Combat Heart Disease, Inflammation With Olive Oil, Vitamin D, Other Polyphenols | CLIP | Vital Signs

over 40 million Americans take statins to lower cholesterol that can form plaques in the arteries which in turn can lead to heart disease and stroke but what if there's a key piece missing from this equation a bodily system in fact that can be leveraged to bring a more natural solution to heart disease Dr Gerald LOL was among the surgeons to perform America's first heart transplants this experience fueled his discovery of the vital role of the lymphatic system in human health working in connection with our nerves veins and arteries is our lymphatic system what role does it play in preventing not just heart disease but chronic disease in general and how can we leverage it to optimize our Health and Longevity welcome to Vital Signs where we learn how to get healthier from all angles from the biochemical and nutritional to the things we do that nourish our minds and our souls I'm Brandon Fallon Dr LOL is a professor of surgery at Temple University and Thomas Jefferson Medical College Dr LOL it's an honor to have you join us on vital science today well it's a pleasure to be here and thank you for inviting me there's so much controversy that continues around the cholesterol the lowering of cholesterol um using drugs like Statin in the interest of preventing heart disease preventing stroke and I know you have a unique perspective on this based on your your research based on your own experience and you're particularly qualified to talk about this being one of the first doctors in America to perform open heart transplant surgery we did the first five heart transplants and we really didn't know much about it we converted an operating room into a intensive care room and we stayed with him 247 uh and was more just learning than it was uh knowing what to do with um with the patients as far as the immunology and things like that so they did well for about a year or two and then all of them died from what they call called Galloping atherosclerosis and what it meant is they we put these young hearts in these patients with good blood vessels and after a year or two depending on the patients they developed this this atherosclerosis of the vessels that looked like 90y old vessels and it was a mystery why the heck this happened after my tour in in Houston I came up to Philadelphia and was cheat of cardiac surgery at Temple University and we worked on cholesterol and how the lymphatics were clearing it on this was 1969 and uh so I did some surgery on six reesus monkeys and we liated we marked the lymphatics with Dy and then liated them and within the short period of time 6 to eight weeks they developed early atherosclerosis so so so basic basically just if I understand doctor you kind of cut the or stopped the lymphatic flow in the monkeys yes we identified the the lymphatics of the heart of the monkey and liated them we tied them off and then gave them a high cholesterol meal and we were able to see deposition of the fats into the arterial wall so that was uh one the first step which showed us there was something with lymphatic like ation that would promate the atherosclerosis and so I wondered well if we can do that why wouldn't chronic narrowing and spasm of them and sclerosis of them caused chronic hardening of the arteries atherosclerosis so uh and the other observation we noticed that there were these little white streaks in the coronary artery patients in the heart muscle themselves is little white STS but they weren't there in the patient with normal Carter so we biopsy those streaks and sure enough they were sclerotic or scarred up lymphatic vessels that were being blocked through chronic inflammation and I understand the lymphatic system it plays a role in clearing these substances in the body that can cause inflammation what is the lymphatic system and how does it work yeah well the lymphatics uh you know we don't learn much about the lymphatics in medical school or training the no menes lymphatics and yet they follow at the course of the vessels and follow along the Venus system and there's actually more LIF than there is blood fluid in the body and every time we have a circulatory Excursion Around our body we lose about 10 or 15% of our clear fluid that's in the blood this fluid seeps interstitial area of the body and it has to be cleared it doesn't go back into the capillary or the vein it goes into the lymphatics as does large proteins and the fat and and lymphatic cells dendritic cells and only Auto the immune cells that we have circulating in our body so all this gets cleared back through the lymphatics back into the Venus side and uh this is is little recognized and not thought of because lymphatic vessels have their own um intelligence as it were they can they can have spasm they have muscles in the wall of the vessel they have her stalsis so they can contract if nervous tissue they have autonomic nervous tissue they can send messages to the brain to the liver all throughout the body and these messages they're not a neural they have to go through the lymphatic system to get circulated to the liver kidneys brain and elsewhere and in terms of cholesterol they they play a role in in moving cholesterol away from the heart well that's what we found and it's interesting see you you have to understand that the level of cholesterol in my belief is not related to the aoma or the disease in the wall what it's related to is the amount of cholesterol that stays in that tissue and it is not taken care of quickly if it is it becomes oxidized and that's when it becomes a uh pro-inflammatory toxin now if you get it's like the fire eater in the in the um circus you see this chap take this flaming uh blade and stick it down his throat and and take it out and he's not he's not burned and how that works is it don't let the flame stay in contact with the tissue issue for a long period of time it's the same thing with the oxidized uh LDL that if it's uh there for a long period of time you're going to get a inflammatory reaction and if it continues it's going to be a chronic inflammatory reaction so this is the reason why we preserve this and the pharmaceutical companies came up with medication that reduceed the level of the LDL and cholesterol levels re real low and thinking that oh well if you give a small burden you won't have the inflammatory reaction but if the cholesterol stays in the tissue a long time you're going to get an inflammatory reaction would you say the lymphatic system is is the principle way that this oxidized I guess mainly aldl cholesterol is is taken away from that area yeah absolutely the lymphatics clear that area and what what we postulate and what's been looked at and probably it is the accurate thing is that we talk about good cholesterol and bad cholesterol the good cholesterol is the HDL but they're both good because LDL does wonderful things for our body it makes hormones it builds cell membranes it does many many things in our body and um it's just in the wrong place at the wrong time and the uh HDL is a very small it's much smaller molecule and what that does is it embies it takes in the cholesterol and carries it now the standard thought is that it the HDL carries it out through the capillar again but that doesn't work that way what we believe in what's been shown by research in many institutions like Mount Si and Washington University is that the HDL takes the cholesterol and carries it through the arterial wall which 30 years ago would you wouldn't think possible because of the internal elastic membrane the wall of the the artery blocking the H shell coming through but it comes through to the outside of the wall and picked up by the lymphatics there and carried through the lymphatic system if it's working if it's got a good fluid flow if it's not in spasm all these things are are affected by chronic inflammation you got to have to keep the lymphatics healthy to obviate get as quickly as you can the cholesterol away from the tissue and keep those lymphatic channels open and well hydrated with fluid and not an inflammatory messages and signals from the rest of the body so that these substances get circulated and out into the um Venus system