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Naren: hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Let It Flow podcast show. Today we’re going to be talking about several questions and this is we’ll be covering what’s covered in the book chapter four of little Flow by Doctor Edmund Kwan. So if anybody wants to follow along, you know just check out chapter four welcome Doctor Kwan how are you this afternoon?
Dr. Kwan: thank you very much I’m really excited to discuss this chapter
Naren: thank you. The first question I have for you doctor is, what exactly is high blood pressure and why is it common and why is it dangerous?
Dr. Kwan: really you know if you look at blood pressure high blood pressure, it is a disease of the blood vessels, that’s why that’s why this high blood pressure fits so nicely with in my book. So basically I think before we go on we need to know what blood pressure is? Blood pressure is simply how do we measure it? Well it’s a number that your doctor gives you it’s called systolic pressure and a diastolic pressure. So they give you two, two, pressures right two numbers one over the other and what the top number is called the systolic pressure and the bottom number is called the diastolic blood pressure. Systolic blood pressure is simply when your heart contracts and the diastolic blood pressure when your heart relaxes so that’s those are the numbers and generally the top number should be below 120 and the bottom number should be below 80. If it’s higher than that much higher than that especially if 130 and above 80 it’s called hypertension. It’s high blood pressure. So what causes high blood pressure? Well high blood pressure many have even recently recently have argued what is the really the exact cause of high blood pressure. I believe it’s a a disease of the blood vessel. When the blood vessel get injured from toxins and everything that we talked about before including high sugar injuries from various toxins including smoking and processed food, what happens is blood vessels gets injured and it leads to inflammation what happens when that happens the blood vessels becomes less flexible and much more stiff, and as blood vessels Narrows and and as they narrow what does that mean as it Narrows our heart now has to pump through a narrowed tube so if you can imagine heart is pumping and now the pipe is getting narrower in order to get the same amount of blood through that narrow tube their heart has to now work harder. So it’s putting a lot more a lot more load on the heart so heart has to work a lot harder to get the same amount of blood. So the heart starts starts getting a little bit bigger and it has to pump harder and of course heart even needs more oxygen as we discussed even before and and the high blood pressure, the damage that it does is basically as the as the blood pressure goes high, this elevated pressure it in itself causes further damage to the blood vessels. Why does it do that they call it they call it hydrodynamic damage, which means that now the blood is Flowing harder right through it and it’s that it’s it’s causing the pre that the pressure damage to the blood vessel wall. So that itself ends up causing that ends up causing damage to the blood vessels and it causes damage to the blood vessel then now the blood pressure even goes up higher. So basically in essence high blood pressure is due to damaged blood vessel wall. As the damaged blood vessel wall becomes more stiff and less flexible it is unable to expand. When the heart pumps the blood vessel has to expand to accommodate the blood flow, and if you can’t do that it becomes stiffer, it causes a rise in the pressure. So and and all the damage occurs with it and really, in the end what high blood pressure really caught where it causes the most amount of damage is when you have high blood pressure the capillaries those are the very smallest blood vessels in our body that where the oxygen exchange occurs, those capillaries get destroyed. Our capillaries, why do they get destroyed? Well when when there’s high blood pressure the capillaries are very fragile in general. When the friends since they’re fragile when the blood pressure goes up if if those fragile blood vessels will burst, if the blood pressure goes up. So in order for our body to protect we develop the protection protecting mechanism. It’ll shut off. So as the blood pressure Rises to a certain level capillary simply shuts down. So you can imagine what this is doing to the self when the capillary shuts down cells don’t get enough oxygen. So really where high blood pressure does the most amount of damage is at the capillaries and basically when capillary shuts down the cells don’t get enough oxygen or nutrients. So that’s where the damage really damage occurs from high blood pressure. Well the danger of high blood pressure is that the, so we know the mechanism. When there’s a damage to blood vessel the blood vessel gets stiff. The main damage to the high blood pressure is twofold. One is that cells don’t get enough oxygen when you have high blood pressure, right, and the next is as I said the heart has to work a lot harder
Naren: right
Dr. Kwan: when there’s high blood pressure. So now when the heart has to work a lot because now if your blood pressure is high, there’s a there’s blood pushing back at the heart right because there’s elevated pressure so now heart has to work harder to pump the same amount of blood not only through tightened blood vessel but also that there’s a higher pressure within the blood vessel, right, that pipe. So now the heart has to work harder. So people
Naren: Got it
Dr. Kwan: people who get heart attacks guess what they have? Many of them, majority of them. High blood pressure
Naren: right right
Dr. Kwan: right so it does major damage, heart attacks and strokes, very closely related to high blood pressure
Naren: right, let’s go to the next question doctor how does diabetes affect our blood flow?
