Heart Disease – Antioxidants When Young

Transcript

“So they’ve done all kinds of trials, okay. For antioxidants and protection, you know, with the heart, with heart disease. And what they find is that, you know, they give people that are 60 or 70 or 50, and they give them one or two years of an antioxidant, vitamin E for example. And then they come with a big headline that says, “”antioxidants don’t work.”” Well, you’re giving it to people that have already started the oxidative damage process, right? And these people have already had all of the things that start the process at an early age. When soldiers were shot in Korea, they actually got permission from the families and they decided to do autopsies and look at the coronaries. And what they found these 20 year olds that were shot, not died of heart attacks. They found plaque buildup in their coronaries at an early age, which means in a Western society with a Western diet, we often have plaque in our coronaries at an early age.

And that progresses over time, depending on our risk factors, how much we smoke, what our cholesterol is, what our blood pressure is, whether we have diabetes, and whether we do other things that are unhealthy for us. So what I always tell people is that if you’re going to be healthy, for example, if you look at now societies, the Mediterraneans, who eat antioxidants at a young age, the Japanese who ingest antioxidants at a young age, they don’t get the same, you know, problem, unless they are smokers or they have other comorbidities that increase that risk. So to me, taking antioxidants means having a healthy lifestyle from youth on. Starting prevention at a later time or more downstream is not going to be as protective as starting it upstream, you know, at an early age. So if you’re gonna lead a healthy life, you got to do it in your teens and twenties and continue that lifelong rather than just do it for a short time and then see if it makes any difference. Because two years of an antioxidant is not going to reverse years and years of smoking for example.”