Dr. Alex analyzes (based on medical research) the top 3 plant groups that help protect the cardiovascular system, prevent pla

Hello everybody, I hope you're having a great day wherever you are in the world and I hope you're learning lots from all of these videos. Let me start this one by addressing the obvious elephant in the room. You obviously cannot unclog your arteries by eating a vegetable in the way that you unblock your drain and that isn't obviously what this video is about. What this video is about is how a simple daily habit done consistently for decades can have a real protective effect on your heart and your blood vessels and bring down your risk of major cardiac events like a heart attack. That is absolutely real and it has been shown again and again in the research. Once a plaque, you know a plaque in your coronary artery for example, has built up and hardened inside the artery wall over years, no single food is going to blast it away obviously. But there are vegetables that if you eat them over a long stretch of time regularly really do slow down the furring up of your arteries, inverted commas, and keep the plaques you already have more stable and calm rather than angry and prone to rupturing and also lower your blood pressure in ways that show up in proper controlled trials. And as always I'll put a few links in the description below for you. So that in a nutshell is what we're talking about today. So I'm going to give you my top three vegetables to eat, things that I eat every single week and I'm going to be counting them down in order of effectiveness, from the third most useful all the way down to the best one. And I'm basing that ranking on the underlying physiology and on the studies that have actually measured these hard outcomes, things like heart attacks and deaths rather than just on vibes and wishful thinking. So I'll give you the third one, then the second one, then the best one, and also tell you how I incorporate each of these into my diet whenever I eat them. But first for anybody that's new here who hasn't met me before, my name's Dr Alex, I'm so glad you're here and watching this video. I'm here to help you cut through the noise, to help you live longer and stay healthier along the way. Remember that modern life is built to make you sick very slowly and modern medicine is built to meet you there once you're already sick, once something serious has happened like a heart attack or a stroke. And I said this phrase in other videos and I feel like it's so powerful, ill but not dead, that is the business model of modern medicine. Nobody in that chain gets paid for preventing anything and that is exactly why I started this channel, to help you prevent the diseases that I see in the A&E all the time, to help you prevent those in the first place. Now before we get into the three vegetables, before anybody says this in the comments, obviously no single vegetable is going to do all of this on its own and it would be misleading to suggest that if you just eat a broccoli or a bit of kale then you're going to be protecting yourself from a heart attack. I am not sensationalist in these sorts of videos and I'm not going to claim anything like that. What the research actually shows is that a whole diet built around lots of plants and whole foods, this really does protect your heart and these three veg are simply among the strongest players in that team. Like I said, eating a bit of broccoli on top of an otherwise poor diet full of ultra processed food is not going to save you. It is the whole pattern held for years and years and years that does the work. So with all of that in mind, let's start with our first vegetable. Now one of the most underrated veg for the health of your arteries is called the cruciferous family and that is your broccoli, your cauliflower, your cabbage and kale as well and brussel sprouts. We grow all of these at the moment in our veggie patch and the reason these are so good for you and so protective is that people who eat these regularly on average tend to have less calcium built up and also hardened into their artery walls and the biology behind that is really really well worth understanding. So in studies that followed older people over several years, the ones eating most of these different kinds of veg had less of the calcification which is the stony hardening that builds up in your large arteries as we age which makes them stiff and brittle. This is what the research shows us and this is actually something that we see all the time in medicine. I see this daily on x-rays. When we take an x-ray of somebody's pelvis or their leg for example and remember that an x-ray really only picks up really hard dense things like bones, we can very often see the lining of the arteries showing up as well almost like two furry parallel lines and what we're seeing there is your artery walls that have been calcified and hardened over many years. Now in somebody who's looked after their arteries who have been really healthy and you know they do all the things I talk about all the time, we simply do not see that. We don't see these parallel calcified lines which is the lining of the artery and it is striking just how different you know the two can look side by side. Now a big part of the story here seems to be vitamin K which these vegetables are absolutely packed with. So vitamin K switches on a protein whose job it is to act like a traffic warden for calcium keeping it moving into your bones where you actually want it and out of your artery walls where you very much don't want it because calcium in your artery walls makes them hard and stiff and