Daniel Trevor survived a heart attack.
The experience turned him into a citizen scientist who debunks some common myths about the relationship between heart disease and metabolic health. He shares his first-hand discovery of the harmful effects of what he refers to as the unholy trinity: carbs, sugar, and vegetable oils,
He documented his personal journey of survival, transformation, and self-discovery in the book, The Unholy Trinity. It is perhaps the single-most citation-dense work on the subject yet published, with a whopping 1,200 scientific citations.
Did you know that 74% of doctors are not fully equipped to handle prediabetes and type 2 diabetes? Daniel leads us through his exploration of the medical community's struggle with these common diseases.
He insists that these health battles require more than just medication, it requires a fundamental shift in our lifestyle and diet. He challenges us to challenge the norms, understand the science behind our health decisions, and take control of our own health.
Going deeper, he challenges traditional wisdom around heart health. We touch on the impact of wheat and vegetable oils, while also emphasizing the importance of understanding plaque in our arteries.
Daniel's story illustrates the critical role of the citizen scientist in health and wellness as well as the power of taking control of our own health.
Daniel's Website: DanielTrevor.com
===========================
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Daniel Trevor survived a heart attack.
The experience turned him into a citizen scientist who debunks some common myths about the relationship between heart disease and metabolic health. He shares his first-hand discovery of the harmful effects of what he refers to as the unholy trinity: carbs, sugar, and vegetable oils,
He documented his personal journey of survival, transformation, and self-discovery in the book, The Unholy Trinity. It is perhaps the single-most citation-dense work on the subject yet published, with a whopping 1,200 scientific citations.
Did you know that 74% of doctors are not fully equipped to handle prediabetes and type 2 diabetes? Daniel leads us through his exploration of the medical community's struggle with these common diseases.
He insists that these health battles require more than just medication, it requires a fundamental shift in our lifestyle and diet. He challenges us to challenge the norms, understand the science behind our health decisions, and take control of our own health.
Going deeper, he challenges traditional wisdom around heart health. We touch on the impact of wheat and vegetable oils, while also emphasizing the importance of understanding plaque in our arteries.
Daniel's story illustrates the critical role of the citizen scientist in health and wellness as well as the power of taking control of our own health.
Daniel's Website: DanielTrevor.com
===========================
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
Hey, welcome folks. Thanks for joining us. As you know, this is the stay off my operating table podcast, dr Phillip Ovedia I'm the talking hairdo with the lack of hair who says this thing Jack Heald and we are joined today by Daniel Trevor and Phil. I don't know how you keep managed to get these folks who look like they're really going to be interesting, but I personally am really interested in getting to know this guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does kind of amaze me the endless supply of interesting people who are discovering and benefiting from metabolic health, and really excited to have another one of them on today. Daniel and I, I would say, have become friends over the past year, plus now. He approached me a while back when he was writing his book, which we're going to talk about today, and I loved the concept, loved the topic and loved the book. Once it was finally done, got a chance to read it, so I'm really excited to get his story out there today. So Daniel is the author of the new book, the Unholy Trinity, and he has a really interesting backstory that led him to writing the book. So with that, daniel, why don't you introduce yourself to our audience?
Speaker 3:Yeah, hi, thanks a lot, Dr Ovedi. I really appreciate that. And yes, it's true, I did find you. I think I saw you on maybe it was Ken Berries Dr Ken Berries channel and I thought, wow, I got to try to reach out to that guy, because I my story is this I, about four years ago, I had a heart attack and it was a complete, total shocker to me because I was a slim symptom-free Mr Healthy, or so I thought. And so, having studied technical data throughout my life, I decided to take a dive into the medical and nutrition science to find out how could this happen to me? I'm Mr Healthy, right, and what I discovered absolutely it truly blew my mind and actually shocked and infuriated me, because what we've been told to eat for decades is killing us, and I didn't know anything about what you now know. And so then I started, I went to Google University and then I was at YouTube University and I was finding all these amazing doctors and so forth and I discovered.
Speaker 3:One of the first ones I discovered was Dr Ford Brewer, who he had. This video was something like how to reverse 20 years of arterial plaque. Like I did, I thought I got to watch this. What's this about you know. So then he explained what happened during a heart attack. And you got to remember. I was thirsty for all of this because I was fortunate that very early on I learned how to study well and make sure I understand all the nomenclature and stop and look things up. Even though it's a painstaking process, you have to do that, otherwise you're lost. And so he got into one of his more technical ones where he's explaining what happens in a heart attack, where you're building the plaque up subendothelial, you know, underneath the arteries, and then it. Well, you know how. I don't have to bore you with all that, but my introduction was to that. And then I found Ivor Cummins, eric Berg, dr Pearl Mutter, eventually found you and many other geniuses on the cutting edge of low carb, keto, ketovoir universe and the whole concept of metabolic health.