Dr. Kwan: well I went over some of this in the sugar section when I talked about how sugar does all the damage. So diabetes Now is a is an extension of what sugar is and really it’s a magnified version of what sugar does to our body. So when you have a diabetes now you’re talking about you have chronically elevated sugar in your body whereas sugar is simply when you eat sugar you eat sugar one day and you don’t eat the next stage so that your sugar level can fluctuate but when you have a diabetes you have a constantly elevated blood sugar level in your body, right, and the reason for that is that you is your cells are no longer sensitive to insulin anymore and they don’t respond. So sure sugar remains High despite whatever your insulin level is. So the way to treat patients with diabetes is is with with one of the ways is just with insulin, but there are other ways. So basically diabetes means that, we’re now to a point where our cells are completely insulin resistant and that and that they no longer respond or the, the, there are other part of diabetics and they’re called type 1 diabetics or insulin dependent diabetics. There’s both type 1 and Insulin dependent and these are patients that simply their pancreas does not have the ability to make insulin. So whether you’ve damaged it and doesn’t make insulin or you’re born with autoimmune disease that that destroys your cells then your pancreatic cells that you don’t make enough insulin, then that’s a whole different issue. Now you can’t make insulin, so you develop diabetes, sugar goes up and there’s nothing to check it to make it go down, right, through insulin so you need exogenous insulin to keep the sugar down. So there’s type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes. Type 1 diabetes in general is fairly low less than five percent of the population have type, type 1 diabetes meaning that they it usually occurs in younger people it’s they used to call juvenile diabetes. They occurs in younger people and it’s they think the this is related to autoimmune disease. The body attacks the pancreas and the and the and the and the cells can no longer make insulin. So these people starting at a very young age, they need to have insulin shots. So that’s type 1 diabetes, majority of the people who have diabetes in a society are type 2 diabetes and type 2 diabetes majority of or all the type 2 diabetes start with adequate amount of insulin. Their pancreas has no problem producing insulin. But what happens is as they eat tons of sugar and as they gain weight, basically the pancreas and the insulin becomes resistant. They no longer respond to sugar levels so the insulin level goes up in their body and this is called type 2 diabetes. First starts as insulin resistance, and then go on to type 2 diabetes. So the pancreas is perfectly able to function normally. It produces insulin however it just doesn’t do the job because the cells don’t respond to it any longer because there’s so much sugar around. So to really to counteract to counteract the this, the best way to really counteract type 2 diabetes is one of the counter, just eat less sugar right eat less sugar or burn the sugar in your body and and lose weight. So those are the those are the mechanisms that you can do to really reduce the reduce diabetes. In fact many people who who are very obese and they have type 2 diabetes, when as they lose weight their diabetes become much better and some of them are even even reverses. They can even reverse type 2 diabetes in patients who lose a good amount of weight and so as in diabetes, as I said already in the sugar part, the damage is it it the the damage it inflicts is mostly on the blood vessels. It really damages and diabetes what diabetes does that’s unlike any other diseases, I call this the ultimate disease of our circulatory system. Diabetes is the ultimate disease, why is that because it affects blood vessel in an entire body and it not only affects the bigger vessel, it affects the capillaries as well. It affects the smallest of the blood vessels every blood vessel in our body that’s why people who suffer from diabetes get not only heart attack and stroke they get the they get retinopathy which means they have visual problems and they can go blind. They have kidney problems they have they lose limbs every part of their body gets damaged, in type 2 in type 2 diabetes or diabetes diabetics in general. So it because it affects every blood vessels makes the blood vessels lose their flexibility and it stiffens them, and they get much more atherosclerosis and so what ultimately comes down to is that the cells suffer. Every cell in the body gets less oxygen and nutrients and that can lead to all the problems including everything that we’ve outlined before including, including, including, chronic inflammation and including cancer. So diabetes increases your cancer risk, remarkably increases your cancer risk as well
Naren: let’s talk about the next question I have. can you give us an overview of heart disease as a circulation problem. That’s something you talk about in the book so
Dr. Kwan: yeah
Naren: how is this a problem?
Dr. Kwan: yeah so we’ve talked about already heart attacks before where I cover some of this
Naren: yeah
Dr. Kwan: so heart disease is basically to kind of reiterate it and it’s so important because our heart is the focal point of our circulatory system. So it’s worth going over I think over and over again so people cannot people can understand this subject. Basically heart disease is a disease of the coronary artery. These are the arteries that basically carry oxygen and nutrients to the heart muscle so every part of our body has blood vessels that carry oxygen and nutrients to that part of the body heart itself although it pumps the blood, heart itself needs oxygen nutrients as well. So they have coronary arteries and coronary arteries are all of the heart, it provides oxygen nutrients to the heart muscle but those those arteries get blocked up. They get stiff, they lose their flexibility and plaques form on them and they narrow and they can lead to heart and this narrowing in this disease of the blood vessels of the heart is called the heart disease, and the heart disease ,what causes heart disease? Well heart disease is caused by smoking diabetes and sugar problems and even processed foods and toxins, and so really you need to you need to reduce the intake of these kind of things. We know that people who smoke end up with much higher instead of heart disease. We know that diabetics get much higher heart disease, but you know we we never really the fact that Sugar causes heart disease or the processed foods cause heart disease, these are really not discussed. Now we’re saying the sugar problem, even not even diabetic, but sugar problem where your sugar levels go up you’re on a high sugar diet, that can cause heart disease. That really to me that is what causes real heart disease, not cholesterol, because sugar causes inflammation, it causes blood vessel stiffness and loses flexibility and it even increases the free radical formation. So sugar causes heart disease cholesterol does not. Cholesterol is again there to assist, yes, it involved in plaque yes in the plaques cholesterols are found. When you look at the plaques of the patients with heart disease, yes it’s made up of cholesterol but it’s made up of a lot of other things as well, but cholesterol is a way for the injured vessels to injured vessels to repair to, repair danger vessels cholesterol is one of the things that is needed. So cholesterol is not causing the heart disease, because that cause heart disease. Again, I have to really emphasize that. So the things that we must do is losing weight eating a whole food diet increasing physical activity and stop smoking and having a low sugar diet these are things that will really help you in preventing heart disease. Not eating less cholesterol or lowering your cholesterol artificially.
Naren: so thank you everyone for listening to this podcast, and look forward to part two where we’ll be talking about the relationship between Cancer and blood flow. if you like this series please share it, write a review for us. I’m sure you already have the book but if you don’t grab it from Amazon it’s called Let It Flow by Doctor Edmund Kwan. Thank you everyone very much
Dr. Kwan: thank you very much Naren.
In this episode, focusing on chapter 4, Dr. Kwan speaks in depth on blood pressure and the dangers of high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease.