Preventive Healthcare & Inflammation:
Steering The Driver of Disease
July 9, 2025
Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer
Co-host: Dr. Gordon Donaldson
Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 7/09/25. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.
Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.
Sam Rohrer:
Hello and welcome to this Wednesday edition of Stand In the Gap Today. And today’s emphasis is on health and wellness. Health and wellness. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Well, you can stay tuned. You’ll learn more here today. It’s another report day. I’m calling Report from the Front Line with Family Practice Physician Dr. Gordon Donaldson. And as I’ve done before for full disclosure, Dr. Donaldson is also my personal physician. He’s also though a true friend of truth, hard to find in today’s economy and a genuine defender of his Hippocratic Oath. And he’s above all a person who fears God and believes that his role as a physician is a calling where he does his best when being a servant to others and treating matters of health by working within God’s created design and purpose for the human body. It makes sense. It used to be the way it always was, but not so much today.
But he’s also a true friend of this program and our entire Stand in the Gap radio and TV ministry. So that’s just a little bit of a background. Lemme tell you, the goal here today is to identify and establish the foundational principles toward what should be the driving attitude. Not what is, but what should be the driving attitude of not only all of us because we’re all patients at one point or another, including my guest today, Dr. Donaldson, but also how we approach our individual health decisions. That’s all put together. But it’s also an approach that should be, again, not is but should be the framework for all physicians and healthcare workers. I’m going to say workers of integrity, but it should also be the basis for government health policy and health insurance criteria and a whole lot more. And what is that? Well, it’s the concept of a wellness approach where addressing root causes of sickness and disease rather than forever managing symptoms is the controlling approach. Now, the tide I’ve chosen to guide our conversation today is this preventive healthcare and inflammation nation steering the driver of disease. And you’ll understand while those words were put together in that title as we get into the program. Dr. Donaldson, thanks for being back again with you. It’s great to have you local and be sitting right here with me in the studio. It’s a real treat when not can happen, but thanks for being back.
Gordon Donaldson:
Well Sam, this is going to be a very timely topic and I think it’s extremely important and it’s a great pleasure for me to be back here with you and your audience.
Sam Rohrer:
Gordon, let’s get into this. If we can last several programs, I’m just to kind of lay the foundation from my perspective. You can disagree, add to it or whatever, but I’ve asked you to give an update for instance on what are you seeing in patient health, both in the immediate and as you see the trend in patient health and overall national health. In the past you’ve indicated patients are generally sicker than you’ve seen them before. And overall the trend is that they’re getting sicker. Now, when I ask you about the primary or the root cause of sickness, you identified that area of inflammation and we’ve talked about some of that in the past and how it is in essence the driver of disease. Alright, I want to talk about that more. You’ve also indicated how you’ve been attempting to treat patients with that in mind.
And so as to help, I would say construct a proactive partnering between the patient and the physician, but centered on wellness and keeping people healthy rather than forever managing sickness and chasing the symptoms of disease. Hence that’s the reason for the title, preventive healthcare, inflammation steering the driver of disease. So here’s my first question in what I just summarized. Is it still accurate, add to or subtract from it anything that I just said as we lay the foundation here to undergird the premise for and the identification description of this wellness approach that you’ve now fully embraced?
Gordon Donaldson:
Absolutely, and this has been something actually that has been building for years and years and it just seems to be, as we would say in the medical profession going on steroids because a lot of things are just coming together in a way that obesity is an epidemic, diabetes is an epidemic. Cardiovascular disease has been an epidemic and it all has been based a lot on how our whole health paradigm has been driven by, as I would say, faulty data, faulty approaches to it. And I know Dr. Vliet last week had mentioned about the food pyramid. The food pyramid has been an absolute disaster and we are trying to right the ship a little bit with RFK Jr. And I believe that he does have the proper approach, but we’re talking about a yeoman’s job and we’re talking about decades of an approach that needs to be turned around.
And so again, for me when I got into this kind of define my health program as a health program that focuses on wellness, not sickness, employing prevention, not intervention, taking a proactive not reactive approach, and understanding that diseases in general across the board are being driven by inflammation and oxidative stress. But this is especially true of cardiovascular disease. And so absolutely this is something that we must turn around if we are to continue. And I believe that patients are the ones need to start driving their healthcare rather than physicians dictating their healthcare to them. And that’s really a huge difference in the approach and I believe more patients are starting to do that.
