How we can build cardiovascular health? What are the physiological causes of heart disease in humans?

Podcast 390 about Rubeplex

Martin: Hello everyone! This is Martin Pytela for the Life Enthusiast podcast, the internet, radio, and television show! Today we have the pleasure of talking to Spencer Feldman, the CEO and chief formulator at Remedy Link. Spencer comes to us with a very important message. Spencer, much like myself, had to develop his methods outside of the mainstream. He is not a classically trained medical scientist. He has come to his wisdom through the school of hard knocks, learning in the field, which from my perspective is way more valuable because when I was trying to get help with my medical problems, I certainly did not get help from the well trained professionals. Maybe he can tell us more about that. Spencer Feldman, good day!

Spencer: It is nice to be here again Martin! So I thought today we might talk a little bit about vascular disease, or heart disease – you know, what causes it, and what kinds of things we might be able to do to put ourselves on the track to healing.

Martin: Yeah! Well, vascular disease, that to me would be the most popular way of ending your life prematurely in North America, in the Western industrialized society, right?

Spencer: Yeah. One of the first things I remember reading was that humans are one of the few species that get heart disease. Guinea pigs, fruit bats, monkeys, and humans are an anomaly out of the 4,000 animal species. Only these four don’t make their own vitamin C. What it’s called is a pseudo gene; the L-gulono-gamma-lactone oxidase gene is what makes vitamin C, that’s a mouthful, right? And in us, it’s a non-operating gene, that’s why it’s called a pseudo gene. So to give you another example of a pseudo gene, we have the genes that code for tails and fur, but they don’t operate. So that’s what gives us our human form. I don’t really know if the people that end up with wolfman syndrome are people who maybe have those genes turned on. I am not really sure.

Martin: I’ve heard of people with a vestigial tail for example.

Spencer: Sure, right. There are pseudo genes that we don’t want on, you know, I don’t want a tail, but there are some pseudo genes that I think would have been good if we had fully functional. One of them is the one that makes urate oxidase, which is what helps a person to get rid of uric acid. And because that’s a pseudo gene in humans, we have a propensity towards gout. Another one is the photo lysate gene, which is what allows the DNA to be repaired from UV damage. And we don’t have that gene running, so we are prone to skin cancer. And the one for the vitamin C is not an operating gene, we can go through all the steps of creating vitamin C, except the last one, so we don’t make vitamin C.

Martin: I guess I would put on the margin here that our creator was pretty sloppy.

Spencer: Well, to be fair, what we do have instead is a spectacular vitamin C recycling system. Our red blood cells are different from most other animals in that on the surface of the cells there is a mechanism to recycle vitamin C very efficiently. So we don’t need that much, but we still need it. And so I believe this is the entryway for explaining why heart disease is so common in humans and so rare in the animal kingdom. What I’d like to do is I’d like to take your audience on the path of discovery I took about trying to understand why we have such a tendency towards heart disease as humans, how that progresses, and what we can do about it.

Martin: Before you launch that, I would just like to pre-frame it with the following. Heart disease is very prevalent, most people don’t know that they have it. In fact, for many of us, the first warning we receive is a fatal heart attack.