327 The Heart Healthy Garden

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327 TRANSCRIPT The Heart Healthy Garden

Farmer Fred

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by SmartPots, the original lightweight, long -lasting fabric plant container. It's made in the USA. Visit smartpots .com slash Fred for more information and a special discount. That's smartpots .com slash Fred. Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, well, you've come to the right spot.

The healthiest food you can eat is the food you grow yourself. Now where have you heard that before? So today we're going to expand on that topic to include you. What is the healthiest food you can grow to reduce the chances or the onset of metabolic disorders? The Mayo Clinic defines this as a cluster of conditions that occur together, increasing your risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.

Culprits could include clogged arteries, elevated blood sugar levels, stress, and a lot more. These are all things that can lead to heart disease. And to put it simply, let's grow a heart -healthy garden. What are the foods that you can plant that are best suited chemically to help reverse what might be going on around your ticker? We talk with Dr. Laura Varich, the fresh physician, about those foods that can do you a world of good.

It's all in episode 327 of today's Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, Growing the Heart Healthy Garden. You or your family or your friends who might be struggling with metabolic disorders just might learn something new and some foods that might improve the quality of their lives. Don't be shy about sharing this episode with them. It's the Heart Healthy Garden.

We're podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Le Butylon jungle in suburban purgatory. It's the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast brought to you today by Smart Pots. Let's go.

THE HEART HEALTHY GARDEN, Pt. 1

Farmer Fred

The Heart Healthy Garden. That's a topic that's close to my heart. Literally, after being diagnosed with four cholesterol jammed heart arteries way back when in March 2012, I underwent quadruple coronary artery bypass graft surgery, CABG as the surgeons like to call it, back in April of 2012. And by the way, at the same time as they're wheeling me into the operating room, they were saying, oh, by the way, did we tell you you have full blown type two diabetes with an A1C of 10 .4? Oh, well, thank you. The surgery went well though, and the long road to healing from heart disease and diabetes began.

And I have to tell you, a shout out, to cardiac rehabilitation nurses. They do a fabulous job of curing you. Doctors tend to fix things, rehab nurses tend to cure you. And I had an excellent cardiac rehab nurse who showed me the way of eating correctly, of eating the right foods. And it was a big help to...where I have ended up 60 pounds lighter. The arteries that now service my heart are still cholesterol free. Blood sugar levels can be a challenge sometimes because sometimes life just gets in the way, but I've figured out basically how to bring them back down. And I'll be glad to share that with you today. Also sharing with us today is Dr. Laura Varich. And she is the Fresh Physician who truly believes that you can make yourself a lot better if you just eat right and give up ultra processed foods and eat the healthiest food possible. And as you know, a favorite saying of mine these days is the healthiest food you can eat is the food you grow yourself. So this sounds like a match made in heaven. Dr. Laura Varich, welcome back to the program.

Dr. Laura Varich

Hi, Fred. So glad to be back. And you're right. You're right. The healthiest food that we can eat is what we grow. No doubt about it.

Farmer Fred

It is more flavorful, for one thing. It is certainly more convenient and it's darn more nutritious than store -bought food. But if that's all you can get, I would suggest a farmer's market as your first alternative and then the supermarket as the second one. And growing your own food, it's not cheap. It's not easy. But you know, the not easy part is good exercise. You can burn up to seven calories a minute out in the garden working. So there's that. And as I'm also fond of saying, shut your mouth and move your feet. I like the way you put it. Basically, you can eat your way to health.

Dr. Laura Varich

Yes, that is absolutely true. You know, my journey into being certified in lifestyle medicine, now speaking to people and educating people on their health through nutrition, mostly through lifestyle, but mostly through nutrition shows us that we can prevent disease, we can halt disease, we can even reverse a lot of these chronic diseases that we have.

So that is pretty amazing. Talk a little bit about your journey to where you were and where you are now, because a lot of it is personal in regards to your own health, but a lot of it too is what you were seeing as a clinician. And it's like, yeah, there's something strange going on when young people are coming down with diseases that used to be the purview of older people.

Dr. Laura Varich

Exactly. And that's really what got me looking into this because I spent my career as a pediatric radiologist. So I was out there at Stanford and that's when I first ran into your work and became a listener. And then we moved out here to Florida. It became very obvious over my career that the health of kids changed very, very dramatically. Even just in the last 10 years, it was obvious that I was seeing all kinds of disease that kids never had. If we saw a case, we'd say, this is weird. And now we were seeing it every day. And one of those things was that really struck me was auto-immune diseases because we have a lot of in my family. I have it too. And the inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis are very big in my family. And to see kids being diagnosed with those now at the age of six and seven.

