The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Dr. Stephen Hussey: Challenging Conventional Wisdom on Heart Disease
Dr. Stephen Hussey was 34 when he had a heart attack. As a chiropractor and functional medicine practitioner who already lived a healthy lifestyle, he was stunned. But what shocked him even more was what doctors found during his angiogram: zero atherosclerosis. No plaque. Just a massive spontaneous clot.
That discovery sent him down a research rabbit hole that completely changed how he thinks about heart disease—and how the human body actually works.
In this mind-bending conversation, Dr. Hussey shares discoveries that flip conventional cardiology on its head. Like why your heart doesn't actually pump blood. Why cholesterol has nothing to do with heart attacks. And why your body is essentially a walking battery powered by something called "structured water."
Sounds crazy? The science is there. Dr. Hussey breaks down research showing how water in your body can hold an electrical charge, how trauma literally gets stored in your tissues as damaged water crystals, and why people with chronic fatigue can't seem to "hold a charge."
He also explains why the sun might be the most powerful medicine on the planet, how grounding your feet to the earth can improve blood flow, and why that constant fatigue you feel might have more to do with damaged water than damaged mitochondria.
This isn't your typical heart health interview. Dr. Hussey challenges everything from the cholesterol theory to why we're told the sun causes cancer. He makes a compelling case that most of what we think we know about cardiovascular disease is not just wrong—it's keeping us sick.
Whether you're dealing with heart issues, chronic fatigue, or just curious about how your body really works, this conversation will change how you think about health.
Dr. Stephen Hussey is the author of "Understanding the Heart" and "The Health Evolution." He offers functional medicine consultations and speaks internationally on metabolic health.
Enjoyed this episode? We'd love to hear your thoughts—share your feedback with us here!
Florence's courses & coaching programs can be found at:
www.FlorenceChristophers.com
Connect with Florence on:
FACEBOOK | TWITTER | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE
Hello everybody and welcome today to an interview with Dr Stephen Hussey. Let me give you a little high-level bio here. So Dr Hussey is a chiropractor and functional medical practitioner. He attained his doctorate of chiropractic medicine and his master's in human nutrition and functional medicine from the university of western states in portland, oregon. He is the author of not one but two books. Uh, the first one is called why sorry, the health evolution, why understanding evolution is the key to vibrant health. And his second book, understanding the heart surprising insights into the evolutionary origins of heart disease and why it matters.
FLORENCE:Um, dr hussie is a health coach, a speaker, um, he offers services. He shared his personal expertise, not just like his professional expertise on the topic of health and heart health, but he has his own journey. He suffered a heart attack in his 30s and went WTF, what the heck is going on here. So he has his own journey of saving his own life through the types of information that he uncovered, through his research that he now shares with all of us for free and platforms like this, and also through his books, and you can also hire him to guide you specifically through protocols that can help you prevent and reverse all kinds of metabolic, cardiometabolic conditions. Welcome, dr Hussey.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.
FLORENCE:So tell us a little bit about your own journey with heart health and your heart attack.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:So tell us a little bit about your own journey with heart health and your heart attack. Yeah, well, my interest in heart disease started well. I'm type 1 diabetic and so I was diagnosed with that at age 9. And that stemmed from a lot of you know, inflammation as a child, lots of inflammatory conditions and being diagnosed with type 1, I learned from physicians over my childhood that I'm heavily predisposed to vascular issues, heart disease, especially of small vessels, so in the eyes and the extremities and the kidney, things like that, and so I always kind of, you know, had an interest in, you know, the vascular system and heart disease. But then, like you mentioned, when I was 34 years old, I actually had a heart attack, which even pushed me further into my curiosity of heart disease and why this happened.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:And I've uncovered a lot that goes against the conventional wisdom I would say, about what people think of a heart disease, what the medical system thinks about heart disease, why it happens, and we're talking everything from atherosclerosis to heart failure, to heart attacks, to arrhythmias, all kinds of things.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:I just have this kind of special interest in it and so, yeah, like I've uncovered a lot of truths, but you know I've also covered a lot of truths.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:But you know, I've also, you know, because of my experience with Western medicine at a young age, I kind of got disillusioned with it as far as like its ability to tell me why these things are happening to me and what to do about them to make them go away.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:And I found it very interesting that I didn't learn until I went to college and started figuring out that I could live my life a different way and that would affect my ability to manage these conditions or get rid of a lot of the inflammatory things that I had. I found it very interesting that nobody within Western medicine ever told me that and I saw a lot of doctors as a kid and so that kind of disillusioned me from Western medicine and I went the more chiropractic route. And so that kind of disillusioned me from Western medicine and I went to more chiropractic route. And just, I'm interested in health in general, not necessarily specifically chiropractic or heart disease, but just figuring out, you know, why we have disease, why life is here, what sustains life, what makes it healthy, and that's kind of led me to where I am Amazing.
FLORENCE:So you have a heart attack. You've already been interested in health, I mean an early diagnosis at the age of nine. Obviously, you didn't have the option of not being interested in health because, right, it was so personal, so young. So you go to school, you have a heart attack and now you're really invested in understanding how does this happen and how do we prevent this and how do we turn this around. So what did you discover when you start to do your research?
