Beyond Cholesterol: Rethinking Heart Health - Dr. Stephen Hussey

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Jack Heald: I am joined today on the Predictive Health Clinic by Dr. Stephen Hussey. I interviewed Stephen a couple of years ago with Dr. Phil Ovedia's show, Stay Off My Operating Table. And what he had to say there was so intriguing. I knew he'd be a great guest to have back. So Stephen, thanks for joining us.

Dr. Stephen Hussey: I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jack Heald: As you know, this is a very issue-oriented show. So what specific health issue do you want to address today? 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: The one I'm most familiar with, I'd say and one I have had my experiences with is heart disease.

Jack Heald: Heart disease. All right. Tell us, why did you get interested in heart disease?

You know what? Yeah. I'm going to back up. I'm going to back up one step. Go into a little more detail. Heart disease is a great big field with a very nebulous boundaries of definition. Define that a little more detail for us. 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Yeah. When you say heart disease, I guess. When it's spoken about, a lot of people are talking about atherosclerosis, which is plaque forming in arteries and that commonly happens in the heart arteries, but it happens other places too.

But yeah, heart disease in general, the term could mean heart attack it could mean heart failure. It could mean heart arrhythmias, lots of different things or I guess representations of diseases or ailments of the heart. I think what's most commonly talked about again is that plaque forming in the arteries because it's thought that is something that will predispose you to more serious forms of heart disease like heart attack or stroke or things like that.

Jack Heald: All right, so that's, is it that specifically that we're gonna, we're gonna address today? 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Yeah, I mean that's the popular one, that's the one that people like to talk about. It's the one I think is most misunderstood as well.

Jack Heald:  All right what got you interested in this? 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Yeah it's my own personal health journey.

Like most people who would be interested in something like this and have delved into it as deep as I have. You know, I had a lot of, you know, inflammatory like conditions as a child. Lots of chronic disease, everything from asthma to allergies to, I used to break out in hives all over my body. I had irritable bowel syndrome. I know doctors could really tell me, yeah, as a kid, young child, started from the age of probably two and really through middle school it was the worst, I'd say.

And then at age 9, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which the theory is that's autoimmune and that your body has attacked the cells that make insulin. And again, I could, you know, I think there's different things going on, but that's the main theory. And so regardless, I don't make insulin anymore and that makes it harder to control blood sugars. And that's very different than type 2 diabetes where you're making insulin, but you're not responding to it. This is where I'm not making any insulin, and I learned going to doctors as a child that heavily predisposed me to diseases of the vascular system or heart disease atherosclerosis, plaque forming in arteries and damage to small arteries in the body, where it's the eyes or the kidneys or the extremities and things like that.

And I was always pretty curious about that kind of stuff, especially as I started learning. In college and in medical training and those types of things, I always was curious about the heart, and heart disease, and how I could prevent this or at least investigate what causes it. And along the way I learned a lot of the conventional wisdom about it and then along the way I learned a lot of unconventional wisdom about it that really led me to the answers that I was seeking.

Jack Heald: All right, before we get to the answers, let's talk about the big popular misconceptions. What are some of the biggest popular misconceptions about heart disease?

Dr. Stephen Hussey: The biggest one, the one that most people are probably at least somewhat aware of is that the idea is that, you know, a high-fat diet, high animal food diet, red meat, cholesterol is driving heart disease.

And that's a huge misconception. There was never any real sound evidence behind that idea. That idea was driven by some poorly done science in the 1950s mainly by a guy named Ansel Keyes, but also others. And there was again, really no evidence for it. There was a lot of push from industry for that idea.

Push from sugar and grain industry, push from the pharmaceutical industry, which had a drug that could lower cholesterol. So if you convince people that cholesterol causes heart disease, you can sell a lot of drugs you know, by that thinking. 

Jack Heald: Okay, let's back, hold on, let's back up a minute. You said that it was driven by bad science. Starting with Ancel Keys in the fifties. Most people in the small arena of folks who have been hyper-focused on metabolic health have heard that. But if you haven't been inside that particular arena over the last several years, this might be news to you. So I'd appreciate it if you'd take just a few minutes, if you can, and expand on that a little bit. It's, I mean, it is basically gospel in the modern world today that you've got to eat a low-fat diet, avoid red meat, lots of grains and so forth and so on. And you say that, that originated with bad data. Expand on that if you would. 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Not only bad and very low, low-quality science as far as the hierarchy of science goes, but also there was a lot of manipulation of data within that science. You know, the lowest tier of research is called epidemiology. And it's basically, associational research where they're just seeing, basically if two things are happening at the same time, if you can observe them at the same time, right? But you cannot prove that one is causing the other.

