Full Day, Full Log, Full Plant-Based Living: Cardiologist Dr. Kim Williams, TMAO & Heart Disease, Rec'd Podcasts
5.20.2020
HAVE HEART DISEASE OR LOVE SOMEONE WHO DOES?
How are you growing forward with health knowledge to reverse the damage to your cardiovascular system? Are you changing your eating habits for the sake of yourself, your kin, or the earth yet? Still reaching for the same harmful foods? Need even more resources and inspiration?
I’m never sure who these are reaching and/or how far that soul may want to go into the weeds of clinical research, but it seems about time to go over the Plant Proof interview with Dr. Kim Williams, because it is a beacon of evidence-based information and illumination.
I have listened to this interview 3 times now, have held back because I thought it may be too heady for y’all, but I realized that is underestimating my audience, and there may be folks that still doubt the truth and doctor-lead research I relay.
What is Plant Proof? A podcast hailing from Australia, lead by Simon Hill (Nutritionist and Physiotherapist), focused on illuminating folks how to optimize their health.
Who is Dr. Kim Williams?
Born and trained in Chicago, Dr Williams was a professional level tennis player and coach before choosing rather to pursue a career in cardiology. Since 2013, he has headed up the cardiology department of Rush University Medical Center – where many of his colleagues have also found their way to adopting a plant-based diet.
Dr Williams has served on numerous committees and boards at the United States national level, including – but certainly not limited to – the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology, the American Heart Association, and the American Medical Association. Among other presidencies throughout his distinguished career, Dr Williams was the 2016 President of American College of Cardiology.
Kim is the inaugural Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention (IJDRP). This new journal has been created to document the science of nutrition and lifestyle to prevent, suspend and reverse disease.
Kim is also on the ‘International Advisory Council’ for Doctors For Nutrition – a wonderful Australian organisation dedicated to helping equip healthcare practitioners, institutions and the public with evidence-based information and education on optimum human nutrition.
I’m not listening to some middle-aged hippy down the street to guide the health of my family, folks. I’m spending my free-time listening to the most brilliant minds in health, and I’m taking their information to heart for the sake of my family’s health, and for the sake of our environmental health.
Why am I so feisty about this? We’ve been leading by quiet example for too long, not enough souls have moved forward (<— not a single one of our family members has changed course), and now I’m at a place where I can’t sleep past 5 because my dreams are filled-to-bursting with articles/info/interviews I’ve learned and how it needs to be amplified. I’m woken with a purpose-driven howl to get back downstairs and keep illuminating.
There is no time to waste, there are too many bodies riddled with disease due to poor dietary habits, and our environment is crumbling with the animal agriculture needed to fulfill your selfish delight in the taste of another soul’s muscle, embryo, and/or breastmilk…all of which just feed you more disease and are not nutritionally necessary.
Continue on for: even more evidence-based information tying animal-products to heart disease, another explanation of TMAO (compound created in your gut when you eat animal-products and how it causes cardiovascular disease), recommended podcasts with keen interviews with nutritionally-focused doctors, a family full of energy/health/action from Plant-Based Whole-Foods (<— only diet proven to prevent and reverse heart disease and diabetes) not wasting away like so many in our culture assume, and a full day’s worth of PBWH feasting.
Live Kindly, Feast Kindly, Grow Forward.
Sunrise view from the Haendle Grove.
I can see this view from my writing window, and as soon as the sun pops up over that hill, you’ll often find me sprinting to this field to soak it in.
Q’s Morning Chalkboard: inspired by his love for the design of the omnidroid from The Incredibles.
This is now the second morning that Q has run downstairs to grab his drawing notebook, and then spent an hour drawing multiple images that were inspired by his dreams.
Also seen: Ian at his work-from-home station.
Plant-Based Kiddo Breakfast: apple, cashew cream, and a black bean brownie (sugar free, plant-based, whole-food)
David Barber Drawings of the day.
As soon as he finished breakfast, he got right back to drawing. I gave him one of my extra log notebooks and he turned it into a a comic log about the Omnidroid and Iron Spider. <3
This is what it looks like when Q is telling you a story behind one of his drawings. He is physically incapable of standing still, everything is full-bodied raconteur flare.
Working hard on his pre-k homeschool packet.
Example of what our district sends home for pre-k kiddos, and a cub proud of his work.
While Q worked on the homeschool packet, I worked on another batch of black bean brownies and finally hit the sweet spot (<— pun intended) of figuring out how to make them sweet but still a whole-food.
Take dates and one banana, puree then with easy oatmilk and a little vanilla extract, and you have yourself one delicious sweet batter that is full of minerals and vitamins.
Then add black beans. :-)
Recipe for this will be posted soon.
The seriousness of black bean brownie baking. :-)
But first: lunch prep.
Plant-Based Whole- Food Lunch: Ethiopian Style Lentils, quick-pickled radish, quick-pickled cabbage, kale & quinoa salad, oil-free hummus, bell peppers, and hot sauce.
Plant-Based Whole-Food Dessert: black bean brownie, cashew cream, and peanut butter.
Powered up with plant-based fuel, we spent the afternoon in the yard. Q roamed around and told me stories through most of it, and grew typical-kiddo impatient with the time it was taking for me to finish my project,
Before
What was I working on? Continuing the quasi-wall Ian started to shore up the side of the past-pond pit in preparation for melons.