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:yeah, well, first a little bit about that experience. People are probably wondering like well, you had a heart attack. What happened? You know, um, and you know, when it gets down to like, the details and actual mechanisms. I don't think that anybody will be able to ever tell me exactly what happened, um, cause I don't think anybody in medicine knows um, I have my theories, but you know, for me, my diet is one thing I could always control, um, so I was always, um always ate a good diet, quote, unquote um, according to what I thought at the time. And people think that diet is what is the main contributor to heart attacks and it and it can be a major contributor Um, but it's much more than that, uh, there's a lot more when it comes to heart disease, and that's what I've kind of uncovered Um.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:But for me, um, leading up to a heart attack, uh, the heart attack that I had, I was going through a very stressful time, uh, probably the most stressful time of my life. It was during COVID, which a lot of stressful things, according to me, were happening at that time, and I got probably some of the most stressful news of my life a day and a half before I had the heart attack, and it wasn't just that it was stressful news, it was the inability of me or anyone in my family to get to this person and help them. We were just sitting around waiting, hoping things would be okay, and so the inability to control that situation definitely led to increased stress. And then I think there were certain aspects of maybe dehydration, maybe oxalate dumping because of the diet that I was eating. And then I, unwisely, the morning I had the heart attack, did a very intense workout in that state and I think that that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:And just for reference, I had, if people are familiar with what a CAC score is, which is a measure of calcium deposited in plaque in the arteries of your heart, I had one done six months prior to this heart attack and it was zero, meaning no calcified plaque. Now, that doesn't tell you much about soft plaque or if there's any presence of soft plaque. However, when they did the angiogram the heart cath and the angiogram to place the stent when I was having the heart attack they found no atherosclerosis anywhere in my heart arteries. They just found a giant clot that had formed and it was a spontaneous, acute clot. So just goes to show that there are things we may not understand or know about heart disease and, again, I think I have my understandings of that, but yeah, so in my research I found a lot of misconceptions about the heart and heart disease.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:One is the one that people are probably most familiar with is this idea that cholesterol causes heart disease, and that's not the truth. The main way that diet contributes to heart disease is eating, you know, processed grains, sugars, vegetable oils these processed foods, and we can talk about the mechanisms by which that contributes. Also, there's a big misconception that the heart is what forcefully moves the blood around the body. There's a large body of research that suggests that is not the case. That's important because if we don't understand how the heart truly functions, how are we supposed to understand what happens when it fails, like in, in quote unquote heart failure, um, and what to do about it, um. So there's that um and there's misconceptions about what the role of the heart in the body actually is, um, which I think it has many roles, none of which are to forcefully move the blood, um. So yeah, you, lots of different interesting things about the heart and heart disease and the body in general, but yeah.
FLORENCE:Okay, well, tell us about this. I'm very intrigued. I think I still have the impression that the main function of the heart is to pump the nutrients and the blood and the oxygen around. And if it's not doing that, what is doing that? And if that's not its main function, what is its main function?
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Yeah, so, um, the heart has, in my opinion, three roles in the body. Um, one is that it vortexes blood. So that means that it's like, if you ever like, take a you know, a two liter bottle and you have water and you spin it around, it creates that vortex in it. That's the spiraling of the blood. And if you look at the heart orientation and how it's put together, and it's one big band of muscle wrapped up on itself and when it contracts it spirals, like this. And when blood flows in and out of the chambers of the heart, and when they contract, they vortex the blood, they spiral, and so that's one role of the heart.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:And the reason that that's important is because there's this whole conversation about structured water in the body, so water that can actually exist in more of like a gel state. So there's three phases of water that we know of, and then there's also this fourth phase, um, that many scientists have discovered throughout the years, but it's mainly been popularized by Dr Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington, and this structured water forms in many places in the body. It's more like a gel. Most of the water in your body is in a gel state, which is why, if I push my forearm it feels like a gel right. It gives and bounces right back right, just like jello or consistency of raw egg white. But this structured water does indeed form on the lining of arteries and the way that it forms actually creates an energy gradient. So the way the structured water forms, it becomes a very electronegative area and then the hydrogens that are cleaved off of that water become a very electropositive area and a positive next to a negative is a battery. That's what we know. We know a battery has a positive and negative end. We have to orient it into something, and they've actually shown that when you create this structured water in these two oppositely charged areas, you can put electrodes in either one and power a light bulb, and so it creates energy and the energy in the vascular system that this creates, as actually does the work of moving fluid. And so they put water loving tubes in water and they put infrared light which energizes the water and that makes the structured water form on the lining of the tube and the water starts moving through the tube with no pump or anything needed.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:So water is this very fascinating thing, um and uh, and that's what provides the main source of movement of blood, and so one of the ways that water can become energized in order to do this is through vortexing it, and that's exactly what the heart does um. So there's other things too. Infrared light, which comes from the sun, um, uh, will do it. Uh, putting your feet directly on the earth will do it. There's lots of different things that will do this, um, but the hearts, one of the heart's jobs is to vortex the blood so that when it gets out into the arteries and the veins it can kind of propel itself through um, and there's fascinating research about um. That is really fascinating book called the Heart in Circulation by Dr Branko. First, but yeah, there's a very extensive topic there that I go into my book.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:The second role of the heart is to actually slow the flow of blood, and there's research that shows that, especially in endurance athletes, the heart kind of gets stronger and bigger because it's actually more effective at slowing the flow of blood. Because if the heart wasn't there doing exertion, doing exercise, all the blood would rush over to the arterial side, um, trying to deliver oxygen and nutrients to tissues. And if the heart wasn't there to slow the flow of blood, the venous side would collapse because it would have no blood in it, and so the heart slows it so that it maintains pressure between the two systems. If that doesn't happen, the venous side would collapse and we would die. So a very, very important role there.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:And the third role of the heart is that through the work of the HeartMath Institute we've learned that every organ in our body lets off an electromagnetic field and the heart has the strongest and biggest electromagnetic field of any organ in the body, which is largely driven by the very dense content of mitochondria in the heart.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:It has some of the densest amount of mitochondria of any tissue in the body and that creates this very strong electromagnetic field body. And that creates this very strong electromagnetic field. And that electromagnetic field serves the purpose of sensing our environment, but also sensing our emotional state and sensing our internal environment and how well our body is communicating with itself, and all that stuff conveys coherence to the body. So the heart is a sensory organ and there's fascinating research through the Howard Math Institute of this. The heart is sensing a lot of different things in our environment and relaying that information to the brain and then the brain communicates that information or it makes decisions on how to communicate the body based on that information. So those are the true functions of the heart, which is pretty interesting.