That's a very hard life for those people. Those are tough diseases. So I started to look into that and what it was all about. And when I did, I saw that it really is about our lifestyle and primarily about our diet. I decided at that point to leave my practice and start just letting people know that there's so much we can do. And that's when I got my lifestyle certification. So this is very, I'm very, very passionate about this work. I think we all need to know that we have a lot of power over all this.

Farmer Fred

All you gotta do is eat as many natural whole foods as possible. It's so very true. It's amazing though how the quality of life has really worsened for ourselves and our families. In your website, freshphysician .com, you point out that the development of 10 of the top 15 major diseases affecting Americans today include things like obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol levels.

And of course, the two leading causes of death, heart disease and cancer. And that is the unintended consequence of a Western diet that is heavy on ultra processed food and not too big on eating fresh food.

Dr. Laura Varich

Yes, absolutely. That is correct. This sort of epidemic of overweight, obesity and chronic disease that we're seeing now really began back in the 1940s or so.

These diseases really started escalating. And that was at the time that really these ultra processed and convenience foods came on the market. And now we know that about 70 % of our diet in America is ultra processed foods. What's an ultra processed food?  Those packaged convenience foods with the long list of ingredients. The thing that really ticks me off is if it has a long list of herbs and spices in it, I'm happy with that. But if it's a long list of ingredients of things that you have never heard of before, you don't know what they are, you wouldn't find them in your kitchen, that's an ultra processed food. And of course it includes our junk food, our fast food, all that stuff. But it's amazing that 70 % of our diet in America is these foods now. And so this is where our health has really been put in jeopardy. And unfortunately, fast food, it's certainly not cheap and it's not getting any cheaper, that's for sure.

Farmer Fred

But it's convenient and I think people are so stressed for time that they option for that instead of cooking a meal. But there have to be easier ways. There have to be easier ways to consume healthier food and that's been one of the tenets of your website, freshphysician .com, because you include a lot of recipes.

Dr. Laura Varich

Right. I include recipes, a lot of recipes on there. And what I've really done is try to make them as healthful as possible. One of the main ideas there is to keep the saturated fat low and the sodium low. So those are a couple of the main things that we need to be watching out for in our diets. And also to make them simple because like you said, they need to be simple. And there's lots and lots of ways to simplify the making of meals, such as batch cooking ahead of time. We need to get a bigger freezer maybe, but we can do a lot of cooking ahead of time and then storing some for future use. There's lots of ways we can do it. We have lost the art of cooking. It's sort of going to be going back to some of the traditional ways that we used to cook and the things that we used to eat. That's sort of the way to think about it. But there are lots of ways to make it more simple and we do need to make it part of our life because otherwise we pay the price

in the time we're going to spend later in the hospital and the doctor's office and the money we're going to spend on medicines and all these things. So it's important to start spending a little time and give food the respect it deserves. It's the only fuel of our body.

Farmer Fred

And eating as healthy as possible, as often as possible can be achieved. And it's not a diet. It goes right to your title, lifestyle. It's not a diet.

Dr. Laura Varich

Right. And I love the way that you that you said that because  I try to tell people  that it's really important to just have your goal in mind and to keep moving in that direction, and just to do the very best you can. There is no perfection. And this isn't a diet, like you said, because it isn't that if you ate something bad today that wasn't on your healthy food list that you're done and you have to quit. And I just can't do it. This is too hard. You just start eating healthier again at the next meal, right? And it's just gonna be, this is how life goes. Things get in our way and maybe trip us up, but we just keep getting back on track and just keep trying to do better, having more of those whole plant foods. That's what we're looking for.

Farmer Fred

I couldn't agree more. In fact, I have this big whiteboard with sticky notes on it. There's something like 50 sticky notes on it just to inspire me to keep eating right and to keep exercising. And, The number one sticky note on there, in the upper left hand corner, says, “write it down”. And that is so important for helping you keep on the track you're on. When you use a program like MyFitnessPal or Calorie King or even just a notebook, writing down what you eat. And what's beautiful about the computer programs is they keep track of the calories, they keep track of the protein, they keep track of the carbohydrates, the sugar, the fiber, and all of that. It’s to help you say, whoa, I better slow down here with the cookies. It really works to get you to lose weight. And that's just a habit to develop that you do day in, day out. And the beauty of writing it down, when you flip the page, when you go to tomorrow, it's a blank slate. It's a brand new day. You're starting perfectly.