that's bad. Without enough vitamin K though calcium is far more likely to end up cementing itself into your vessel walls. On top of that cruciferous vegetables carry sulfur-based compounds that lower inflammation and support the health of your endothelium that delicate single cell lining of your blood vessels that controls how they relax and behave and really really helps with your blood pressure. And there's one more thing that these veggies bring to the table which is all about potassium. Now potassium is one of the most useful minerals that we have for keeping your blood pressure down and plenty of us are eating far too little of it. Largely because we're not eating enough veg but for some other reasons as well. Now you might have heard that high potassium can be dangerous and that is very true. You know it can cause cardiac arrest. It is very serious if we see hyperkalemia in the emergency department. Hyperkalemia is just a fancy way of saying high potassium. But this is the most important thing. It is pretty much impossible to push your potassium into that danger zone through eating vegetables alone. That tends to happen with kidney problems or with certain medications or with other illnesses like severe dehydration or kidney injury or sepsis or other things like that. As long as your kidneys are healthy more potassium from food is almost certainly going to be a good thing not a risk. But don't sue me if you've got concerns about what I say then just check with your own doctor who knows your medical history and your medication list as well. Okay now one of the best ways to get these foods into your diet is very very simply to roast a big tray of broccoli and cauliflower and maybe some kale as well with some extra virgin olive oil and I get mine from Citizens of Soil which is a really really good company. Sometimes with a bit of garlic and some lemon juice as well and then we can just add that roasted veg to our breakfast, our lunch and dinner over the next few days. And obviously you can mix it up as well you can add some peppers in there add some potatoes you can make this into an entire meal and have that with some roasted chicken breast or with a bit of steak as well. You know the opportunities are endless. The point is that you could prepare this and have this for your next few meals so it makes it super super easy to get so much goodness inside of you for the next few days. Okay in at number two and this one surprises a few people this is beans and lentils the legumes of the vegetable world. Now you might not think of a tin of beans as a vegetable in the classic sense but the evidence for what they do to your heart is far too strong to leave them off this list. If you look at the pockets of the world where people most reliably reach their 90s and 100s in pretty good health and you go hunting for one of the foods that they tend to share in most of them it comes back to beans and lentils. I say most because it isn't a hard rule. Obviously there are places with very high life expectancy where legumes aren't really a traditional part of the diet at all. Iceland is actually a pretty good example of this their traditional way of eating leans much more heavily on fish and lamb and other whole foods as well. But as a general pattern across the majority of the long-lived populations that we know about legumes turn up again and again and when you look at what they actually do to your heart it becomes obvious why. So in controlled trials regularly eating beans I don't mean baked beans with loads of sugary sauce and just no whole beans like cannellini beans or butter beans or things like chickpeas as well and lentils these lower your LDL cholesterol which is the type that gets built up into the plaques inside your artery walls and it does this by an amount that is clinically pretty meaningful a reduction big enough to matter for your long-term health risk without a single tablet or supplement nearby. The reason for this is really interesting from a physiological point of view so beans are really rich in soluble fiber and I did a video on this a few days ago and this soluble fiber dissolves into a kind of gel in your gut and literally acts like a bit of a sponge binding to cholesterol and to the bile acids that your body makes out of cholesterol and then it carries them out of the body and into your stool. Your liver then has to pull more cholesterol out of your blood to replace what's lost if you're following this and then your blood cholesterol comes down as a result so it's a pretty neat pathway. That same fiber goes on to feed your gut bacteria which produce the anti-inflammatory compounds that I keep coming back to on this channel things like butyrate and because beans release their energy really slowly and steadily they barely barely touch your blood sugar you don't really get a spike when you eat these sorts of foods which keeps your insulin low and it takes a real load of strain off your cardiovascular system and something that I've noticed personally when we eat a meal with a base of beans or chickpeas or lentils or whatever and we just eat as much of it as we like until we feel full on those particular evenings we never really crave anything sweet afterwards and you know I've got a massive sweet tooth you know this if you've watched a few of these videos normally we will have a couple of squares of dark chocolate or a couple of dates afterwards but whenever the meal is built around beans or lentils that just doesn't happen we don't really crave anything sweet once we finish the meal we don't really think about food for the rest of the day now as for how to actually get