Speaker 3:And so I took the dive into it and early in the book I do tell the reader. I say, look, I know you're probably thinking. You know, without university credentials and medicine, organic chemistry, you know why the hell should I trust you? And I tell him look, don't. None of this is my opinion. My book has more citations or scientific references than any other health and wellness book out there. Most of them have two or 300. Mine has 1,227. And I just want to. I knew I had to have that back up and so I just say look, just think of me as a friendly relay point of the best and most modern 21st century science that it has to, that the 21st century has to offer for your health and longevity. Trust that instead of me and fix yourself.
Speaker 3:I did, and I got better. I went from, like Dr Ford says, from heart attack to six pack, without even trying. I just changed everything around, and that wasn't even a goal or something you know, because when you start eating ancestrally, as you very well know, you start shedding all of the excess weight and you start eventually looking and you do maybe some intermittent fasting. You hit the gym and you start to look like one of these hunter gatherer type persons that are fit and they're chiseled, and all this and without even you know. That's just the way they looked, and so it wound up like that.
Speaker 3:So, anyway, I had the heart attack, I took the deep dive and then, not long after it, I learned about all these tests that you can get to measure your metabolic health, and so I did a lot of that pretty early on because I wanted to find out the good, the bad and the ugly, right Like I knew I was going to have a bad report card, but I thought, well, let me have a benchmark where I can then compare my future you know, in three months, six months and so forth, my progress and so that I can look back and go okay, I am really making some improvement. So that's basically, in a nutshell, what happened to me and where I discovered you and many other geniuses, like I said, that are on the cutting edge of metabolic health and wellness and so on.
Speaker 2:So too, I'm going to jump right into the hard hitting question. But you're you know now on a growing list of non-physicians that we've had on this program that seem to have figured out something that 99% of physicians haven't figured out Exactly why. Why is that? Why do you think it's so hard knowing what you know now and having the 1200 plus you know citations and all that went into your book? Why is it that it's so it seems so hard for physicians to figure this out when you know and I don't mean this in any insulting way, but you know, a regular guy like you can figure it out and they can't. Well, here's the deal.
Speaker 3:Like I said, I did come to it with one advantage in that I knew how to study and I knew how to read studies like they could read. But, as I covered with Dr Ford on his podcast a couple of weeks ago, there was a study from 2019 out of Johns Hopkins and they discovered that 74% of doctors you know this includes internists, general practitioners and cardiologists do not know how to diagnose prediabetes or type 2 diabetes, let alone know how to deal with it. Right, 74%. And we're commenting on the fact that no wonder it's such an epidemic, because the diabetes, as you know, that's where all of the other diseases start, that's where you get your heart disease, that's where you get your fatty liver, the leading cause of amputations, blindness, you name it, pcos and so on. So you know, it just doesn't get down to the medical schools and I think doctors, you know, they go through all that training and then they go to, you know, have their internships and then they get into practice and there's so many of us showing up at their door with these metabolic syndrome and with all these diseases and they're so busy they don't stay up, they don't stay current with the current science to find out hey, who is this Dr Ovedi? What is he talking about? Metabolic health, what is that? They don't ask the questions. And then, of course, economics comes into it. I think you would have a better idea of this than I, but you know the doctors. They probably don't have much time to spend with a patient to talk to them about their diet, their exercise, their usual, what is it? The average visit to a doctor is seven minutes and they're in and out and they have to see people because of how poorly insurance pays and pays them and so forth. So I can understand that doctors, they have mortgages and they got staves and so on, but they just don't keep up with the current science. And that's the best thing that I can come up with, having observed from afar and talking also to Dr Ford and he because he knows a lot, because Ford Brewer, when he was at Johns Hopkins he taught thousands of doctors and he knows what they don't know and they go through all the usual things. I mean, thank God they're there right To set the bone, to suture up the wound, to remove the bullets and the steering wheels from people's chests and so on. But like he and I and you, we're more on the biochemical side. I mean, thank God they're there to help us in those emergency dire situations.
Speaker 3:But why are we there in the first place? Why are we in there having VTAC, ventricular tachycardia or whatever it is that's bringing you in? What is the root cause? Oh, we got to look at that, but that's never addressed and I think for some docs it just gets to a point and I've talked about this with my daughter my older daughter is a PA in the emergency room and she I talked about all this stuff all the time and I have gleaned from her and the people that she works with that at some point it gets to be more like a nine to five for a doctor and they want to get in and out, do their usual thing. All the patient is presenting with such and such. This is what you do if you got the VTAC. You give me any order on your Stop and knock that out, but never okay. So what is the source Of why this guy is having our troubles? And that's why I love what you're doing so much, because that's that's where you come in.
Speaker 1:Let's make this personal. One of the cool things that we get to do. Well, that I get to do is sit and listen to Highly educated specialists In the field of metabolic health. We've had some of the some of the smartest, most technically astute doctors and researchers I've ever met on this show. I love that, but you have you bring to this that what is known as the citizen scientist approach.