So the example I give is and there's tons of these you could give, but if you're standing on the sidewalk and you see a traffic jam in front of you. All the cars are backed up and you also see that it's cloudy. Most people would say you, they know you can't make sense of saying that the clouds caused the traffic jam or the traffic jam caused the clouds. You would have to consistently create clouds or create traffic jams to see if it caused the other. And even then you don't know the mechanism by which one would cause the other. And so most of the studies that are behind this theory that cholesterol causes heart disease were associational studies.

Okay. Oh, you know, people with or countries with higher levels of cholesterol have more heart disease, but that does not mean that one is causing the other or vice versa. And so that's what most of our nutritional research is based on is those types of studies, because it's very expensive to do any other clinical trials or other more rigorous research.

And so all the studies that say red meat is bad or that grains are good or things like that are all based on these types of studies, which are very poor quality and nutrition.

Jack Heald: Which are basically clouds cause traffic jam type of studies.

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Exactly. And there are many flaws in these types of studies. And I can go through those if you'd like as far as specific details of why they're problematic and why they shouldn't be used to make recommendations. But they're supposed, they're really used, supposed to be used to find the associations and then take those associations and test them more rigorously in controlled trials and things and see if they are causing the other.

But that's usually never done, like I said, because it's very expensive to do that. And so those are the types of studies that originally created this theory. And like I said, there was a lot of money behind this from the food industry, from the grain, cereal, sugar industry and from pharmaceutical industries. They wanted this idea that saturated fat was bad, cholesterol caused heart disease because they stood a lot to gain from that. You know, monetarily. And so by the time the studies were done, and they were, this is probably one of the most heavily tested theories.  

Jack Heald: This is where we're going. I'm going to ask what's the truth.

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Yeah. If you look there was probably five or six very big, very expensive studies done where they actually replaced saturated fat in the diet with unsaturated fat, in the form of either certain types of vegetable oils or just plant fats in general. And they all found that the more unsaturated fat that people ate, the more heart disease they had, the more heart attacks they had, the more all-cause mortality from anything they had.

But by the time those studies came out. The theory had already taken off and there was a lot of money behind it. The industry had already taken it up, medicine had already taken it up, and it just kind of took off. And it has taken us until probably the last 20 years for people to kind of catch up and see, okay, this is not working.

And diet is by far not the only thing that creates health or creates disease, but it is a major player. And yeah, and but there was also curious things done one of the main studies called the Minnesota Coronary Survey was done, and the, there's a guy named Christopher Ramson who dug up the data from that study that was done, I think, from 68-73, 1968 to 73, and they didn't get the results they wanted.

They got the result that unsaturated fat, the more unsaturated fat you ate, the more heart disease people had, and so they didn't publish it. They didn't publish it until I think 1986 and so then Christopher Ramsey came back in 2005, I think it was the early 2000s, and he dug up the data and he found that not only did they not publish it they waited to publish it and they published it in a small journal that not many people read, which the authors of this study had to clout to publish in the biggest journals if they wanted to and they didn't.

And they also omitted data he found because he dug up the original data and they omitted data that made it look even worse. And so there was a lot of, you know, nefarious play there. And he found the lead author of the study and interviewed him. He asked him why didn't, why'd you do all this?

He said, cause we didn't get the results we wanted.

Jack Heald: Which is kind of the exact opposite of science. That's not science. Exactly. Science doesn't set out to prove, science sets out to disprove. 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Or just be curious in general.

And find whatever you find and report it, but there is a huge interference with industry and science these days.

The New England, the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years, Marcia Engel, came out and wrote a book about that, about how in her 20 years she says, slowly and reluctantly came to the realization that there was too much influence, too much industry influence in science.

And it was basically the state of lots of medical science and especially nutrition science, what is happening is that it's being used as a marketing tool. And so companies, pharmaceutical companies, or nutrition companies, or food companies, they hire scientists to do studies, design them in a way, a certain way they get the result they want so they can use it for marketing.

And that's unfortunate. And you know, when you read an article it says, the science says this, you can't necessarily trust it anymore. And there's good science out there. There's science that's there for just the discovery of something or find out what's there, like how the world works.

There's good science out there, but unfortunately lots of medical science, lots of nutrition science is not that way. 

Jack Heald: All right, so normally the next question is what is the most likely outcome if people do not take action, but I think we should refine this.

What is the most likely outcome in any individual's life if they do not take action to respond to the truth, that we've been lied to about nutrition for the last 60 years?

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Or health for that individual.

On an individual level, that's what we're facing and that can manifest itself in many ways. It can manifest itself in just chronic inflammatory conditions. Like I suffered from as a child. It could manage itself as heart disease.

It could just manifest itself as, oh, I have headaches every day, or oh, I am tired. I just feel general fatigue. For an individual, that's what it is. For a society, paying attention to these recommendations and a society heeding those recommendations, which there are studies that show that the majority of Americans are listening to guidelines and they're trying to eat that way, so to speak. And we see the results of that.

