

0:15:07 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): There's tons of this available. And it's highly pure. It has a better like omega 6 to 3 composition of any other oil that you can consume. And it has a higher smoke point, some over 500 degrees, so you can cook with it freely.

0:15:25 - (Adam Payne): My understanding is okay, how come I haven't heard about this up to this moment in time?

0:15:28 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): I don't know.

0:15:29 - (Josh Bellew): But I can't have your head in a different space. That's why you rely on People like Dr. Royce Barton.

0:15:34 - (Adam Payne): I'm Josh Bellew. Okay. Okay, Josh. But you've never shared this. What is this stuff?

0:15:38 - (Josh Bellew): Where do they sell it?

0:15:39 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Recently learned about it. So it is through a farm called Zero Acre Farms. And I think their website is zeroacrefarms Calm. And you can purchase this oil. It's called culture cultured oil. Cultured oil, I think is what it's called. I am currently waiting on my order. So I have not tried this yet. But it's I think that it's going to be like a game changer.

0:16:05 - (Josh Bellew): Well, after this podcast, it's just going to blow up worldwide. We should have an affiliate code.

0:16:10 - (Adam Payne): No, we need one.

0:16:11 - (Josh Bellew): Listen, we're moving into our last segment here. Coming up, we are going to talk a little bit about afib. We're going to talk about myocarditis pericarditis. You have been listening to Adam Payne on the end, CEO of Ultrabotanica.com. you've got Royce Vargas here and you can reach her through Bargis Wellness. B A R g a s wellness.com you can get a discovery call. It can kind of help you get to know her, map some things out. She'll do that for free. So go to bargusswellness.com

0:16:42 - (Josh Bellew): I'm Josh Bellew. We're going to be right back with Ultralife. Today we're going to talk a little bit about afib. We're going to talk a little bit about COVID MRNA myocarditis, pericarditis. Have you been hearing the truth about that? Stay tuned.

0:16:57 - (Adam Payne): 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.

0:17:27 - (Josh Bellew): Welcome back to Ultra Life today. This has been chapter 2 of 2.0. Royce Vargas here from bargas wellness.com b a r g a s wellness.com I want to get that in because we're going to get real excited about some topics here and we're going to forget to tell you how to contact her. Bargas Wellness.com get your free 10 minute discovery call with her. Begin to roadmap your life to better, better health and wellness, which is wellness, which is really you can't put a price on.

0:17:58 - (Adam Payne): So honestly, okay, this is part, this is part of chapter four, part four of part two or chapter two. And my mind has been blown. So if you haven't joined us from the earlier part, yeah, you can go.

0:18:09 - (Josh Bellew): Back to number 45. It's the very first interview we had with Dr. Royce Vargas. You can pick up there learning a lot about her journey, her practice, great origin story and her determination and tenacity to get where she is today. But I told you, Royce, off camera, actually we were emailing back and forth and thank you for that long, articulated, heartfelt response. Someone I know that's dear to me recently had an AFIB event and it came totally out of the blue. This is an individual, super healthy, fantastic exercise, ultra clean, primarily plant based diet, and then some awesome wild caught fish on occasion.

0:18:50 - (Josh Bellew): Eats just perfectly, lives a Zen, yoga kind of lifestyle up in the mountains. What could go wrong, right? Well, they did get the MRNA vaccine. And since that period of time, they've now had a cardiac event that was diagnosed as afib. What in the world is afib? And then I kind of even turned you onto a book that kind of has a little bit of a misleading title, but nonetheless, you took a deep dive into it. Thank you for doing that. Tell us about afib and then also tell us about myocarditis, because I'm hearing myocarditis is a nothing burger.

0:19:22 - (Josh Bellew): I'm hearing if you get diagnosed with myocarditis, take a couple of months, relax, don't do any heavy lifting, and then just get back out there and live life again. You'll just live a long, healthy life. So I know I said a lot. I'm going to turn you loose now with the afib.

0:19:35 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Okay, so AFIB is the most common abnormal heart rhythm in the world. The older you get, the much higher your chances of developing atrial fibrillation. It's basically a disorganized electrical chaos in the top chambers of the heart where the heartbeat is supposed to originate from. It's supposed to come very rhythmically and regularly, 50 to 100 beats a minute at rest. When you have atrial fibrillation, you have complete electrical chaos in the top chamber. It can make your heart beat very rapid and irregularly.

0:20:09 - (Adam Payne): So it's out of sync with the rest of the heart.

0:20:11 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Essentially the whole heart gets out of sync, really, because you don't have this uniform electrical impulse generating the heart rate and beat and contractility. You have this chaos. And there are a lot of causes for atrial fibrillation. There are a lot of triggers for atrial fibrillation, but in general, the most common thing is when you have stretching of the atrial cells. And then this causes them to have a higher level of automaticity. So their ability to create electricity and to create a heartbeat.

0:20:51 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): And the common causes of that are high blood pressure is really the most common. And then sleep apnea is a huge contributor because that increases the pressure in the heart, it causes high blood pressure, it can cause low oxygen, and all of these things sort of strain the top chambers of the heart and make electrical, make atrial fibrillation more likely to occur. In the case of your loved one, I would have to kind of Back up and ask how much exercise? Because atrial fibrillation is the arrhythmia of athletes.

