S1E03 - Success Stories 

SUMMARY KEYWORDS 

metabolic, people, health, metabolically, unhealthy, talk, showed, patients, arteries, surgery, heart, healthy, diabetic, 30s, high blood pressure, blockages, blood, early 40s, operating, obese 

SPEAKERS 

Jack Heald, Dr. Philip Ovadia 

Jack Heald  00:00 

Welcome back to the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast with Dr. Philip Ovadia. I'm your host, Jack Heald. And today we're going to talk a little bit more about metabolic health. Last episode, we talked about what it is, today, I want to hear stories about some of your patients, Dr. Ovadia, who have seen the light. And as you did, tell me about some of the success stories that you have seen. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  00:26 

Sure thing. So, once I discovered this, how to be metabolically healthy, and I was able to fix my metabolic health, probably one of my earliest patient experiences, was really with a friend of mine, a co worker. And this was a nurse anesthetist that I worked with early in my career. And he and I ended up kind of we, he went to one other hospital, I went to a different hospital. And we always kind of stayed in touch, we had some common interests then. And so we stayed in touch over the years. And he saw this journey that I was taking literally saw the pictures that I would post on social media, and reached out to me one day and said, what are you doing, you are looking  great. And this is now probably 10 years after we first met, and he said, You look younger than the day we first met. So I told them, and I kind of launched my first effort at coaching someone else through this. And over the next six months, he was in his early 50s at the time, and over the next six months doing similar things to what I had done, he was able to drop about 50 pounds, he was able to greatly improve his blood markers, those five, three blood markers. And those two other measurements that we talked about, for metabolic health on a previous episode, he improved all of them. And he now had the energy to keep up with his son. He had a teenage son who plays hockey, and was very active, and he could now keep up with them. Yeah, that is some serious energy. And he I remember him excitingly, excitedly texting me one day, with a picture of him in his uniform, he had previously served in the military. And he showed me with this picture that he could fit into his uniform from basic training that he had not been able to fit into since his early 20s. So over essentially 30 years, he was able to get back into those, those clothes. So that that's a great example of what can be accomplished. When we fix our metabolic health. 

Jack Heald  03:05 

When I was in my early 20s, I had an astonishing energy. When I look at photos of myself, I feel like I was really, really thin, 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  03:15 

as we, again have talked about previously, it's key to understand that being thin doesn't necessarily mean that you're metabolically healthy. So I, it is not uncommon that I end up in my career as a heart surgeon operating on people who are thin, it is very uncommon that I end up operating on people who are metabolically healthy. And the unfortunate problem we have in health care, is that we don't realize that most people think and most people are told by their physicians, that if you're not overweight, you don't have anything to worry about, you're generally going to, you're generally healthy. And oh yeah, maybe you have a little bit of high blood pressure, but nothing to worry about, we're just going to give you a pill for that. And then fast forward 20 years, and those people are ending up on my operating room table. And so that's why I have come to realize how important metabolic health is and how important it is that we assess metabolic health well, 

Jack Heald  04:28 

so in the five years since you've started this, this different direction in your life and your, your professional practice. Have there been patients you actually operated on who you were later able to, to help get themselves back together with metabolically? 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  04:46 