Speaker 1:Yes and there's a great. I personally find a great deal more credibility from somebody like you who's actually done the research rather than just has opinions. So let's start with your personal journey. You had a heart attack. You gave us the beginning, you gave us the end, you what you said. You know I fixed my problem without Hardly try, and. But let's talk about, after you had the heart attack, what you learned about what was going on in your own body, how you got there and the things that you learned that you were doing wrong or that led to that, and then Kind of take us along that, that journey, that path, sure, and then I've got a bunch more questions. I want to ask, ok, that sounds.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, no, no, listen.
Speaker 3:Once I started, like I said, visiting Google University and YouTube near University and finding these wonderful doctors and scientists and so forth and taking the dive and because I can read studies just as well as any doctor can I may have to look up a ton more words than they do, because they've already covered those particular words or the nomenclature of a particular area.
Speaker 3:When they were in medical school, like when Dr Ovedi was going to the cardiology school, he already knew about the left ventricular and ejection fraction and all these things and and so I had to stop and learn all that it was. It was a struggle, but I was never more highly motivated to fix something in my life than then, because, you know, although I feel I can study anything, I have to be really interested in it. So I was very highly motivated, so I took the deep dive into it and I, at the same time, I kept chronicling what I was doing, the tests that I found out about my own progress, and also chronicled as well the studies that I found, because you know you have to provide for the end notes and citations and references you have to provide, if you're going to write a book, the author's names and the date and the name of the study and where it was published, and so on and so on and so forth. How to gather. That was a ton of work too, I mean.
Speaker 1:And then a link to, but you're, you're being boring right now.
Speaker 3:Ok, tell me what you want to know, so what I?
Speaker 1:you, you have, you have a heart attack. You're probably freaked out and scared to death. Yeah, you survived the heart attack, yeah. And then you start digging into it and you discover you got to change some stuff.
Speaker 3:I discovered that I had a change. I was eating way too many carbohydrates and I got an air quote coming at you Heart healthy whole grains, which, on the glycemic scale, are higher than table white table sugar. So I was sold on the propaganda of heart, so called heart healthy whole grains, and I was sold on the whole fake idea and the false science that it was the saturated fats and butter meat cheese that was clogging up my arteries. And then I discovered the science behind that, because I got to know Nina Ticolch, who I was just exchanging emails with today I'm sure you know, nina. She wrote a wonderful endorsement for the book, for the book as well as Dr Ovedia, and and I got her book. What is it? The Big Fat Surprise? Yeah, I meet. Why butter, meat and cheese belong in a healthy diet, and that blew my mind. And so I started changing things around and and I found out what how we've been eating for the last hundred years is killing us. It's just awful. I mean, how about this?
Speaker 1:So go into the gory details. How have we been eating?
Speaker 3:How have I been eating Well?
Speaker 1:but what is it? That's what's? What's the eating that's killing us?
Speaker 3:It's the Unholy Trinity is the title of my book Subtitle how carbs, sugar and oils make us fat, sick and addicted and how to escape their grip. Unholy, unholy Trinity. We're getting unholy, gory details now. Yes, unholy Trinity how carbs, sugar and oils make us fat, sick and addicted and how to escape their grip. And when I say carbs, I'm talking about the industrially refined and processed grains which they turn into bread, pasta, cereal, crackers, biscuits, waffles, pancakes, chips, pretzels, rolls, pizza, tortillas, etc. Etc. And then you've got your sugars, which is the candy cake, ice cream, soda. You know on and on that way. And then the oils, the vegetable oils, the so-called healthy again hard healthy vegetable oils. I have a whole chapter on that. Chapter six is just mind blowing. It still blows my mind to this day. We didn't eat any of this. This wasn't in the.
Speaker 1:What I'm excited about here is when we have scientists and and research folks who spend their their life in a laboratory with chemicals and beakers and lab coats and instruments saying all this stuff, us lay people can kind of go and it and it. I mean it's. But to hear it come from a guy who, according to your biography, has been a professional entertainer and a trader in precious metals, and in other words, a guy to hear you say it all of a sudden, it sounds different. It just sounds different, Right, Am I right, Phil?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what I'd like to hear about is so you have your heart attack and you know the doctors taking care of you, I'm sure, gave you, you know, the advice Go on the low fat diet, take your medication, and that will be OK. And at some point you said something's not right about this and started down this pathway. So talk to us about what that was like. What, what made you question what were probably very, you know, very competent and you know, experienced doctors Well meaning telling you you've had a heart attack, you got to take these medications, you got to, you know, cut the fat out of your diet. And what made Daniel say doesn't seem quite right to me. Maybe there's a different answer.
