496: Dr. Philip Ovadia—Meat is Medicine

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

Episode 496: Dr. Philip Ovadia—Meat is Medicine
Date: July 28, 2026
Guest: Dr. Philip Ovadia
Host: Mike Rowe
Co-host: Chuck

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Episode Overview

This episode features Dr. Philip Ovadia, a board-certified heart surgeon who’s performed over 3,000 open heart surgeries and lost 100 pounds through dietary changes. The conversation explores his journey from being an overweight surgeon adhering to conventional medical wisdom, to a staunch advocate for low-carb, high-meat diets. The episode challenges foundational concepts in modern medicine, namely the vilification of cholesterol, the food pyramid, and the underappreciated dangers of sugar and processed foods. Dr. Ovadia presents his framework for true metabolic health and disease prevention: “Meat is Medicine.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Dr. Ovadia’s Journey and Credibility

• Origin Story ([08:28]–[22:28])

  • Dr. Ovadia realized he was morbidly obese and pre-diabetic while actively practicing as a heart surgeon; none of his colleagues questioned his health.
  • Encountered Gary Taubes’ work (“The Case Against Sugar”)—this ignited his questioning of mainstream medicine’s approach to heart disease.
  • Lost 100 pounds by cutting out sugar and unhealthy carbs, increased meat intake, and questioned why lifestyle and metabolic concepts are ignored in medicine.

• Credibility and Mission ([07:11]–[08:28], [79:24]–[80:35])

  • Multiple guests and family members have benefitted from Ovadia’s approach.
  • Dr. Ovadia’s new book, “Stay Off My Kitchen Table,” is a companion to “Stay Off My Operating Table,” delving deeper into dietary and nutrient density principles.

“If you’re looking for a credible source of information…much less impressed with the initials after your name…than [with] the fact that you’ve actually performed over 3,000 heart surgeries and that you lost 100 pounds yourself.” – Mike Rowe [07:11]

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Challenging the Cholesterol Narrative

• Medical Dogma & Cholesterol ([09:39]–[12:57], [27:17]–[29:40])
  • Doctors and organizations (such as the AHA) propagate the cholesterol-heart disease hypothesis, often without humility or review of outcomes.
  • Heart disease remains America's #1 killer despite “wars” on cholesterol for decades.

“We have been so convinced that cholesterol is the singular cause of heart disease that there’s just no other [explanation]…that’s where we are when it comes to heart disease. That’s why we’re not making progress and it’s getting worse.”
— Dr. Philip Ovadia [11:32]

• The Firemen Analogy ([27:58]–[29:40])
  • Cholesterol isn’t the cause; it’s the body’s attempt to repair vascular damage—akin to blaming firemen for causing fires because they’re always present.

“Cholesterol is actually sent to our blood vessels to repair the damage…if you’re some alien…and you notice every time there’s a house on fire, there are firemen standing next to it, obviously they’re starting the fires. That’s what cholesterol is.”
— Dr. Philip Ovadia [28:22]

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The Real Culprit: Insulin Resistance & Sugar

• Insulin Resistance & Metabolic Health ([30:10]–[37:49], [43:42]–[44:30])
  • Processed carbs and sugars drive chronic insulin elevation; “insulin resistance” is both common and underdiagnosed.
  • Insulin resistance is at the root of not just heart attacks, but nine out of ten of the top causes of death—including cancer and psychiatric disorders.

“Sugar has…killed way more [people] than fentanyl, than smoking…nine out of the ten [top killers] are due to insulin resistance.”
— Dr. Philip Ovadia [43:56]

• Diagnostic Tools & Prevention ([35:10]–[36:23], [69:09]–[70:01])
  • Advocates for routine use of Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) scans (“the mammogram for the heart”) for direct heart disease detection.
  • Urges patients to ask about insulin resistance and have fasting insulin levels tested.

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Meat is Medicine: Diet & Nutrient Density

• Dietary Recommendations ([53:49]–[56:13])
  • Encourages eating the most nutrient-dense, bioavailable foods (meat, fish, eggs, dairy).
  • Being full reduces cravings for sugars and processed carbs.
  • Meat intake is associated with improved satiety, metabolic markers, and long-term health across Ovadia’s patients and personal experience.

“Meat is medicine…The meat was never the problem. The meat is never going to be the problem. Eat all the meat you want.”
— Dr. Philip Ovadia [53:49]

• Vegetarian/Vegan Considerations ([56:13]–[58:15])

  • Case study of his co-author, a former vegan, who saw dramatic health improvements after reintroducing meat.
  • Acknowledges this is a recurring pattern in his patient base.

• Practical Approach for All Incomes ([80:20]–[82:43])

  • Advocates “real food first”—even the cheapest ground beef can be healthier and more satiating (and cheaper per nutrient) than processed foods.
  • Food cost concerns are reframed: long-term health savings far outweigh up-front food expenses.

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Systemic Failures: Medicine, Industry, and Guidelines

• Healthcare Shortcomings ([46:02]–[48:31], [61:36]–[63:31])

  • Doctors focus on treating symptoms; decades of preventing heart disease have failed due to the wrong priorities and systemic pressures.
  • The medical system ensures doctors and patients are overburdened and not truly aligned.

• The Power of Marketing & Manufactured Consensus ([50:14]–[51:20], [100:51]–[104:05])

  • Pharmaceutical and processed food ads are omnipresent.
  • “Manufactured consensus” and the historical role of Ancel Keys (and his flawed research) in demonizing cholesterol and fat.
  • Classic marketing lines like breakfast being “the most important meal”—a Kellogg’s invention, not a nutritional fact.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Medical Guidelines:
  “Being a good doctor is just following the guidelines… We need to get back to that individualized medicine.”
  — Dr. Philip Ovadia [61:41]

• On the Stakes:
  “I am seeing 30 year olds end up on my operating table… Society is literally collapsing under its own weight.”
  — Dr. Philip Ovadia [77:56]

• On the Enemy in the Story:
  “We assigned the villainous role to cholesterol… But maybe it's the hero.”
  — Mike Rowe [14:45]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–06:08: Show opening, setting up Dr. Ovadia’s “heal thyself” journey.
• 08:28–12:57: Dr. Ovadia discusses statistics, why heart disease remains unsolved, and professional dogma.
• 14:20–17:20: Certainty among experts, cholesterol as the villain, root of institutional resistance.
• 27:17–30:03: Early science, how “cholesterol = heart disease” became entrenched, the flawed logic.
• 30:10–37:49: Insulin resistance, processed carbs, food pyramid, blood vessel damage explained.
• 43:42–44:30: Sugar’s health toll compared to every other modern substance.
• 53:49–56:13: “Meat is Medicine”—the dietary philosophy in practical terms.
• 69:09–70:44: How to ask your doctor about insulin resistance, practical tests.
• 80:20–82:43: Cost, accessibility, and practical strategies for eating well anywhere.

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Takeaways & Actionable Advice

What to Ask Your Doctor

1. Am I insulin resistant? ([69:09])
2. Can I get a fasting insulin level test? ([70:01])
3. Can I get a Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) scan? ([35:12], [87:47])
4. Do I have inflammation? (Ask for CRP test) ([87:53])

Dietary Rules of Thumb

• Rule 1: Eat real food.
• Rule 2: The more insulin-resistant or metabolically unhealthy you are, the less you should eat carbohydrates.
• Rule 3: Meat and animal-derived foods are the most nutrient dense and satiating options available.

Systemic Criticism

• Rigid guidelines and “evidence-based” medicine reduce individualization and stifle critical thinking in medicine.
• Institutional inertia (“manufactured consensus”) perpetuates ineffective treatments and public confusion.

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Summary Table: Myths vs. Dr. Ovadia’s Perspective

| Conventional Wisdom | Dr. Ovadia’s View | |---------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------| | High cholesterol = heart attack | Cholesterol repairs; insulin resistance is the culprit | | Plant oils are heart-healthy | Seed oils and margarine cause inflammation, worse than natural fats| | Sugar addiction is manageable | Sugar is the root of most chronic diseases | | Vegan/vegetarian = healthiest | Meat is essential for optimal health and metabolic function | | Guidelines = good medicine | Individualized approach, patient not protocols, yields better outcomes | | Breakfast is vital | Marketing, not science; eat when genuinely hungry |

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Closing Message

Dr. Ovadia is on a mission to disrupt medicine’s failed orthodoxy:
“Meat is Medicine” is not just a slogan—it's a call to reconsider what health really means, reclaim ownership over wellbeing, and question the stories perpetuated by powerful industries. Whether you’re a patient or provider, the episode argues for stepping back, seeking real outcomes, and daring to prioritize nutrient density over dogma.

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Further Information

• Books:

  • Stay Off My Operating Table
  • Stay Off My Kitchen Table

• Online Practice:

  • iFixHearts.com

• Key Tests:

  • Fasting insulin
  • Coronary Artery Calcium (CAC) scan
  • CRP (C-reactive protein)

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“The most common lie patients told themselves is that they don’t have control over why they ended up on the operating table.”
— Dr. Philip Ovadia [97:23]

“Let’s give people what they need so that they can feel healthy…and all this other stuff…is because we stopped eating the good stuff.”
— Dr. Philip Ovadia [59:02]

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For more, follow Dr. Ovadia at iFixHearts.com, and consider his two books for comprehensive guidance.

Transcript

[Chuck]

Foreign.

[Mike]

Hey, guys. It's the way I heard it. My guest today, I'm gonna say is really, really, really important. I'm gonna lean into, you know, really, really, really, really important. Chuck.

[Chuck]

That's a lot of reallys.

[Mike]

Mike, let me tell you why Dr. Philip Ovadia is important. He's not just another voice espousing the virtues of a. What do you call it? Ketonic.

[Chuck]

Ketonic diet. Yeah.

[Mike]

Ketonic. Yeah.

[Chuck]

Or carnivore diet.

[Mike]

Carnivore diet. The Dr. Atkins diet. He's not just another guy who's saying, hey, maybe carbs are wrong, or, hey, maybe the food pyramid is upside down, or, hey, something's wrong with the medical system. This particular doctor is a heart surgeon who has conducted thousands, over 3,000 open heart surgeries.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Mike]

And he also was a guy who was £100 too heavy.

[Chuck]

Yep.

[Mike]

He was doing both of these things at the same time, which is odd, isn't it? Well, it certainly would inspire a measure of cognitive dissonance, I would think, in the patient.

[Chuck]

Yes, exactly.

[Mike]

Who's getting wheeled in. Oh, yeah, yeah. But look, he went on his own sort of Physician Heal Thyself Journey, which actually is not a bad title for this. Did we come up with a title for this one yet?

[Chuck]

You know what?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

I don't think we did.

