Background I’m about to share an incredible story with you that happened over this past summer. In my clinic I see patients before and after heart attacks, but not typically during one. My family and I had just exited a movie theater on a Sunday afternoon and I was walking ahead when suddenly my wife heard shouting…”Is there a doctor around?” and then grabbed my arm and alerted me. For some reason my gut told me this was going to be a South Asian male in cardiac arrest and sure enough it was. An elderly Indian gentleman was lying flat on his back just outside the cinema entrance, looking pale and completely unresponsive with a crowd around him. He had no pulse and wasn’t breathing. We immediately called out to have someone dial 911 while we initiated CPR. I have to be honest, I haven’t done CPR in over a…
Read MoreWhy Saturated Fat Is Feared
Let me first start this post off with my disclaimer. If you are inactive and already eating a diet high in excess carbohydrates, your are likely in constant fat storage mode due to excess levels of the hormone insulin. In this case, eating liberal amounts of saturated fat is not healthy. Please don’t use this post as an excuse to add a potentially fattening food to an already fattening diet. If you’re eating lots of sugar, sweets, and even rice, beans, bread and excessive grains in the context of a fairly sedentary lifestyle, adding ghee, butter or full fat dairy will only make matters worse. When it comes to their health, many people have a tendency to do selective research and pick out what they desire… “chocolate, red wine and saturated fat are good for me, but I’ll push aside the part about cutting back on carbs, eating at least…
Read MoreHeart Disease: A Preventable Tragedy
I’ve had the privilege of making a positive impact on the health of many patients and employees through my consult practice and employer wellness programs. I share these stories often to educate and motivate patients and physicians. Unfortunately I’m also haunted by tragic stories where healthy changes came too late or never came at all. I replay these often in my head, wondering what else I could have done or said to prevent such a fate from falling upon these patients and their families. I wanted to share one of these with you not to “scare” you into making healthy lifestyle changes, but to provide a sense of reality to an epidemic that often doesn’t seem real until it strikes. Those who have gone through it are left wondering “what if….” The story I share below is an excerpt from my book and is a fictitious case with…
Read MoreMetabolic Syndrome: What Cholesterol Guidelines Should Really Focus on
Background I recently had the opportunity to meet a medical hero of mine at the Stanford University faculty club. Gerald “Jerry” Reaven is the renown endocrinologist and researcher (pictured with me) who coined the term metabolic syndrome and is author of Syndrome X: The Silent Killer. I owe Jerry my life given that his metabolic syndrome criteria helped identify my own underlying risk for heart disease and chronic disease. Something the cholesterol guidelines and archaic Framingham risk calculator would have missed. Dr.Reaven’s research has also inspired me to devote my medical practice to the care of high risk Asian Indians and now even East Asians who are plagued by an epidemic of insulin resistance characterized by metabolic syndrome. The LDL Fallacy Global heart disease is predominantly driven by metabolic syndrome, an insulin resistant condition which has nothing to do with the LDL result you see on a standard lab report. Metabolic syndrome can…
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