We are the sickest country and America is the sickest country in the world despite spending trillions more dollars on healthcare than any other country. So clearly there's something wrong with our healthcare system and with nutrition recommendations. And so on a societal level, what does that mean for us?

That creates issues with overwhelming health care especially when it's not well equipped to handle those types of diseases. It's very good at emergency medicine, but it's not very good, doesn't really understand how to combat chronic disease and the methods they use aren't that great.

So that creates a lot of spending there. And it creates a lot of workplace and cost with you know, just being able to work. People miss work all the time from whatever it is, low back pain, fatigue, whatever. They're taking too many days off. Massive productivity and there's lots of issues there as far as, you know, you know, happiness in the workplace and things like that.

But you know, I've heard people say that it's an issue with national security as I some, I can't remember the percentage, I'm not going to say one, but some too large percentage of people who try to get to the military unfit for duty. They're just not well enough to serve or they have some sort of chronic disease like me.

Type 1 diabetic, like I'm fit enough. I could probably serve, but being a type-one diabetic, I cannot. So that kind of stuff. So lots of different societal issues are being created because of that. So yeah. 

Jack Heald: Okay. We fix these problems, society-wide problems. We fix them one person at a time, contrary to some of the idealists. It's one person at a time.

So what specific action do you recommend that individuals take in order to avoid these negative outcomes? 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Yeah. I think that, I mean, there are so many things that people could do for their health, but if I'm talking about one specific thing that will lead to all the rest of those things, it's take an interest in your own health, stop outsourcing it to other people.

You know, because if you think that You can just live your life however you want to or however society tells you it's okay to says it's okay to eat these processed grains. It's o it's okay to drink alcohol. It's okay to do all these things, you know, especially excessively. It's okay to look at blue light past sunset. It's okay to all these things that are contributing to poor metabolic health. And then, you get sick one day, you wake up one day and you're like what's happening? I feel bad. I can't function or whatever. And then you go and you rely on Western medicine. You go to the doctor and you say, what's wrong with me?

And you're going to find most of the time that they don't have the answers or their answers are short-term fixes without fixing the underlying problem, leaving you with more long-term illness, as it gets worse and worse. And so that's outsourcing your health. Instead of doing that, you've got to become interested in yourself.

You've got to, you've got to realize that no one's going to care more about your health than you do. And so when you do that, when you start to have that mindset and you start to investigate, what do I do to live healthier? You're going to find just like I did and many people who are pushed into this space that the answers that the conventional wisdom that we're getting from the powers that be, the authorities are not correct.

And that we feel way better. We get way healthier, and we function way better when we do almost the opposite most times of what they're saying, whether that's dietary, whether that's exercise wise, whether that's light- or whether that, no matter what it is, like most of the time we're getting the wrong information.

And so how can we expect to be healthier if we have the wrong information?

Sometimes I like to pose it as a form of inherited wealth. People with inherited wealth, oftentimes, not all the time, but oftentimes, don't respect that wealth because they never had to do the work to gain that wealth. And so they don't respect it. They're not humble before it. And they tend to abuse it. And it can be the same thing with information or with science. If we, the ultimate form of inherited wealth is a patient sitting in a doctor's office just blindly listening to the doctor's advice. Because not only is that patient completely ignorant of the rigours it took to gain that information, you know, that the doctor took, even if it was wrong information. But the doctor's ignorant to the rigours it took to gain the information over years by scientists you know, before him or her.

And even then, we're just, we're standing on the shoulders of giants. And no one's really respecting the process, or that the process has been interfered with. And so that poor consumer is sitting there and inheriting this wealth of information, this knowledge that could be completely wrong. And without going through the rigours of gaining that information yourself, then you don't gain the wisdom and the knowledge that you gain when you go through that process. Does that make sense? 

Jack Heald: It does, but I'm going to push back on you. It sounds like you're advocating for everybody to become a medical expert?

Dr. Stephen Hussey: I, yeah, I would say yes, I am. 

Jack Heald: So let's narrow it down because that's a big field. We started off by talking about heart disease in particular. So what if people want to avoid or recover from heart disease, what do they do? And obviously starts by taking responsibility for your own health, but then what's the next step after that? 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Yeah. There are lots of steps. And I'm going to start answering that question by addressing your small bit of pushback just a little bit.

In that, because when people, when I say, when you say people need to become medical experts and I say, yes, people are just like they're overwhelmed. They're like I'm not a doctor, right? 

Jack Heald: Absolutely. 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: However, and I'm not saying that there's no place for medicine, but look at the results that it's getting us. Look at the people who are supposed to be the smartest about our health. Look at the results that's getting us. And from a personal experience, people who are familiar with my work know this. I had a heart attack. I had atherosclerosis in my leg from a procedure that they did addressing the heart attack, and I followed almost none of their recommendations.

I did not take any of the medications they recommended, even though there was about six they told me I'd take the rest of my life. And I completely healed my heart within three months, and I reversed the atherosclerosis in my leg without doing any of their recommendations.

Now, I'm not saying that people should just go do that. I'm not saying that's going to be the same for everybody, because it's not. However, there are other ways of thinking about this and they don't hold you know, they don't hold a stranglehold on the information. There's other information out there.

Jack Heald: It sounds like what you're saying is, the next step after taking responsibility for your own well being is to start questioning the conventional understanding. Be active and intentional about questioning the conventional understanding. I'm just going to throw this in here.

I'm interviewing a guy later on this afternoon, who is the principal author of a report in the Journal of Nutrition about a longitudinal study of the health of nurses, a 31-year-long study. And the gist of the study showed that the more compliant these nurses were with the government's recommendations, the higher the percentage of obesity was.

The less compliant, they were in terms of government guidance. The less obese they were. 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Yeah, and that brings up an interesting point for me that I've been making recently. Is that in an emergency situation, life or death situation, the emergency room, a modern-day hospital is the absolute best place for you to be, hands down.

They will save your life, they can do miraculous things. The moment that you're stable and there's no threat of you falling back into being unstable, the hospital is the absolute worst place for healing. And that is because of so many things one because there's lots of artificial light around and there's not enough sunlight or access to nature. Two they're feeding you terrible food, and most people who've been in the hospital know how terrible the food is because it's following those guidelines. They're waking you up multiple times a night letting get that restful sleep. Plus your sleep is disrupted by the artificial light. There are lots of electromagnetic fields everywhere. It's there's not friends and family around oftentimes or as many as we would have. So there are lots of reasons for that.

And I hope that when people, when they're hearing me say that kind of stuff, I'm answering your question of what do we do next, right?

Because you see like the opposite of what creates that unhealing environment, which these nurses are suffering from, plays right into, okay, then what's that healing environment?

It's the one where we're eating, you know, lower carb animal-based diets because that's what humans, that's what made us human and that's kind of the opposite of what we're being told and, you know, the nurses who did the opposite seem to be healthier.

We get natural light, you know, we get sunlight. That's the original light for humans and artificial light. If you just go into the research and type in artificial light and any disease there it contributes. And not just from a standpoint of light, that artificial light hitting your skin, but also how it disrupts your circadian rhythm, which is your you're matching up with the day-night cycle of the sun. There's that.

There's inactivity and you know, how cardiovascular exercise or endurance exercise is touted as being like the best for the heart in reality, muscle mass, gaining muscle mass is probably the best for the heart. Not to say that no aerobic training is what we should do because we should do some, but maintaining muscle mass is a much better idea, As far as longevity and things like that.

So you're getting the idea, you know, this, it just, that point right there illustrates that medicine has no idea how to create health. If a hospital environment is the opposite of what creates healing and helps people recover. And that study you're going to talk about later with that guest is kind of showing that because these nurses spend a lot of time in that environment.

Jack Heald: All right. Question seven, what's the most common compliment you get in your practice? 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Probably that I'm full of useful information. Like people say things, they're not even expecting information, but I can say something about it and I can give them a little tidbit or something. And they're like, oh, really?

And then always oh, you're just full of little things.

Jack Heald: What's the most common complaint you get? 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Probably that I mumble often say things and they'll be like, what? And then I didn't get, it's sorry, I mumble. I got it from my grandfather. 

Jack Heald: Oh my, you know, in my day-to-day life I work with voiceover artists and that's one of the things I have to look for is, Hey, you know, you have to pronounce these words, don't mumble.

But I don't have to worry about that with my guests. Cause that ain't your work. All right. This is my favourite question.

Question nine. If you had, if you could deliver just one message about health and you were limited to no more than eight words, what would that message be? 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Let me see how to phrase it in eight words. I mean, we kind of already discussed it, but you know, take ownership of your own health. 

Jack Heald: Those are really powerful words. 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Or don't outsource this to anybody else. Something like that. 

Jack Heald: Yeah. Don't outsource your own health. Very good. Dr. Stephen Hussey has been my guest here on the Predictive Health Clinic. Thank you for taking a little bit of time with us. Folks who want to follow up with you, you will have provided some contact information. It'll be in the show notes, but why don't you give that real quick, just in case. 

Dr. Stephen Hussey: Yeah, my website is ResourceYourHealth.com I do my health consulting there, my blog is on there and then I'm on social media just at @DrStephenHussey.

Jack Heald: And that's Stephen with a PH, not a V for our listeners who are not looking at this. All right. We appreciate the time. We will talk to you guys next time.

Oh, good Lord.

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