[Mike]

I don't think we did either. Let's call it Physician Heal Thyself, because that's what he did. And in the process, he's healed a lot of other people thanks to a book he wrote a few years ago called Stay Off My Operating Table. I learned about this book from our friend Vinny Tortorich, who's been a frequent guest on the podcast. And, Chuck, you took it to another level?

[Chuck]

Yeah, I actually had a couple of consultations with him. He recommended that I get a CAC scan, which I can't remember what that stands for at this moment, but you got one. I got one. And determined, you know, that I was at a medium risk for heart disease, and he helped me to prevent that, let's say.

[Mike]

Well, I mean, what really initiated it? Tell me if I'm wrong, but your doctor. Doctor told you your cholesterol was too high.

[Chuck]

Yes. Yes.

[Mike]

And in order to get your cholesterol down, you need a statin.

[Chuck]

Yes.

[Mike]

And this would be filed under conventional wisdom, slash, accepted consensus.

[Chuck]

Makes sense. The number's up here. You need it down here.

[Mike]

Right.

[Chuck]

This statin drug does that.

[Mike]

Except Dr. Ovadia said it's all backwards. It's all wrong. Cholesterol is not the enemy at all.

[Chuck]

Yep.

[Mike]

And if he were just another guy saying this, I wouldn't have him on. But like I said, he's got the receipts, he has the experience. His book is terrific. He's written a new book called Stay Off My Kitchen Table.

[Chuck]

Yes.

[Mike]

That's more diet focused.

[Chuck]

Correct.

[Mike]

So this conversation is full of really good tips for anybody who just wants to fight back against inflammation. Maybe blood sugar regulation, insulin resistance.

[Chuck]

Yes.

[Mike]

Is a thing you're going to hear him talk a lot about. There's all that. The evidence is compelling, but between my friend Vinnie and my friend Chuck and then my dad's recent heart attack and my friend who I graduated high school with, whose name I'm not going to mention, but she has since signed on to Dr. Ovadia's practice, and the transformation in her life has just been extraordinary. I don't need to tell you everything we're going to talk about, but suffice it to say that Meat Is Medicine is another thing you're going to hear a lot about.

[Chuck]

That should be the title.

[Mike]

Oh, that is a better title.

[Chuck]

Yeah, that's what he said. Multiple times.

[Mike]

Yeah. All right, scratch that. The episode you've already started is not called Physician, Heal Thyself. Although it could be. It could be because he did.

[Chuck]

Yep.

[Mike]

But if I were to put something on a billboard that we're really going to get people's attention and make them want to learn more, you know, coming from a source as credible as Dr. Ovadia, it would be Meat is Medicine.

[Chuck]

Yep.

[Mike]

So vegans, vegetarians, clutch your pearls, buckle up, but don't be dissuaded. There's wisdom, great wisdom, I think, in the advice you're about to hear. Advice that many of us, I dare say, should heed right after this. After bragging about Pure Talk for the last year or so, I got to admit I was very proud to see that they were the only wireless company in America to get five stars in every category from the latest Consumer Reports survey. That was a survey that asked 120,000 people to rate their wireless providers. It's kind of a big deal to celebrate. I'm not going to say I told you so. Instead, I'm just going to remind you that PureTalk is offering any of their plans for just 15 bucks a month for the first three months, including their top tier unlimited data plan that normally sells for $65 a month. In other words, you can save $150 over the next three months while you test drive the only high speed network to get Five stars in every category from Consumer Reports. That's any plan including their top tier unlimited plan for 15 bucks a month for the next three months. No contracts, no commitments. Just a fair deal on a high speed network from a five star American wireless company that really does want to earn your business. Give them a [e-mail] ro that's PureTalk.com row. I can't even imagine how many times you've heard your name butchered.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

There are a couple of versions of it.

[Mike]

Which one do you prefer?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

So the interesting thing is my family has always pronounced it Ovadia. But Ovadia is the technically correct way to pronounce.

[Mike]

Yeah, that's rather British almost.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, it's the Hebrew pronunciation of it. But yeah, I always go Ovadia. But I usually don't worry about Ovadia when people say it.

[Mike]

I'm going to defer to what you do because you would know. You're Dr. Philip Ovadia. And I really appreciate you coming up here from Florida to spread the word. That seems to be the thing, man, that you're on such a mission. And I'll just tell you very briefly how you wore me down. From a distance. It started with our friend Vinny Twitterich, who just thinks the world of you. So we got your book and Chuck, weren't you going through some sort of cholesterol drama?

[Chuck]

Yeah, I met with Dr. Ovadia teleconference, you know.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

For.

[Chuck]

From Clearwater to Valley Village. And.

[Mike]

And that was what, like a year and a half year ago?

[Chuck]

I think two years ago.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Chuck]

And I still have the, what do you call it, the cholesterol medicine that my doctor prescribed. The full bottle sitting in my nightstand

[Mike]

that you never took.

[Chuck]

That I never took. Yes.

[Mike]

Interesting. So that happens. So, like Chuck's in my life and Vinnie's in my life. And then my dad, Christmas before had a heart attack and very nearly didn't make it out. He wound up with a stent in like the main vein and he's 93 and he's hanging tough, but that just made me once again, it's like, oh, God, this heart business. And then a dear friend of mine who I went to school with is one of your patients and she spoke so highly of you. And so I just thought, okay, I picked up your book and went through it and I want to get to as much of it as you want to get to. But I think I just want to start with the point that if you're looking for a credible source of information for Me, I'm much less impressed with the initials after your name these days than I am with the fact that you've actually performed over 3,000 heart surgeries and that you lost 100 pounds yourself. So based on those bonafides, it's great to see you. And how's the mission going?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, the mission remains the primary driving reason that I do what I do. 750,000Americans are going to die of heart disease this year. Every 33 seconds, someone has a heart attack. What really bothers me, I would say, most now as a heart surgeon, is this has been going on for 70 years. We declared war on heart disease in 1955, and quite frankly, we are losing that battle. Heart disease continues to get worse. And I look around and ask why? Because what's ironic is when I was deciding what type of surgeon to become, I was in the early part of my training and I was doing what we call general surgery, and I was learning about all the different types of surgery that you can do.

[Mike]

Where'd you study, by the way?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

That was in New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson, after graduating from Jefferson Medical College. And I was talking to my mentors and I said, I love heart surgery. I love the technical aspects of it. I love the physiology. I love taking care of the heart.

[Mike]

You loved it before you actually did it.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Well, while I was doing. When I got exposed to it and then I was deciding, I said, I want to go into heart surgery. And they said, phil, please don't. That would be the worst thing you can do. This is early 2000s. Statins are the most widely prescribed class of medication. And they say heart disease is figured out. There's going to be nothing for you to do in 20 years as a heart surgeon. You're going to be out of a job. Go into anything else. Don't do that. Well, here we are, 25 years later. Heart surgeons. There is a shortage of heart surgeons in this country. Currently, there aren't enough heart surgeons to do all the heart surgery that needs to be done.

[Mike]

Is it a shortage of heart surgeons or a plethora of patients?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

You know, Mike, I wish more people in the medical field asked exactly that question, because you're right, it's not a shortage of surgeons. It's too many people with heart disease, with this advanced stage of heart disease that ends up needing heart surgery.

[Mike]

And what is that advanced stage called, technically?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

So the main form of heart disease we deal with is what's called atherosclerotic heart disease. It's the gradual buildup of plaque in the arteries that can ultimately lead to heart attacks. And it is the most common thing that kills people. And, and it is, in my mind, entirely preventable.

[Mike]

Before we get to prevention, can you just riff for a minute on the certainty with which your profession seems so enamored going back to that period of time? It's 26 years ago. And it's not some random people that advised you, it's your mentors. It's the people you look up to and respect. And don't take this the wrong way, but where in the world has the humility gone from the medical profession?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, again, it's a great question. Right. And you know, as a physician, if you're treating a condition and that condition isn't getting better, the individual patient in front of you is not getting better, or the collective with this condition is not getting better, you should take a step back and you should say, something's wrong here. Now, the problem is specifically when it comes to heart disease, we have been so convinced that cholesterol is the singular cause of heart disease that there's just no other. No one asks these questions. Everyone says, well, we know that cholesterol is a cause of heart disease. And if heart disease isn't getting better, as we lower patients cholesterol with dietary changes, pharmaceuticals, whatever it might be, the answer must be that people aren't listening to us enough. We're not lowering it enough. We're not starting early enough. The latest sort of recommendations that have come out of the American Heart association is we should be testing 10 year olds for their cholesterol level and starting them on medication if they have what is considered now to be high cholesterol. And it's insanity. It's what Einstein said. Right. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And that's where we are when it comes to heart disease. And that's why we're not making progress and it's getting worse.

[Mike]

I mean, look, the most interesting thing to me that you just said is it's smart people making this mistake. Yeah. It's not the dummies, it's not the uneducated. It's not the people that aren't like. It's our experts. I think, doc, the thing that most baffles me about all of this, and I'm still trying to stay at the 30,000 foot level. It's just that what do we do when experts can't agree? What's the average person to do? We were kind of joking off camera, but there's just an endless fire hose of information out there on every single topic. Chuck, I don't know if I sent this to you, but a clip of a guy who's like, the Strait of Hormuz. Why do I know about the Strait of Hormuz? Why am I constantly being brought up to speed on what's happening there? Well, obviously it's newsworthy and it's consequential, but you can cross that out and scratch in cholesterol or LDL or vaccines or really anything. If you give me a topic, it seems like I can give you a consensus and I can give you a contrarian view, and I can populate the entire argument with really credible experts who are very, very sure. Yeah. What are we to make of this?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Well, you know, I think increasingly, the more convinced that the experts seem about something, the more we should question it. Right.

[Mike]

Wow. Amen.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

You know, cholesterol, for me. Right. Has been the original story around this, but again, it's the same narrative that we have now seen played out in many different, you know, many different aspects of health.

[Mike]

Is it because narratives are stories and stories need villains? Did we assign the villainous role to cholesterol to the point where we're afraid to walk it back? Never mind. Never mind. It's not just a question of, oh, wait a second, maybe it's not the villain. It's really like, oh, maybe it's the hero.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Exactly. And, you know, specifically when we start talking about things like red meat, that is exactly the conclusion that I have now come to. Right. Not only is red meat not harmful for our heart and our overall health, it is essential I now go around telling people as a heart surgeon that meat is medicine. We need meat in our diets. And this is one of the things we talk about in the new book. But again, it's that on my charitable days, I just say, well, it's that institutional group think that we've got entrapped in. Right.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

And if you're an organization like the American Heart association and you've spent 70 years telling people that cholesterol is the main cause of heart disease, and you've put billions, maybe trillions of dollars at this point into research around cholesterol as the cause of heart disease, saying, I think we made a mistake, I think we were wrong, is very hard for large institutions like that. And we know that ultimately the only way that happens is when the institution basically gets destroyed and some other institution can replace it with a better idea. And I'm optimistic that we're starting to get to that point. I'm optimistic that the people, the patients out there are getting fed up enough. And I even start to see it among my colleagues because everyone talks about we have this problem with doctors getting burnt out. What I see is doctors aren't burnt out because they don't like being doctors. Doctors are burnt out because their patients are not getting better. And again, heart disease ends up being the main focus of this because it is the number one killer. It's been the number one killer. And like I said in my mind, 70 years later, for something that we declared war on, right. And we put all these resources into and it's not getting better. That's where doctors and patients now need to come together and say, we need a different approach. We need to make it so it's not the number one killer anymore. And that's the mission I'm on.

