No.1 Heart Surgeon: Cardio Is A Waste Of Time For Weight Loss! Philip Ovadia

**Philip Ovadia** (0:00)
Cardio is not effective for weight loss.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:03)
Why isn't it helping me lose weight? It seems like a bit of a head spin.

**Philip Ovadia** (0:05)
There are two reasons. Number one is...

**Steven Bartlett** (0:10)
That's bad news, isn't it?

**Philip Ovadia** (0:11)
That is bad news.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:12)
Dr. Philip Ovadia, the world-renowned heart doctor, has conducted over 3,000 heart surgeries.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:18)
His book, Stay Off My Operating Table, Fighting To Make America Healthy Again.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:22)
When you were 40 years old, you described yourself as being more bigly obese.

**Philip Ovadia** (0:26)
I was 100 pounds heavier than I am today. I was going to end up on my own operating table. I came to realize the true root cause of our health problems. Sugar is more addictive than heroin. Processed food is addictive. 88% of adults are not healthy. And 600,000 people die from heart disease every year. If we don't change the course in the next 50 years, we're not going to have a society left.
A very young woman, a 30-year-old, ended up on my operating table. And I had to go tell her young children, I'm sorry that we weren't able to save your mother.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:09)
Was her heart condition preventable?

**Philip Ovadia** (1:11)
Yes. The surgeries that I do shouldn't need to be done in the first place. I want people to be healthy again.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:19)
Dr. Ovadia, what is the diet that's going to keep my health intact?

**Philip Ovadia** (1:24)
That's really the million dollar question. So.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:37)
Dr. Ovadia, tell me the mission that you're on, and also tell me why you chose to pursue that mission.

**Philip Ovadia** (1:50)
So I am on a mission to normalize health. I want people to be healthy again. And it really was my own personal journey that set me off on that mission.
I found myself at a spot that I was a very unhealthy heart surgeon. And that's going to sound pretty surprising, I think, to people. You know, they think that here I was, here I am, a heart surgeon, in many ways at the pinnacle of medicine, and trying to get people back from the brink of death. And yet, I was headed down that same pathway myself. And I was so unhealthy myself. And I had to figure out how to save myself. And that has really opened my eyes to how much we need to save society at this point. Because we are a very sick society, and we need to be saved.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:56)
When you say you were an unhealthy heart surgeon, give me a picture of what that looks like in reality.

**Philip Ovadia** (3:00)
Yeah, so I was morbidly obese. I was 100 pounds heavier than I am today. I was pre-diabetic. And I was in my late 30s and realized that I was going to end up on my own operating table, so to speak. I was walking the same path that so many of my patients had walked down. I had family history. My grandmother died of heart disease. My father has had heart surgery.
And I knew the path that I was headed down, but I didn't know how to change that pathway. And that's the problem that I'm really trying to solve for people, to get them to realize how they can change what many of them see as their destiny.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:48)
When you think about our destinies, we often look at our parents and think, you know, that's probably the clearest indicator I have of where I'm going. Because of, you know, genetic and environmental factors, what, when you look to your parents, what did you see?

**Philip Ovadia** (4:02)
Yeah, so my parents were both overweight, had both struggled with obesity their entire lives. And as I mentioned, my father had developed heart disease. And I was under that same impression that there really wasn't much I could do because it was genetic.
But I think that's one of the biggest myths we need to dispel around medicine today. Very little of the sickness that we see so prevalent in society around us is truly genetic. And the reason that we know this is because human genetics don't change that quickly. Yet in the past 100 to 150 years, we've seen this explosion, this epidemic of chronic disease, things like obesity, diabetes, even heart disease, the very condition that I have spent my life treating, was relatively rare, was almost undescribed 100, 120 years ago. And so we know that human genetics don't change that quickly, yet we see these diseases developing so quickly. And that should tell us that it's not genetic. Yet almost everyone, when they go to their doctors and they ask, why did this happen? The common answer they're going to get is because it's our genetics.