Dr. Derrick DeSilva on Heart Disease Prevention

June 2, 2022

Dr. Hotze and his special guest, Dr. Derrick De Silva, discuss integrative and natural approaches to reducing inflammation and preventing heart disease. Discover how you can protect the inside of your arteries, naturally.

Podcast Highlights:

3:23: Folks, cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease.

3:33: Well, 60% of people that have heart attacks have normal cholesterol, 60%. Cholesterol is not the villain. It’s inflammation, the inflammatory response.

4:05: That’s where the damage and the disease begins, is if you’ve got inflammation within the vasculature, within the arteries, the veins, the capillaries, that’s where the damage is to the inside of the blood vessel, which is called the endothelial glycocalyx, which is a slippery, gel-like layer. That’s where disease is and that’s where inflammation and the problems begin.

4:31: Treat the underlying cause, which is inflammation, not cholesterol.

5:20: Well, the underlying inflammation could be, for example, diabetes. Diabetes is an incredible inflammatory condition.

7:57: We find people that are overweight, whether they have adult-onset diabetes or not, they tend to run high blood sugar because they’re eating a high-carbohydrate diet. That’s causing the inflammation, so folks, one thing you could do is change your eating habits.

8:30: All of the data that is out there is suggesting that the Mediterranean diet is the number one diet for this…which is a combination of proteins, nuts, berries, fruit, etc.,…and vegetables.

8:49: I am not a fan of any kind of an extreme diet. It needs to be a balanced diet. For people to say, “Well, I’m only going to eat eggs and bacon for the next three months,” no, that’s ridiculous. That’s not the way we are made anthropologically to eat. We need to eat a variety.

9:42: …insulin is what is called a lipogenic substance. Every time you spike insulin, you build fat, so you have to control that spike.

10:14: What’s your insulin level because if your insulin level is elevated, you will never lose weight. It’s just not going to happen.

10:21: Another thing that causes the inflammation in the arteries is various infections. This can be any bacterial or viral infections. They are found in the clots, I know in the atheromas they find in the coronary arteries, they find bacterial or viral particles in there.

11:01: Another thing that there’s some physicians and dentists that are very big on the fact that your teeth and your gums, if they’re not healthy, they will produce viruses and bacteria, gram-negative bacteria, too, that produces toxins that cause the inflammation in the arteries, so you’ve got to keep your teeth healthy.

15:10: Now, the third thing that can cause inflammation is metallic substances like mercury, aluminum. We cook in aluminum. The dentists, for decades, have been putting mercury amalgams in your teeth.

17:35: One of the best things that you can do to chelate heavy metals are B vitamins, so if you have access to somebody that can do IV nutrients, you can get a nice high dose of some B vitamins.

20:22: Root canals are one of the worst things you can do because every tooth is connected to a meridian within the body. People that have had problems with, for example, back pain, various ailments within the body, are all related and connected to the teeth, so be very careful where you do a root canal.

25:24: Well, in the heart, when you get the inflammation of your arteries, that breaks down the glycocalyx, which is the inner lining of your arteries. It’s a very thin film over the endothelium, which are the cells of the inner lining of the artery.

28:19: The average woman puts 128 different chemicals on her skin every day. The average man puts over 75 toxic chemicals on his skin every day.

29:34 Why are they starting menstrual cycles earlier? Why are young men having testicular cancer at such an earlier age? Why are they having gynecomastia, the enlargement of the breast tissue? These are all endocrine disruptors not only from the environment, but from the toxins that we’re putting on our skin.

35:02: I’ve been working on this now for, I would say, 15 years. There is a seaweed. There’s a type of seaweed that has the same building block structure as the glycocalyx.

35:22: The glycocalyx is a slippery, gel-like layer that is above the endothelial layer, which is a single-celled layer in the inside of the blood vessels.

37:10: That molecular structure that we have, that we get from this seaweed, replenishes, repletes, gives the body the ability to rebuild and to re-heal because there’s no other way to do it.

41:09:  I wonder if it’s between the seaweed that they eat in Japan, between the natto that they eat in Japan, no wonder their incidence of heart disease is so low. Not only are they rebuilding the glycocalyx, but they’re destroying, they’re getting rid of the little clots that are within the system. I mean, it’s genius. I call it the dynamic duo.

Podcast Transcription:

Dr. Steven Hotze: Hello. I’m Dr. Steven Hotze. Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. I believe that you need to have a physician and a staff of professionals who can coach you on a path of health and wellness, naturally, so as you mature, you enjoy a better quality of life. Today, we’re going to talk about the number one leading cause of death in America. It’s not COVID-19 or infectious disease. It’s heart disease. It has been and always will be heart disease.

I have with us today a close friend of mine, a brilliant physician from New Jersey, Dr. Derrick DeSilva. Dr. DeSilva is on the staff of the Department of Medicine at Rariton Bay Medical Center in New Jersey. He’s also on the teaching faculty of the JFK Medical Center in Edison, New Jersey. He’s been on the planning committee for Age Management Medicine Group and a past president of the American Nutraceutical Association.

I first heard Dr. DeSilva at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine several years back. I was so impressed on his discussion about heart disease and the cause of heart disease, I decided I was going to get to know him and learn everything he could teach me about the treatment of underlying heart disease. Dr. DeSilva, thank you for joining us today.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: It’s a pleasure, sir. Thank you very much for the invitation.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Well, in our society today, with all that’s going on with COVID-19, it’s got  everybody’s attention, which has taken our eye off the real ball. The real ball is heart disease. Why don’t you talk about your transition from being a doctor that was more conventional in your approach to underlying health issues and heart disease and how you made a transition to more natural approaches on how to treat the underlying cause of the problem, rather than treating the symptoms that cause issues.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Dr. Hotze, that’s something I started from the very beginning of my career. This is something that I’ve been doing for 35 years. I was born in Sri Lanka and this is the way my grandmother treated us. If you had any kind of an ailment, anytime I had an exam or a test, my grandmother would go outside. She’d pick some gotu kola. Gotu kola is one of the most incredible brain nutrients. She would make something called mallung, which was she would chop it up, put a little bit of coconut oil, a little bit of garlic, a little bit of ginger with some nice brown rice and that was my breakfast in the morning. This is something that I’ve always done and I’ve always thought needs to happen.

There’s no question that Western medicine has a role. We all know that, but there’s also a role for finding the root cause, as you said, from Eastern medicine, which is what is really the focus and I’ve always believed that we have to use the best of both worlds. That’s the transition that I’ve always gotten into.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Well, let’s discuss heart disease and the underlying cause of heart disease. If we ask the average person on the street, of course, and even the average physician, what’s causing heart disease? What is the main cause of heart disease? They’d all tell us cholesterol.

Folks, cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease. We’re going to discuss with Dr. DeSilva the underlying cause of heart disease and what role cholesterol may or may not play in that.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Well, 60% of people that have heart attacks have normal cholesterol, 60%. Cholesterol is not the villain. It’s inflammation, the inflammatory response. If somebody has inflammation in their wrist, for example, or their fingers, it’s not just your wrist and your fingers. If you’ve got inflammation in your wrist and your fingers, you’ve got inflammation the rest of your body, your eyes, your brain, your heart, and, specifically, the blood vessels.

That’s where the damage and the disease begins, is if you’ve got inflammation within the vasculature, within the arteries, the veins, the capillaries, that’s where the damage is to the inside of the blood vessel, which is called the endothelial glycocalyx, which is a slippery, gel-like layer. That’s where disease and that’s where inflammation and the problems begin.

Treat the underlying cause, which is inflammation, not cholesterol. It was a great sales job that was done about 50, 60 years ago. It was a great sales job and they’re still doing it. Well, no, if you can’t use it for cholesterol, well, maybe we can use it for something else. That’s what they’re looking for.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Right. If inflammation is the underlying cause of heart disease, the arteries become inflamed, the glycocalyx, which is the superficial part that covers the endothelial cells that line the artery, if that breaks down and becomes inflamed and the endothelial tissue and the cells become inflamed and clots are formed and that occurs, what has caused the underlying inflammation?

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Well, the underlying inflammation could be, for example, diabetes. Diabetes is an incredible inflammatory condition.

Dr. Steven Hotze: It’s the high sugar levels.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: The high sugar levels. There are various infections. There are certain viruses, cytomegalovirus, the herpes virus, perhaps some of the other viruses that are around today. They all cause inflammation.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Well, we know that the COVID-19 virus, the spike protein on the COVID virus, causes inflammation of the arteries. In fact, it’s what causes the clotting.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Well, it causes the inflammation, so what happens is, and let me just back up and describe what this glycocalyx is. If you take a fish out of water, the fish is very slippery.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Right. Correct.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: You leave that fish out of water for, let’s say, five minutes, what happens? You lose the slipperiness of the fish, which is that layer, or that glycocalyx layer, and now you can just grab it and it’s not slippery anymore. Within the blood vessels, that layer is called the glycocalyx. It’s a layer that has a lot…it’s a very, very complicated layer. It’s a layer that is, literally, alive. That layer has so much physiologic function, it’s hard to even believe what this layer does.