FLORENCE:Very interesting, super, super interesting. So that third role of the heart just sort of moves right into the woo-woo realm, right, because we always oh, my heart's broken. We grab our heart when we're stricken, when something's shocking or touching, and it just seems wild that you're sort of catching up with the science to suggest that. I always kind of thought it was because the vagus nerve goes to the heart and all the organs and the heart's just one of many organs where it's pulling information about what's happening in the interior world, moving that up to the brain for processing and for action. But I didn't realize that the heart was particularly important in that sensing interoception role.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Yeah, there's definitely a reason that we say I love you with all my heart and not I love you with all my brain or my spleen, or something like that I love you with all my pancreas.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Yeah, um, or we say we gave it all our heart. You know, there's this emotional connection to this organ, because it is what's sensing our emotional state, um, uh, emotional state, and conveying that to the brain, not just neurologically, through the vagus nerve and there's actually research that shows that more signals are sent through nervous system tissue from the heart to the brain rather than the other way around and it also communicates electromagnetically to the brain. It's communicating that information so that the brain can respond. The brain is just a processing center. It's not really in control, it's just receiving all this external sensory information that's being picked up by the body and that's communicating to the brain and the brain then responds by telling the body how to respond, like whether it's a stress response or whether it's moving the body or whatever it may be. Um, the brain is just processing the information and responding, importantly, kind of like a computer so, going back to that, the vortex creates a polarity in the water.
FLORENCE:It's structured, helps structure it so that it can move itself through the veins. Is that right so?
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:if you want details. Yeah, so vortexing of water or sunlight on water, or water in contact with the earth these are all different things that, quote-unquote, energize the water. And when I mean energize, I just mean that if water is flowing through a laminar tube, like through a pipe, or water has lots of toxins in it, or water is void of minerals, it becomes kind of dead water, and what that means is that the molecules of water are next to each other but they're kind of moving independently of each other. Right, they're not really connected very well. Those hydrogen bonds are very, very weak, because in water the hydrogen bonds bind and then they're weak and they get pulled apart. So when water is more energized, it's kind of like they're moving in concert with each other. They're kind of moving like that. Does that make sense? So when they are that way, they're more likely to become structured water.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Structured water is more of a gel, so if it's structured it's going to look more like jello or the consistency of raw egg white.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:And so what we need for water to structure itself is we need energy, so that could be infrared light, could be grounding, or contact with the earth could be vortexing.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:It needs water and we need a hydrophilic surface, which all biological surfaces are hydrophilic. And when that happens and water is next to a hydrophilic surface, like the lining of an artery, it will structure itself. And what I mean, what happens specifically is, you know, water is an oxygen and two hydrogens, and when water structures itself, one of the hydrogens is cleaved off and then the other oxygen and hydrogen team up with other oxygens and hydrogens. They make this um kind of a um benzene ring type of thing, like a hexagonal ring that team up together and it makes like an infinite number of that and a planar thing and that stacks up on this biological surface. And then, because the oxygen is bigger and it's more negative and it's not balanced out by two hydrogens that are positive, now then that structure of water is very electronegatively charged and the hydrogens that have been cleaved off into the space next to it are very positively charged and they create a very positively charged area and that is where the energy comes from, the battery comes from.
FLORENCE:So, yeah, and does that energy that's produced in that structuring process through the vortex process, the sunlight, the infrared, the grounding, does that give energy to the body? Or does it just energize the water enough for it to flow throughout the system? Or does it actually sort of serve as a bit of a battery, Because I always just think it's only the mitochondria that create our ATP and our energy? But is that wrong?
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Uh, yes, I think so, um, and I think that is wrong, and I think that water is what holds our charge. It is the battery that holds our charge, and so when we are feeling low energy or getting symptoms, it is because the water in our body is not holding charge. And this may sound crazy to people, but there is a lot of sound science on this if you read the right science. It's just been ignored by medicine because they don't see it as something that serves that system and the profitability of that system. But there are many water scientists like Gerald Pollack and Gilbert Ling and Albert St Georgie and Fitzpomp and Mei-Wan Ho and James Clegg and Jim Oshin. There's so many water scientists that have discovered this, and so you mentioned two things that were very astute there. One is that the water does hold this charge and that's what holds the charge of the body, and anybody who studies cellular physiology will know that our cells hold a net negative charge and that's where they operate at their healthiest is at this net negative charge, and that's held by structured water in the body. And you mentioned also that we always thought that mitochondria create our energy and that ATP is what our energy currency is. However, gilbert Ling did some very eloquent experiments that basically showed that our mitochondria could never produce enough ATP to power a cell, and much less just the sodium potassium pump, which there's question about whether that exists too. And what he showed was that the main role of ATP is to unfold proteins, like structure cellular proteins in the cell, like the intracellular matrix, because when you unfold those protein, that creates a lot of surface area for structured water to form. So that's what ATP is doing. And then when ATP unfolds those proteins, we get lots of structured water. We get a very negatively charged cell, something that can hold our charge. So, yeah, that's the role, that's what ATP does.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:But the other things that mitochondria make are very, very important. It makes water and it makes perfectly structured or energized, deuterium-depleted water. Mitochondria also create infrared heat, which infrared is one of the best ways that we can energize water so that it structures itself. It also creates a free radical, which is a signaling molecule telling your body how healthy the mitochondria are, and many other things. So we see things free radicals as bad things, which they can be if they become excessive. But these all play a purpose and a role, and so I remember being taught that in mitochondria they make all these things and they're byproducts. The real thing is ATP. Right, but all those byproducts are actually not byproducts. They're very, very important and ATB is actually the thing that's creating the ability for structured water to form and we have a healthy cell. So, yeah, it kind of turns things on its head.
