Basically, it's a hyped-up fish oil. It's the omega-3 oils but here's the thing.
High triglycerides is incredibly prevalent. You see it in 25... maybe 30% of
certain demographics, certain groups. And do they really need to be taking the
newest, most expensive treatment, especially when it's something like fish
oil? Well, there's actually something that's even easier, less expensive than
any of that. And there seems to be again, as usual,
a major focus on medications, prescriptions, and maybe not enough focus
on lifestyle.
Look at the newest, the latest, the biggest thing in high triglyceride
treatment. It's icosapent ethyl. There was a New England Journal article
about it in January of 2019 then the following editorials. Now it is a very
impressive medication. So first of all, what is triglycerides? And again,
what are the ignored treatments? Back to the biochemical part, you remember a
triglyceride is a glycerol. You add three fatty acids to it and the glycerol
hooks the three fatty acids together. In other words, it's that subcutaneous fat.
Most of us recognize that as saddlebags. Now if you look on the
internet, most folks will say, "Well look, there are six ways of helping elevated
triglycerides." You may have seen some of my videos as well. I talked about high
triglyceride over HDL ratio, and that is a very important thing. Most patients
that come to me, if they haven't had any lab tests and they don't have an OGTT
(oral glucose tolerance test) or an insulin survey, almost all of them will have it... a
triglyceride and an HDL because you'll see both of those on the cholesterol
panel. Again, if you look at the internet, they'll say okay here the causes and
there's a lot of agreement over what you can treat and what you can't treat. For
example, as you get older, triglycerides tend to get higher. Their gender is an
issue that you can't change either. Males are more likely to have high
triglycerides. There are other hereditary factors and other diseases which
sometimes you can't control. You can control the amount of sugar that you eat
and that is a big deal. That is the lifestyle issue that I go over time and
time again. Now there's a lot of agreement that you can control your
obesity. I would say it's not quite so easy. I think there's a lot of people,
obese people, walking around that b-bear testament to that fact I'm not
gonna go down that bony hole of talking about the success rates. Well I will just
real quick I'm having most of my patients over half coming into me now
are coming in from the YouTube channel and over half of them come to me saying,
"You know what, I've already lost over 30 pounds." They're doing it by
decreasing sugar, decreasing carbs (not just sugars but all carbs), stabilizing
their insulin values, and then decreasing that eating window. So yes, you can
control obesity, believe it or not. And despite all of the obese people you see
walking around, there is a much bigger way of controlling obesity. A much better
way and it's happening more and more. Then they get to as we mentioned in the
beginning of this video, medications like expensive medications
like icosapent ethyl. Now there are some places in the internet, you start looking
around, you'll see neglected treatments for how high glycerides, lose weight, cut
your sugar intake, go consider going keto, consuming fiber, eating nuts, get your
omega 3 fatty acids from the real thing eating fish, exercise, limit your alcohol,
and even do intermittent fasting or Prolon fasting. Now let's just go ask
a quick question: what is hypertriglyceridemia? "Hyper" means too
much; "hypo" means too little. So hyper is too many triglycerides. That's what we're
talking about. "Emia" means in the blood. So again, it's
too many of these triglycerides in the blood. Now why do you get that with
insulin resistance? Why do men get that? Why are they? Why do you get it
as you're older? Because you tend to get inslin resistance quicker. If you're a
man, quicker as you get older. And quicker as you get more obese. Insulin (as many
people know) decreases blood sugar by opening up the channels in our cells. So
we decrease blood sugar. But what most people don't know is that insulin
decreases fat burning or decreases the burning of triglycerides.
Hence the book and the concept, "Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It."
That book makes the statement that you know what maybe we're not getting fat as
we get older because we're eating more. Maybe we're eating more because we're
getting fat. Now what does that mean? Well, we're getting insulin resistance. So
our insulin is cranking up and this insulin cranks up our ability to burn
that fat and decrease those saddlebags, decrease that subcutaneous fat. As we
increase that in spacial insulin level, we decrease our ability to burn that fat.
If you have more interest in that book, its up. It's the endocrine theory of
weight gain. So this was a brief jump, a brief video looking at a little bit
different perspective on hypertriglyceridemia, high triglycerides.
We'll cover more in a series. Thanks for your interest.
My name is Ford Brewer. I started off as an ER doc then I became very
frustrated with the fact that most things that bring people into the ER
were preventable, like heart attack and stroke. I went to John Hopkins to get
training and ended up running the program there in prevention. There, I
trained dozens of docs. And again that was three decades ago. Since then, I've
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And even most importantly, helped thousands of patients prevent things
like heart attack and stroke. Waiting for the disease and hoping
for a cure for this kind of devastation doesn't work. Come to Louisville on
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get a complete evaluation. In addition, you get an arterial scan called the CIMT.
To get the right one of those is fairly
difficult. So I'm looking forward to seeing you there.
Thanks.