When you lose that layer, you expose what is called the endothelium, which is a single, cell-like layer. If you think of shingles on a roof, the shingles are overlaid on top of each other on the roof. There’s a little bit of an overlay. When you lose the glycocalyx layer, what happens is when blood flows, the shingles lift. Clots start to form on the lifted shingles. That’s the genesis of how the disease begins. We have to do everything that we can to protect this slippery, gel-like layer so that these clots and things don’t form.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Well, so important to that would be to address the underlying cause of the inflammation like, as you mentioned, in diabetes, you have elevated sugar levels. Of course, anybody that eats a high-carbohydrate diet that would contain wheat products, potatoes, rice, corn, all those simple carbs are made up of sugar molecules. That’s a starch. It’s sugar molecules hooked together.

What happens is when you eat that, it dissolves in your mouth. The enzymes break it down in your mouth and in your gut and, all of a sudden, you have high sugar levels. That can cause inflammation. We find people that are overweight, whether they have adult-onset diabetes or not, they tend to run high blood sugar because they’re eating a high-carbohydrate diet. That’s causing the inflammation, so folks, one thing you could do is change your eating habits.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Absolutely.

Dr. Steven Hotze: What you recommend as far…Now, that’s one of the first things that can cause it. We’ll talk about the other things that cause the inflammation. What can they do dietarily, what can they do to change their eating patterns? What would you recommend as far as eating healthy to improve or decrease the inflammation that occurs from high sugar?

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: All of the data that is out there is suggesting that the Mediterranean diet is the number one diet for this.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Which is?

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Which is a combination of proteins, nuts, berries, fruit, etc.

Dr. Steven Hotze: And vegetables.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: And vegetables, of course, of course. I am not a fan of any kind of an extreme diet. It needs to be a balanced diet. For people to say, “Well, I’m only going to eat eggs and bacon for the next three months,” no, that’s ridiculous. That’s not the way we are made anthropologically to eat. We need to eat a variety.   You can eat, for example, complex carbs. What are they? Beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils. These are complex carbohydrates that don’t break down into sugar or if they do break down into sugar, it’s not a spike of the sugar. It’s a slow, gradual release is what we want because we don’t want these spikes because the insulin that is produced during these spikes-

Dr. Steven Hotze: Is what causes the inflammation.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Is what produces the…insulin is what is called a lipogenic substance. Every time you spike insulin, you build fat, so you have to control that spike.

Dr. Steven Hotze: That’s important, too. It’s the insulin. It’s not just the sugar, but the sugar causes the hormone insulin to be produced by the pancreas. When that occurs, that causes inflammation.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Right. That’s one thing that I always check in my practice are insulin levels. For people who come in and say, “I can’t lose weight. I’m doing everything. My weight is not coming down.”  What’s your insulin level because if your insulin level is elevated, you will never lose weight. It’s just not going to happen.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Okay. Another thing that causes the inflammation in the arteries is various infections. This can be any bacterial or viral infections. They are found in the clots, I know in the atheromas they find in the coronary arteries, they find bacterial or viral particles in there. They’ve done that before, right?

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Absolutely. Absolutely, specifically, things like chlamydia. Chlamydia is one of those viruses, it’s one of those bacterias that will do that. The herpes simplex virus. There’s all kinds of bacteria and viruses that do this.

Dr. Steven Hotze:  Another thing that there’s some physicians and dentists that are very big on the fact that your teeth and your gums, if they’re not healthy, they will produce viruses and bacteria, gram-negative bacteria, too, that produces toxins that cause the inflammation in the arteries, so you’ve got to keep your teeth healthy.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Right. One of the things, Dr. Hotze, that I tell my patients and I’ve done shows on this also, when you go to get your teeth cleaned, it is one of the most…it’s important. It’s absolutely important that you get the plaque removed, etc., but the day before you go to get your teeth cleaned, you need to take something like a higher dose of Vitamin C or a higher dose of glutathione or a higher dose of andrographis paniculata.

These are all herbs that will kill viruses and bacteria because when you clean the teeth, you bleed. Not only do you bleed that you end up spitting out when you rinse your mouth, but you’re also bleeding into your circulatory system, so that’s how those organisms that are around your teeth are also going to pass through your heart. This is something I always do the day before, the day of, and the day after. This is something that I’ve not heard anybody else talk about is cleaning, doing something like a high dose vitamin C, 4000, 5000, 6000 milligrams of vitamin C and some kind of an antibacterial. Again, I like andrographis paniculata. Andrographis is an herb that is an adaptogen, that is a very potent antiviral/antibacterial, and, actually, also an antifungal. I do it the day before, the day of, and the day after.