FLORENCE:It really does. I did not wake up today expecting to have my mind blown by this interview. Why so interesting? So you know, there's this whole other sort of aspect that might be way beyond where you can go with this, but where my mind's going with this because I have a bit of a trauma background and I understand there's something called the freeze response and many, many, many individuals, uh, are so frustrated because they have absolutely zero energy when they've collapsed into this dorsal freeze response where they have no energy and I we often think it's the mitochondria malfunctioning and we often think about what are we doing to support mitochondria health? But to have a look at what's happening with water and structuring and like I don't know if you can speak to that at all, I can definitely speak to that.
FLORENCE:Oh, because so many people are desperate to get out of the freeze response, help me and they have a really short leash, or a really small window of tolerance, like a little bit of stress, and they just keep collapsing and it's so frustrating for them.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Yeah, so well, we'll start with that vagus nerve and how there's two pathways in it. Um, you know, there's the? Uh, the ventral vagus and the dorsal vagus. Um, or the nucleus ambiguous and the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus nerve. Um, and you know the, the dorsal motor nucleus is this older evolved thing, uh, that's been around in in animals prior to humans for a long time, and when that gets overstimulated it kind of creates this shutdown. And so, you know, in order for mammals to evolve from reptiles, we needed this ability to have a stress response and not have shutdown, because we have very metabolically active organs and we have body heat to maintain. We can't shut down organs like a reptile can and kind of play dead right. And so, you know, evolution did that for us. It created this nucleus ambiguous aspect of the vagus nerve so we could have that stress response and still maintain our metabolic activity.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:However, I don't think it was accounting for the fact that we would have these modern societies or traumas that would affect us in a way that would kind of override that and send us back into that dorsal motor nucleus functioning Um, and that causes uh over time. I mean, a trauma can cause that instantaneously, but over time it can cause, um, you to go into that freeze response and they call it like a functional freeze, where you're kind of functioning in society but you're, um, you're kind of dissociated society but you're, um, you're kind of dissociated, uh, from society, and so you can think of it like you know, just like a blood sugar response, like our blood sugar, is supposed to respond and go up and then it's supposed to come down naturally within two hours, right, Um, and anything outside of that usual response is considered pathologic, um, and so the same thing can happen with someone with issues, past trauma and injury or, like, I guess, training the vagus nerve to operate in a certain way and kind of default back to that dorsal motor nucleus. Aspect of it is that we have that trauma response or we have a response to it and we don't come back down normally, it just stays up in it, right, just like a blood sugar would stay up in it and a type two diabetic, and so that's a huge issue. It creates a lot of dysfunction as far as your ability to interact with society and what we see in that, which is very relevant to what we just talked about, is poor heart rate variability. Which heart rate variability is what's measuring coherence. And so you're. So. Not only are you able not able to interact with society as well or deal with other stressful things as well, you've lost your resilience to do that. Um, your heart is incoherent and that's why.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:And so the reason that can happen with trauma is because because most of the time or not most the time, but much of the time when we experience a trauma, no matter what level of trauma it is like, trauma is not dictated by how severe we see it from the outside. It's dictated by how prepared that person is to handle the trauma and what happens after the trauma that allows them to recover from it. If you're not given signals of safety soon enough afterwards, or enough of the time afterwards, that trauma can become something that turns pathologic and the trauma can get stored in tissues. And it gets stored. The way it gets stored in tissues is water, because we've known this from Dr Emoto's work. Marasu Emoto, he has shown that you can express, you know, love and gratitude and these positive emotions to water, and then, when you freeze the water, it's a beautiful snowflake crystal. And then, if you express anger, resentment, traumatic things to water, when you freeze it, it becomes fragmented, it can't do it very well, and so that can happen in our body. So we think about, like a crystal of ice I just talked about how structured water is. This liquid crystal, it's kind of this gel, but it's a crystal state because of the hexane ring that forms, and so that is how trauma can get stored in the body and the tissue in the body.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:And we you know people who are familiar with like body work and things like they know that you can like work through a muscle and all of a sudden this trauma is released and people start crying or laughing or something, um, they have some emotion, um, with that. And it's because, you know, um, that can be stored in a muscle which superficially it's kind of easy to work through that. But if it's deeper, if it's stored, stored deeper, like in organs and things like that, that can be a problem and that can represent as disease, um. So water we were made of water, we're all told. We're, you know, 60, 70, 80 percent water, um, and but most of it's in the structured state, and that water is our antenna and it's monitoring, uh, many different things, just like the heart is, and it's uh, it's allowing us to interact with our environment.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:If that water becomes damaged or trauma is impressed upon it that can create an issue and that results in like when that happens, then the heart senses that there's incoherence in the body because the body can't communicate as well because of that stored trauma. And the heart senses that there's incoherence in the body because the body can't communicate as well because of that store of trauma and the heart senses that it goes to the brain, the vagus nerve sends the wrong signal, you know. It starts to get into this more pathologic state that starts with just hyper sympathetic signaling and then eventually can default into dorsal motor nucleus. So I hope I made sense of that and people understand I, I tracked it.
FLORENCE:I tracked it because I know polyvagal theory and I know trauma and I'm like this is I've never had someone tie in water and we always hear that you know the issues are in our tissues, but I've never had someone explain that what shows up in our tissues is water that's no longer in that snowflake crystalline form.