them into your diet what we did the other night was that we had butter beans and cannellini beans cut down with some onions and some garlic and some chopped leeks chopped really finely add a few spoons of creme fraiche and some chicken stock as well in a big pan you know like a big well big pot or whatever you've got at home and then we roasted some chicken or we pan fried it in another pan and then just served the two in a big bowl it's super super easy and it's super super healthy and that lasted us a couple of nights for our evening meal another easy one is a lentil dal which we have quite often or a lentil bolognese where the lentils bulk out the sauce and it stretches the meat further or replaces the meat entirely if you're veggie and a tin of chickpeas roasted in the oven with a bit of oil and a bit of spice like paprika or a bit of um you know roast garlic and some salt and some pepper as well you know that can be a really really healthy snack that you can pick out as the week goes on in large population studies higher legume intake like this it always tracks with lower rates of heart disease and lower rates of death from any cause which is a pretty strong signal when you think about it so when you weigh up all of that against the cost which for these foods is super super super cheap this has to be one of the most powerful half foods sitting on any supermarket shelf and it's sitting there literally for pennies we can buy a whole bag of lentils that lasts a couple of weeks we can buy that for a pound or we can buy a tin of chickpeas for 49p you can't really get much cheaper than that and so we come to number one on this list today and for me the single best vegetable for your arteries and your health in general is the humble leafy green like your spinach and your rocket or arugula your chard your lettuce and kale as well the reason they take up this top spot ahead of everything else on this list comes down to one remarkable bit of chemistry happening inside your blood vessels right now so your blood vessels make a gas called nitric oxide and nitric oxide is the master signal that tells the muscular walls of your arteries because every artery has a muscular layer so it can contract and dilate that causes your arteries to relax and widen which brings your blood pressure down and keeps your blood flowing very smoothly to every organ now here's something that brings all of this to life for i guess any doctor or healthcare professional watching this you will be able to resonate with what i'm saying in A&E when somebody comes in with angina or a heart attack or severe heart failure where fluid is backing up into the lungs one of the first things that we reach for is a drug called GTN glyceryl trinitrate GTN so we can spray it under the tongue or use it as a tablet that dissolves under the tongue or we can give it as an intravenous injection or an infusion like a continuous infusion straight into the vein and it works by releasing nitric oxide the very same molecule that i'm talking about here which opens up the blood vessels within seconds or minutes and it takes the strain off a laboring heart so we're literally using a man-made version of something that your body already produces the difference is that with food we're not after a sudden burst in an emergency we're after a very gentle steady supply all day long almost like a very slow modified release version of that same effect ticking away in the background 24 hours a day as we age and as our arteries take damage from a poor diet and years of high blood sugar we tend to make less of this gas we make less nitric oxide and that falling supply is a big part of what drives stiffening arteries and creeping blood pressure as we get older this is where leafy greens come into their own because they are absolutely loaded with natural nitrates when you eat them your body along with a load of friendly bacteria living on your tongue converts those nitrates step by step into that very same nitric oxide and we can actually see this working in randomized controlled trials which again are the gold standard because they can point us towards genuine cause and effect giving people nitrate rich leafy greens or things like beetroots as well brought their blood pressure down within hours and it did this by a good few points and it kept it lower with regular daily intake so we saw their blood pressure literally come down after they ate these foods now a few points might not sound like a lot but if you spread that across an entire population a drop that size prevents a serious number of strokes and heart attacks because so much cardiovascular risk comes down to the slow grind of pressure over decades and here's the really really powerful part about all of this when you stack this on top of the other things that i talk about on this channel like walking after your meals or building a bit of muscle or sleeping properly or managing your stress each of them nudging your blood pressure down by a few points they don't just add up they compound so what that means is put together that combination can be more powerful than an actual blood pressure tablet and it comes with none of the side effects and i still find that remarkable that something as simple as a swap on your plate can do something that powerful it can literally reduce your blood pressure and we can document it in a research trial how amazing is that now on top of the nitrates leafy greens also deliver folate and potassium which i mention all the time and magnesium and a huge wave of antioxidants that each support the heart in their own little way and in the large observational studies people