[Mike]

I don't want to gloss over the stakes or the scope. 750,000 people are going to die this year.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yep.

[Mike]

Is there anything more lethal that we're looking at in terms of disease?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

No. No single condition. And if you add up number two and number three, it still doesn't quite match number one. What are two? And so we have cancer is number two. For a while, Covid was between number two and three. And oh, by the way, all that time that we had the daily ticker on the news about how many people are dying today of COVID it was half of the people that died of heart disease at Covid's peak.

[Mike]

Was that your first thought when you saw that ticker?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

That was exactly my first thought. Like, where's our heart disease ticker? Why hasn't it been on the news for the past 20 years? Because again, the numbers are much bigger and all of these things, heart disease remains number one and nothing has come close to it.

[Mike]

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[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

again. I reckon these days that it's not because the food and the pharmaceutical industries that are the main supporters of TV don't really want those results publicized. They don't really want people thinking about, well, we changed our whole food approach. We released dietary guidelines in 1980 that were targeted against heart disease. We developed all these medications, you know, starting in the mid to late 1980s and accelerating, you know, up until today. And we're failing. It's still number one. Like, you know, again, a logical person steps back and says, this doesn't add up. There's gotta be something wrong here.

[Mike]

It's so calcified. It's so. I mean, I feel like you're trying to grab the country by the lapels and just shake it. And then like that scene in Airplane, just give us a slap.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Say, look, you just have to. You just have to step back from everything you think, you know, it's a peripetia. It's that moment of realization where it's like, good grief, to have something so fundamental be so fundamentally incorrect. So I saw you lecture once. You were talking to a room full of doctors. And I think you just came. You said, listen, let me tell you about the zombies in the room. And just described in your opinion, this state that a lot of really brilliant, successful doctors have devolved into, where all they can do is repeat these talking points that I think you actually just said it out loud, is killing their patients. I mean, how's that go over?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Well, you know, when I say things like that, right? It comes from a place of understanding, because I was one of those zombies, right? My origin story with all of this goes back, you know, 10 years now. Right. So I was 15 years into a career as a heart surgeon. Right. I was a very busy heart surgeon. I was a successful heart surgeon, but I was a morbidly obese, pre diabetic heart surgeon. And I kind of looked around one day, I know you.

[Mike]

I put myself like, I'm on the gurney, I'm being wheeled in.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah.

[Mike]

And this guy that's £100 on the wrong side of healthy walks in and.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Exactly.

[Mike]

Okay. It's all going to be great.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

And you know what? Not one of my colleagues during that time ever said to me, like, physician, heal thyself, you know, and. Because quite frankly, a lot of them were in a similar situation. But I looked around and I said, you know, I'm going to end up on my own operating table. And I don't know what to do about it because all that advice that I've been giving people that I was taught to give, it doesn't work. It wasn't working for me. It wasn't working for them. So what do we do here? Right? And thankfully, I was in one of those big lectures. I was at a meeting of heart surgeons, and there was a guest speaker that year by the name of Gary Taubes. And Gary is an investigative journalist, a scientific investigative journalist. And he had just written a book called the Case Against Sugar. And before that, he had written another book called Good Calories, Bad Calories and why We Get Fat. And Gary started talking about, it's not how much food you're eating, right. It's not about eat less. It's about the types of food that you're eating and something called insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome. And I kind of thought back to medical school and I said, I think I heard that maybe mentioned once or twice, but no one's ever said anything about it in relation to heart disease. But it makes sense. Let me give this a try. Right? And I started cutting sugar out of my diet and I got more broad and started cutting most carbohydrates out of my diet, and I lost £100 and I started eating more meat.

[Mike]

Over what period of time?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Over about a year, I would say that's a lot to a year and a half. And it was a lot. And you know, that's 10 years ago, right. And understand, I had lost weight before, but you know how it goes, you lose the 50 pounds and you gain 75. And this was the first time that I was able to sustain it. And I started looking more into this and I said, why did I learn about this from. And no offense to Gary, and I've told him this to his face, said, why did I learn about this from an investigative journalist? And I didn't learn about it from any of my mentors, any of my colleagues.

[Mike]

People ask me all the time, why did I learn more about my diet from a celebrity trainer named Vinny Tortorich? Why didn't my doctor sit me down? Where's the proactive outreach from the medical community?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Anyway, go ahead.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah. And so, you know, one thing leads to another because you say, well, if I. What they taught me was wrong about obesity, you know, maybe what they taught me was wrong about heart disease. And, you know, low carb diets invariably bring up that question because you start eating more fat, you start eating more red meat. Some people see their cholesterol levels go up. Some people don't, by the way. But, you know, and then you start saying, well, okay, is this going to lead to heart disease? And that's the number one question I get when we talk about low carb diets. Everyone's like, well, well, I can't eat all that fat. I can't eat all that red meat. It's going to, you know, everything else might get better, right? Your diabetes has gotten better. Your blood pressure is lower, you're off 10 medicines. And I've had patients, literally, they've gotten off 10 medicines. And they go back to their doctors, and the doctor says, well, what are you doing? And they tell them, and they look at that one number on that one blood test, and they say, you can't keep doing that. It's going to kill you. Even though everything in their life has gotten better. But doctors are so convinced that cholesterol is the cause of heart disease that they can't imagine that the fact that their cholesterol level, this patient's cholesterol level, may have gone up a bit, even though they're off 10 medications, they've reversed diabetes, all this other stuff gets better and the patient still gets scared and may stop doing that diet that have. That has had this benefit just because of this misconception about what role cholesterol plays in heart disease.

[Mike]

I just come back to story and how desperate we are to have a narrative that we can follow with a good guy and a bad guy and a couple of plot twists, but nothing too complicated. And whether you're, you know, just trying to live a healthy life without becoming an expert in the field or just a parent trying not to screw up their kid. So I'm going to send you to college, even though you might not be wired for it, even though we might not be able to afford it, even though you don't even know what you want to study. I'm going to do this thing because it's so inculcated and then calcified, and I just see such a parallel with it. And I'm also really struck, you know, the whole cholesterol debate and lipids and it's been around a long time.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Long time.

[Mike]

Like a century and a half, maybe. People have been talking about this.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah. The original theories around, you know, cholesterol and heart disease go back to the 1930s. 1940s really came to a head in the 1950s is when we got on this narrative of cholesterol is the cause of heart disease.

[Mike]

So we're taking, I assume, autopsies and going in and. And we're looking at blood vessels, and we're seeing plaque, we're seeing cholesterol that's accumulated and concluding, okay, that's what killed him. But what are we missing when we conclude that?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, so that's exactly how this started. Right. And it makes sense, okay? People die of heart disease, we open up their arteries. We see this waxy stuff called cholesterol in there. We look in the bloodstream of living people, we see cholesterol. We look at some of the foods that we eat, and there's cholesterol in there, right? So you start making the connection. We eat the cholesterol, it goes into our bloodstream. When you have very high levels, which was the initial discovery of cholesterol in the bloodstream, you die more of heart disease. So makes perfect sense. The problem is it's not true. It doesn't quite work that way. And one of the favorite analogies I use to explain this is if you're some alien, right, and you're looking down on the earth, and you notice every time there's a house, a structure on fire, there are these firemen standing next to it, right? And so you may say, okay, well, obviously, they're the ones that are starting the fires, obviously. And that's what cholesterol is. Cholesterol is actually sent to our blood vessels to repair the damage. Now, it turns out when cholesterol itself becomes dysfunctional, and, you know, we might get into talking about insulin resistance, which is what really causes all of this, but the cholesterol comes to repair the damage. And because the cholesterol itself isn't really working like it should, it starts to get stuck there, and then we're doing more and more damage because we have high blood sugar. Maybe we're smoking. You know, we have this insulin resistance problem. And so more and more cholesterol shows up. More and more cholesterol is now stuck in the wall of the blood vessel.

[Chuck]

And.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

And this is where the plaque starts to build up. But it wasn't the cholesterol that started it. It was what damaged your blood vessels. And that's the step that we missed. That's the step that we don't pay enough attention to, that if we can stop the damage to the blood vessels first, if we can make sure that our cholesterol is healthy and working as it should, that's how we're going to stop heart disease.

[Mike]

Well, obviously, what can we do to facilitate that? How can we make our blood vessels healthier?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah. So, again, what is the number one thing today causing that damage? It's basically high sugar, and it's an underlying condition. Again, we call insulin resistance. So insulin, everyone's heard of it. It is the primary hormone that our body uses to keep our blood sugar under control and to regulate basically what happens with energy in our body and what the problem that we have developed in this society is. The number one thing that causes insulin to go up are carbohydrates. Carbohydrates, broadly and specifically, when we start talking about processed carbohydrates, sugar, and refined flour and these things.

[Mike]

A donut.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

A donut. It causes our insulin to go up. And when you do that too often, and you're doing that all the time. And again, recommendations came down from the government, this thing called the food pyramid, and the big base of that food pyramid was a load of carbohydrates, right? So we told people, stop eating fat because we thought it was bad. And of course, you take something out, you got to put something back in, you put more carbohydrates. And now we got into this situation where people are eating too much carbohydrates, too much refined carbohydrate, and they're eating it all the time. And so the insulin level stays high, and the cells of the body then say, we're not listening to insulin anymore. Right? Insulin is always over there yelling at us. And you know what you do? You start tuning that person out. And so we're not listening to the insulin. And now we have too much sugar in our bloodstream, and that's damaging the blood vessels. And that's the primary thing. It's not the only thing, but it's the primary thing leading to the damage to the blood vessels and also making it so the cholesterol doesn't work properly. So the cholesterol can't just go and repair the damage and then disappear and leave a nice, you know, new smooth wall behind. It goes there to repair the damage. It sets off its own inflammatory reaction. And that's how we start to see all this plaque buildup.

[Mike]

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[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Hey, haw

[Mike]

how does inflammation underpin metabolic health?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, so inflammation is one of the hallmarks of poor metabolic health. We start to get inflammation lots of places in our bodies. And that's why, you know, when we're talking about something like diabetes, right? It's not just damage to our blood vessels. It's damaged all of our organs, essentially. And this inflammation is one of the primary drivers of that. So I now tell people we want to focus on three eyes when it comes to heart disease. We want to focus on insulin resistance, we want to focus on inflammation, and then we want to focus on imaging. And this is another thing that comes Back to how we approach heart disease. It's the only real major disease where we're relying on indirect measures of it. Right? As much as we want to argue cholesterol is or is not important, cholesterol is not heart disease. The plaque in the arteries is heart disease. So if we really are concerned about heart disease, we should be looking at the plaque and the arteries.

[Mike]

What's the test called?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

So the screening test is what's called a coronary artery calcium test. And when I spoke to Chuck a couple of years ago, I said, chuck, go get this test. Right? That's like the mammogram for the heart. And it is severely underutilized. It is a cheap, inexpensive test. You can go get it done for about 100 bucks in most places in this country.

[Mike]

What's entailed is it like a five minute scan?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

It's a scan. It's a CAT scan, what we call a CT scan. No iv, no dye. You just lay down on the table, run you through the scanner, and it's going to show us plaque, calcified plaque in the arteries of your heart. And that's the screening test that I now tell every man by the time you're 40, every woman by the time you're 50. You need to get this done. Because treating heart disease in the way we treat it these days is like telling women, don't get mammograms. When you feel a lump in your breast, when your breast is hurting you, when you have symptoms, that's when we'll worry about you might have breast cancer. And that would be insane. But that's exactly what we do with heart disease. We say when you start having symptoms of heart disease, when you have a

[Mike]

heart attack, like, it's.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

That's when most people figure out that they have heart disease.

[Mike]

Yeah, yeah. My dad, I mean, wow. Last couple years, you know, my, my folks are older now and I, we've been luckily, you know, healthy by and large. But to really get a front row look at, I mean, this was, this was Hopkins. This is. You know, my dad was at University of Maryland, I think, and my, my mom was at Hopkins for her thing. And, man, you just. It's just back to the exit. They're so busy. They're so the best of the best are overworked. It just left me feeling more than anything, doc, like we have to assume a far greater responsibility for our own wellness. We just can't wait for the guy in the white coat. We can't wait for Marcus Welby to make it all better. There's just too much. There are too many minds that we can step on. Sugar, obviously, is a big one. I guess everybody knows smoking. I don't want to gloss over metabolic either. I know that's remedial for you, but so people really understand, like, what is metabolic health and maybe talk about how, you know, when you don't have it, you become so susceptible to a thing like COVID 19.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, exactly. So metabolic health, the basic concept is we are giving our body inputs, right? And the primary input we're giving our body is the food that we eat. And metabolic health means that our body is doing what it should do with that food, right? It's using some of the components to build and rebuild our tissue. It's processing the energy that's in that food and using it for all of the processes that are going on in our body. And there should be some of it that goes into storage. Because again, remember, historically, as we evolved, the primary problem was we couldn't get enough energy, we couldn't get enough food. Right? You had to work hard for food. You had to go hunt down some big beast, or you had to work the earth and hope something grows. And oftentimes neither of those things happened and we didn't have enough food around.

[Mike]

And the uncertainty of not knowing when the next meal.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Exactly. So you want to have some storage. And then we all of a sudden got into modernity here, and now we have more food than we could ever know what to do with. Right. For most people, that has become the primary problem. And when our metabolic health breaks, that balance between storage and utilizing the energy, that's really at a fundamental, you know, the fundamental basis of what goes wrong. And we start storing all of this energy in the form of fat, and we never. The famine never comes. We never use that energy. And getting back to sort of the biochemistry that I talked about earlier, one of the other things that happens when your insulin level increases is that you. Your body is now blocked from accessing that fat. So even though. Right. One of the fundamental questions that never really made sense to me is people get overweight. They're walking around literally, with millions of calories, right? Stored energy on their body, and yet they're hungry all the time. Why is that? Doesn't make sense. But this is part of why insulin resistance explains so much of our problems. Because when insulin is high, your body can't access that body fat. And again, the analogy I use for this is the big tanker truck that's going down the highway carrying the fuel Right. To the gas stations that can run out of gas. Right? Because you have the gas tank that you're actually able to access while you're driving that. And you can't actually access, you know, these millions of gallons, thousands of gallons of fuel that you're carrying around. And that's kind of what starts to happen in our body. We have all the fuel. We just can't use it. We're stuck on burning sugar for energy. Right, because your body knows that sugar is toxic. So when there's sugar in the system, the body's goal is get it out of the bloodstream, because we know it's going to damage our blood vessels. And so you get in this loop that you start burning through that sugar, you can't access fat for energy any longer. And so you say, okay, I need more sugar. Right? Time to get hungry. Let's go eat more of that, you know, more donuts, more of the processed food. What was the book called? You mentioned the sugar, the Case against sugar.

[Mike]

And what would it look like if we prosecuted that case? Would you support. I mean, I don't know what Bobby Kennedy's up to at the moment. He does seem to be pissing a lot of people off by ultimately suggesting a series of ideas that I could see. I don't know that it will happen, but a reasonable person reading your book and looking at the data might wonder why it's legal. I mean, why is it in everything? Why do we permit it? How did that happen? And do you think you can put the crap back in the goose?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, it's a great question. And again, I think it ties into a lot of the larger societal questions we're asking these days. But, yeah, that question of why did we get here? Because it didn't have to go this way, right. When we go back to the 1950s and when it was decided that fat cholesterol, that was the cause of heart disease, there were competing theories. There was a theory that sugar was the primary cause of heart disease back then. And you start to mix some questionable science. Some people would say there was some outright fraudulent studies done. Maybe they were just badly interpreted. Science and politics gets involved, right? And money gets involved.

[Mike]

So much money.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

So much money. And here we are, right? And then you start to see that reinforcing behavior, Right? Because anyone who was questioning the narrative on a scientific basis, they start getting the version then of being deplatformed, delisted, Right? You can't get studies that question the cholesterol narrative published in the medical literature. And then so they can stand back and say, look at all this medical literature that supports the cholesterol hypothesis. Because they know that anything that goes against it probably isn't going to get studied or get published. And that's where we are.

[Mike]

Well, since we're talking about inflammation, what's the most inflammatory thing you can say that you believe to be true about the consequences of our sugar addiction?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

The most inflammatory thing that I think to be true about our sugar addiction.

[Mike]

For instance, what's killed more people?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, No, I mean sugar. Sugar has more.

[Mike]

Fentanyl.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Way more have died because of sugar excess than fentanyl, than smoking, than anything you can really talk about. Because, you know, we've been talking a lot about heart disease, but what I didn't, we didn't really get into yet is that metabolic disease, insulin resistance. This isn't only about heart disease. Those top 10 causes of death every year in the United States that we kind of started going down to. Nine out of the ten of them are due to insulin resistance. So what's been most.

[Mike]

Wait a minute, 9 out of 10 out of 10 of the top killers of the top killers are all preceded by insulin resistance.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Correct. And that includes things like psychiatric disorders. We now have this growing field called metabolic psychiatry where psychiatrists are treating people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression. Right. These major psychiatric conditions, and they're changing their diet and the condition gets better. So, yeah, nine out of 10 are due to insulin resistance. And yet when you go to your doctor, the chances that they're ever gonna mention insulin resistance to you, the chances that they're gonna test you for insulin resistance properly are almost nil. It is very rare. There are.

[Mike]

Wait, I just. Look, what am I missing? Why, like I understand why a network can't put a ticking clock up on the screen that would indicate the number of sugar related deaths. If the show in question is being sponsored by Captain Crunch and Hershey's and lollipops and down and down, down it goes. That tracks. But why wouldn't a doctor, how did your profession become so captured by whatever the answer is to that question?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah. I think the reality for the average doctor is they're just too busy to think about it.

[Chuck]

Right.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

We've been trained and, you know, to the defense, I guess, of the medical system. Right. We are there to take care of sick people. Right. You have a heart attack. We can deliver fabulous care today. Right. That we couldn't deliver 50 years ago.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

So the progress we've seen against heart disease is treating heart disease. It's not in preventing it. Right. And you say the same thing for diabetes. Right. The average doctor in his office and the patients are just coming in. There's an endless line of people with diabetes. And so you say, okay, how can I most efficiently treat diabetes? It's not really about best. It's most efficiently, so I can take care of the most people. Right. And it's like, okay, get out the prescription pad, write the prescription, and you know, it's going to make their diabetes a little better. And doctors truly don't have the time to step back and say, can I make it so not every one of my patients is diabetic anymore. What if I reverse the diabetes? And now I don't need to keep seeing that person every couple of months to manage their diabetes. And the sad reality is that doctors don't have the time to think about it. And, you know, if you want to get more into the system. Right. The system has actively discouraged doctors from thinking that way. Right. By saying, follow the guidelines. We know this is the best way to treat diabetes, for instance. So don't question that. You know, what we're telling you to do isn't actually fixing diabetes. Right. This is the best way you can do it. And this is what's most defeating to me as a doctor.

[Mike]

Sure.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Because doctors have been told this is the best we can do. Right. The fact that heart disease is still the number one killer. And you're going to put patients on these medications and a lot of them are still going to have heart attacks, but, you know, it's a little bit less than the number that would have had the heart attack if we didn't give you the. If we didn't have the medicine. And that's become the best that we can do anymore. And again, that's another central problem. Doctors don't think big. Right. The doctors aren't out there like me saying, instead of, you know, doing a great surgery on, you know, a couple of hundred people that I'm going to operate on every year, what If I kept 100,000 people off the operating table and there aren't enough big thinkers in the medical world anymore.

[Mike]

Well, no. And the internal contradiction you've just opened is you started by saying when you were young and studying how deeply you fell in love with the heart and working on the heart, and now how? Well, if you're successful in this mission, you won't be doing any more heart surgery.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

I actually, ironically, hope to prove my mentors wrong. Right or right. That there'll be nothing left for me to do?

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

That is the mission I'm on.

[Mike]

What do you think when you're sitting at home watching the tube, eating something healthy, no doubt, maybe walnuts, perhaps a nice big steak. A nice big steak. Okay, so you're just sitting there on your sofa, you're just, you're just eating a full on Fred Flintstone. Probably a rib eye. Right. With a lot of nice marbling in it. Yeah. And you see what I would call just the parade of pharmaceutical ads. Like you can't even lampoon them anymore. A 60 second ad. And 45 seconds of it is a disclaimer. Like they literally have to spend 45 seconds talking about rectal bleeding and strange itching and chafing around my genitals. And I, I mean, it's just. I don't understand what's happening, Matt. Everything is unpronounceable. It's a long overdue cure for a condition I didn't know existed. And on the downside, it's going to cause, I don't know, Tourette's or whooping cough or some crazy thing and it's just one after the next after the next. And it must be working. It must be working from an advertising standpoint because it's everywhere.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah. And it's interesting, right. So the two things that always strike me on the ra instance I watch TV anymore is it's actually an alternating carousel of ads. Right. Because it goes food pharma. Food pharma, Food pharma. Oh God, literally all of it.