FLORENCE:It's been damaged. And if it's damaged it's not supporting the polarization, the proper polarization, so that we can have that energy, and it can't hold a charge. Because that's what made me think of this is that we always say people who have a small window of tolerance, their stress resilience is so little before they they get overwhelmed and they collapse and into the dorsal high functioning state is because they say we can't, they can't hold a charge and it can be a positive charge. They can only feel happy for so long before that. It's just kind of like they could feel this overwhelm. So it suggests that we need to work with the water in our system in such a way to be able to have it be able to hold a charge and to be in the proper form. And I guess this begs the question for me. It has to be the case that somehow sugar damages the water's capacity to be in a crystalline form, or something like that. Do you have any idea how that happens?
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Yeah. So think about it like this. Well, we'll preface it with burning mainly sugar for fuel has been shown in many studies that create more oxidative stress. We talk more free radical production. So that's one of the byproducts, so to speak, of a mitochondria. Is this oxidative stress? That's a signaling molecule. It tells your body about satiation and things like that.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:However, in order to get enough ATP and things you need from mitochondria by utilizing sugar, you need way more molecules of sugar than you do, say, fat, especially healthy fat. But if you have to use sugar to do that, you need way more molecules of sugar, which results in way more oxidative stress, way more free radicals, way more molecules that have an unpaired electron that really, really want to be paired, and they'll go to any length to find that pair. I tell people it's like the Looney Tunes Tasmanian devil. They're going around like crazy trying to find that pair and destroying things in the process of finding that pair, that other electron. And what I've told you is that structured water is very electronegatively charged and it's very primed to give up electrons because it's negatively charged, because it's negatively charged. And so when we have a high state of oxidative stress, high state of free radical production or toxins, things in the body that can act like free radicals that can tear down structured water, whether it's in cells or if it's damaging mitochondria themselves, and then we don't make that ATP to unfold proteins and make structured water things like that. Or if it's high in the bloodstream and we get damage to the structured water there and that can leave the lining of the artery vulnerable to damage from those same things, which is the process, the start of the process of damaged lining of artery and atherosclerosis or plaque formation in arteries, because structured water kind of protects that there as well as moves the blood.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:So, yes, these sugar-based processed food diets is one way that we're contributing to damaged or structured water in the body, which is decreasing charge. So when I think of something that says that, oh, this food is inflammatory or this, whatever, this lifestyle behavior is inflammatory, what that means to me is low body charge. Our bodies want to be slightly alkaline, slightly negatively charged, and if we are doing things that decrease that negative charge like a sugar-based or processed food diet is one thing that can do it then that's taking us more toward positive or acidic charge, which means low structured water. That's what that means. You have to equate that to that. And if we have low structured water, we have low body charge, we have inflammation. That's what that is wow, so interesting.
FLORENCE:So for everyone who's listening to this, who has fatigue and has issues with holding a charge, having energy, feeling good, being able to hang on to emotion before or stress before it overwhelms them, how can we, how can we improve the charge of our water, like, how can we directly intervene at the level of what's happening with the water in our body?
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:yeah, so there are things, uh, that have been shown to increase structured water in the body, and there are things that have been shown to increase structured water in the body and there are things that have been shown to break it down, and they're all things that we can control to an extent. And so one is a good, metabolically healthy diet, a diet that creates metabolic health, and I'm more of a fan, for myself, of a um, higher animal foods, um, animal fat diet, uh, and running your body on those and being metabolically healthy, where you get in and out of ketosis pretty readily, um, and staying away from, um, uh, the processed foods. That's the main thing. Stay away from grains, sugars and vegetable oils. Um, those are, those are the big ones. Just do that, and then you know, uh, I'm not going to be dogmatic about any other sort of diet or way of eating. Just eat whole foods. Find what works best for you. Um, I think animal foods are critical. We need animal foods in our diets as humans, um, so that's one thing is create metabolic health that way, um, the other way we want to create metabolic health and positively affect our mitochondria is set our circadian rhythm. It's very, very important. Artificial light is disrupting our circadian rhythm and that has just as much to do with poor metabolic health than diet, maybe more so. You know, especially after sunset, artificial lights, screens, all that kind of stuff is disrupting your. It's telling your body that it's daytime when it's supposed to know that it's nighttime, which is disrupting sleep. Um, and if you look at um, you know any any. Just go into PubMed or in Google Scholar or whatever, and type in disrupted circadian rhythm, artificial light and any metabolic disorder you want, and there's research on it. There's thousands, tens of thousands of studies now. Um, so that's a big one.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:And then there's things you can do. Like people think that the only place we can get energy in the form of electrons is from food. You know we all, like every medical student or anybody's studies, cellular physiology learns that. You know food is taken into the glycolysis and the Krebs cycle and electron transport chain and mitochondria, and we're harvesting electrons from the chemical bonds in food. But we can get electrons from many places. Our body has mechanisms by which we can turn sunlight directly into electrons, through melanin, which is what pigments our skin, but it's also in a lot of other places in the body, and through the molecule, dha, which is a fatty acid found in high amounts in seafood, which is another reason why animal foods are important. We can take that sunlight and make electrons like literally make DC electric current, like the photoelectric effect that Einstein talks about. That's what it does to us.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:For us, we can also absorb electrons directly from the earth in this thing called grounding or earthing. We're supposed to be in contact with the earth and the laws of electrostatics tell us that when two conductive surfaces are next to each other, the area of higher charge will flow into the area of negative charge, and I'm never going to have the electron dense as electron dense as the earth. So if my feet are on the earth, I will absorb electrons. And there's different grounding devices you can use indoors. If you have grounding, true grounding outlets in your house, like grounding sheets and grounding mats and things like that, we can absorb electrons directly and there's studies that show that that builds structured water, especially around red blood cells in your arteries in the body. So those are the main things that you can do. But you know, infrared saunas, red light panels, all these different things will energize the water and create more structured water in your body.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Drinking enough, you know, clean water and making sure that it's mineral-rich, replacing minerals, so electrolyte solutions and things like that very important. And then removing the things that have been shown to break down structured water, so specifically things that create oxidative stress or toxin exposure. And very specifically, in Dr Pollack's lab they've shown that glyphosate breaks down structured water. I think it's between 10 and 20 percent. It breaks it down. Which glyphosate is an herbicide. You can buy it at Lowe's. You can go to Lowe's and get Roundup right now and that's, that's glyphosate. So be very careful with that stuff. Eat as organic as possible to avoid it. And then other things are. In Dr Pollack's lab they've shown that a wireless router destroys structured water 15% to 20%. So that's a problem.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:We are surrounded by non-naive electromagnetic fields. These days, with all this wireless technology, the only wireless or electromagnetic field we're supposed to be exposed to is that given off by the earth. It's called the Schumann resonance. And these other ones are called non-native, not very compatible with our physiology, and one potential mechanism of how they harm us is that they break down the structure of water. They steal our charge. So obviously we can't avoid all that today, but we can do our best to minimize it as much as we can. Keep your phone at a distance. Try not to hold it up to your ear. Turn off the Wi-Fi when you're not using it. Plug things in when you can rather than using wireless. Just as much as you can. You know, avoid those things.