0:21:21 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): And intense, you know, Ironman type gym.

0:21:26 - (Josh Bellew): Not intense Ironman at all. The perfect climate. Walking up and down the mountainous hills, but not running up and down the mountainous hills, but doing that, you know, five to six days a week, you know, in a very beautiful scenic environment. And just. And they've done it for years.

0:21:43 - (Adam Payne): So my impression always has been that atrial fibrillation, fibrillation, afib is usually. It's something that happens, it progresses to a point and then the electrical signals get disrupted and then you have this phenomenon and the only options seem to be like ablation of the nerve or doing some of this cryoablation, maybe. Help us understand, are there other things. Can you reverse afib? And why is we. Why have we been seeing AFIB in people that have gotten the vaccine?

0:22:22 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Well, we see AFIB in people who got the vaccine or people who got Covid. I have found in my practice the most troubled patients from cardiovascular and all other things that go along with COVID and the vaccine occur in people who got both. They got the vaccine, then they had a bout of COVID and then they got another vaccine. Both Covid and the vaccine are intensely inflammatory. And if you just bombard your system with one inflammatory insult after another, then there's a risk of a lot of things. And atrial fibrillation is one of them.

0:22:57 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): As far as treatment for atrial fibrillation, again, we could spend an hour on that alone. But there are medications to treat atrial fibrillation. They're 50% effective at best. There is an invasive approach to treating atrial fibrillation with ablation that can be done with radiofrequency or with cryoballoon. And there's actually even an open chest surgical procedure that can be done. But that was the first thing that was ever done from a surgical or ablative standpoint for atrial fibrillation.

0:23:28 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): So there are ways to do it. Will you always have a slightly higher risk of having AFIB than somebody who never had afib? Absolutely. Can you change those cells in the heart to make them not so high in automaticity to decrease your likelihood of having afib? I believe that we can. And there's more and more data coming through, various studies that show that maybe you can have reverse remodeling of the atrium is what that's called, where the cells kind of go back to normal.

0:24:01 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): The key with afib, and you kind of alluded to the Book the AFIB cure. First of all, I don't believe there is a cure for afib. You can put AFIB into remission, but there are these very rare circumstances where a perfectly normal healthy heart will go into atrial fibrillation from a vagally mediated cause. Most commonly is when somebody gets like a big gulp from 711 and they drink it down super fast and they get that horrible brain freeze. And the next thing they know they're in afib.

0:24:35 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): And if you get them out of AFIB or they spontaneously convert out of AFib, they do have the substrate to have AFib. So they are at increased risk more than somebody that never had it, but they might never have it again. And so there are kind of isolated instances where people can have an episode of AFIB during an extreme circumstance and then they may not have it again, ever, or for 10 years or however long until they have their next episode.

0:25:02 - (Adam Payne): So you're implying then that if your electrical rhythm becomes disruptive and you're in afib, you can, what's it called, revert, not reverse it. Cardiovert, cardiovert them and then you get back to a normal rhythm. So going back to the COVID is the spike protein damaging the atrium?

0:25:23 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): I don't think we know the answer to that. I think that the inflammation, there's no organ not affected. And so the inflammatory response is so.

0:25:36 - (Josh Bellew): Strong that you can find it certainly wasn't localized. We've now at least learned from studies coming in all over the world, Dr. Peter McCullough, that this spike protein is not just remaining local in one area, it's moving into every organ system.

0:25:51 - (Adam Payne): This MRNA could attach itself to a, to a heart cell and then that heart cell could be circumvented into making spike protein, which would then be an inflammatory process. I mean that's possible. Or the virus could be in the heart tissue creating more spike protein causing inflammation. Wow, I just never thought about it that way.

0:26:15 - (Josh Bellew): So we've got about six minutes left and the hot topic that everyone has heard about, whether they listen to mainstream media or not, has been myocarditis. Athletic deaths, young people just, you know, the all cause mortality rate has skyrocketed across the entire world. And the only indicator for a lot of experts is this one mass vaccination event that took place. And so it seems to be, you know, at least in the insurance companies minds, that's what's going on. But tell us a little bit about myocarditis and why it isn't a nothing burger. Because they're very much downplaying it, in my opinion. And I want to hear from a cardiologist what it really is. And then what does it mean for the future of an individual that has suffered with myocarditis, pericarditis?

0:27:04 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Well, myocarditis is not a benign phenomenon for sure. It is basically inflammation of the heart muscle cell which is called a myocyte.

0:27:15 - (Adam Payne): Wow.

0:27:15 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): And so that is a problem because similar to how I talked about how AFIB starts, like these cells can have this automaticity. And so arrhythmia is very common in people with myocarditis. I wouldn't be able to give you the incident, but if you have cells in the bottom chamber in the ventricle of the heart that are very inflamed and irritated and dying, then you can have generation of abnormal heart rhythms from the bottom chamber which are what cause cardiac arrest and sudden cardiac death.