who ate a good serving of these leafy greens a day had noticeably lower rates of heart disease than those who ate almost none now the way that i get these into my diets it could not be simpler i keep bags of spinach in the freezer because you can get frozen spinach that compressed into like little cubes and there's nothing added to it it is just a whole leaf just pressed and frozen we keep those in the freezer and throw a handful into most things that we eat like a curry or a bolognese or a stew or a soup where it wilts down to almost nothing you know that if you cook spinach it wilts down into basically nothing and you can barely taste it but the goodness is absolutely there or something else that we do which i've mentioned a times is that we get a bag of chopped spinach put it onto a bacon tray drizzle it with olive oil and some maldon salt and just roast it in the oven for 10 minutes 15 minutes and what comes out is beautifully crispy kale and you can eat the whole bag between you in half an hour before your main meal or just as a snack throughout the day it is really really easy to get these foods into your diet so how would you actually turn all of this into something that you will actually keep doing rather than just a joyless chore that you abandon in a fortnight because it does sound quite overwhelming doesn't it trying to get broccoli and cauliflower and brussel sprouts and kale and beans and lentils and arugula and spinach into your diet every night well the trick i think is to make it almost invisible as i mentioned the frozen spinach basically disappears into anything hot like stews or soups or curries the beans stir through your usual dinners while bulking them out and then stretching out the meat that's usually in them even further and the cruciferous veg gets roasted once and then eaten across two or three days or if you use rocket or arugula you can have that as a side salad with extra virgin olive oil and some balsamic vinegar alongside pretty much anything you eat none of that if you think about it really is extra cooking it's just small tweaks to the meals that you'd usually be making anyway and if you've got a bit of space in your garden and we do have quite a big space behind our caravan we've got about 12 13 acres a row of kale which is super easy to grow is probably the best thing that you can ever grow in your garden you can keep cutting it over the weeks and just eating it every single day it's pretty much fine with the cold in the uk and it keeps giving you leaves every single week throughout the summer just try just try to find a space in your garden that you can sow a few seeds or a few plug plants and see how you get on just let me know in the comments i'm really interested now before i let you go before we finish this video there are just a couple of cautions worth flagging and it will only apply to a very small proportion of you watching this the first one is about a blood thinning tablet called warfarin or if you're across the pond coumadin the vitamin k in these leafy greens could sometimes affect how well warfarin works so if you're taking this then this is worth being aware of and if you're going from eating none of these foods to then suddenly eating it every day then just check with your doctor first and make sure that whoever checks your INR which is how thin your blood is is aware of this as well they may want to check a bit more regularly as you're adding these foods into your diet but let me be really really clear though it is very hard to cause yourself any harm through diet alone the issue isn't eating the greens it is a sudden dramatic change in how many of them you eat if that makes sense so like i said if you're going from almost none to a big daily pile of kale overnight then that swing is what you've got to mention to your doctor so they can keep an eye on your INR levels and your dose of warfarin the best thing to do is to increase very gradually over time rather than a dramatic change after this video the second caution is the bigger one and i'll keep saying it until i'm blue in the face like i've said so many times these vegetables are about prevention not treatment they are not a and they are absolutely not going to substitute for any medication your doctor has put you on they work together yes they can be really powerful in terms of lowering your blood pressure and you know lots of habits stacked together could rival a blood pressure tablet but if somebody has prescribed you a blood pressure tablet or a statin or a beta blocker or anything like that eating these foods works alongside the medication and the idea and hope that is over time you may be able to gradually reduce the dose of those medications as you become healthier the point i'm making is you don't want to just stop all of your medication based on what i say this has to be a working relationship with your doctor so that is my honest take on this topic obviously no vegetable can outrun a bad diet but the right vegetables eaten consistently for years are some of the most powerful medicine you'll ever be prescribed so i really hope you found this video useful if you've got a question then please pop it in the comments below i'm trying my best to reply to as many of you as i can i get hundreds and hundreds of comments a day i am so grateful to be saying that so thank you so so much i do read all of them so even if i can't reply to you just please just pop a comment anyway let me know what you want me to focus on in the future share this video with somebody that you think might find it useful also give it a like and hype as well and i will see you in the next one