FLORENCE:This is a curveball question. I have lipidema, even though I'm normal weight and I've been 90, 95% eating whole foods for years. It sort of came on with menopause and I don't really know what triggered it, maybe a bit like your. What happened? Like I got a clot out of nowhere with my heart but and I was at a very, very stressful time of my life as well actually but anyways, I have it and it literally feels like water in, like you know, it's subtle and most people would say, oh, come on, it's so minor, don't talk about it, but it's still a real thing. Like it feels like a watery sort of I was told it was fat that has got into the lymph system. Is it potentially this jello-y water somehow in there?
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:No, but I do think it has to do with lymphatic drainage. Well, part of it does, and I think the other part of it has to do with leptin resistance. Everybody talks about insulin resistance, which is important and that's kind of this foundation of poor metabolic health that people talk about, but they don't talk much about leptin resistance. So I think one thing you could do is test your leptin levels and see if they're elevated. If they are, then there's some leptin resistance and you could be completely metabolically healthy and have normal insulin levels and still be leptin resistant, because the main thing that causes that is disrupted circadian rhythm. So it's the artificial light.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:And so here's the connection.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:So leptin is the hormone that basically signals for satiation, pretty much, but it basically tells your body about energy expenditure and storage.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:So if you're leptin-resistant, you get too much energy storage, so those fat cells can be encouraged to hold on to more fats than they need to because there's leptin resistance.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:So that can be created by disrupted circadian rhythm in and of itself and we can talk about how to regulate circadian rhythm if you want. But the other part of that is that if your circadian rhythm is off and you have low melatonin levels because artificial light is disrupting that, then you're not getting the deep, restorative sleep that is needed for healing is needed for healing, and one of the key things that happens or is supposed to happen every single night with enough melatonin is lymphatic and glymphatic drainage. That is supposed to happen, but not just that. It's supposed to trigger for mitophagy and autophagy, which is the killing off of old cells and mitochondria to make new, healthy ones. And this process is mainly supposed to happen every single night when we sleep. And so if our circadian rhythm disrupted by this artificial light, environments, screens, artificial overhead lights, things like that, especially after sunset, but also it has to do with our morning routine and what happens with light in the morning, then that can incredibly disrupt these processes and leave us prone to things like lebedema.
FLORENCE:So yeah, that makes sense. Working way too late totally in front of a computer screen, fighting sleep, all that Like that makes sense to me. So what about for people who swear up and down that they're drinking you know four or five liters? I can't get hydrated. I feel like I can't get hydrated. What's going on there?
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:So true hydration, um, first of all requires minerals, and the water that we're drinking needs to be very mineral rich and toxin free. Um, because those things in that combination toxin free and mineral rich is what, um, I guess, facilitates that the structuring of water. And so that's the key, is that true hydration happens when water doesn't just get in our body, but when it gets in it becomes structured water, it becomes the more gel-like water, and so to do that, we need to be exposed to the right stimuli that structure that water. So that's, the main ones are infrared light and grounding, which is humans are largely removed from. We're told.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:The sun causes cancer, which is absolutely false. There's no evidence for that. I mean, humans have been in the sun since humans have been on this earth. And skin cancer in the levels that we're seeing it as a relatively new thing, um, the levels of it started to increase maybe the 1920s, and it's kind of steadily grown since then. So we need to be asking what changed then? Um, not what, what's been around forever, which is the sun, uh, and so what happened was our light environments changed, we put a lot more toxins on our skin, um, lots of different things like that. We've. We've disrupted our circadian rhythm so our tolerance to sunlight is much lower, because we're not, our bodies have no idea what time of day it is and what season it is, because we're out of touch with the sun, those types of things.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:But we need to build the structured water which hydrates it right. So especially in our fascia, our connective tissue, which is a lot of times where trauma is stored in that fascia, because the fascia is supposed to be hydrated with structured water around it. But then our cells are supposed to be hydrated with structured water with the cellular proteins in there. Our vascular system is supposed to have structured water. It's supposed to be. Vascular system is supposed to have structured water. It's supposed to be everywhere. It's supposed to align our organs. But in order for that to happen, we need the right energizing stimuli to that structured water so that it becomes this gel-like state and it kind of sticks to the body, you know, like it kind of gets there and stays hydrated. So yeah, that's the key is hydration is not just about drinking water, it's about minerals, toxin-free water, and then light and grounding natural lighting, grounding amazing, and you know the skin cancer, I mean it.
FLORENCE:Just there's certainly evidence that there's the amount of sugar that's coming to the surface that's browning. You know that's got to be play a role in it the diet and all the junk we're eating, wow, okay. So back, I guess, to the topic of. Is there anything else you want to say that you want people to know about heart health and what we can do to protect our hearts?