[Chuck]

Right.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

And you know, no one makes that connection. Like, could it be that that food that I'm eating is what's causing me to need all this medication?

[Mike]

I'm thinking of like the incredible slow motion high speed shots of like just a hamburger or a piece of pizza or. And it just, it's. It's porn, basically. Yeah, it's food porn. It's so in your face. And if you have like a. I've got a 60 inch TV, high def and you know, the best cameras in the world are shooting supermodels eating this stuff in slow motion. And you're so right. The second it's over, some fast talking guy in a convertible driving into a sunset is telling me something about my pancreas.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yep, that's where we find ourselves these days. And it's right, you sit back and you just say, I mean, this is insanity. How did we get there? And how have we not woken up? And you know, I am, like I said, optimistic now because we do have people like Bobby Kennedy, who are starting to wake people up, you know, on so many fronts. And we have a new food pyramid, right? And we have a government website.

[Mike]

It's the same pyramid. It's just upside down.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Well, yeah, exactly. And you know what's so funny about that? I don't know if you've seen, but I now use it in a lot of my talks, right. Fifteen years ago on south park, they had this episode where, you know, the Kyle and the kids went on this mission, right, to flip the food pyramid upside down. And there's this scene now that everyone, I think, relates to where they're in the mission headquarters of the FDA and they're talking about all these people dying. And Kyle's calling in and saying, you gotta flip the food pyramid upside down. And they do that. And all of a sudden, nutrition stabilizes, and here we are. And again, it's crazy to think that that's how this all played out, right? Because I look at the old food pyramid, and I say, you could not have intentionally designed something better to make people sick. And you say, you know, no one can screw up this badly by incompetence alone. And that's where you start getting into the conspiracy theories, right? And you start saying, this had to be intentional. And, you know, I go back and forth on that. But the bottom line is we screwed it up so badly that the only answer was flip it upside down. And it turns out that that is the real answer, you know, and yet

[Mike]

we're still so long in certainty in so many other areas. Like, if we were that colossally wrong about something that fundamental, it just seems like if there's any ability left to think critically, we would go, all right, what else did we miss? But we're not.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah.

[Mike]

What should Kennedy do? Like, really, if you were king of the world, if you were in charge of broadcasting, if you were in charge of the fda, if you were. If you could turn it all around. Walk me through the basic steps that King Ovadia would implement.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, I mean, I, again, would start with the basics, right? I start with this fundamental. Meat is medicine. We need to be eating more meat. Because I'm not big about telling people, you know, restricting them. Right. Again, we tried it. It didn't work. Just eat less, Right? It doesn't work. What we need to do is focus on what is the most nutrient dense, bioavailable food to us as human beings. What is that food that is optimally. You know, you can say we've been designed or we've evolved, whatever you want. To believe. So that that is what our system works best on. Oh, can I guess? Let's guess. Meat. Meat. Meat is medicine. Let's just say it. Meat is medicine. So let's just start there. Tell people, eat all the meat you want. The meat was never the problem. The meat is never going to be the problem. Eat all the meat you want. And you know, when I do that with people, what you start to find is they just start becoming less hungry for the other stuff. You don't have to tell them, well, don't eat all the sugar. Right. Because they don't want it. They eat the meat. It is nutrient dense, it is bioavailable. It is what nourishes people. It is what our bodies are looking for. And so let's just start there.

[Mike]

Beef, pork, poultry. All of it.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

All of it. All of it.

[Mike]

Fish.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Fish, Yep. I guess it's dairy, the eggs, the animal products in general. It is the protein source that our body has been optimized for, and it is the fat source that our bodies have been optimized for. And if we just get that, right, that starts to take down all of the peripheral myths, right, that it's, oh, it's going to drive your cholesterol up and the cholesterol is going to cause heart disease. It doesn't. I have seen it in myself, I have seen it in my patients now, right. I can eat what many people would be considered, would consider to be obscene amounts of meat. And my health has only gotten better. And it's not just me, you know, I'm not just some wacko out there, you know, with this. We see huge communities now of people that are doing this and it works. And that's what we need to come back to. And people resonate with it because it works.

[Mike]

Yeah. How many of your patients came to you as vegetarians or vegans or just very, very suspect? How do you get somebody over the hump?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, it's not infrequent anymore that that occurs. And in fact, the co author of my new book, Joshua Lysik, he actually ghost wrote the first book with me. And at the time that he ghost wrote the first book, he was a vegan. This is a great story. And we go into it in the new book and I said, joshua, you know, you know that I talk a lot about eating meat, right? You're going to be able to write this book for me. He said, don't worry about it. You know, it's your book. I just take care of the writing part. And to his Credit. He did an amazing job. And the first book came out great and very well received. And during that period, I said, you know, let me look at your blood work. And I looked at his blood work, and I said, joshua, I see some concerns here. I think you might need to start eating some meat. He said, I can't do that. I'm a vegan. And so we left it, and, you know, a year, two years pass, and we're, you know, we remain friendly. And he starts saying, you know, Phil, I'm not feeling all that great. You know, maybe you could take another look at my blood work. And I do. And I say, joshua, I think you need to start eating meat. He says, can't do it. I'm a vegan. And all the stuff, it goes on another year or two, and now he's at the crisis point. And I say, joshua, you need to start eating meat. And to his credit, he does. And amazing transformation in his health. And again, it's something I've seen over and over again. And so Joshua's story is very prominent in Stay Off My Kitchen Table now, because he underwent that transformation. And he's not the only one. I think in the book, we talk about two or three other people that I know that are like that, and we see this a lot. And that, ultimately is what brought me to that conclusion of meat is medicine because it is not only not harmful, it is essential to our health.

[Mike]

So if you've got a message for free on every billboard, that's what you'd go with?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

I'd go with meat as medicine.

[Mike]

These days, I think it's really smart because you have to. I mean, I'm not saying you don't believe that literally, but people aren't expecting to hear that. They're expecting to hear, hey, it's not as bad as we were told. Or, you know what, it's an important part of a balanced diet or something conciliatory.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yep.

[Mike]

Not medicine. Not the thing that can fix you, not the thing that can fix your inflammation. What's more powerful, meat is medicine or sugar is poison.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Again, I tend to go with the positive message.

[Mike]

How about I'm positive sugar is poison? Yeah, there you go.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Exactly. Again, I look at it as, let's give people what they need so that they can feel healthy. And ultimately, all this other stuff, the reason that we're all addicted to sugar and we have all this processed food is because we stopped eating the good stuff. Right? And we see this again, even zooming out on the evolutionary level, we see this when we went from primarily carnivorous diets. Right. And we became domesticated and we, you know, started the agricultural era. What we see is our brain size has shrunk, our height has shrunk during that time. You can look at our teeth, you know, the structure of our jaws and our teeth, and that's become problematic. Crowded. Yeah, crowded and, you know, under. Yeah. All these problems, right. That never existed before came. And again, getting back to heart disease, because that's what I always come back to. Right. We have decreased our consumption of red meat about 40% in the United States between 1940 and today, and heart disease has gotten worse. So how could meat possibly be the cause of heart disease if the problem gets worse when the supposed cause, we're eating less and less of it?

[Mike]

How much of what is wrong with your profession broadly can be attributed to this tendency to paint with such a broad brush? I mean, it just seems like people are pretty complicated, and I mean really very complicated. We're all individuals. But this idea that there's a guidebook and guidelines, it seems like once those guidelines get articulated or written down and then disseminated and then collated and then, you know, put in a binder and now they're on your desk and now it's. I mean, and then what should doctors be doing? Because someone just sat there a couple weeks ago, talked about the exact same problem with education. Like the idea that a teacher could stand in front of 40 people and we would expect somehow for all those 40 individuals to learn at the same rate. It's so preposterous on its face. You know, a third of them are bored because they already figured it out. Another third are confused because they don't have a clue. And the ones that are tagging along are probably lucky, I guess.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah.

[Mike]

It just feels to me like that exact thing has happened in medicine.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, you're right. The movement of what we call evidence based medicine that I talked about earlier, that just follow the guidelines. Right. Being a good doctor is just following the guidelines. And the more that you're able to check the box, the patient walks in, their blood cholesterol is high, I write the prescription. And that's what is defined as being a good doctor these days. And it is a big problem. We need to get back to that individualized medicine. We need to understand that at a population level, yes, you can look at the fact that if you bring people's cholesterol level down, you make a little bit of progress against heart disease. But that is a lot different than saying that every patient that walks in in front of me with high cholesterol is a problem, because again, we miss. What are the other factors that are going on there.

[Mike]

It's just, again, every discipline subject to this. Like, there was an economist who just sat here, Nick Eberstadt.

[Chuck]

Nick Eberstad.

[Mike]

You know, we're talking about unemployment, right? The unemployment numbers. He said, who gives a shit? Like, what do you mean? He goes, like, who cares? Who cares how many people are unemployed? That doesn't tell you anything. That's an artifact of the Great Depression at a time when you could treat unemployment by creating jobs that didn't exist. Now we live in a time when millions of jobs exist, but people are unemployed. So you can see it's not the lack of jobs that's causing the unemployment. Like, oh, of course I can track that. And yet, I guarantee you on CNBC right now, somebody's talking about unemployment and what it means as if it's still 1932. I just don't know how to break the spell.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, I think ultimately the way we break the spell is, you know, again, doctors and patients coming together to take back control of health. That's what I always talk about. I say, understand that the healthcare system works great for everyone except the patient and the doctor. And, you know, that's where we're at. So the only answer is the doctors and the patients are going to start coming back together, right? We're going to get things like the insurance companies that are in the middle, right? You know, think about it. The insurance companies basically get the patient pissed off at the doctor, and they get the doctor pissed off at the patient. Right? And. And, you know, we've lost that direct relationship. You know, people always laugh, but, you know, back in the day, when you came into your local doctor, he was going to deal with. He or she was going to deal with whatever problem you had. And then you said, okay, you know, what can you pay me? And, you know, maybe you gave him a chicken, a couple eggs or whatever it was, right? It worked a lot better back then. And, you know, maybe we don't have to go quite back to that. But the bottom line is that doctors and patients need to come together now and say, the most important thing is that patient is the outcome that that patient is getting, you know, with whatever condition we're trying to deal with. And let's forget about all the other crap and let's focus on that and let that be our guide.

[Mike]

I mean, it's very Hippocrates.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yep, exactly.

[Mike]

That's him. Right. The Hippocratic oath.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yep.

[Mike]

How do we get the word hypocrite, which seems like a bad thing from Hippocrates? Well, I always think I'm coming from there.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Mike]

I don't think it must not, but it's pretty close. I mean, a hypocratic hypocrite. I don't know. Well, there certainly seems to be a lot of hypocrisy where there should be patient first.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Exactly.