Dr. Steven Hotze: So that’s very important. This brings up this whole concept of teeth. Farmers understand this, folks. There’s an expression around it that says don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. What do you think that means? Well, if somebody comes to give you a horse, why would you look at their teeth? Don’t look a gift horse in the teeth. Well, when you go to buy a horse, you look at a horse’s teeth to see if he’s healthy or not. You look at a cow’s teeth and you see if they’re healthy or not. A farmer knows that, that if they have bad teeth, you don’t want to buy them because they’re not going to be a healthy animal. When you get a gift horse, it’s kind of a insult to somebody say, “Well, let me check its teeth before…”

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: …before I take the gift.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Before I take the gift. Now, farmers understand this very well. I know that because recently, we bought two horses. One thing that my foreman does, when we went to look at the horses before we bought them at an auction, he looked at their teeth to make sure their teeth were healthy.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Interesting.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Farmers understand that, but we don’t. I mean, what you’ve told us here, I’ve never had a dentist tell me “be sure before you come in to take something that’s antibacterial/antiviral, whether it’s vitamin C, whether it’s the herbs that you recommended, or even an antibiotic.” Occasionally, if they do surgery, they’ll say, if they’re going to take out a tooth, they’ll tell you to take an antibiotic.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Well, that’s why if you’ve had, God forbid, you’ve had a valve replacement or something like that, why is it that you have to take an antibiotic? Because the blood is going to circulate through the entire heart and it’s going to go through the valve.

Dr. Steven Hotze: It’s going to carry the bacteria and they get…

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: They get stuck on the valve.

Dr. Steven Hotze: They get stuck on the valve and then get a big problem.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Then you have a big problem, yes.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Anyway, keep your teeth clean, folks. Make sure you have good dental care and be sure you take something before, the day before, the day of, and the day after.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: When you do your teeth clean, absolutely.

Dr. Steven Hotze: That’s right. Now, the third thing that can cause inflammation is metallic substances like mercury, aluminum. We cook in aluminum. The dentists, for decades, have been putting mercury amalgams in your teeth. We cook with aluminum. There’s cadmium. There can be lead in the water, all these things, I understand, are highly inflammatory on the coronary arteries.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Not only on the coronary arteries, but also in one of the most overlooked organ systems within the body – that’s the liver. I’m telling you, Dr. Hotze, I have seen this across the board over the past 35 years. One of the things that I’ve really noticed is people that have nervous system disorders, if you go back and ask them, “What kind of work did you do?” Most of them are going to say, and you have to really investigate this, plumbers. They’ve been around toxins. They’ve been breathing heavy metals. Those heavy metals go into the body and they get stuck in the liver. The hepatocyte, or the liver cell, cannot clean this toxin, so what happens? You end up having damage and disease that affects not only the heart, but more importantly…

Dr. Steven Hotze: The brain.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: …the nervous system and the brain. Alzheimer’s disease, all the neurodegenerative diseases of the brain are going to be affected.

Dr. Steven Hotze: I wonder if that may be an underlying cause of Parkinson’s.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Absolutely. You just hit the nail on the head. After 9/11, what happened was that I’ve had three patients in my practice now. They’re currently in my practice all with Parkinson’s disease and they were all a couple firemen and the other gentleman was one of the recovery workers there. All have Parkinson’s disease. They have no other risk factors. It was the toxins from the environment in the air. No question Parkinson’s disease is part of the neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Most of the diseases we have, folks, come from the toxins that we get in our body that are coming from the environment, in our foods, and in the air that we breathe. It’s hard to stay away from that, so we want to be able to detoxify ourselves. What kind of detoxification program do you recommend for people? Do you use any chelation, any type of chelation and tell us about that.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: One of the best things that you can do to chelate heavy metals are B vitamins, so if you have access to somebody that can do IV nutrients, you can get a nice high dose of some B vitamins.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Talking about a Myers’ cocktail or something?

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Yes, and then a little bit more, so the B vitamins and even orally you can chelate some of those heavy metals. That’s number one. The number two, the other good chelator and one of the best things you could do also besides the B vitamins to clean the liver is glutathione. Glutathione is a good liver cleanser. N-acetylcysteine is another good chelator.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Which converts to glutathione.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Which converts to glutathione. It’s a precursor. Also, something like saunas, infrared saunas. I have an infrared sauna in my home. I get in that infrared sauna three times a week. After I get out of there, first of all, I feel like I’ve worked out for an hour because I’m drenching wet after 30 minutes. I get it up to about 135 degrees. It is phenomenal to clean out your system. What I really like are things like milk thistle, schisandra, glutathione…

Dr. Steven Hotze: ALA?