0:27:47 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): And so there is an increased risk of that if you have significant inflammation in your heart muscle. And so can it go away? Absolutely. But we don't know without actually doing biopsies or post mortem analysis of the heart muscle cells from people who die, we don't know how much of it is resulted in scar tissue. And the origin of abnormal heart rhythm is scar. And therefore, when we ablate a heart, we are creating scars, creating scars to get rid of one rhythm. But it's at the risk of increasing arrhythmogenic substrate to have more arrhythmias, abnormal heart rhythms in the future.

0:28:32 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): So I would say myocarditis from certain circumstances, it can resolve and get better by a global assessment of the cardiac function. Your left ventricular ejection fraction can be normal, but we don't know if there's microscopic damage. One would think if a heart cell died, it's replaced with scar tissue because that heart cell does not come back.

0:28:58 - (Josh Bellew): It's not like a liver cell that came back. Isn't the heart basically the only organ in the body that does not actually replace cells?

0:29:05 - (Adam Payne): Well, the heart and the brain.

0:29:07 - (Josh Bellew): The brain. Okay, there you go.

0:29:09 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Right. And I mean, you can actually grow new neurons in your brain, but the same way you can, like grow new arteries in your heart. But a heart muscle cell does not regenerate. Like the liver can, like fully regenerate.

0:29:21 - (Adam Payne): It's so amazing, it's so interesting.

0:29:23 - (Josh Bellew): And clotting issues have been spoken of over and over again. When an individual has a clotting issue, we are seeing tons more of those in the last three years. What does that Mean, and what does an individual need to do? Well, for instance, again, an individual with myocarditis, an individual that is now having clotting issues, what are preventive things or things they can do to try to make sure that those don't turn into more serious events?

0:29:50 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Well, I mean, as with all things in functional medicine, you have to fix the matrix and decrease inflammation. And so you have to set yourself up for success and give your body every opportunity possible to deal with the clots and the inflammation and to resolve the inflammation. I think that clots are probably the most common reason that people died from active Covid. In the beginning of COVID where all these people were dying, it was because.

0:30:19 - (Adam Payne): It'S sort of a genetic. Yeah, yeah.

0:30:21 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Maybe inflammation causes clots. If the inflammation occurs in the artery and you get a clot in the artery, you're not going to.

0:30:27 - (Adam Payne): So maybe a chance for a shameless promotion of Ultracur. Do you think Ultracur has a place in helping to deal with this afib or these clotting issues or this inflammation?

0:30:38 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Well, I think curcumin is a potent modulator of inflammation. And I mean, I've seen myself, I use a lot of curcumin in my practice, your products, specifically to address those inflammatory markers that I see in people's blood work. And it.

0:30:57 - (Adam Payne): Does it help?

0:30:58 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yes, absolutely. 100% it helps.

0:31:01 - (Adam Payne): So we do. There are tools. So we're not just going to a dead end here with AFIB or with clotting issues or systemic inflammation. We've talked a lot about diet today as a way to help mitigate inflammation. And we have some great new tools, I guess with this. What's this Oil? That's artificially cultured oil.

0:31:24 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Zero acre farm.

0:31:25 - (Adam Payne): Yeah, we definitely have to look into that. And I'm gonna buy some Tunisian olive oil. Moroccan. And what about the avocado oil?

0:31:34 - (Josh Bellew): Well, I've actually got. I've got two brands that a good friend of mine has vetted and only recently. Adam, I wasn't holding out on you. Only recently have I learned about the Tunisian Moroccan. Actually within the last 72 hours.

0:31:45 - (Adam Payne): Oh, really?

0:31:46 - (Josh Bellew): Yeah. And this. And this guy's taken a huge deep dive because he has relationships internationally, all over place the the world. So we'll even mention those brands on future podcasts when I get to my well.

0:31:56 - (Adam Payne): Let's give one last non shameful plug for Dr. Bargus here.

0:32:00 - (Josh Bellew): Absolutely. So once again, Adam Payne on the end, CEO of Ultra Botanica, lead inventor of the unique technology that we employ to be able to take polyphenolic compounds like berberine, curcumin, quercetin, EGCG into the bloodstream at these beautiful elevated levels where you can experience like what Dr. Vargas said, the lowering of those overall inflammatory markers in the body. This is Royce Vargas we've been talking to today.

0:32:29 - (Josh Bellew): Bargas wellness.com b a r g a s wellness.com please have a free 10 minute discovery call with this awesome woman that really wants to help you in your heart journey or your health journey, whichever way it fleshes out. Again, this is Josh Belliere. This is Ultralife. Today. We're going to see you for another episode soon.

0:32:50 - (Adam Payne): Share with your friends and we've enjoyed having you here. Dr. Barkis, thank you for joining us. I guess we're opening the door. There's so much more to talk about. So we'll get into chapter three and chapter four.

0:33:01 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): Yes.

0:33:02 - (Adam Payne): Thanks for joining us.

0:33:03 - (Dr. Royce Bargas): I can't wait.

0:33:12 - (Adam Payne): Sa.