Speaker 3:Well, what made me brave about that is finding people like you who also went through something that you know was not as healthy as they would have liked it to be. And I found these other doctors that they themselves said hey, I was clueless about this, I was. I was on low fat, you know. And then I look at all of the studies and then I also compare the statistics to I go OK, so in 1930, the obesity rate was 1 percent. We are approaching 50 percent in less than 100 years, and never before in history has a population gotten so fat and and sick so fast. What's happening? And then you find it is the, the unholy trinity the carbs, the sugar and the oils and big food, in collusion with I well, I don't want to say collusion, but it makes you question. Big food, big pharma and big medicine seem to be like the other unholy trinity. As soon as, especially when you find out that big pharma funds the medical schools and have a lot of say in their curriculum, and that's why a lot of doctors will reach for the prescription pad first before getting into metabolic health. Or what are you eating and are you working out, and that kind of thing, and then big food they have. You know, in their corporate offices around the United States and other parts of the world they have conference rooms filled with PhDs in biochemistry that are figuring out what is it that we can put in these products that makes them eat more of it. And addix them, and they'll eat the whole bag instead of half of the bag. So you have vested interests, and I know this sounds maybe crazy to some, but you have to be able to confront the fact that there are people who are more invested in the bottom line than in people's health.
Speaker 3:And so I started connecting the dots there and thinking, wow, this guy that's advising me to take this high dose of a torvostatin or whatever it was, a lipitor, right? No wonder I have these side effects. So I have a whole chapter on statins, which I think you've seen, and so I went into all that. And then I found out OK, so how should I be eating? So then I started eliminating the carbohydrates, especially all of the. You know, for breakfast I'd have, let's say, this granola that had probably 50 carbs in that right away, and that's more than I get in the whole day right now. So I had to eliminate that because I didn't know the grains, which I learned a lot from Dr cardiologist William Davis. I'm sure you know, dr Davis, and he did a whole couple of books on wheat and grains and why they never belonged in the human diet in the first place and they didn't even, they weren't even there until like that.
Speaker 1:All by itself is just one of those mind blowing things. I know the grade world history we study, that civilization began with agriculture, when they learned how to grow, and they always say wheat, and the idea that that civilization is built on this grain. And maybe it's true, maybe it's not, I don't know. But holy smokes what we've learned over the last 30 years about what happens when we eat this process.
Speaker 3:I'm telling you, look at it from this way. If you back up a little bit and I cover this I have a whole chapter called Are you a Wheat Addict Chapter 10, where I cover the whole history of how it really wasn't in our diet until 9 or 10,000 years ago, which is like a snap of the finger. In the eons of time We've been eating, you know, our bodies have been designed in a different way, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. In Chapter 3, I cover this that we're built for a high-fat, low-carb diet. It goes back at least 2.6 million years where they discovered that. You know, archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, anthropologists that we've been eating animals for at least 2.6 million years as the primary food for these genetic, humanoid, evolutionarily developed bodies. And 10,000 years ago it was like nothing. And I show this picture of a guy who's well, it's a skull and it's 100,000 years old and his teeth are perfectly intact. And I ask you know, do you think he had a orthodontist or floss or anything like that? But you know what happened is, after they started eating all these wheat and grains, lots of tooth decay, all the new diseases started coming around and what they did was they were eating these things because they considered wheat and grains as fallback food. That's what they called them, these anthropologists that have studied this when animals were not available. We ate a lot of wheat and grains and that's what we about. 9 or 10,000 years ago, we started raising our own livestock and growing crops, but that's we took. You know, after we started that, men shrunk 5 inches, women shrunk 3 inches. Everything changed. The new diseases started to come around, not like in the last 100 years, believe me, but back then.
Speaker 3:So if you get a bigger picture, you see all of this that it's proven there. I mean I, you know again, I have all the references and citations in the book. So again, this is not Daniel. None of it is Daniel's opinion. This is all confirmed science, and just go look at it. And in fact, I have so many citations we couldn't fit them in the book. What I had to do was we put them up on the website and it'll say references at the top of the website Daniel, trevorcom and where I range, just so that you can actually download all of them and people like that, because what they can do is, instead of having to go to the back of the book and type something in from the book to the search engine. They could just click on a link that I have, that I provide. That takes them right to the source data. Again, none of this is Daniel's opinion, but I have all that there.
Speaker 3:But wheat, especially in the last 50, 60 years. What Big Ag has done to it? It's something called chemical mutagenesis, mutagenesis and radiation mutagenesis, where they alter it in such a way that, as you know, over the centuries it was about shoulder length, high, amber waves of grain and all that kind of thing in the song. But now it's called it's 18 inches and it's called semi-dwarf wheat. And the reason why, even though it's smaller, the seeds are bigger, and that's where they get the more bountiful crop from the seeds. But what happened was it amps up this chemical called Gliadin, g-l-i-a-d-i-n Gliadin, and what that does. This is a new surprise. It attaches to the opiate receptors of the brain and it doesn't get you high or relieve pain or anything like that. It causes you to crave more carbohydrates in the form of grains and wheat.
Speaker 1:Listen, I got this all in chapter 10, again, none of this is my opinion, and so Dr Davis mentioned this, but it's been almost two years since we've had him on, and just to hear it all over again, it's not God. Our wheat-based foods are working in our brains in exactly the same way that heroin works. Yes, I mean, that's what I hear. I may not be stating that scientifically accurately, but as the resident dummy, that's what it sounds like to me. Weed and our brains treat wheat like it was heroin.