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Yeah, definitely. So two things I'll say. One is that if we look at atherosclerosis, or plaque formation in arteries, or a heart attack or a stroke, they're all clotting. You know, if you analyze atherosclerosis, it's clotting tissue. As you know, there's very little cholesterol present.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:So if we want to prevent atherosclerosis or a heart attack or strokes, we need to prevent clotting. And the way we prevent clotting, we can do it in two ways. One you can take pharmaceuticals that thin your blood unnaturally, which is not advisable because of, you know, long-term use of that can thin your blood in ways that you don't want because of long-term use of that can thin your blood in ways that you don't want. Or you could build structured water in your arteries, because structured water is what prevents clotting, because Rudolf Virchow back in 1856 found that what causes clotting is damage to the lining of the artery, poor stagnant blood flow and when elements of blood clump together. And that's held true in medicine today. It's still accepted. That's what causes clotting. So if we want to protect the lining of the artery, we build structured water on it, because it's also called exclusion zone water. So that protects the artery because it excludes things. That's not it. It's kind of this impenetrable barrier. We've already talked about how structured water creates blood flow, so that prevents poor, stagnant blood flow or turbulent or interrupted blood flow. And then structured water also forms on the elements of blood, like red blood cells and lipoproteins and whatever else is in there, and when it forms around them, it gives them this negative charge, and negative charges repel each other, so nothing sticks together. So that's how we prevent clotting. It's just those types of things.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:And then the other thing is that I mentioned before that the heart tissue is one of the dentists in mitochondria of any tissue in the body, and it's interesting that if you look at heart tissue, it also seems to preferentially burn fat for fuel. So we all know that, um, well, not everybody, but people in the low carb space and things. They know that you have to restrict carbohydrates for most of the body to choose and start burning fat and make ketones. Um, however, in the heart, it seems that it prefers ketones and fatty acids, even if there's glucose present, um, and the reason being is because that what creates that's what creates mitochondrial health, um, better mitochondrial health, and it's very important for the heart to have mitochondrial health.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Now, it can still be forced to burn glucose unnecessarily if we're very metabolically unhealthy. But creating that mitochondrial health with the right light environments and the right diet information is very, very important for the prevention of things like heart failure and things like that. Because it's not really the heart failing, it's the structured water mechanisms breaking down that force the heart to do more pumping than it's supposed to, because it's not really supposed to be doing much pumping. And that creates the situation where we get poor blood flow and the heart expands because it's trying to. It's more pressure on it, it's forced to do more pumping than it's supposed to, and that all starts with poor structured water and poor mitochondrial function. If we want to feed our hearts and make healthy mitochondria, we need to be metabolically flexible, be able to burn fats and make ketones pretty readily, be able to burn fats and make ketones pretty readily.
FLORENCE:So why is there such evidence coming out of the sort of whole food, plant-based I mean whole hospitals? There's heart-healthy science that shows the exact opposite of what you're saying, that a heart healthy diet is Mediterranean, so there's too much science for it to just be like why is that showing? Why is that way of eating and your way of eating both saying this can be heart health?
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:So, um, well, first of all, we have to. We have to discuss the state of medical science, um, which is good as far as the amount of industry bias that is plaguing it, and it's very, very clear at this point. I mean the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years, marcia Engel, wrote a book about how she can no longer trust most of the science coming through medical science, because it's all funded by industry and there's so much industry influence. And that's from big food companies that have something to gain when they push this plant-based message, because they have lots of plant-based foods to sell. And it comes from pharmaceutical, who are very invested in this idea that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease because they have a drug that will lower cholesterol. So the more that you have that idea, the more people will get the drug, the more money they make. And this is just a reality. Now, this is something we have to be informed of as consumers that the medical science has been bought and paid for, not to mention the fact that if your benchmark is that high cholesterol causes heart disease, then anything you can do to lower cholesterol all of a sudden is how you prevent heart disease. But what if there's? What if that idea that cholesterol causes heart disease isn't what causes heart disease? Then all those studies that say that they're heart healthy because they lower cholesterol are not good for heart disease. They're just going off the wrong benchmark, you know.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:So if you eat like, cholesterol in the blood tells us nothing about risk for heart disease. All that tells us is what you're choosing to metabolize at the time. If you are burning more carbohydrates, you're going to have more triglycerides in the blood and you're going to have lower LDL and lower total cholesterol, because your body's not running off of fats, which are delivered by LDL. It's running off of sugars, so your body's converting those sugars to triglycerides and that's being used in the body. If you're eating a ketogenic or more high fat diet and you're making ketones, your body is burning more fat for fuel and then so it raises the LDL or at least in a lot of people it does, because you're trying to deliver more energy to tissues, the only energy your body's able to burn at that time. So all cholesterol is telling us is what we're choosing, what our body's metabolizing at that time glucose or fat and you can also get a sense of if there's inflammation in the body. If you get more damage, small particles and oxidized LDLs, you can say, okay, yeah, there's damage happening, or you can get a sense of metabolic health if you take a trig to HDL ratio.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:But that's pretty much what it tells us and, in my opinion, overanalyzing cholesterol is barking up the wrong tree completely.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:And it's just been this huge distraction from finding out what the actual causes of heart disease are, which to me, it's just an energy deficient state which is impairing structure of water, which is creating clotting tissue on the lining of arteries, or creating the process that eventually causes the body to create that clotting tissue.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:So, yeah, I mean, there's just a, you know, fascinating, you know personal experiment done by somebody, uh at Harvard, uh, nick Norwitz, and basically he found that, uh, you could, he could eat a ketogenic diet and then his LDL would go up because he's delivering fat to his tissues, and then he could eat Oreos and that lowered his LDL significantly by eating those carbohydrates. And then he tested it versus a statin and the Oreos worked better than the statin. Um, so it just like the whole theory is just totally off the wall and it was never really any sound science behind it in the first place. Um, the recommendations for what LDL are supposed to be quote unquote was kind of pulled out of thin air initially. Um, it's just, it's been, it's been a mess and again, like I said, it's been a huge distraction from what the actual causes are.