Dr. Laura Varich

Oh, you know, I really, really like that. What a great idea. You're right. Because every day we need to look at that. Maybe every meal we need to look at that as a blank slate. We're starting over. We can start fresh and do better and better and better.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, we're human and we're going to be chowing down sometimes when we shouldn't be. But again, the words on the paper or the words on the computer can help you dial back a little bit. And of course, there's always exercise.

Do you subscribe to the belief that you can consume more calories in a day the more you exercise?

Dr. Laura Varich

Well, I guess you could look at it that way. You could also look at it as  you could lower your total calories for the day by getting some exercise. But one thing we know for sure is we cannot out-exercise a bad diet, right? It takes a lot to burn off 100 or 200 calories. That's a big, long workout, right? And we can eat that in one minute, two minutes. We really have to focus on, especially if we're talking about weight loss, we have to focus on what's going in. Exercise is critical for our health, no doubt about it. It keeps our vessels flexible and strong to allow the blood flow to our organs. Exercise can help to control, heart disease and Alzheimer's disease and stroke and all these other things. So exercise is critical. Weight loss, it is not gonna be the key. The key is gonna be what goes in our mouth.

Farmer Fred

Exactly, and what it's amazing what healthy eating can be doing to the inside, to help your body help itself. It's amazing what we're learning about the microbiome and what's going on in our gut and all the good things that can happen when you eat right. In your latest newsletter called Making Heart Choices, where you talk about heart health being the number one cause of death in our country. The good news is that even though the primary cause, which is a buildup of cholesterol in our blood vessels, develops over decades, we can halt the progression and even reverse this process. And you introduce us to a new word called phytosterols. What are phytosterols?

Dr. Laura Varich

Yeah, phytosterols are a really interesting chemical substance. A phyto means a plant. Phytosterols are plant sterols. It is a version, the plant's version, of what is the animal type of cholesterol. So what's really neat about phytosterols is that when we eat phytosterols and they come in our plant foods, we are going to actually be able to block cholesterol from being taken up into our bloodstream from our intestinal tract.

And the really great thing about this is that it blocks both the cholesterol coming from our food as well as the cholesterol our own body is making. Our body makes a lot of cholesterol. 70 % of the cholesterol that we have circulating in our bloodstream has actually come from our body itself. And our body makes all that it needs. All the cholesterol it needs is made by our body. Anything extra we take in is extra cholesterol, and that's what can cause so many problems with heart disease.

But about 70 % is what our body makes itself. So if we eat these phytosterols, they actually block that cholesterol our own body made and puts into our intestine, which would then be reabsorbed back into our body later on, blocks that even from getting taken up. So it really can, these phytosterols, really can lower our cholesterol. And this is why plant foods are so important for being able to lower cholesterol. They actually block the uptake.

Farmer Fred

The other thing about plant foods is they have a lot of fiber and fiber actually hides some of those components like cholesterol and some of the fats and even some of the sugars in our food and carries it out of our body. So we have these couple things working for us from plant foods that help to lower our cholesterol. And you can see why if we're not eating a lot of plant foods and we're eating more ultra processed foods and more animal foods, our cholesterol is gonna go up. In my old blog page, The Farmer Fred Rant, I wrote years and years ago about the Heart Healthy Garden, and it was based on the crops that you can grow in your backyard garden that have the most soluble fiber. A lot of people think of fiber as just something that helps keep you regular, and that's insoluble fiber. But soluble fiber is part of fiber.

It's a type of fiber that dissolves in water to form a gel -like material. I know the Mayo Clinic has studied this extensively. And soluble fiber can help lower blood cholesterol levels by reducing the LDL, the low density lipoprotein, or the bad cholesterol levels. And soluble fiber has other heart health benefits such as lowering blood pressure, blood glucose levels, and inflammation. Going back to my big white board of inspiration, another sticky note says, “eat more fiber, eat less sugar.” And when you eat more fiber, it's probably gonna have some soluble fiber in it, which a lot of plants do have, that is going to reverse the cholesterol buildup in your body and lower your A1C numbers if you're a diabetic. And I'm living proof of it here, 12 years later, that it works. Yeah, that soluble fiber is really important. Yeah, most plant foods, really all plant foods, contain both the soluble and the insoluble types.