Speaker 3:Yes, morphine, heroin yes, exactly yeah. And so that's one of the first things that I eliminated. And then, of course, I knew enough about sugar that that should be avoided. And then what really blew my mind is these so-called hard-healthy vegetable oils, and I got the whole history of that from not only Neatotichaltz but also all of the research that I did to it. Chapter 6 is still blowing my mind. I can't. All of the diseases of modernity that are related to these vegetable oils. And they were never meant to be in the human diet in the first place. They didn't arrive until Crisco, which was what was it? 1911. And wouldn't you know? And then it started flying off the shelves, because prior to that, the vegetable oils were used as to lubricate machinery in the industrial revolution. And then they got this bucket and they said, wow, it kind of looks like lard. Why don't we sell it to humans? And that way that we could make money off of this thing, because it was considered a toxic waste the cotton seed oil and the soybean oil.
Speaker 1:And it's just amazing, it's awful to laugh, but it's better to laugh than to cry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, and it does. Like you said earlier, it sounds so unbelievable and yet it's all true. And what I'll add to that is I gathered 100 cardiologists from the American Heart Association Conference and I got them in a room and just said a couple of those facts, like you talked about, that your brain essentially responds to wheat the same way it responds to heroin, or the heart healthy vegetable oil that we've been promoting was a toxic industrial lubricant that they had to find another use for. And they would all say well, there's no way that can be true. And yet again, as you have well referenced in your book and many others have documented, it is quite true and yet we struggle to get this message out.
Speaker 3:And that's why, when Big Food discovered this back in the 70s, they started putting wheat and a form of wheat in just about everything in the supermarket. Take this stat the average supermarket has 60,000 products. 59,000 of them contain some form of wheat. Twizzlers, the candy. The second ingredient is wheat. It's just insane.
Speaker 3:I mean, listen, if your audience likes this information, it's all in the book it's part of. It is an expose on Big Food, big Pharma and Big Medicine, even though there are wonderful people working in all three, believe me, I'm not. You know, I don't condemn all of them, but it's too much profit driven. Then what's good for mankind? I mean, I even covered this study. It was Goldman Sachs, the international banker they have.
Speaker 3:One of their analysts did a white paper and an analysis for their biochemical companies and their pharma companies and they said look, creating cures is good for society, but it's not good for the bottom line. And the example they gave was this drug called Harvoni, which had a 96% cure rate for hepatitis C. When it first came on the scene it was a blockbuster $12 billion. Within a couple of few years it dropped 75% to about $3 billion and it continued its descent after that. And so again, it's the bottom line. We can't be coming up with cures because it's not good for the bottom line.
Speaker 3:Sorry to add that in there, but I have things like that throughout the book, besides how to get metabolically healthy and the things you need to avoid in your diet, like the grains and the sugars and the oils, as well as adding some, maybe some intermittent fasting and why that works and why it's very ancestral because, let's face it, I mean our ancestors were lucky to eat once a day, right? I mean their diet consisted of what they could catch, kill and eat nose to tail, right, and maybe what they might pick off a tree or a vine, that kind of thing. There wasn't nothing.
Speaker 1:It was what which would be seasonal Exactly.
Speaker 3:Exactly. So that's what I learned and I learned immediately what I needed to exclude and at the same time, okay, I got to hit the gym. What's the best kind of workout Do I have? And then I took a dive into that and that's covered in chapter 9, where if you're over 40, there's a different kind of exercise you want to do and it's backed by science than younger people, and that is.
Speaker 3:It was a large meta-analysis of I don't know it was 50 or 95 studies. It was a big study and they wanted to find out what's the best exercise for people over 40? Is it cardio or is it resistance training? And they measured it against all the metabolic markers A1C, hdl, triglycerides. You know all the metabolic, the five or six chief metabolic markers that we follow that have been established since what? 1988. I think it was Gerald Revan, his work and over 40, by far, and I have a graph on this in the book. What they showed. The results were resistance training is way more beneficial for anyone over 40 than cardio, getting on the treadmill and stationary bikes and all that. In fact. They also found that for men over 40, the more cardio they do, the lower their testosterone goes. So I have a whole chapter, oh, stop stop.
Speaker 1:Stop the presses, men. If you are over 40, you want to listen to this one more time.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, no, that's just. You know, the more cardio they do, the lower their testosterone goes, and I have a whole section on testosterone in my chapter 14 with a chart that shows. You know, you start up here and as you get past your 20s and it starts going down like this right, and I discuss the whole scene behind it and what us men need to do to get it back. And so because when you have lower testosterone as a man and women and lower estrogen, you start attracting the diseases of aging. So what can we do to avoid that? Anyway, I have 10, what is it called 10 testosterone tips that I give for all the guys, and the first one is you don't want low cholesterol. Cholesterol is a precursor of testosterone and you need it to create cholesterol, to create testosterone. And who has the lowest cholesterol levels? Vegans and vegetarians. So not to condemn them.