FLORENCE:Got it. So, basically, what you're saying is when we pick up a bowl sorry, a box of Cheerios from the store and it says heart healthy and it's been approved by the you know, the American Heart Association, what is basically saying is that this product has been shown because it's a carbohydrate to reduce cholesterol, and then they take this leap this leap that because Cheerios or grains or whatever lowers cholesterol, like Oreos did in Nick's research experiment. Therefore it's heart healthy. The assumption that lower cholesterol leads to less cardiac cardio metabolic problems is wrong. Then the whole sort of pushing of the Mediterranean diet, which is a perfectly healthy diet If it's mostly whole foods for many people, right, it's really the processed foods. That we're all. We're all agreeing on that.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Well, and the other thing is like people talk about you know the plant-based advocates and they'll say, well, dean Ornish has this study that shows that a plant-based diet reversed atherosclerosis. But what they don't tell you is that they took people on a standard American diet and put them on a whole foods plant-based diet and they managed their stress, they stopped their smoking, they started exercising and it's like you can't say that it was the whole foods plant-based diet that did that, because they did so many other improving health behavior things and they took them from a very inflammatory diet, you know. So that's one flaw. And then you look at the blue zones and how A they were very inaccurately reported and I know people that have been to blue zones and studied food culture and they eat plenty of animal foods there in most of the blue zones and studied food culture and they eat plenty of animal foods there in most of the blue zones. But they also.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:You also can't say that a plant-based diet is best when A they're not eating that and B those zones are also doing all these other healthy behaviors. You know they're. They're exercising more, they have a great sense of community, they are outside, they you know they're, they're active, they're. They're doing all kinds of things. There are much less toxins in this community because it's not like an industrial city. You can't say that it was. Oh, this is the best diet for humans, because we saw in these zones where they don't avoid animal foods by any means but they also do all these other healthy behaviors, and that's, that's just inaccurate reporting and that's just how people mess with science to give you a message, or because they have an agenda promoting this idea rather than just looking for objectively, looking for like what, what they find. You know they do it to look for a certain message.
FLORENCE:Yeah, and I think that there's also a temptation to find the food that's gonna like purple potatoes. If I, if I, if I eat purple potatoes, I'll be like we're looking for the magic pill. I don't know if you've read the magic pill yet, the book by johan harry. So good, it's so, so good. But yeah, basically, he's like our food culture is poisoning us and now pharmaceuticals will coming in to give us another sort of toxic substance to save us from all the damage done by these ultra processed foods. And it's just like this double whammy.
FLORENCE:But he's like, yeah, we're caught in this situation now where some of us are needing this pill because it seems to be the only thing that yeah the addictions are so high and we're so hooked into it and we're we, yeah, we love all these foods and I would argue that the magic pill is the sun.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:Um, because literally all the energy for life comes from the sun. Uh, life on everywhere in this planet. If you think about the light energy that's stored in your food that you then consume, you're absorbing light energy. If you absorb energy from the earth, that's light energy that's been concentrated into the earth through lightning. You can absorb energy from the sun directly, from sunlight exposure, and that's what life is.
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:If you look at the laws of thermodynamics of the universe, energy is never created or destroyed. It's only transferred between two entities, and things tend toward disorder. And if we define life as order, temporary order while something is alive, then the ability of life to create order from energy is health, and so we need to gather energy from our environment, and the way we do that is through the many avenues to which we absorb energy from the sun. So the magic pill is the sun, no matter which way you slice it up and where you get the energy from it. You need to absorb energy into your body so that your body can create order, and that's the simplest way of thinking about it.
FLORENCE:And that blows my mind because I always still had the model that, yes, certainly we can get some energy and, like I know, the plants take sunlight, convert it into chlorophyll and then we eat it and we eat those plants and we get the energy. But I actually thought it was just because it was energy for the cells in the mitochondria that generated energy. I never thought about it actually as an energy transfer. Like I still have this idea like my head's, kind of in my head I'm arguing with. I'm like I'm like no, no, no, we generate energy, so do we do both?
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:yeah, so we're. There's actually such thing as like a human photosynthesis sort of um. You know, plants use, uh, chlorophyll and chloroplasts. Um, and uh, well, chlorophyll and then chloroplasts are like their mitochondria, and we use melanin and mitochondria um, we do the same thing pretty much. We get that energy from sunlight. If you look at when sunlight hits melanin, it dissociates water. Melon uses that energy to dissociate water into oxygen, hydrogen and electrons, which are exactly what your mitochondria need to function. And we have melanin on our skin, skin in many different places in our body, and so does most animal life on the planet. It has melanin. Um, that's why we're different than plants. Uh, but it's all about the sun, it's all about energetics, and if we can get the right energy into our body, it knows what to do and then utilize that energy. By having healthy mitochondria, it knows what to do.
FLORENCE:Amazing. All right, Well, if that is the best argument I've ever had that I need to move to Florida I have never heard one being up here in my Northern Canadian climate. So thank you so much for your time in this amazingly interesting interview and pulling it all together in such simple, simple, practical ways. Do you have any final words to say before we wrap up?
DR STEPHEN HUSSEY:simple, simple, practical ways. Do you have any final words to say? Before we wrap up, I'll just say be your own health advocate. No one's going to care more about your health than you do. Don't outsource your health to anybody you know. Take care of yourself and and and take the time to learn how to do that.
FLORENCE:Thank you so much. Thanks everybody for tuning in today.
