Evidence-Based Strategies for Heart Health and Longevity | Highlights of 2025 (Part 2)

Welcome back to The Proof, and welcome to the best of The Proof 2025 part two. As we close out the year, I want to wish you a very happy New Year, a year of great health in body, in mind, and spirit, plenty of laughs, and perhaps most importantly, a year that is filled with incredible memories that deliver dividends for years to come. In our last episode, part one, we revisited some of the biggest nutrition conversations of the year. We covered protein, seed oils, the microbiome, and more. Today, in part two, we're turning to what all of that ultimately impacts, heart health and blood pressure, including LDL, ApoB, and hypertension, how the way we eat affects the environment, what lactate and zone two training tells us about our metabolic fitness, how lifestyle can influence cancer risk, and where creatine really fits in when it comes to performance and healthy aging. Here we go. Best of the proof twenty twenty five part two. What is the optimal LDL cholesterol blood pressure for the general population who is wanting to prevent cardiovascular disease as early in life as possible? What would you have told me to aim for if you had have spoken to me at age 15 or 20? Optimal for LDL cholesterol for the general population, you know, we we'd have to start saying probably under 70 milligrams per deciliter or lower. Why do I even pick that number? It's because the number of less than 70, at least by studies done within the arteries, intravascular ultrasound. It's the splay point where we know that the disease begins to regress and the progression slows down. Now from, again, realizing that's at age 20 or 30, we might not be able to undo the first twenty or thirty years of your life. And if the disease, atherosclerosis, has already started, we absolutely want to optimize your cardiac risk profile with lifestyle behavioral approaches so that LDL below 70. An LDL below 70 is a pretty tough hurdle for human beings through lifestyle and behavioral approaches only, even if they're vegan or vegetarian because our cholesterol levels are not only determined by what we eat. Exercise has very minimal impact on the LDL cholesterol. It can raise the HDL, lower the triglycerides. Let's talk about blood pressure. Your blood pressure optimal is less than 120 over 80 millimeters of mercury, and most adult Americans do not have optimal blood pressure. It's typically young women who have optimal blood pressure, but many are in the already elevated blood pressure before they get to hypertension. From the Framingham Heart Study, we know even in that window between optimal and elevated, if you're living in that window for decades, it doubles your cardiac risk. And what what are the main risk factors that are driving that elevation in blood pressure? A hundred percent of human beings carry the genes for hypertension. Ninety percent of Americans will develop hypertension if they live …