What's Really Destroying Your Arteries & The New Science of Reversing Plaque | Dr. Anthony Jay

**Jesse Chappus** (0:00)
Coming up on today's show.

**Anthony Jay** (0:02)
There's two things that people have to be aware. Number one, what actually causes plaque? I think it's insulin resistance, that's the root cause. One of my favorite scientific studies was done on 28,000 people, and it was looking at the hazard of heart attacks, not just LDL, and they found that insulin resistance, it was a 6.4 hazard of getting a heart attack. And the next highest was hypertension at 2.2, which is a huge gap, and triglycerides were 2.1. And by the way, LDL was 1.38. It was literally the lowest on the list. Almost 50% of Americans under age 40 are already insulin resistant. So then your heart starts to starve, and then your heart doesn't really know how to burn fats, but it's got to do something, so it starts absorbing fats. And of course, LDL is a fat transporter, that's what it's doing. So now you've got a bunch of lipids in your arteries and in your heart, and then guess what the doctor's gonna blame? The fat. I've had people reverse plaque as quickly as six weeks, but usually it takes a few years for that hard plaque to reverse, and I'm always focused on the hard plaque. I want your arteries to get rid of that calcium with the vitamin K2. Your body's amazing at healing itself. If you give it the right tools and the right environment, most people don't. In our culture, it's hard to do, but you can do it.

**Jesse Chappus** (1:17)
Anthony, what is actually causing plaque to build up in the arteries?

**Anthony Jay** (1:22)
Going right to it. So, I think in order to understand plaque in the arteries, you have to understand human metabolism. And most people don't. I mean, I talk to people every day doing these health consults. You know, I do genetic consulting. And I ask people, what are the energy sources that humans have? Sometimes I get photosynthesis. Sometimes people tell me it's sunshine.
We have two energy sources predominantly. Your car has one energy source. It's gasoline, right? Humans have two. It's sugar, usually called glucose, and fats. So your body is either burning sugars or in fats. It's pretty simple, right? And you can burn creatine, and there's all kinds of other exceptions, weird exceptions. But those are very unusual, weird exceptions. They're not normal metabolism.
So your heart, right? If we talk about individual organs, your heart is very unique.
If you put sugar and fats and test them on different cells, and I've done a lot of these actual experiments myself, you'll see that they prefer to burn sugar. Brain cells prefer sugar. Liver cells, kidney cells, whatever. You can take different cells from different organs. They'll preferentially burn sugar. That doesn't mean sugar is better for them. They just prefer it because it's faster energy. And you can actually burn sugar outside of your mitochondria. You can burn it in the cytosol inside your cell. It doesn't have to go into the mitochondria, into the little batteries inside the cells. You can burn it outside the batteries. Fats, on the other hand, you have to use the mitochondria.
And the point is, it's slower energy. It's more efficient. It's cleaner energy. The analogy I like to use is a diesel truck. Sugar is like a diesel truck. There's black smoke coming out the back. It's dirty energy. Fats are more like a Tesla. There's no emissions coming out the back. It's just cleaner energy. But the point is, most organs and cells in your body will burn sugar if given the choice. And again, I'm not making a judgment call. I'm just saying whether that's good or bad. I'm just saying that's what they'll do. But the heart is very unique. It does not do that. It prefers to burn fatty acids, even if you give it a choice. So the problem is, even from baby food, it kind of pisses me off. I've got a bunch of kids. It sounds like you have kids too.

**Jesse Chappus** (3:41)
A couple, yeah.

**Anthony Jay** (3:42)
You go to the store and you look at the baby food and it's all carbs. It's barely protein, almost never fats. It's like applesauce and parade pears and parade peaches. And we're starting our little babies off on just carbs, carbs, carbs, carbs, carbs, sometimes seven meals a day, which is insane. And then what slowly ends up happening over our lifespan is we become sugar addicted. Our heart can burn sugar. It doesn't prefer to, but it slowly adapts to that environment. And it starts burning sugar.
And it actually becomes very bad at burning fats. There's, there's extremely different metabolic machinery when you're burning fats versus burning sugar. People think of it as kind of like a switch, like a light switch, you turn it on and off. It's not like that. It's very complicated. There's a lot going on. There's thousands of different things going on.