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Well, there’s alpha-lipoic acid and alpha-linoleic acid, so yes, if you’re using alpha-lipoic acid, that’s another great liver cleanser. In fact, it’s one of the things I use to treat people with hepatitis C and then the other thing is turmeric, curcumin. Curcumin is not only an antiviral, but it will also help clean and cleanse out the liver.

Dr. Steven Hotze: These are very important points to make. We’re going to put this list on the podcast and have this available for you so you can know how to go through a good detoxification program. We have three things that we talked about that cause the underlying inflammation and that is:

1) The infectious diseases, and many of which come from your mouth and your teeth, having poor dental hygiene.

2) Secondly would be high sugar levels, which lead to high insulin. That causes the inflammation.

3) Also, the mercury and other metals that we get in our system.

Those are three main sources of inflammation. Is there any other source of inflammation?

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Well, things like high blood pressure is an inflammatory condition. Any of those, again, people overlook stress, the idea of stress. One other thing that I want to mention to you very quickly before we go, people that have problems, and this is something I heard 20 years ago. I did a tour of the US with 10 cities in, I don’t know, in 10 days. There was a dentist that I was with. Root canals, one of the worst things you can do because every tooth is connected to a meridian within the body. People that have had problems with, for example, back pain, various ailments within the body, all related and connected to the teeth, so be very careful where you do a root canal.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Right. As a matter of fact, Dr. Huggins, who was a dentist, was real big on warning against these root canals. I’ve heard many lectures on it. I let somebody do a root canal on me and then I realized I shouldn’t have done it after I heard a lecture. I had that tooth pulled.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: There you go.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Because you have some micro-cavities up there and networks that even though you remove the infection in the root canal, you still have it in the tooth. That seeds these bacteria into the body, which attack arteries and attack your heart.

Well, we’ve been visiting with Dr. DeSilva today about heart disease. When we come back, we’re going to talk about some very important natural treatments that you can use to treat underlying heart disease, if you have it already. How can you cure it? How can you return your heart to a normal state? Thanks for joining us. We’ll be back right after this message.

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PART 2  

Dr. Steven Hotze: Welcome back. We’re visiting with Dr. Derrick DeSilva out of New Jersey. Dr. DeSilva is one of the leading experts in the field of antiaging or you like to call it aging…

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Age Management Medicine.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Age Management.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Optimal aging.

Dr. Steven Hotze: He believes, like I do, as we mature and age, you want to be alive, alert. You want to be full of vitality and enthusiastic about life. You shouldn’t be sick and tired of being sick and tired. I know many people, even some of you listening to this program, are sick and tired of being sick and tired. There’s no reason to feel that way. I’m right now, currently, I was born in 1950, so you can figure out how old I am. I feel like a million dollars. Dr. DeSilva looks like a million dollars, but he’s 20 years younger than I am.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: No, I’m not that much younger than you. I was actually born in 1957.

Dr. Steven Hotze: There you go.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: So, just got my Medicare card.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Good grief.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: I thought it was my dad’s. I said, “Why are you giving me this card? This says Derrick DeSilva.” My wife pointed out to me that it said junior, so it was mine.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Well, in the first portion of our program, we visited with Dr. DeSilva about heart disease. Most Americans right now, at least over the last several years, have been fixated on viral infections, particularly, the COVID virus, as a leading cause of death among Americans. It’s not and it never was. The survival rate for people that get the so-called COVID infection…which doesn’t even exist anymore. Now there are variants to the COVID infection. The COVID-19 is long gone. Now there are variants that have come out and which tend to be, so far, they’ve been much milder than the infection. Those people that contracted that infection and were diagnosed with it and treated, had a 99.99% survival rate.

Now, in America, the leading cause of death is not viral illnesses or respiratory illnesses, much less COVID-19. The number one cause of death is and has been heart disease. We discussed this on the first portion of our program, the underlying causes. We discussed inflammation as a major cause of underlying heart disease, rather than cholesterol. Cholesterol is used by the body as a band-aid to cover the inflammation. Think about taking a piece of sandpaper and rubbing it on the back of your hand until it bleeds. That’s inflammation. That’s what the inside of your artery looks like when it gets inflamed. Your body doesn’t like that, so what does your body do? It eventually clots off the bleeding and forms a scab. Then the cells grow scar tissue and eventually, the scab comes off and it’s healed.

Well, in the heart, when you get the inflammation of your arteries, that breaks down the glycocalyx, which is the inner lining of your arteries. It’s a very thin film over the endothelium, which are the cells of the inner lining of the artery. When the inflammation comes and breaks down the glycocalyx and breaks down the endothelium, it’s raw and your body doesn’t like that. It’s going to deteriorate.