[Mike]

Like genuinely first, do no harm.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah.

[Mike]

I mean, that relationship you're talking about, it's probably more robust between the voiceover guy who's doing the disclaimer on the pharma ad and the patient. Because, I mean, have you seen this in your own practice? People will call and say, hey, I just, I just saw this medicine. I'd never really heard of it, but I'm wondering if it's right for me. And, you know, I just went on the chatgpt and it says it is. And so on the one hand, yeah, riff on this. On the one hand, you're saying that people need to take more responsibility for their own health. And on the other hand, we're surrounded by just a sea of chattering and disparate voices and conflicting experts. How do we do the thing you say we should do without making ourselves mental?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

I think a lot of it, again, comes back to that fundamental question, right? Is the patient getting better or not? Because if that becomes your North Star, right, you as a doctor or you as a patient, right. If that's our North Star, that's going to be our best path forward. And, yeah, there's all this chatter out here, right. And, you know, there's a lot more doctors out there saying that, you know, don't listen to this idiot Ovadia cholesterol is the cause of heart disease. Than there are Ovadias out there saying, maybe we're wrong about this. But ultimately, again, the patients are not getting better. You know, when I, as a heart surgeon, the number one question I get right, the patient is there, they're in my office, or they're on the gurney, you know, we're going to need to do surgery on you. And they say, why? I listened, I took the medicine, my cholesterol is low. I was told that was going to prevent heart disease. And yet here I am on your operating table. Those are the types of questions that patients need to be asking more. And quite frankly, doctors need to be receptive to and asking more. Why does this keep happening if we think we have the cause and if it does keep happening, because we do what we think is the cause, maybe it's time to try something else.

[Mike]

I don't want to commit the crime that I just alleged was rampant, but what should my cholesterol be? When should somebody get a cholesterol reading and assign meaning to it?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, it might be, like the unemployment number. It might be completely meaningless.

[Mike]

Right. Well, let's talk about Chuck. You don't care, right? No. Yeah.

[Chuck]

No, but I mean, it's been two years, I think, since. Since we met, you know, but my cholesterol, I think, was like, 240, something like that.

[Mike]

And your doctor. Concerned? Not concerned.

[Chuck]

Oh, yeah, very concerned. Was like, you know, you need to be on a statin, stat. And I was on a statin before, you know, seeing Dr. Ovadia. And, like, I noticed muscle soreness, little brain fog. There were other stuff I didn't realize. No one ever told me that this could be a side effect of a statin until I spoke with Dr. Ovadia. And then I was like, okay, well, I'm going to give this a try. And. And I have. And the muscles went away. The brain fog.

[Mike]

You be the judge.

[Chuck]

I mean, I know I'm sometimes.

[Mike]

What do you mean, the muscles went away?

[Chuck]

Oh, that's. The muscles. The muscle aches went away. Yeah.

[Mike]

Okay. I think it's working great.

[Chuck]

Yeah. Right.

[Mike]

So the moral of your story is you. You still have the prescription for the statins in your medicine.

[Chuck]

Yeah. From, like, two years ago. Yeah, it's sitting in my drawer. I went through my. My drawer and found those again. I was like, oh, look at that. You know, I'll look on the date and see exactly when it was, because,

[Mike]

man, it's just so. It's, you know, this. The stakes are high, you know?

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Mike]

I mean, it's mortal stakes for people all over the place. They're scared. Yeah.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

And, you know, to empower the people. Right. And again, that's something I believe very much in. When your doctor is asking, is telling you about your cholesterol level. The question I want people to ask their doctor is, am I insulin resistant? Am I insulin resistant? Four words. Right? Nice and easy. Just ask them that. Right.

[Mike]

What should the response be from a doc who has his or her head screwed on straight?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Well, the response should be, we've tested you for this, and you are or you aren't. But the reality is, 99% of the time, the doc's gonna say, I don't know. We didn't test you for that. I may not even know what that is. Let me go back to my. Like I had to do, right? Go back to my medical textbook and say, I know I heard this term, but what is it? How do I test for it? How do I manage it?

[Mike]

How do you test it?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Right.

[Mike]

Like, what's the test I should ask for?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

If you're gonna get one simple test. It is a fasting insulin level. So when you get your blood work done, they've checked your sugar level, right? They've checked your cholesterol levels, but they haven't tested your insulin level. And that's the start of how we can figure out if you're insulin resistant, because that makes a big difference as to, you know, is my cholesterol problematic or not? Because the reality is, if you're not insulin resistant, your cholesterol can be quite high. And it's not going to be a problem because it's good quality cholesterol. That's the other part of this conversation that we miss. We measure quantity of cholesterol. We don't measure quality of cholesterol.

[Mike]

What does cholesterol do in my brain? That's important.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Well, your brain is cholesterol. It's like 70% cholesterol. Cholesterol makes up the structure of our cells. More importantly, right, in terms of the functions of cholesterol, it's part of your immune system, your hormones. Testosterone, progesterone, estrogen, vitamin D. These all get made from cholesterol. So, again, this concept that cholesterol is just in our bodies to kill us, right? And therefore, we need to drive the level down to as close to zero as we can get it. Again, it makes no sense. Why would our bodies even start making this substance that ultimately is trying to kill us? And those basic questions don't get asked enough. Why is cholesterol in my body? What are some of the good things that it was doing? And what can I do to make sure that it's doing all that good stuff without doing this bad stuff that we're worried about? And that all brings us back to metabolic health, insulin resistance. These are just the basic, you know, biochemical processes that come up over and over again.

[Mike]

We have to get those right.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Really start asking about what is causing heart disease.

[Mike]

It just. There just seem to be some fundamentals we must get right or nothing else is going to add up. Like, is vitamin D even a vitamin?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

No, it's actually a hormone. Technically.

[Mike]

I think so.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yep.

[Mike]

How did that happen? How did. That's like Pluto.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, it's my planet. Maybe it's not.

[Mike]

No, no, it's not like it's still there, whatever it is. Yeah, but why would a hormone be classified as a vitamin? Yeah, why would somebody make that decision?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, it's just one of those things that we misunderstood what we were looking at, you know, and then as stuff gets better, as our ability to figure out what things are doing in our body gets bigger, better, and the science evolves and just no one ever really goes back and corrects the mistake.

[Mike]

What other corrections are worth. Are worth ruminating on? I mean, if we're that wrong about cholesterol, right, like maybe sunlight, maybe vitamin D, maybe. It just seemed like we went through this phase of skin cancer.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

It's a big one.

[Mike]

I mean, look, you got a naturally ruddy glow here. Living down in Florida, I love the sun.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Rarely have ever put on sunscreen anymore and get out in the sun as much as possible. And. And one thing I hear often from people, right? When you stop eating processed food, vegetable and seed oils, you don't get sunburned anymore. Turns out that sunburn is these, what we call the polyunsaturated fatty acids, these adulterated fats that are in all the processed food in these vegetable and seed oils. When they get in the fat cells under your skin and now the sun hits them and they get oxidized, they fry, and they fry. And that's why you become sunburned, and that's why you probably get skin cancer down the line. And it turns out you get all those things out of it. And you shouldn't be fearing the sun. You don't have to fear the sun. The sun is another great example of something we've demonized. And yet again, we evolved as human beings in the sun. How could it possibly be right whether you believe in, again, evolution or creation? Right. How could it have possibly gotten to a point that this thing that literally gave us life is harming us?

[Mike]

Well, for a while there it was because there was this other thing called ozone, and then there was a hole in the ozone layer, and then we weren't being protected from the sun the way we normally were. But now the hole's closed.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

And don't forget to blame the cows for causing the hole.

[Mike]

Well, the cows were farting like crazy.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yes, that's need to get rid of all meat because.

[Mike]

Because the cows are gassy.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah. How deep in the rabbit hole do you want to go?

[Mike]

You know, I mean, I would. Look, this is a great conversation, it's super important, but I. I want people to hang on To a couple of things. Meat is medicine, in your opinion. The sun is not your enemy. That would you call it the polyunsaturated fats that get under the subcutaneous layer of your skin. That's actually the thing that's interacting with the. What? The ultraviolet ra. Causing your skin to burn. Fascinating. Do you remember. I guess margarine's nowhere on your good list.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Oh, boy. Wow, margarine again. You know, like you said earlier, right. What killed more people, you know, sugar or fentanyl. You can put margarine on that list as well. That was a. Again, just. And again, it all comes from, you know, the natural fat. That's gotta be bad so we can do better.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

This is one of the other things you start to see.

[Mike]

What is margarine really? People used to say was just plant fat, but what is that?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

It's a manipulated plant fat. Right. It's, you know, the vegetable and seed oils broadly are industrial fats. Right. These were lubricants for machinery. These were the things that we used to make candles out of. Right. And when the candle industry started going away because we had this thing called the light bulb, someone said, well, what else can we do with this?

[Mike]

Let's eat it.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Let's eat it. No, I mean, it's. It sounds slap it on bread, but it is true. You know, can we detoxify this enough that it doesn't immediately kill us when we eat it? And, you know, there we go.

[Mike]

And here are your guidelines, and here's an acronym that says it's good. And the next thing you know, and

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

oh, by the way, it lowers your cholesterol.

[Mike]

Lowers my cholesterol.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Let's put the heart disease stamp of approval on it and tell people this is, you know, how to fix heart disease, when in fact it makes the problem worse.

[Mike]

And don't forget my favorite part. Let's market it. I know. I can't believe it's not butter. I can't believe it.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Exactly.

[Mike]

Well, it's not. Can you.

[Chuck]

Can you believe it's petroleum or whatever it is? Yeah.

[Mike]

Can you. So, kibono, right? Who benefits most from seed oils? Who benefits most? I've got friends in the sugar industry. I've worked on a sugar plantation. These are good people. There are many, many jobs. They're providing for their families. It's a free market. It's some candy corn. Everything in moderation. I think you made a really good point before. It's hard to say. You can't walk it back to some real conspiratorial classic villain, twirling his mustache in the corner, laughing maniacally at the ruse he's pulled off. It's so much more complicated and there's so many other well intended, or at least not nefarious people who are going along for some ride. And they're nice people. Maybe they're in the Kiwanis Club and they volunteer at their church and they're raising their kids and yeah, they work down at the Captain Crunch factory or whatever it is. It's going to be really hard to pull this thread out of the fabric of the society we've built for ourselves without wrecking the garment.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, I think unfortunately we again are at the point where some large institutions need to be wrecked. Right. There's going to be some tears in the fabric of society. You know, again, we don't have a choice because we keep going this way. Understand, Right, that society is literally collapsing under its own weight. Right. We are going bankrupt as a country trying to take care of the sick people. We don't have enough healthy young people to serve in our military. Right. We're seeing all these things. I am seeing 30 year olds end up on my operating table. You know, and again, going back to all of this, what has been most noticeable to me in my 25 year career as a heart surgeon, it's that I used to operate on 70 and 80 year olds, some 60 year olds, the 50 year olds were rare. Today I routinely operate on 40 year olds and it's not that unusual that I have a 30 year old on my operating table these days. And so you say that's the unsustainable path. Keep following that and we are literally headed to the destruction of our society. So the way I look at it these days is we don't have a choice but to change course because, you know, we're on the Titanic and there's

[Mike]

the iceberg right ahead.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

We're headed right towards it.