Dr. Laura Varich

So yeah, anytime you're eating plant foods, you're getting some soluble fiber. There are some particular foods that are really good and really high in soluble fiber, and those are going to be our whole grains, right? And we think of oats, because we've heard about oats over and over again for heart health, and this is one of the reasons they have a lot of soluble fiber in them, but other whole grains also. Our legumes, you know, our beans and peas and chickpeas. Lentils, those have a lot of soluble fiber also. But really you're getting some in almost any plant food you eat, so you just need to get more of those in.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, whole grain can be kind of a deceiving title, because in some cases, whole grain is not whole grain. I've gotten into the habit of buying my bread not from the bread aisle, but from the freezer section because I know that freezer bread must contain some sort of living organisms that are better for you as opposed to what's sitting on a shelf for who knows how long. And that is the true whole grain. Maybe it’s the bread that you would find in the freezer section.

Dr. Laura Varich

Yeah, I like that tip a lot. And I also have another tip for your readers, because I think a lot of people are very confused about this whole grain thing. Harvard Medical School put out a guideline for us not that long ago that is really helpful. If you have a whole grain bag in your hand, say you have my favorite whole grain, oat groats. You have that in your hand. That is a whole grain. You don't have to worry about its proportion of things. So that's a whole grain product. But if you have a bread or a pasta, everybody wants to advertise that it's whole grain because we're thinking about that. But is it really a whole grain product, or is there just a little bit of whole grains in it? The way that they talk in the article about figuring this out is a really helpful and easy to remember. It is this: if you look at the label, what you're looking for is the carbohydrate to fiber ratio within that food, being 10 to 1, or even more, of the fiber. So carbohydrates ten, to fiber, one. So you can compare those two on your label and just see how much fiber it has, because that's what a whole grain would have, a 10 to 1 ratio.

Farmer Fred

Oh, that's a great tip. All right. The 10 to 1, carbo to fiber ratio. I like that. That can help us out a lot when when shopping. Bring your magnifying glass with you when you go to the store to start reading the small print on those labels. And it's really ticking me off that some products now are saying, you want more information? Here, scan this code and go to the website. No, I want the information right there on the bag.

Dr. Laura Varich

I agree with you. Who has time for that? Yeah.

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Farmer Fred

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THE HEART HEALTHY GARDEN, Pt. 2

Let's get back to our chat with Dr. Laura Varich, the Fresh Physician. And let's keep building that heart healthy garden.

Farmer Fred

You brought up a point earlier that a good shopping point, and that is that a lot of the ultra processed foods are in colorful packages. And so if you just shop the perimeter of a supermarket and avoid all those aisles with the colorful packages, you can find a lot of healthier food, usually on the edges, maybe not the fresh vegetables and fruits, which tend to be towards the middle. I mean, if you can just try to spend as much time as possible in that section. But when you got the fresher foods, along the edge that are usually refrigerated, that is a healthier sign that there's stuff in there that has a limited lifespan and it's better for you.

Dr. Laura Varich

Absolutely, I totally agree with that. The foods that you're going want to get more of are all along the perimeter. Now, if you do wander into those middle aisles though, read your labels because it can be pretty amazing the difference in some different products that we might find. Some might have just tons of chemicals and emulsifiers and other things in them, and others right next to it may have just only a few ingredients. So it's really important just to take a look at those labels. And one of the main things, especially if we're talking about heart health, that really we're finding out as sort of in general for health, we want to lower our saturated fat intake. That's probably the best thing we can do for our health, preventing Alzheimer's disease, stroke, cancer, heart disease, on and on, is to lower the saturated fat intake. So really look at that on your labels. And we want to keep saturated fat levels down,  as low as we can, really.

So I compare products and try to find the ones with the lower saturated fat. A lot of products are putting it in. Saturated fat gives things a kind of buttery taste, right? Butter has a lot of saturated fat in it. And so they'll add some oils with a lot of saturated fat to get us to feel like this is a really delicious product.

Farmer Fred

That's one reason I like to use the MyFitnessPal food guide on the computer to keep track of what I'm eating because you can follow at a glance up to six different categories of nutrients that you're trying to either limit or increase. And I'm following calories, sugar, fiber, sodium, protein, and saturated fat. And I always try to make sure that in the summary of the day at the bottom of the page, that the amount of saturated fat that I have consumed is less than the daily goal.  And I just keep it under that.

Dr. Laura Varich

Oh, that's a smart way to do that. Yeah.

