#1 Best Way To Prevent A Stroke.

If you're like most people, a stroke is one of the scariest things that you can imagine. And the risk only grows for every year that you're alive. But here's what almost nobody explains. There isn't just one kind of stroke. There are four different kinds and at least three completely different mechanisms behind them. And you can't prevent them if you don't know how it works. Hello Health Champions. Let's talk about what a stroke really is and how to prevent it. The four types of strokes are thrombotic, embolic, dissecting, and hemorrhagic. And thrombotic is the most common one and it is where we have the blood vessel and then there is existing plaques, atherosclerosis. And because of that plaque, because of the turbulence and the tendency that you have a little bit for clotting when you have plaques, then we have a thrombosis, a clot, a buildup start building. And eventually if that gets big enough, now it can start occluding that lumen and reduce the blood flow. And ultimately it could get to the point where it closes up. The embolic works the same way but it's different in that we have a clot form somewhere else. So the thrombosis, that happens in the location, in the brain vessel. But with an embolic, we have a clot form elsewhere in the body and then it travels. And then once it gets to a place that is a little bit more constricted, then that clot gets stuck and it occludes. It stops all the blood flow from that point on. So then that portion of the brain doesn't get any oxygen. And now the third type is dissecting. And now what really is going on here with these walls is that they have three layers. And we're just going to draw out the layers here on one side to show you. And now these three layers are keeping up the integrity of the wall. But if we have the innermost layer, if that gets damaged and eventually the blood breaks through the innermost layer called the intima, now blood goes into the wrong place and it starts splitting that blood vessel and it creates a swelling where the blood is on the wrong side. So it can't flow because it's getting pushed into the wrong place. And hemorrhagic is similar but it is more severe. So in this case, we have the wall with the three layers. It gets completely open up and broken through. So now we have not just the intima but all of these layers get compromised. And this is the only one where we have an actual bleed. And now the blood ends up outside of the blood vessel entirely. And we get what's called a hematoma where it starts filling up. And we'll talk about all these in detail so you understand what they're all about. So thrombotic is the most common with about 45% of all strokes. The embolic where it travels and gets stuck is about 40. And with dissecting it's only 2% and hemorrhagic is 13. But then these are different in how serious they are, how fatal they are. So the thrombotic kills about 8% of people in that stroke. The embolic is about 27%. The dissecting is about 2%. And the hemorrhagic is a full 38%. So that's the most serious one and we'll talk about why this is. Now the first three are grouped together and called ischemic. And that has to do with lack of blood. When something blocks off the blood flow then we can't supply oxygen to the part beyond that point, to the part of the brain beyond that point. So for thrombotic, embolic, and dissecting that's the mechanism. For hemorrhagic it's different because now it's not choking off the blood supply, it's bleeding and the blood's going to the wrong place and putting pressure indirectly. So that's the one that has the true bleed and where it forms a hematoma which is a collection of blood that starts pressing on the wrong thing. Now let's go over these one by one so you really get it. The thrombotic, the clot forms in one place and this happens in a relatively large blood vessel. Now the lumen, that's the inside, that's the space inside the blood vessel, it narrows over a period of years. This happens very gradually and this is where we have the TIAs, the transient ischemic attacks. So as this thrombosis starts forming and where it's narrowing the opening, now we can get these warnings, these mini strokes. So TIA, the transient means that it resolves itself. So let's say that 80 or 90 percent of that lumen is occluded and then you have a little bit of stress and it tightens up a little bit and occludes just a little bit more. Now you're going to have stroke-like symptoms and that's what they call a TIA. But either there was just a tiny little bit of something stuck that resolves, that dissolves, or it was just like a vasospasm and once it relaxes you recover. So the thing with TIAs is that you're not depriving the brain cells of oxygen long enough to actually kill cells and that's the transient part. It's temporary because it's not long enough to kill anything so there's a full recovery of the brain tissue. But we need to understand what's actually going on with the process that this is not just because you recovered doesn't mean that it's over. Another form of thrombosis happens in the small vessels deep inside the brain structures and that's called lacuna. And this happens like in the thalamus, in the basal ganglia, and the pons. And these are central deep structures. The thalamus, for example, it's about the size of a walnut sitting between the spinal cord and the brain. And the thing about these structures is that all the information in the body travels through these. So even a small lesion, even a small stroke where you kill off some brain cells, they can have a huge impact. And it could be that you get slurred speech, it could be that you lose sensory sensation, you lose feeling, or you could lose motor function. But then the brain rewires and you could recover. However, a lot of these are silent also. It could be so small that you kill off some brain cells but you don't really notice. And this is more common than people realize because when they do MRIs on people with high blood pressure, then we have 52 to 77 percent of people with high blood pressure are going to have some of these lacunar infarcts. They can see the results where the tissue is damaged. And these lacunar infarcts, they over time, they contribute to the aging process. And a lot of the things that we associate with aging, such as vascular dementia, a deterioration of gait, and a deterioration of cognitive function. Anabolic, like we said, means that the clot forms someplace else, then it breaks loose, it travels, and then it