Speaker 1:Cholesterol is a precursor to testosterone. Yes, if your cholesterol is too low, you don't have the fundamental building blocks for testosterone.
Speaker 2:Yes, phil, I'm going to ask you to make sure I'm getting this Dr Verified indeed that testosterone and estrogen and progesterone are all made from cholesterol, and it's just one of the long lists of vital purposes that cholesterol does have in our bodies.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and there was even a study that I have in the book in that I think it's after number 10 that they found it was studied just from 2021 that showed that exactly what I'm just saying right there. And also they discovered that testosterone levels in men have been declining since the mid 20th century. And then I asked well, what happened in the mid 20th century? That's when Ansel Keys and his low-fat crew, along with the American Heart Association, started coming up with this. Oh, you have to avoid the saturated fats and you got to eat low fat diets, and that's when all that started. So there's science on all of it. I have it all in the book and it's just a shame that this doesn't get out. I mean, I wish we could have more doctors like yourself find out this information, but they're just. They're so swamped with handling people that are arriving there with cardiovascular disease which, as you know, the root cause of is having a diabetic physiology.
Speaker 3:You have to be either pre-diabetic or full-blown type 2 diabetic to even have heart disease, and that was me. I didn't know. That was one of the tests that I got. I thought, okay, so let me get a lot of these tests. So I went and got this one test.
Speaker 3:That's why I have chapter seven is called the most important health tests you've never had, because doctors don't recommend it. And so when I got that, I found out that I was a full-blown type 2 diabetic, even though I was slender and had no symptoms. And even Joseph Kraft, the father of the insulin assay, discovered that back in the 70s and 80s, where he in his book you know about his work and his quote was something like those with heart disease not associated with diabetes are simply undiagnosed. And he's the one that did several thousand autopsies to discover that the process of diabetes is atherosclerotic, is in the arteries, and you can't have heart disease without also having some degree of diabetes. And so I found out that I was a type raging type 2 diabetic along with and that was the root cause of my heart disease.
Speaker 1:And then I I'm assuming you were an asymptomatic type 2 diabetic, Exactly.
Speaker 3:Well, listen, all these major diseases, as the doctor was, except for the heart attack being a symptom of it.
Speaker 2:Other than that, but, yeah up until the time you had the heart attack. So how long has it been since your heart attack?
Speaker 3:It's been about four years, a little over four years, I give that story. I have it at my website, danieltrevercom. I have a seven minute video where I give the story. I say about four years ago I had the heart attack and it was a total shocker because I was lean and symptom free and I give this whole thing that I'm telling you, and then I get some shocking statistics, kind of like what you hear where you've heard the last several minutes from me and I share some of that with the audience. It's just a seven minute video and then below the video they can see Dr Ovedi is wonderful endorsement, along with Nina tight cults and, you know, mark Hyman and the rest of them.
Speaker 3:And I don't know if you notice, doc, but I have your on the back cover. I filled it up with as many endorsements as I could and I have yours, an excerpt from yours, right at the very top and I got to read this one sentence because I thought it was wonderful, I thought it was brilliant. This is Dr O coming at you. Now he says to anyone who doesn't want to see me or one of my colleagues standing over them in a hospital bed read this book. Thank you, doc.
Speaker 2:I mean, of course the whole endorsement is inside the front cover, but yeah, yeah, I know, Like I said, it really is an excellent book and, you know, like you said, more heavily referenced than most. You know most books that are put out there kind of written by doctors.
Speaker 2:Medical authorities yeah, written by doctors. So it's pretty interesting to see that contradiction, and so tell us. I think it would be helpful for people to hear you had a heart attack four years ago. You've been on this journey, you've made these changes. What's the state of your cardiovascular health today?
Speaker 3:Oh well, what I decided was what I found out in my research and I've really gone down some bunny holes and love to share some of those with you sometime, but that's for another conversation. But I discovered that, well, when you have a heart attack, you've got permanent damage to your heart. No one knows how much or to what degree, but this can lead to arrhythmias such as atrial fibrillation, atrial flutter, ventricular tachycardia, which is the number one cause of sudden death, and all kinds, you know, heart failure and so on. So, but nobody knows to what degree. That's not me, is. It's that beeping? Is you hearing the beeping? I don't know what it is. Okay, I hear it. It's the World Health Organization noticing that we're talking about things that we shouldn't be talking about, the lasers are focusing in on us.
Speaker 3:Or the World Health Organization who was promoting that we get off of meat and eat bugs instead, but that's another conversation. But anyway, I decided that I had to. Since I had this unknown degree of permanent damage, I thought, well, I need to get myself and control what I can control and get myself into the most superior metabolic health I can possibly achieve. So I've got to tell you, when I eliminated the grains, my HDL skyrocketed into the 90s. It was like 92, 93, and I had never had that before. And you know that's an extremely highly protective metabolic marker. As you well know, triglycerides crash. All my markers went in a great direction. So the one thing that I might be interesting to bring up is something I discussed on another podcast, and that is the. In Chapter 19, I discussed the CAR-DU. What is it called the CAR-DU? Cac?