[Mike]

What did you say? Collapsing under our own weight. Yep, jot that down. That's a good one. I'm just looking for titles at this point.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

There we go.

[Mike]

Although it's tough to beat. Stay off my kitchen table. Let's plug it shamelessly. How do the books differ? Because I see similar food groups on the covers of both.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, that is consistent. So stay off my operating table. That was the blueprint, that was the plan. You know, this is what you're going to do to stay off my operating table. Stay off my kitchen table. We go a little deeper into why and we talk about Those things like nutrient density, bioavailability, that really starts to inform people as they're trying to build their system. Yeah, right. I'm all about the systems and let's build the system. Let's give you the basic plan, let's, you know, give you some recipes, but let's talk about why these are the foods that should stay and these are the foods that should come off your kitchen table. So ultimately you can stay off my operating table.

[Mike]

How big a problem is money for your average patient or just the average person, like if to embrace the foods that you're recommending? Yeah, food deserts. Just the, the availability of the slop.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yep.

[Mike]

Versus how smart do I need to become?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Well, again, you know, it's. How do you look at the money? Right? Because eating that cheap, ultra processed available food, it's going to cost you more in the long run, right? Yes, meat is a little bit more expensive than that stuff. But it turns out, first of all, when you're eating mostly meat, you end up eating less, you're less hungry all the time. You're satiated, you're satiated, you're getting the nutrient density. So if we equated, how much does this cost per nutrient? Essentially you're going to find out that meat is a lot cheaper. And that doesn't even take into account that if you don't develop the diabetes 10 years from now, how much is that going to cost you? How much is it going to cost you when you have the heart attack? So when we start thinking about food in that context, eating meat becomes very cheap, very affordable and people can do this. You know, there is, when you get into the, you know, my community, right? And people start talking about meat, right? And they start talking about, oh well, optimal is the, you know, regeneratively raised grass finished, you know, beef. And you know, that's expensive. But I know people that literally they go to Walmart and they buy the, you know, 10 pound tube of the cheapest ground beef that they can find and they eat that, and they eat only that over a week, right? And their food cost has gone down dramatically and they are getting much healthier. You can actually go to the fast food place and you can say, give me, you know, two, three, four burger patties, nothing else. I don't want the bun, I don't want the topping, I don't want the fries, I don't want the soda. And that's going to be your food for the day. And I know people that do it and they get healthier. So you can do this affordably, you know, in the short term. And then you have to start thinking about how much more affordable it actually is in the long term, because you're going to be healthy.

[Mike]

What did it feel like for you not to lose 100? Because I can kind of imagine that. But I lost 40 and put back 10. I kind of want to be around 200 now. My body just. That's not true.

[Chuck]

You want to be 180?

[Mike]

Well, I want to be 185, but given the way I eat now, I didn't go full keto, but I took the carbs out. I eliminated desserts. I didn't cut the booze out, but I cut back on the wine and was just, you know, a vodka here and there, whatever, you know. But it was. It's like a magic trick.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Like when the first £20 come off and all of a sudden you're not hungry anymore, that is. I think I was probably in ketosis for a couple months, maybe, maybe. And I haven't been in a while, but I. But I know I can get back to it. And, you know, how much of what you're doing? Is this just another sort of keto diet or is it broader?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, I mean, low carb, I guess, is the best umbrella term for all of this. And a carnivore diet, right, that you're eating mostly meat or only meat? It's a version of that. And it all can work. Ultimately, what I tell people is the first rule is eat real food. And then the second rule is the more insulin resistant, the more metabolically unhealthy you are, the less your body can tolerate carbohydrates. So let's start reducing the carbohydrates. And those are kind of the simple concepts that I get people started on. And then, like I said, I tell them, meat is medicine. You can eat as much meat as you want. And if you give people that simple framework, they'll find their way. And some people, they're like full on carnivore, and the only thing they eat is meat. And other people are more, you know, on the low carb keto kind of spectrum. But it all ends up working for the most part. And there are certain situations where you might lean more one towards the other. And then I'm also honest with people. You know, again, this isn't a linear thing. Right. My weight has gone up and down some over the years since I lost all the weight, but. But I can get back to what I need to do. And I think we are on a path forward now where we at least have those long term, the solutions that will work long term for people and we can really get on top of all of this.

[Mike]

Should I be fasting?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

If you want. Again, I mentioned it earlier, when you eat a lot of meat, you're hungry less often.

[Mike]

Well, you also mentioned with regard to the insulin tests, and I want to make sure people really understand this because I want people to ask their doctors that question. Yeah, but you put the word fasting in front of it. Yeah, explain.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

So in that sense, we want to know your insulin level when you haven't eaten for about eight to 12 hours. Now, most people should have a period in their life where they don't eat for eight to 12 hours. But a lot of people, right? Yeah, it's called sleeping. Right. You know, if you sleep for the eight hours and you don't eat for an hour before or two hours before, and you don't eat for two hours after, you know, that's what we're going after. But understand, a lot of people can't even do that. So we want to get a sense of, you haven't eaten for eight hours, what is your insulin level? So that's kind of the, you know, when we talk about fasting, blood work, that's what we're talking about. Now when most people say, should I fast? Right. Should I work fasting into my dietary strategy? You know, my answer is, yeah, it's good not to eat as often. And there are some real shocking studies around this, right. When they actually look at how often people consume calories these days, whether they're drinking or eating it, the average person, I think, is somewhere between 12 and 16 times per day. Right. So again, if you're asleep for eight hours, it just never stops. Every hour, you know, you're getting something in. And that becomes another problem because again, when we go back to, you know, ancestrally, and we killed the beast and we ate, right? And then we didn't eat again for a while, okay? So your insulin level might go up a little bit after you eat, but then it comes down and it stays down. And again, most people today, they're constantly eating, so it's always up. You know, it starts to come down a little bit, it goes back up again. And, you know, we need that fasting insulin level to come down to the baseline it's supposed to be. And so that's the reason that the fasting insulin blood test is so informative, because we can see, okay, you haven't eaten for eight hours. If your insulin level is still elevated, you're in trouble.

[Mike]

Okay? So I asked my doctor, am I insulin resistant? I say to my doctor, I'd really like a cac.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

I think it was coronary artery calcium. Yep. CAC scan.

[Mike]

Anything else?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Those are the two big ones. If we did that at every doctor's visit, I think we would make a massive impact on heart disease because, again, it's going to lead to all these other conversations. You know, does my cholesterol matter? What's actually happening with the plaque in my arteries? What can I do about that? But if we just started at those two places, and maybe the third one I would put is, am I inflamed? Do I have inflammation? Another simple blood test called crp, C reactive protein. So throw that in. And again, we're not talking, like, expensive tests. A fasting insulin level and a CRP. Probably 30 bucks, maybe 40 bucks if you go pay cash for yourself. And this is something else I want patients to understand. If your doctor says, I can't do that, I don't know what it is. You know, I'm not going to order it for you. Say, great, go home, get on your computer. Many websites that you can do this at. I'll put a plug for one of my friends, ownyourlabs.com and I believe those two tests combined are going to be somewhere around 40 bucks. Do it once or twice a year, spend the hundred bucks on the coronary calcium scan, and you're going to vastly improve your health.

[Mike]

Tell me about your practice. Are you anchored at a particular hospital? How much of it is long distance? I mean, you and Chuck are 3,000 miles apart. How many of your patients are out of state?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

So I have a dual professional life. I'm still an active heart surgeon. And as I mentioned earlier in the conversation, there's a shortage of heart surgeons in this country. So I contract with hospitals that are in need of heart surgery services, and I travel to them and I take care of the patients there that need their heart surgery done. So that's my heart surgery practice. I have my preventative practice. That is all telemedicine is nationwide. I have gone through the insane process of becoming licensed in all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C. yes, I don't recommend it. Not for the faint of heart. And I have a team. I have a nurse practitioner. She's also licensed in all 50 states. I have amazing health coaches, and we have a nationwide telemedicine practice so we can see patients wherever they are. It's all done via telemedicine. We can find the testing that you need. You know, go get your labs done locally. Go get your coronary calcium scan done locally. And we do everything over telemedicine. So nationwide, all telemedicine. It's another outside the box approach to how we can start to solve these problems.

[Mike]

Yeah, because inside the box ain't working. Not for a lot of people. You know, I ask about fasting because my friend in Baltimore who really credits you with saving your life told me the other day that she fasts twice a week. She'll go 24 hours twice a week. I think it was Mondays and Fridays. She just zero. And it may have even been more than that. I think she was going 48 hours at a time. But she had that slap in the face. I mean, it was so shocking for her to be told that her heart was just in terrible, terrible trouble. So she wound up on somebody's operating table. And I guess came to you after that.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Right.

[Mike]

And I don't know, I guess you just file this under there is. There are no recommended guidelines that fit everybody. Because your answer to should I fast? Is maybe, you know, if you, if you want to.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

No. It turns out that fasting can be a great tool to utilize. You know, it's one of the things I put in the tool belt. And when people are dealing with significant insulin resistance, it can be a way to sort of accelerate the process. You start eating less carbohydrates, and then you start eating carbohydrates less often. And, you know, if we can get people to the point that they're doing, you know, 24, 48, 72 hour fasts, even beyond that. You know, I personally have done a seven day fast. It's not needed for everyone, but it can be a great tool and it's something we work in. But it's not something that I want to tell everyone that, you know, you need to be doing this. We probably do all need to be doing what's called now intermittent fasting. Right. So we said, we eat 16 times a day. What if we only ate twice a day? Right. And what if those twice were within, let's say, an eight or a 10 hour window during your day, so that you have 14 or 16 hours that you've not eaten during that day. That's a great way to start to improve things like insulin resistance.