Yes, there have been many. Recently I can relay a story of a lady who is in her late 60s, and she ended up In the hospital with a heart attack that blockages in the arteries. And I did a common surgery, it's called coronary artery bypass. So I basically rerouted the blood in an on her heart to get better blood flow goes into all the areas of the heart. And she did well with the surgery and recovered well from the surgery, and came back to see me in the office A few weeks later. And it asked me a pretty common question, why did this happen? He said, I haven't, I've been generally healthy. I was taking my medications that I was prescribed for my high blood pressure and my high cholesterol. And I still ended up needing an operation, but you know, what happened? And what can we do to prevent it. And I had the conversation that I now have with people. And  regrettably, for the first 10 years of my career, I didn't have these conversations, because I really didn't know this information. But I went through her blood work with her, I showed her that she was pre diabetic, not overtly diabetic, but pre diabetic, and her fasting blood glucose was over 100. So she didn't meet that measurement of metabolic health. And I showed her she was on blood pressure medication, and her HDL cholesterol was low, and her triglycerides are high. And importantly, again, her LDL cholesterol, the bad cholesterol that most doctors focus so much on, that was actually low, she was on medication to lower it, but it even before she started taking that medicine, we went back through your history, and we saw that it wasn't that bad. So I showed her that she had for the five measurements of poor metabolic health right there. And she wasn't obese, and her waist circumference was, okay. So I explained this to her. And I explained to her about focusing on metabolic health, and how to eat in a metabolically healthy way. And I know, that's something we're going to talk about. But generally, I went through that with her. And she was very thankful and took the inflammation to heart. And, came back to see me a few months later, which is actually a little bit unusual. Understand that, as a heart surgeon, I don't typically follow my patients over the long term, but she specifically came back to see me, because she was so excited about her results. And she had gotten, new blood work done, this is now about three months after the surgery. And her numbers were almost perfect. She had reversed or pre diabetes, she, even though she wasn't obese, she had still lost probably about 15 to 20 pounds. And she felt better, and she looked better. And she said, I truly feel better than I have in 20 years. It demonstrates that it's never too late to improve your metabolic health. I know people in their 70s, even into their 80s that have improved their metabolic health and made these changes. And so it's never too late. And certainly I think that story demonstrates how you need to focus on the proper things in order to get the get the outcomes that we want. 

Jack Heald  08:44 

So, you've helped folks in their 50s and 60s, have you ever, ever worked with somebody, say in their 20s or 30s and seeing similar results? 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  08:55 

Yeah, I mean, I now commonly obvious on the, within my telemedicine practice that is focused on metabolic health, I now do get younger and younger people. Again, we, we, in previous episode discuss that 88% of the adults meaning over in that study over 21 years of age 88% are metabolically unhealthy, and while it increases it gets more common, the older you are to be metabolically unhealthy. It is not uncommon that young people are metabolically unhealthy. There was a paper that just came out very recently within the past week, that showed that unfortunately, obesity and childhood continues to rise and it in fact, it rose quicker in the past year with all the COVID stuff, the lock downs and all of that it has gotten to the point that it is increasingly Frequent that children are obese, and that children are getting into pre diabetic, not the typical type one diabetes of childhood, but type two diabetes, and they are metabolically unhealthy. So, I do have a number of clients currently that I work with in their 20s and 30s. 

Jack Heald  10:24 

Wow. So, speculate just a little bit for me, what's the future look like for children who are metabolically unhealthy? 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  10:33 

Well, it looks very bad. And unfortunately, on my, on the heart surgery side of my practice, I have started to operate not infrequently on people in their late 30s and early 40s, that they are having open heart surgery. I commonly see those people in their 30s and 40s, that are diabetic, that have kidney failure that have major medical problems that we always think don't happen until we're 60 or 70, or 80. I can tell many of the other heart surgeons I talk with across the country relay the same information to me that they are increasingly operating on people in their 30s and in their early 40s. 

Jack Heald  11:25 

And this all goes back to metabolic health. 

Dr. Philip Ovadia  11:27 

This all goes back to metabolic health. Now that I know how to properly assess metabolic health, and I do it for all my heart surgery patients now, it is exceedingly rare that patients that are coming to me, specifically for coronary artery bypass for blockages in the arteries of their heart, people coming to me for that type of surgery it is exceedingly rare that they are metabolically healthy. 

Jack Heald  11:59 

So the moral of the story there is if you don't want to end up on Dr. Ovadia’s table or someone like him, keep your metabolic health in order. Well, I appreciate the information Dr. Ovadia. This has been the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast with Dr. Phil Ovadia. Be sure to subscribe so you're notified every time a new episode is released and we will talk to you next time.