Speaker 2:scan Yep, the coronary artery calcium scan.
Speaker 3:Exactly, as well as the CIMT carotidinthimimedia thickness test. And oh man, I'm going to shoot somebody if that evening, stop I World Health Organization, we will not eat your, you know, according to them, meat will still be around, but it'll be a special treat if you're, you know, a good slave. But anyway. So the coronary artery scan. I decided, well, let me get one of those, because I didn't know. I didn't know any. The fortunate thing about the book, if I can backtrack just a little bit, is that I got Dr Ford Brewer to write what turned out to be Chapter 22, which is what are the most important blood labs and scans that any person can buy inexpensively online without needing their doctor's prescription. Because a lot of the doctors are going to say, oh no, you don't need that, you don't need that. No, no, no, and you can't get them. So that way you yourself can find out if you've got something lurking ready to pounce or you're just fine or somewhere in between. That needs attention. So I have all those in there and I got this scan and I had a bad score. It was it's supposed to be, as you know, between zero and 400 at the top. Mine was like an abysmal 600, right. So I knew I had work to do, and, and then, about a year and a half later, after going through this whole transformation of low-carb, intermittent fasting, high healthy fats and getting to the gym, more and so forth, I thought, hey, let me go take that test again, Not knowing that well, by the time I did it I found out that your test, your score, can actually rise because you're turning all of your soft dangerous plaque into calcified plaque. And I cover a couple of studies from Jack, you know Journal of American College of Cardiology, as well as one out of Cleveland Clinic, which, as you know, cleveland Clinic is ranked number one globally for cardiovascular care, and they're talking about the difference between the calcified plaque and the soft plaque. They say, well, if you get a, it's a good test to get the calcium scan, but you got to remember that there's, on average, about 40% of the calcium, that there's, on average, about four times as much soft dangerous plaque that's vulnerable than there is calcified plaque. And the soft plaque is the plaque that causes the heart attacks, the strokes, because, as you know, when the plaque ruptures through the wall of the endothelial and it enters the lumen where the blood flows, it touches blood creates a clot, it breaks off, goes downstream, so to speak, and if it goes, your heart, you have a heart attack. Goes your brain, you have a stroke. So once you can eliminate the soft plaque or turn the soft plaque into calcified plaque, you're in better shape.
Speaker 3:So the ending to this story was I did that extra. I never heard this. Yeah, well, it's in chapter 19 of my book and they call it. They call it the CAC paradox, or plaque density paragraph paradox, and where they find that, for example, my score was at a visible 600, like I said when I did it, a year and a half later, when I had gone through this wonderful transformation, it had skyrocketed to 2600. And that's because I had turned all of my dangerous, soft, vulnerable plaque, which caused my heart attack, into calcified plaque.
Speaker 3:And this is what is called now. These studies are like from 2021, 2021, 2022, which is like what 10 minutes ago, and the medical field and that's why most doctors don't know this is cutting edge information, and so I was fortunate to be able to add that into that chapter and I explained what that's all about, and with all the references and everything. So that will be new news to any doctor, or most doctors let's put it that way Except those at the Journal of American College of Cardiology and the Cleveland Clinic and JAMA cardiology and other doctors and so forth.
Speaker 2:And you know, I would maybe put a little caveat on that, in that we're still figuring this out and as we get more advanced scanning techniques and we start to understand these different type of plaques because, you know, it is a little bit of a paradox, as you said, we know that people with higher calcium scores are at higher risk for developing clinical events like heart attacks, and so, ultimately, I think it's not as simple as all plaque is the same, and that's still something that we're figuring out. And there were more advanced scans that we're now able to do CT angiograms and such that can help us. Not only you know it's not as simple as soft plaque versus calcified plaque, but there's probably different types of each that we're still figuring out.
Speaker 3:No, no, no, listen, I'm not here to tell you that you learned it wrong or anything like that.
Speaker 3:by any stretch of the imagination, no, no, I'm just reporting what the studies were showing and they're saying like look, it's just. The analogy that they gave was if there's four times as much soft dangerous plaque below the surface, just think of it as a what do they call it? An iceberg, where the calcium score is the tip of the iceberg, where underneath is where the danger is. It's because, like the Titanic, all the danger came from underneath the top of the ship. It was below the surface, and so that's why they gave that analogy there an iceberg.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the message that I think is important for people is you know, get your CAC scan, oh yeah. It's not all of the information, but it's a good screening test and I'm sure in retrospect you would have loved to have that scan prior to you having the heart attack. Absolutely you would have known that you had this brewing problem, so exactly.