gets stuck once the blood vessel gets a little bit more narrow. Now most of these blood clots are going to form in the heart in the left atrium. And during an episode of atrial fibrillation, then the blood is going to get stagnant and you're going to form some clots. And this un-ejected blood is what forms clots. So during atrial fibrillation, there is a disturbance. The heart isn't working. The electrical circuitry kind of broke down. And it's beating so fast that it's just kind of sitting there vibrating, and it doesn't have the time to actually squeeze and eject the blood. It's just a partial contraction. And if it doesn't squeeze the blood out, now it gets stagnant and un-ejected. And once it sits there and just kind of vibrates, that's where the clots tend to form. Another less common version is artery to artery. So you could have a clot or a plaque in one artery, and then a fragment of that clot breaks loose, and then it starts to travel that way. And these two, the afib, the heart clot, is the most common. The less common is artery to artery. But these still account for the vast majority of embolic strokes. And unlike the thrombotic, which gives you some warning through the transient ischemic attack, which you could have a number of those. You could have a half a dozen of those transient before the real stroke happens. But with embolic, there is no warning. It's instantaneous. Once it gets stuck, that's the first warning you get. And the dissecting, like we said, is when there's a tear in the intimal wall, in the innermost layer of the blood vessel. And this is going to happen in the largest arteries that we have serving the brain, which is the carotid artery on the front and the vertebral artery kind of following and going through some of the spinal segments. And then the blood ends up in the wrong place. It pools up in what they call a false lumen, a false opening because there's no outlet. It just goes in between the layers. And now, like we said, it's going to block the flow and deprive the brain of oxygen in that area. And the dissecting is also the most misunderstood of all the strokes because a lot of people think that the moment that it happens, then whatever you did then is what caused it. But that's not how it works. There is often triggers that creates the symptom, but the trigger is not the cause. And triggers are very commonly things like sneezing. When you move the head quickly or you change the pressure in the head and neck, it could be coughing or it could be turning the head. Something as simple as driving in traffic and just turning your head to look over your shoulder, that twisting could be the trigger, not the cause. And another common thing is if you go to the hairdresser and they're going to wash your hair and you tilt your head all the way back and stretch it out that way. So again, please listen and hear that these are triggers. They're not what caused it. They're triggering a pre-existing condition that has been building up for years or decades. Now, chiropractors have been in the spotlight a lot for this. So I want to take a minute just to make sure that you understand how it really works. It's gone so far that in the emergency room, if someone shows up with a stroke, the protocol is to ask, have you seen a chiropractor recently? And if they say yes, then the conclusion is, oh my God, then that's it. The chiropractor caused that stroke. The chiropractor turned the head and tore the inside of that blood vessel. And it's been shown over and over and over that that's not even possible, but the protocol is still there and chiropractors are still getting blamed for something that they didn't do. But here we have to understand the difference between a temporal relationship and a causal relationship. Temporal means that there's an association in time. It happened around the same time, within a few hours or a couple of days or a week, but it has nothing to do with causation, that one thing led to another. They are unrelated events that happen around the same time. And why are they unrelated? Because this dissection, the dissecting artery took years or decades to develop. It's a process. Now why do chiropractors tend to get the finger pointed at them? Because one of the classic symptoms of this artery starting to break is neck pain and headaches. So a person gets neck pain and headache, that means the dissection has already started. And then they go to the chiropractor and the chiropractor adjusts them. And if they, a week later, get the stroke, then they tie that together. But it's a temporal relationship, not causal. But because medical records tend to be kept on what providers they visited and what symptoms they've had, rather than if they sneezed or coughed or turned their head or went to the hairdresser, then that's where the association is made. But like I said, it's not even possible for a chiropractor to do that. You cannot create that type of force where you damage an artery. And one way we know this is that chiropractors over 100 years have delivered billions of adjustments, and there's not one single time been shown to have a causal relationship. Quite the contrary. And then the hemorrhagic, like I said, it's different from the others, different from ischemic, because the mechanism of damage is not primarily that it blocks off the delivery of oxygen. It is an actual bleed where the blood gets out of the artery. And this happens in tiny brain arterioles. It happens in tiny blood vessels, not the big ones that we talked about recently. And when all three layers of the blood vessel fail, now we have a bleed that gets outside the blood vessel, but we're still inside the cranium, inside this bony enclosure. And the cranium is not flexible, so it can't accommodate for this increasing volume. And the hematoma, this collection of blood that starts forming, it starts putting pressure, because it pulls up between the brain and the cranium and the bone, and now it's going to start putting pressure on delicate structures. Now in the acute phase, which is immediately within minutes or within the first hour or so, now this hematoma, the pressure from it starts suffocating other brain tissue, the structures around it. But then it can be equally damaging in the second phase, which is hours to days, even weeks, when the contents of this blood collection, this hematoma, it starts breaking down. And it contains a lot of iron, which basically can rust your tissue. So we get toxic byproducts from this hematoma. And we're not