Farmer Fred

Then you can really keep your eye on it. I don't think we can discount exercise in helping you get back on the road to wellness. And it doesn't have to be really heavy exercise. Now, some would say I'm an athlete. I am not an athlete. I'm just a guy that likes to ride my bike. And I do ride my bicycle about 100 miles a week. Usually it's over 100 miles a week. And I think that's what basically delayed me from having serious heart issues until I was in my 60s. But like you said, you can't out exercise a bad diet. But with exercise though, you are burning up that cholesterol, that sugar and other things and just what it does for you mentally. And I have found one key in the last year or so that has really helped me out because I have decided that OK, it's fine to ride your bike 100 miles a week, but maybe include a little workout within that workout to be even better for you. And that's where high intensity interval training comes in. And there was a book I was reading called “The One Minute Workout” that talked about a Scandinavian interval training program that was researched by doctors at Norwegian University of Science and Technology that found that a four minute. 60% effort followed by a three minute 30% effort, repeated four times can do so much good for you, and it doesn't matter what age you are. And in fact, they found it specifically very helpful for sedentary middle-aged patients to avoid diseases, as well as cardiac rehabilitation patients would work out just fine with this exercise program, the 4-3-4. They also call it the Norwegian workout. And they found that not only did it trigger improvements in athletes, but they've done studies on numerous other populations, including those who had cardiovascular disease and the overweight. And in one 2008 study at the same Norwegian Institute, they applied the protocol to this group of middle-aged men and women with metabolic syndrome,

which is a precursor to heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, and had them repeat this 4-3-4 interval training three times a week for 16 weeks. And the format was able to actually reverse the symptoms of metabolic syndrome. In fact, the interval group increased their VO2 max, which is a critical marker of health, by 35%, which was more than twice as much that the group that performed continuous moderate exercise.

So it really has a lot of benefits in sedentary people who want to reverse the risk of metabolic syndrome. And again, it was called The Norwegian. And the book, again, is entitled “The One Minute Workout” by Martin Gibala, who is a researcher. And I just wanted to get that plug in there for the benefits of thinking about adding interval training to whatever you're doing, even if all you're doing is walking. If you just walk where you are, going for four minutes at 6 % of perceived effort followed by three minutes at 30% effort and you repeat that four times, you're gonna feel better.

Dr. Laura Varich

Yeah, I like that. I'm gonna get that book. I'm gonna definitely check that one out. I started  adding some interval training to my workouts not that far back, maybe a year or so ago. I find it so much more fun too. It makes the workout so much more interesting.

Farmer Fred

Yeah, it does. And actually, I feel better after doing that. It just gave me a peace of mind, which is the other benefit of exercise. It clears your mind. I have a cycling jersey that says “bicycling is cheaper than therapy”. It sure is, despite the increasing price of bicycles, it just clears your head out and makes you a happier person.

Dr. Laura Varich

Yes, for sure. And yeah. The price of bicycles goes up, but so does the price of therapy, doesn't it?

Farmer Fred

Well, that, yeah. And medical care, too. Yes. Don't blame yourself, folks, if you are suffering with these diseases, because a lot of it, I really believe, is the addictive nature of things like sugar, salt and fats that you just want more and more of . And for whatever reason, there isn't enough, I don't think, good research

and publicity about the addictive nature of certain food ingredients. To me, right now, the big bugaboo in my life are potato chips, because like the old TV commercial used to say, “bet you can't just eat one”. You can't.

Dr. Laura Varich

Exactly. Well, there is a lot of information, actually, about this out there. There was an expose called “Craving the Cookie’. I think it was back in, hmm, I don't know the exact year, might have been as far back as 2005 or 2009 or something like that in the Chicago Tribune. And they basically exposed the food companies for what they were doing, which was brain research on people to try to figure out what flavor combinations were going to make our brains addicted to a food. So feeling like I need more,  the typical addiction type of behaviors, I need more, I can't get enough. I'm thinking about it all the time. And that combination was sugar, fat and salt. Now sugar, fat and salt in nature do not come together in any food package. So it is well known that this combination makes our brain go a little bit haywire because those are the things that through evolution our bodies have craved because they have the high calories or the nutrients that we need. So our brains know we need these and they were hard to find. They were very hard to find back in the days when we were hunting and gathering, right? So when they come together in a food, our brain just goes crazy and our brain thinks this is the best thing ever. And so, yes, it is hard to stop ourselves from eating that. Now, the best thing to do is to taper yourself off of those things and you'll see that the cravings will decrease with time. You start to crave other things. I've noticed I crave now a lot of legumes,  who would have thought?

Farmer Fred

Yeah, those foods are really are addictive and they're designed that way. The beauty of legumes, beans, chickpeas, snow peas, they're easy to grow at home. And you can grow them, depending on your climate, you can grow some of them year round, and it's just a great addit