[Mike]

How did we get so frightened of feeling hungry? Not being hungry? Yeah, because most people listening to this have never actually been hungry. But we've all said, and this goes to language too, you know, which I think is so powerful, but metaphorically, how many people have said, I'm famished, I'm starving. No, you're not. You're not. You know, I mean, after seven days, I might imagine that feeling. Here's the question, how do I know if I'm hungry or just feeling hungry?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah. Most of the time the answer, like you said, is you're just feeling hungry, right? So I always tell people some simple things, right? You think you're hungry, go take a 10 minute walk outside and come back in and decide if you're still hungry, drink a glass of water, you know, and come back 10 minutes later and decide if you're actually hungry or, you know, a lot of times we're just bored again. We're addicted, right? The sugar itself is addictive, the carbohydrates are addictive. We're programmed, right? Because the constant ads on TV and you know, a lot of us have built our whole social structure around eating. And listen, I'm all about community, right? You know, we talked about sun, right? Community is another pillar of health. But maybe it doesn't always need to be about eating, right? Maybe we can just like hang out and we don't have to eat, you know, and just enjoy each other's company. Not something we do in society anymore. So you're right, we've built a lot of social structure around eating and we've become programmed that we need to eat all the time. And the reality is we don't. And you know, and then we can also just start making some better choices when we do decide to eat. And like I said, it doesn't become a struggle. This is what I think most surprises people when they start doing this, right? Because you say to them something like, you know, you're gonna eat less often, you're gonna fast. And they're like, oh, I can't do that, I can't do that, right? But when we start with just sit down, the average person sit down and eat, let's say, half a pound of meat, take some ground beef, cook it up, eat half a pound and then see when you're hungry again. And the answer is, it's going to be a lot longer than you think it is, right? It's going to be a lot longer than. And people always argue, well, it's just about the calories, right? If you take the caloric equivalent of a half pound of beef, right, and you eat that as a Twinkie, right? A cupcake, when are you going to be hungry again? Immediately.

[Mike]

Right.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

You're not even. You didn't stop being hungry because you didn't get any nutrients out of that Twinkie. But the half pound of beef you got a lot of nutrients out of, and you're going to be hungry a lot less often.

[Mike]

See, my problem is if you. So you eat the half a pound of meat, but you also have half the baked potato, right? And maybe you have some of the beans, and then, you know, you don't want to be rude. You're with friends and somebody sent over a slice of cake, right? And so now you have all of it, and you go home thinking, ah, you know what I mean? Everything in moderation. But I had the important stuff. I had my half pound of meat. But now how do you like it's not. I screwed it up, didn't I? I poisoned it.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

This is something else we talk about in the book, right? A lot of these plant products have what we call anti nutrients in them, right? So you're eating what you think is, you know, it's a vegetable, it's healthy, right. Can't possibly be harming you. And you don't realize that it has chemicals in it that actually block the absorption of the nutrients. So those nutrients that were in the ground beef, right? That if you ate it alone, you get all of them. If you start mixing in some of this other stuff now, you don't get as many nutrients out of that ground beef. And, oh, by the way, all these nutrients that we were told are in these vegetables that are so essential to our health, we're not getting those either because we can't actually process those. And we got all these anti nutrients. So this is something else. And it's hard, right? People are like, no, that can't be true. It's like, no, it's true. Just stick with the meat. It's the most nutrient dense. It's the most bioavailable to us.

[Mike]

Here's some questions from AI. You ready?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

All right, I'm ready.

[Mike]

As a heart surgeon, what was the most common lie patients told themselves before they landed on your operating table?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

The most common lie that patients told themselves is that they don't have control over why they ended up on the operating table.

[Mike]

Huh. Deference of responsibility.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Act of God.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Not my fault.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

A lot of that comes from the medical system. Right. You know, again, the medical system tells people, you know, you can't fix this, only we can fix this.

[Mike]

Yeah. Or maybe. Maybe the magic medicine.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, exactly. And patients come to believe that if

[Mike]

you could install one warning Light on the human body, like the check engine light in a truck. What would it measure?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

It would measure nutrients. Ultimately, that's why we eat. And, you know, if we were able to see our level, right. And see how the different foods that we're eating are affecting those levels, that would probably be the one that I would put on there.

[Mike]

And where on the body would you put this light? Just aesthetically, so I can understand what this might look like.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, it needs to be, like, burned in the back of your eyeball. Right. So you can't avoid looking at it because you know what you do with the check engine light. Right.

[Mike]

I hit. Okay. Off change oil. Not today.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, exactly. Get out the duct tape to cover it with.

[Mike]

What's the healthiest thing you've ever seen someone do that had nothing to do with diet or exercise?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

I would go back to get out in the sun for that one.

[Mike]

Or sleep.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Sleep is a good one as well. But, yeah, ultimately I talk about the four pillars, right. Which are what we eat, what we do, how we sleep, and, you know, sun. Those are probably our four pillars of health.

[Chuck]

Sun is one of the pillars.

[Mike]

Well, this is going to blow your mind, Chuck, but new idea. Sleep in the sun.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

What?

[Mike]

Sleep in the sun. Wow.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Sleep in the sun.

[Mike]

That's like, get that hammock out, cook

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

your meat in the sun. That's how we're going to do it.

[Mike]

Suppose insurance companies only paid for treatments that improved health 10 years from now. How would medicine change overnight?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, I think the doctors would be a lot happier and the patients would be a lot happier.

[Mike]

We're not big on the delayed gratification thing.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Well, yeah, incentives. Right. You know, it always comes back to the incentives. And we got to realize that the insurance companies are not incentivized to keep people healthy. That's a whole nother. We might have to save that for episode two. But it's another kind of interesting aspect of all this.

[Mike]

It's just fascinating. That's the thing about what you do. It just touches everything. Everything.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah.

[Mike]

What belief. Oh, this is great. What belief about health did you hold with complete confidence 20 years ago that now makes you absolutely cringe? Yeah.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Cholesterol is the cause of heart disease. I mean, that's the big one. Of course, I look back and say, how did I fall for that? But again, it helps me understand how everyone else has fallen for it and how we start to undo that lie.

[Mike]

I think, you know, it's the way we fall for everything. There's a little frog in the boiling Water. And then there's, you know, a guy I love, Todd Rose. He would really enjoy that. He wrote a book called Collective Illusions.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Okay?

[Mike]

And he runs a think tank up in Boston called Populous. And he sat right there not long ago and told me that in his estimation, the greatest threat to our country was the manufactured consensus. Not just a consensus that's dangerous enough if it's wrong, but the ability now to deliberately manufacture. But it's how you get a mob. It's how you get certainty. And so I've talked to senators and all kinds of people in power lately who keep coming back to what China's doing with social media to influence our feelings toward data centers, toward AI, toward any number of things. And, you know, when I listen to this conversation later, I'm gonna be struck by the whole villain thing in the narrative. Where's the China in this whole crazy story about turning cholesterol into the villain who did that? And I think we've already talked about it. It's probably not one person, but just this unholy cabal of interests, the person

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

who gets bought up most commonly as maybe the one person that got us down this, you know, on this path. His name was Ancel Keys. He was a physiologist, a scientist, 1950s. So President Eisenhower has a heart attack while he's in office. Right. And Ancel Keys had started promoting this theory of cholesterol, saturated fat being the primary driver of heart disease. And Ancel Keys had enough influence that he influenced. He wasn't a doctor, but he kind of influenced the doctors taking care of Eisenhower. He ended up becoming a prominent figure in the American Heart association, which was a early kind of fledgling organization, but rises to prominence. And Ancel Keys is who a lot of people trace this back to. And Ancel Keys had done a study, a very famous study in the history of connecting saturated fat and dietary cholesterol to heart disease. It was called the Seven Countries Study. There's a famous figure where he lines up the amount of saturated fat that countries consumed and their incidence of heart disease. It's a straight line. It looks perfect. What was later discovered is Ancel Keys had data from 21 countries and hand picked the seven countries that fit on the line. And he didn't put in France, for instance, which had the highest consumption of saturated fat and the lowest incidence of heart disease around the time. Right. And it became known later as the French paradox. How come they don't follow this rule? And, you know, though there are examples like that, but, you know, that's One of the most prominent examples. And when you ask most people, you know, who started this whole cholesterol myth, Ansel Keys is the name that comes up over and over again.

[Chuck]

Well, he's in Vinny's movie.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah.

[Chuck]

There's a big thing about him in

[Mike]

the first one, I think. Are you still in touch with Vinny? You guys talk?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Oh, yeah. Saw him last week. Was with him in person. Yeah, last week. So he's okay?

[Mike]

He's doing well.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, he's doing well. And. Yeah. So his movie, Fat, a documentary. Another great resource on this, Nina Teichols. She wrote a great book called the Big Fat Lie that goes into this whole history about how we got here. And, you know, that's. As a. As a physician, that's kind of one of the things that's been fascinating to me about all of this.

[Mike]

What about breakfast?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

How did we get here?

[Mike]

Where do you put breakfast? I mean, just again, just from a marketing. Yeah. You know, the most important meal of the day.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah. Is it really a marketing slogan? That's where that came from. Developed by the Kellogg's corporation. Right. To sell their breakfast cereal.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

And so, you know, breakfast is. It's an interesting discussion these days, Right. Because on the one hand, you say, okay, you're not going to eat for 16 hours. Right. So that means that you ate dinner and then you eat lunch for a lot of people and you don't eat breakfast. It's certainly not the most important meal of the day if you are going to eat it. It's also a great opportunity. Eggs and meat, you know, bacon and eggs. Right. Steak and eggs. That's a great breakfast. And you're not going to be hungry again until dinner. Right. So I go back and forth on breakfast. A lot of days, I end up just not eating it because, again, I'm not hungry when I wake up in the morning. But if I am going to eat it, you know, it's one of the easier meals. Right. You just have to skip the toast and you don't want that cereal.

[Mike]

And so it's also a great rumination on. On dedication. The. The whole bacon and eggs routine. How'd that go? The bacon and eggs. The chicken. The chicken was committed. The pig was dedicated.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Mike]

Well, look, man, we're in desperate need of a guide, a docent, somebody to navigate us through. And those are the people that I'm most interested in talking to. And when I find somebody like that, who's also on a mission, who has spoken the truth to their own tribe, I think it's really important. I find it hugely important that you lost £100. And I think a lot of other people do, too, and I think many other people will minimize that. I just. In times like these, we want people

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

who walk the walk.

[Mike]

And I think you got just a great story to tell and I hope it reaches more people, because now I got Chuck, my dad is going to get this book, and my friend in Baltimore. And Vinnie, I really had no choice. You just wore me down.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

We finally circled the wagons. But I appreciate you having me on. I think this is a very important message that we just need to get out to more people. And this is ultimately, it's going to be a grassroots movement that gets this done.

[Mike]

Well, Stay off is the theme. Stay off my operating table is the first book. Stay off my kitchen table is the second. Is there a place where people can go who just want to keep up with what you're doing? Or maybe, I don't know. Are you taking patients?

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Yeah. So the practice is actively taking patients. IFIX Hearts is where you can find me everywhere. All the social media, iFixhearts.com will bring you to. If you're interested in the practice, you can go there and learn more.

[Mike]

I'm going to do that. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for making the trip.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Thanks, Mike.

[Mike]

All right, adios. Like us and subscribe. Before you go.

[Dr. Philip Ovadia]

Before you go.