talking just a tiny little bit, we're talking about high concentrations in a localized area, creating inflammation and oxidative stress to the point where we can actually kill brain cells and create cell death. But now we're getting to the critical stuff. Now that you know how they work, then what is the So we have the first cause is metabolic or vascular root cause. And this is the thrombotic and the embolic. So whether it forms locally on an existing plaque or next to an existing plaque, or whether it's a clot that dislodges and travels, those are metabolic and vascular root causes. The second root cause is mechanical structural root cause, and that's the dissecting. And then the pressure driven root cause is the hemorrhagic. So the metabolic and vascular, the root cause, the primary driver is insulin resistance, because that's the primary driver of cardiovascular disease and plaquing and clotting. But we also need to understand that inflammation and oxidative stress is what is the precursor to these plaques. So these are very, very important, and virtually every degenerative disease have a component, big component of inflammation and oxidative stress involved. And even though insulin resistance is typically the primary driver, there is significant overlap here to dysbiosis and toxins in the diet and environment, and to food sensitivities, because these also, to a large degree, drive inflammation and oxidative stress. The mechanical structural is the dissecting stroke, and here is where it's due to a weakened intimal layer. So something in the body has created a weaker layer, and part of that is a genetic predisposition. We have a lower baseline, that's just you were dealt some unfortunate cards, just like some people have a higher tendency for insulin resistance or being tall or short. We are different, and some people just have a little bit weaker structure, a little bit weaker tissue to begin with. And a lot of the things we talk about in this video are very general, but one rather specific is high homocysteine levels. Roughly half the world's population has some alteration, some variant of a gene called MTHFR. And when you have this gene, you have a tendency to build up homocysteine levels, which are inflammatory, but specifically they impair collagen cross-linking. So your arteries have a high component of collagen and elastin in them, and high homocysteine levels specifically can damage that. And then again, inflammation and oxidative stress, we know they come up virtually everywhere in every context, and they're involved here as well because they degrade both collagen and elastin. The pressure driven is hemorrhagic, and think of that as chronic pressure or friction, basically wear and tear. We're abusing the tissue over time. And this friction creates stress on tiny blood vessels called arterioles, and these are sort of at the end of the vascular tree. They're about 100 to 300 micrometers or microns in diameter. And if we have high blood pressure, especially chronic, not just now and then, but chronic, and we have years of stress, then that can eventually tear the layers, tear the blood vessel, and we get that bleed. So the solution here is to control or reduce insulin resistance. It is to control or reduce inflammation and oxidative stress. It is to reduce toxicity. It is to reduce stress. And these things come up over and over and over because there is a lot of commonality to all our modern degenerative disease. We want to control blood pressure, and we want to control our homocysteine levels. So especially if we have the MTHFR variant, then we want to consider supplementation. And how do we do that specifically? It's nothing magical. We eat less carbohydrates. You don't have to beat keto, but you can't eat 80% of your diet as processed food. So low carb, high fat, which means meat and lots of vegetables and nuts and healthy fats and food like your ancestor ate, basically. You reduce toxic load by eating as much as you can organic to rinse your vegetables and to clean up your environment, to filter your water, to use a minimum of toxic cleaning products and personal care products, hygiene products, and makeup. You do it by reducing stress. And again, stress is not what's out there in the world. Stress is a stress response. It's how you are conditioned to react to it, to respond to it. And of course, you're not aware of that. So reducing stress means that you do something proactively like breathing exercises, reading books that make you feel good, doing meditation. You change the momentum and the conditioning and the wiring of your nervous system. And then you make sure that you get some movement, some exercise, because not only does that help somewhat with insulin resistance, but the main thing it does is to stimulate your brain and to stimulate every organ in your body. You improve circulation, you improve every aspect of physiology. There is no organ that doesn't function better with movement. Now, if you watch some of my videos here, you're going to recognize a lot of this. And some people are going to say, well, you know, I've heard this before. It's the same steps. It's the same solutions. It's the same mechanisms or similar. So I don't need to watch any more videos because they're all the same. It's all the same stuff. But then other people are going to have the same recognition, but they're going to say, wow, this is incredible. I need to watch more videos because I love to see how everything is connected. It helps me understand the body. So it's not that insulin resistance and blood pressure and arthritis are different things. They're the same thing. And the more I get this reinforced and the more I get regularly reminded, it helps me reinforce why I need to stay on track. And I'll give you a little hint by the color I use to frame these statements, which one I think is the correct one. Because the green obviously is the more we understand, the more we trust the body, the more we're willing to take the steps and to stick with it. And we all need that reinforcement and those reminders, me included, because right action, doing the right things, it's not about knowing what to do. Every person on the planet has heard by now that it's not great to eat as much sugar and as much processed foods as we do. And yet nothing really changes much. Sales don't really decline on those items. You're only going to take the right steps and act on it consistently if you know why it matters. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.