Think about it. Every time your heart beats, every time it beats, it pulls that artery. Think about if you can see the vein on the back of my hand, if that was the left anterior descending artery, every time the heart beats, it stretches and compresses that vein. Well, that’s what happens in the heart. It compresses and stretches the arteries. If they’re inflamed, they would deteriorate.

Well, God’s built into the body a healing mechanism. It takes lipid and protein. It’s called lipoprotein, which is protein with cholesterol and it starts to band-aid on top of the inner lining of the artery. Then it assimilates calcium in there to harden the artery so it doesn’t deteriorate and break down, which initially makes good sense, but over time, if you don’t stop the inflammation, next thing you know, your artery is hard as a rock. I’ve seen that. You have, too. Then you throw a clot down there and it clots off and you got a heart attack. Then you have problems.

What we want to do is stop the underlying inflammation. We said there were, really, three major causes of it. One is infections. Primarily, those infections that come from your…they can come from other parts of your body, but the teeth are a big problem. Infection in the gums, infection in the teeth, root canals, all these will spread bacterial products and viruses into the bloodstream and seed into the arteries of your heart and other arteries in the body, but the heart’s under the biggest stress. That’s where it causes inflammation, so you have infection.

Secondly, you have high levels of insulin caused by high-carbohydrate diet when you get a lot of sugar in your diet, wheat, corn, and potatoes and rice all convert to sugar, raises the insulin level. You get inflammation.

Then the third thing is when we’re exposed to heavy metals. Those metals would be like mercury amalgams. There’d be aluminum, when you cook with aluminum. You may get lead in the water. You’re breathing this if you’re in an industry…for instance, you mentioned the plumbing industry, where you’re soldering with lead and those sort of things. You’re inhaling that. That will cause tremendous amount of toxic damage to not only your coronary arteries, but as you discussed earlier, to your liver. That causes a host of problem. We talked about how to detoxify that.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: One of the other things I want to mention, too, excuse me for interrupting you, that people forget, there are so many environmental toxins. The average woman puts 128 different chemicals on her skin every day. The average man puts over 75 toxic chemicals on his skin every day. You say well, men don’t use cosmetics and makeup. Well, you do. You use shampoo, use conditioner. You use soap. You may use hairspray. You may use gel. You may use a body lotion.

These also are called endocrine disruptors, so the skin, which is the largest organ system of the body, is also something that we must become aware of. Look at the ingredients on your skincare. Dr. Hotze, this is something recent for me. Within the past two years, I’ve started to look at how these chemicals become what are called endocrine disruptors. They go into the system and the body looks at this and say, “Oh, this looks just like estrogen. Well, let me displace the estrogen that’s there and let me bind to it.” Well, that’s an endocrine disruptor. Why are younger girls developing breast tissue earlier?

Dr. Steven Hotze: Right, having menstrual…

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Why are they starting menstrual cycles earlier? Why are young men having testicular cancer at such an earlier age? Why are they having gynecomastia, the enlargement of the breast tissue? These are all endocrine disruptors not only from the environment, but from the toxins that we’re putting on our skin. Excuse me for interrupting you.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Really, and that’s the fourth cause of this inflammation in the system is the petrochemicals that are in the environment.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Absolutely.

Dr. Steven Hotze: I neglected to mention that. I should’ve mentioned that. I’m glad you brought that up because that is a huge, huge problem. We know this. In males over the last 50 years, their sperm counts are down to about half of what they were 50 years ago. Testosterone levels are low, we see.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: In the ground, in the ground. 30 year olds, 30 year olds are coming in to see me because they have no libido. They have erectile problems. I do their testosterone levels.

Dr. Steven Hotze: It’s in the gutter.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: They’re 200. I said, “You’re 30. How can this be?” My testosterone levels are four times that. I mean, what’s going on here? It’s the endocrine disruption and again, which is, again, provoking inflammation. Remember one thing, folks. I’m going to say this very carefully. The blood vessels down below are the same size as the blood vessels here in the heart. I will never treat erectile dysfunction without doing a stress test because those blood vessels are the same size. If you’ve got inflammation down below, you’re going to have inflammation here, so be very careful when you go to your doctor and say, “I want testosterone.” Make sure you know what the underlying, root cause is.

Dr. Steven Hotze: That’s very, very important. I remember I saw a young man who was in the insecticide business came into see me when he was 28 years old. He had no energy. He couldn’t think clearly. He just, he felt terrible. He wasn’t overweight particularly. He just felt terrible all the time, aches, pains. He said, “I’m just, I’m 28. I feel like I’m 58,” which, by the way, I’d love to feel 58 again.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: I was going to say, “Hey, be careful what you’re saying here, Dr. Hotze.”

Dr. Steven Hotze: Anyway, he didn’t know that. Anyway, he said, “I feel like I’m an old man now.” We check his testosterone level. It was just in the gutter. I mean, it was in the flat gutter. We got him on testosterone. It was like we made a new man. He just woke up because testosterone, folks, this is for you men. Most everybody thinks testosterone is just for sexual function and libido. That’s wrong. It’s for initiative. It’s brain function, initiative, assertiveness, sense of well-being, self-confidence, moods, goal orientation, your drive, your directive. It’s your decisiveness, your analytical ability. All these are brain functions and the hormones, both male and female sex hormones, affect your brain and the neurochemistry in your brain.

Testosterone also affects your muscle tone, muscle mass, cardiovascular function, and your romantic moods and inclinations and abilities. That’s just part of it. It’s very, very important for cardiovascular function and for your musculature. I go to the club and I play golf. I see guys in the locker room, guys, some are younger than me now, most are, but there are some older guys. I’ve noticed for years all the older guys, they’re pale. They’re pasty. They look washed out. They’re not ruddy. They don’t look healthy. They’re not because their testosterone levels are low.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Absolutely.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Testosterone enables your bone marrow to produce red blood cells and so what you find in older men is that their blood counts tend to get lower. They may not be anemic, so to speak, according to the lab values. They’re always down in the very low range. That’s why they look pale and pasty and their muscles are drooping. They’re low in testosterone.

This, as Dr. DeSilva has mentioned, occurs in people now that we’re exposing ourselves to these endocrine, which is hormone glands, endocrine disruptors that disrupt the hormones in our body so they don’t function. We depress. When you get all these petrochemicals, they’re xenoestrogens. They act like estrogenic products. They get into males’ bodies and they turn down and turn off the production of testosterone.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dr. Steven Hotze: It feminizes males.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Absolutely.

Dr. Steven Hotze: That might be one of the reasons we see all this craziness going on about boys thinking they are girls or something like that.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Estradiol. You know something, that’s a great point because what’s happening here is they’re starting to aromatize at a very young age. They’re converting their testosterone to estrogen, so they’re converting their testosterone to estradiol. You just hit something. I just didn’t even think of this. You just really hit something on that, but there are other things that we can do. There are things like Arterosil. I mean, let’s…

Dr. Steven Hotze: Let’s talk about that. That’s going back to the glycocalyx. We have the inflammation. We’ve been exposed to the petrochemicals or we’ve been exposed to viruses or bacteria. We’ve been exposed to metals. We’ve got high sugar levels. We’ve got this inflammation. We want to heal it, so one thing you have to do is you have to do everything you can to stop the exposure first.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Correct.

Dr. Steven Hotze: I mean, you want to do that, but you still have the underlying problem. What can we do to help heal that?

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: I’ve been working on this now for, I would say, 15 years. There is a seaweed. There’s a type of seaweed that has the same building block structure as the glycocalyx.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Remind us again what the glycocalyx is.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: The glycocalyx is a slippery, gel-like layer that is above the endothelial layer, which is a single-celled layer in the inside of the blood vessels. This layer was not discovered, was only looked at maybe 30 years ago, 40 years ago.

Dr. Steven Hotze: You know what? You mentioned that and I heard your lecture, I don’t know, three years ago or so, the first time I ever heard a lecture on glycocalyx ever. I never heard of it before and it’s been around 30 years. How many other doctors like me never heard of it before?

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Well, one of the cardiologists that I know very, very well, he came up to me. He heard me present this data. He said to me, “Derrick, do not ever give up on this because this is the key to…you have hit on something that is the key to what’s happening with heart disease.” I looked at him and I said, his name was Caesar, I said, “Caesar, I’m not a cardiologist, but you know what? Cardiologists don’t know this and you need to teach them.”

This is what I’ve been doing. It’s become my mission because this particular seaweed has the same molecular structure as the inside of the blood vessel, which is the glycocalyx, the slippery, gel-like layer. The analogy that I have for this is I have a driveway at home. It’s a very large driveway. That driveway has blocks in it. It’s a blocked driveway. It’s a driveway that has certain pieces of block that if one of those blocks get cracked, what do I do? Well, what the guy said to me was, “What I want you to do is I’m going to give you a half a pound of these blocks, so over the years, they’re going to crack. Just take one out and put a new one in.”