After
Plant-Based Whole-Food Snack: blackberry, strawberry, orange, and spirulina smoothie.
I think Q’s favorite part of the day is when his play-mate Papa is done with work and they can romp around together.
Cappello Taco Tuesday: siete soft shells, oil-free refried black beans, hempeh, quick-picked radish, quick-pickled cabbage, bell peppers, pickled jalapenos, and enchilada sauce. (We had been out of fresh greens —in the fridge— and realized afterward, that we could have raided some form the yard.)
The more I learn about the connection of body-health/gut-health/earth-health, the more driven I am to howl until we are all on a kinder path.
After consuming the above, we continued on to a family walk and felt energized. Years ago, these tacos would have been filled with ground cow muscle or the flesh of some chicken, topped with mounds of harmful/cruel cheese, and they would have left us feeling sluggish because they were harming our endothelium; but we moved away from those products out of compassion and health imperatives.
We know fully well why eating another souls flesh isn’t kind to that soul (and that the animal agriculture businesses is ruining our environment), but why is it again that they are bad for us?
they create TMAO (Trimethylamine N-Oxide) which is a metabolite caused when you consume of animal products. How does this work? Animal products are high in choline (all of them: beef/dairy, pig, chicken, eggs, and fish), when choline hits your gut micro-biome it is converted to TMA, and your liver converts the TMA to TMAO. TMAO is associated with cardiovascular decay, colon cancer, liver cancer, prostate cancer, kidney disease, increased diabetes risk, the list goes on.
animal products are directly tied to cancer which is on the rise.
animal products have harmful, untied-to-fiber saturated fats that lead to cardiovascular disease
Want some more info on TMAO? Below is from the American Academy of Cardiology:
Yoriko Heianza, RD, PhD, et al., examined 760 women in the Nurses' Health Study, a prospective cohort study of 121,701 female registered nurses aged 30 to 55 years old. Women were asked to report data on dietary patterns, smoking habit and physical activity, plus other demographic data and provide two blood samples taken at Cleveland Clinic, 10 years apart.
The researchers measured plasma concentrations of TMAO from the first collection to the second blood collection. After adjusting for participants with available plasma TMAO levels at both collections, there were 380 cases of CHD and 380 demographically matched-control participants without CHD chosen by the researchers included in the analysis.
Results showed that women who developed CHD had higher concentrations of TMAO levels, higher BMI, family history of myocardial infarction and did not follow a healthy diet including higher intake of vegetables and lower intake of animal products. Women with the largest increases in TMAO levels across the study had a ****67**** percent higher risk of CHD.
If you want beautiful, well-explained, long-form clinical reasons through an evidence-based approach, you need to set aside the time to listen to this Plant Proof Podcast with cardiologist Dr. Kim Williams.
It explains:
The prevalence of cardiovascular disease
Kim’s path to Medicine
How tennis kept him fit, but is also clinically tied to cardiovascular health
Nutrition training during Medical School
Being elected President of the American College of Cardiology
The difference between the ACC/AHA guidelines and the USDA dietary guidelines
The role of industry in effecting guidelines
How he explains to patients the importance of changing their diet
What dietary components increase your risk of developing atherosclerosis (narrowing of the artery with plaque build up)
Why LDL cholesterol is an independent risk factor
What a heart healthy diet looks like
why you want to avoid Impossible Burgers
Changes he would like to see in the 2020 USDA dietary guidelines
Government policy changes he would like to see
Community outreach he does to help with folks living in food deserts
The types of foods he likes to eat in his own diet
and much much more
We’ve benefited greatly by growing forward with the advice laid out by cardiologists like Dr. Williams, are healthier/stronger/happier than ever, and you could be too.
Interested in more doctor-lead/cutting-edge/nutritional research that also leads to healing the earth?
The Nutrition Rounds podcast with cardiologist Dr. Danielle Belardo (this is my absolute favorite podcast and I dearly wish she had more episodes. (The most recent one is from January and it is all about women’s heart health. All-time favorites: Dr. Neal Barnard “Hormones and Nutrition”, the one with Dr. David Katz where they discuss “research methodology in nutrition science, why the world needs to follow a plant predominant diet for both our health and the climate, the pseudo confusion created in the nutrition space, keto debunked and much, much more”, and her third interview with Dr. Dean Ornish and Anne Ornish where they discuss the Undo It book I’ve been reading, and the research proving the imperatives of plant-based whole-foods and physical activity.
The Nutrition Facts podcast with Dr. Michael Greger
Plant Proof with before mentioned Nutritionist and Physiotherapist Simon Hill
the Switch4Good podcast hosted by Olympian Dotsie Bausch which has a feast of inspiring interviews as well as some of the absolute doctor interviews (like this mind-blowing one about the microbiome and gut health with Dr. Angie Sadeghi)
Give those a listen and you’ll understand why it is that I could be up at 4:30AM, perch in perpetual movement behind a standing desk and contemporaneously plow through a nutritional call-to-arms for several hours, move on to help my son with homeschooling while baking us plant-based/whole-food/zero-waste brownies, plow through an afternoon building a stone wall in hot sun, come in and make up a fresh batch of refried beans, and then still have more than enough energy to run back out the door and go for a family cardio walk.
Here seen, an hour of running, talking, walking, drawing.
We aren’t wasting away: we are getting stronger every day, healing the earth in the process
purposeful Geogle Michael Bluth hang :-D <3