Speaker 3:You're so right Very underutilized test. You're so right about that. And to finish, the answer to your question is that with all of the other markers I was then I knew that I was then out of danger with a high HDL, low triglycerides. You know that ratio got way down. My insulins, I don't know one or two or something like that. So you know, all the metabolic markers proved that I'm it is a much healthier state and, and even physically too, I was able to do more that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:So where are you today? Talk about how you feel, what you're doing. Four years ago, your late well emergency room.
Speaker 3:Today your yeah, after having gone through the bowels of the medical system and find out what works and what doesn't work, and doing all the study and research.
Speaker 3:Well, just like in the beginning chapters, I tell you, know, I make people aware that, look, you are addicted to certain foods right now and the best thing you can do is to find delicious substitutes, like I did, for all those addictive foods that you can't do without. You got to make your list of them. Okay, I can't live without that. I can't live without that, and you got to know what is it that and is there a healthier version of it? Is there instead of the tortillas? Oh, I can buy egg things that are made from cauliflower and eggs and I can wrap things up that you know. You start to find these different things through, whether it's a Google search or YouTube is a treasure trove of low carb, healthy recipes and so forth that don't have sugar, and and I used to love my granola, and then I you know there's a way to make granola that doesn't have any grains, no sugar and all that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:So, okay, you got to find your healthy substitutes by only your favorite substitute for. Well, you, what was your? What? What was the, the, the most addictive bad habit you had in terms of food that you have found a tasty substitute for?
Speaker 3:Well, there are many One of the ones where I would love the tortilla and wrap it up, wrap things up in that and eat that, but that had the wheat and the grains and so forth, and so I that one that I just told you. Now, of course, what happens is and I, you know, tell the readers. Look, I was addicted to everything. Like you, I couldn't eat just half the bag of chips, I had to eat the whole bag, and so things like that. But as you go through this, over the weeks and months, your palate and your taste buds change and you no longer want those harmful objects and harmful foods. And I know it's hard to believe now, but you start feeling so good that becomes your addiction, that, wow, I feel this great. Now I just don't have any brain frog from the grains and the.
Speaker 3:You know the way my blood sugar and my insulin was going up. It's kind of like if you don't get tests, it's kind of like you're going through life without a steering wheel and a speedometer. You don't know what you're about to run into because they're all silent diseases, right? Or how fast you're going or what your blood sugar is doing. So you have to like Ford Brewer calls his chapter 22, don't guess test, because they're all silent diseases like I went through. I had no symptoms and I was one of those I don't want to say rare, but I think there's like 2% of the population that can be on the lean side, like you and I, jack, and still have be a flaming type 2 diabetic.
Speaker 3:That was Peter Atia. Dr Peter Atia fell into that. He was a long distance swimmer, triathlon, all of that right but he drank sugary carbohydrate laden Gatorade like he owned stock in the company or something right and he was type 2 diabetic and so now he's a keto. I think he's still keto. I don't know where he is right now but, I don't know where he is.
Speaker 2:He's gone back and forth on the keto. I would certainly put him in the metabolic health low.
Speaker 3:There you go. However we want to describe people, I'm more in the not quite carnivore. There's a term that Ken Berry came up with. He calls it ketovore. I don't know if that's his, but I'm more of a ketovore.
Speaker 2:Very good. Well, yeah, I mean once again, the book is really a tour de force. I want people to understand it is a very well referenced, goes deep into the science on a lot of these topics and I think anyone struggling with these issues will really benefit from reading this and understanding the science behind the unholy trinity, as you termed it. Where can people find more? Get the book? All of that good stuff?
Speaker 3:Well, what I tell people, what seems to convince people or get them interested in the book. More is to go to Daniel Trevorcom. Watch my seven minute video Below that you'll see the wonderful endorsements that I have from people like you and Nina. I even have Lou Ignaro, who is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of nitric oxide, which, as you know, is so important to the arteries and vascular system, and other amazing scientists and doctors and so forth. And I also offer, if they want, a free preview of the book and what that is, if they just write in their first name and their email address, I send them the first 48 pages of the book and that is everything table of contents, introduction, up to the end of chapter one, and that way they know right away hey look, I'm interested in this.
Speaker 3:And then there's a what would you call it? A buy now, amazon bucket button. You can just click there and it just launched a couple of weeks ago and I'm happy that it debuted at number one for heart disease, number one for type 2 diabetes and number one on low carb diets. Of course, there's so many books, that fluctuates day to day. I don't know where it is today, but it's off to a good start and I want to do as many of these podcasts and I request people, if they like it, please go there and buy the book and write me a review. All right, daniel Trevorcom.
Speaker 1:Daniel Trevorcom. The book is the Unholy Trinity. I love it that a real person is doing this kind of research. I love it that we've got more folks in the citizen scientist category who are binding and sharing the truth. Thank you, Phil. This has been a good one. Daniel, appreciate you being with us. This has been the Stay Off my Operating Table podcast. We'll provide all these links in the show notes and we look forward to seeing you next time.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Dr Ravidian. Thanks, Jack.