That’s exactly what this does. That molecular structure that we have, that we get from this seaweed, replenishes, repletes, gives the body the ability to rebuild and to re-heal because there’s no other way to do it. Yes, you can reduce inflammation. Yes, you can get rid of infection. Yes, you can get rid of heavy metals. If you don’t have this, then it’s going to be a problem. Where are you going to get it from because these blocks are made of glycoproteins, peptidoglycans, different other complex sugars that rebuild the inside of the blood vessel.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Right. When I first heard about this, I heard it in a lecture about three or four years ago at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. It was Dr. DeSilva speaking about this. I just sat there like, and I’ve always been interested in heart, always been an interest of mine, and I never heard of the glycocalyx before. I thought to myself…

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: What is this guy talking about?

Dr. Steven Hotze: Well, I thought to myself, where have I been? I mean, why doesn’t everybody know this? It’s so obvious, showed all the microscopic pictures of it and of everything that had happened. He recommended the product called Arterosil, which is not even a prescription product. It’s a product that doctors can give through their offices and through their practices. There’s no drug at all on the market that heals.

Remember folks, drugs are toxins. They have to be detoxified by the liver. Pharmaceutical companies cannot patent anything that’s natural. That’s just, you can’t do it, so the pharmaceutical companies don’t promote anything natural. They’re always going to promote drugs, pharmaceutical products, all of which are toxins. Nobody is sick because they have low levels of pharmaceutical drugs in their body. They’re sick because either they’re toxic or they’re not getting the right nutrients in their body to build the proper structures from the endothelium to the glycocalyx to all the other organs of the body and the cells that are needed. Tell us about this product, Arterosil. I was fascinated when I heard the lecture and that there was some way that you could heal the glycocalyx.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Right. That’s exactly what I was just talking about. These are the building blocks. You’ve damaged the driveway. You have these particular blocks, building blocks within the driveway. You’ve damaged them. There’s no way to replenish them. You have to go back to your basement, bring some of the block backs up, the bricks back up and redo them.

Now, there’s another product that I really, really like. It’s called Nattokinase. Nattokinase is what is called a fibrinolytic agent, so if you’ve got…

Dr. Steven Hotze: Fibrinolytic, fibrin is like scar tissue and lytic means breaks down, so fibrinolytic agent breaks down scar, breaks down tissue.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Breaks down the tissue, so breaks down the clot. You’ve damaged your glycocalyx. Clots are starting to form. What are you going to do? Yes, you can rebuild the glycocalyx, but what about the clots? This is where something called nattokinase comes in. Nattokinase is from fermented soy. Not only do you have to ferment the soy, but you need to put a certain bacteria in there so that the natto is produced. I don’t know if you’ve ever had natto. Have you ever had ferment…

Dr. Steven Hotze: I haven’t.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Don’t. Don’t. I was in Japan. I was with a very, very, very important gentleman who was just like an emperor. This guy was unbelievable. We were at dinner and he gave this to me. I said, “I got to eat this. I got to eat this.”

Dr. Steven Hotze: Because you’re here and he offered it, right?

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: Dr. Hotze, I was so close to blowing my cookies that it was unbelievable. I don’t know how I swallowed it. It tasted so bad, but they eat it there all the time, the fermented soy. I wonder if it’s between the seaweed that they eat in Japan, between the natto that they eat in Japan, no wonder their incidence of heart disease is so low. Not only are they rebuilding the glycocalyx, but they’re destroying, they’re getting rid of the little clots that are within the system. I mean, it’s genius. I call it the dynamic duo. I mean, it’s unbelievable. The two of them should be done together.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Right. That’s Nattokinase and because of Dr. DeSilva’s recommendations on this over the last three years, we recommend this to our individuals. We do heart scans on all our new guests. Those individuals that have problems with atherosclerosis, we know they have inflammation, so we recommend those products. These products are over the counter, too, which means they’re going to be very inexpensive compared to cardiac drugs.

Well, Dr. DeSilva, this has been a great discussion with you. We’ve learned so much about heart disease, the underlying cause of heart disease being inflammation, and inflammation caused by high insulin levels from sugar, from bacterial infections, and from metal and from petrochemicals. We’ve learned how we can treat those by changing our eating patterns, staying away from those chemicals, and keeping our bodies healthy and our teeth healthy and then taking something to repair…that would be Arterosil and Nattokinase. Thank you for joining us today.

Dr. Derrick DeSilva: My pleasure.

Dr. Steven Hotze: Thank each one of you for joining us.

Categories: Blog, Blog English, Heart Health

Tags: arterosil, Dr. Derrick DeSilva, heart disease prevention, nattokinase for heart, protect arteries of heart, repair arteries of heart naturally

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