You’re Taking Fish Oil WRONG (Do This Instead) | Dr. Gundry’s 5 Best Heart Supplements

Well, as a heart surgeon and a cardiologist, everybody always wants to know what are the best supplements for heart health. Let me give you a fun example. So years ago, a friend and TV producer would every now and then come to see me because he is of generous proportions. He's obese and he's insulin resistant and he has metabolic syndrome and he knows it and he's a friend, but he doesn't follow what I ask him to do. And every time I saw him, I said, man, this guy has a heart attack waiting to happen. And years go by and he walks into the office. He says, hey, you're not gonna believe this. I just had to have an angiogram of my heart and I'm going, oh yeah, I believe it. I said, what'd they find? And he said, absolutely nothing. My coronary arteries are smooth as a baby's butt, as he described it. And I'm going, well, that's really interesting. He says, well, yeah, I've been swallowing two cloves of garlic every day for my entire life. And I'll bet you that did it. And I actually had to agree with him. The allicin group family of vegetables like garlic, like onions, like leeks, allicin is actually one of the best compounds to keep the lining of your blood vessels, which is called the glycocalyx. I wrote about it in most recent books. The glycocalyx is this basically sugar compound that coats your blood vessels. And it's the breakdown of the glycocalyx that is actually the cause of cholesterol deposits, the cause of inflammation. And as long as that glycocalyx is intact, not much is gonna happen. And garlic is a great way of keeping the glycocalyx intact. So he taught me something. I should have realized it because I am a big fan of garlic. When you're buying garlic, you want usually fermented garlic, or there's a number of good brands out there. Kaolic is one, just as an example, or high allicin garlic compounds. You can get them that don't smell like garlic, that don't make your breath stink. Add garlic to your regimen. I'm a huge fan of garlic. I take high allicin garlic every day, literally for the last 30 years. Now, speaking of the glycocalyx, there are a number of companies that based on very good research will sell you seaweed-based compounds that have been shown to modify the glycocalyx in a good way. One of them is one of my favorites called fucoidin. Now, fucoidin is a component of brown seaweed. Kelp, by the way, is brown seaweed. There are a number of different brown seaweeds. Bladderwack is another brown seaweed. Fucoidin has some incredible benefits. Number one, it is really good at repairing the wall of your gut. It's really good at making the tight junctions work well. Number two, it's really good at improving the glycocalyx, making it work better. And there's even evidence that it's really good at repairing the blood-brain barrier. So I've been a big fan of fucoidin for many, many years, and it's available as an extract now. Usual dose is about 500 milligrams. There are numerous extracted seaweed extracts that are bioavailable, or guess what? You can eat fermented seaweed. Now, we know that cultures like Japan and Korea are high seaweed eaters. We've also known for a number of years that many of us lack the bacteria that is able to break down the cell wall of seaweed because we're not exposed to those bacteria. People who eat a lot of sushi or raw fish, interestingly enough, get bacteria from the fish that populate their gut microbiome that allows them to eat this seaweed and get the benefits and to digest it. I've always been fascinated, particularly in Italy and the south of France, about how popular raw seafood is, kudos, and how popular raw shrimp is. It's on almost every menu and every place I go to. And so here we are in the Mediterranean eating raw sushi, if you will, sashimi, without realizing that maybe the benefit wasn't so much the seafood itself, but that we were actually swallowing the bacteria that allow you to digest seaweed and get its benefits. So that's another great way of getting a heart-healthy supplement into you. Now, two other of my favorite are grape seed extract and French maritime tree bark, which was patented years ago as pycnogenol. It was determined that tree bark from trees growing on the coast of France had some very interesting polyphenols that were remarkable in reducing the stickiness of blood vessels. Now, years ago, I was the consultant to the company that developed the blood test to measure how sticky or smooth the lining of your blood vessels were, the glycocalyx. And this test, you can easily obtain from your physician. It's either called the PLAC test, P-L-A-C, or the L-P-P-L-A-2 test. It's the same test. Early in my career, I wrote a number of papers where I could measure the stickiness in people's blood vessels, and many people had it, and I'd put them on grape seed extract and pycnogenol, which way back then, both used to be available at Trader Joe's and Costco, and they were really quite reasonable. And lo and behold, the combination of grape seed extract, French maritime tree bark, pycnogenol, and fish oil across the board made their sticky vessels slippery. And I even wrote a fascinating paper that many of my patients, after we made their blood vessels slippery, stopped taking the grape seed extract and pycnogenol because they were fine. And lo and behold, because we draw blood every three months, once they stopped these two supplements, their blood vessels got sticky again. What did we do? We put them back on grape seed extract and French maritime tree bark, and lo and behold, their sticky blood vessels got slippery. And I've published this data. So these are two useful, quite reasonably-priced supplements that are very good at making the blood vessels slippery, and that's what you want. I mentioned that these studies, we also combined fish oil. And fish oil is useful for several reasons. Number one, fish oil is one of the few fats, oils, that actually improve repair of the wall of the gut. Fish oil is one of the few fats that lowers the amount of LPSs getting into your bloodstream. And that's a good thing. But fish oil really needs to be activated. And the omega-3 fats in fish oil, which is what you're looking for, do not have any anti-inflammatory effects by themselves, but they have to be activated by a small amount of salicylic acid. Now you go, salicylic acid, I think I've heard that word before. Believe it or not, aspirin is salicylic acid. Now, fun fact, salicylic acid is present in seaweed. And so when salicylic acid interacts with fish oil, it's turned into compounds that are called resolvins. And they were called resolvins because they resolve inflammation. And you may see studies that show giving fish oil to people has no effect on inflammation. And that's true. But giving people fish oil with a tiny amount of salicylic acid, what's a tiny amount? Well, an enteric-coated 81 milligram aspirin a couple times a week is all the salicylic acid you need to turn your fish oil into the active compound, resolvin. When that's done, lo and behold, fish oil has an amazing anti-inflammatory effect. And what's so interesting is, guess what? Way back when, people were getting their fish oil by eating fish, and they were also getting their salicylic acid by having some seaweed with it. It's amazing how all of these practices come together to show why people who do certain odd habits do so well in the long run. So those are my five favorite tricks for heart health.