Sam Rohrer:
I’m glad you mentioned that because in the last segment, Gordon, we’re going to have a little bit more of an application as we go into the detail of what is inflammation and how does it work and all of that kind of thing. And root causes, we’re talk about the next two segments. But in that regard, just out of curiosity, you have embraced this wellness approach that you just talked about. When did you do that? And just out of curiosity, you can’t give me the number, but are you in the minority or are we seeing a rush within the medical community to say, Hey, what you know, it would be a whole lot better if we would try to keep people healthy rather than treating sicknesses in the symptoms?
Gordon Donaldson:
Well, number one, I take a biblical perspective and that is in Leviticus 17, we’re told many times that the life of the flesh is in the blood. And so it really is that cardiovascular and being driven by the oxidative stress. And that word is something you may or may not be familiar with, but chronic inflammation, it’s a chronic inflammation in the cardiovascular system which causes the buildup of plaque. And so I was frustrated with the whole medicine approach and decided to go a different direction almost 14 years ago. And I was at a national conference and went to two breakout sessions on the BaleDoneen method for the prevention and regression of cardiovascular disease and events. And it was there that I met doctors, Brad Bale and Amy Dine. Two weeks later I was certified in their method. And my practice of medicine was forever changed and I learned how to approach really the whole driver of cardiovascular disease.
Sam Rohrer:
And Gordon, you’re going to tell us now, ladies and gentlemen, stay with us because we’ll go further into, I’m going to ask some of those questions that all of us would have. And so we’ll talk in the next segment about inflammation, what it is, what it does, and then we’ll talk about why the reference to, as patients, we need to be educated and as patients, we can help drive a change in our system. You can be a part of that. Well, if you’re just joining us today, thanks for being with us. I hope that if you’re just tuning in, stay tuned because I believe that what we’re discussing today, I know this, I know what we’re discussing today will be of benefit to every one of you who are listening and you say, well, what could be in that category? Well, it’s this category. We’re talking about healthcare today.
I have as my guest, again a repeat guest, my personal physician, Dr. Gordon Donaldson. And our theme today is this, and just a little bit of an update from the frontline in the last segment if you missed it. But we’re talking about preventive healthcare and inflammation. The focus is on wellness, not managing sickness. If you missed it, that’s a brief over date where we, you and the idea of inflammation, which we’re going to discuss and define more greatly in this segment because it is in fact the driver of disease. We’ve used that term. Dr. Donaldson’s used that term. We’re going to break it out just a little bit further. Alright, Gordon, patient education, you’ve already mentioned that we want to walk into that because in the last segment you said actually patients, if they are educated and informed and they should be, they can help think for themselves, they can help actually.
Well, you’re going to get into it further what they can do. But they can help to influence their own physician. If the physician is not telling them this is approach that is good wellness and all that, they can help influence the physician. So that’s a hopeful thing. So before we get into that, let’s go back to this driver of disease called inflammation, oxidative stress. You use that word first. Define just a little bit more. What is inflammation? Why do we call it inflammation and why should we understand what it is and why what it does is so bad actually drive disease? All us understand that just a little bit in layman’s terms.
Gordon Donaldson:
So inflammation, and again, let’s go back to definitions. And most of us think of inflammation as it’s a body’s reaction to stress or injury, which we usually associate with five main things. A number is redness, which is flushing at the site of the injury, swelling, fever or heat pain or tenderness, which then results in dysfunction because that’s what we can see. That’s acute inflammation and that’s the one that we think of when we talk about it. Oh, my joints hurt, or I get a cut and it gets red and it starts to heal and it’s the body’s way of coming in and trying to heal something. But here we’re talking about chronic inflammation and especially in the cardiovascular system. And what this does is it’s a silent underlying buildup of plaque in the arterial walls. Well, the arteries are the blood supply to every single organ system in the body.
So that’s why it’s so important. Now, when we think of oxidative stress, think of the word oxidation. Now most commonly for the lay person in terminology, it’s like having rust in our blood vessels. Oxidative stress is an imbalance in free radicals and antioxidants in the system we normally operate, there are free radicals that run around our system, but then we have antioxidants that come along and chew them up and basically get rid of them. But whenever we have this chronic oxidative stress that’s being driven by root causes, and we’re going to kind of talk about that, but when it comes to the education of a patient is we have to understand what diseases, what are driven by this. Well, you’ve got cardiovascular inflammation, which is the main ones which heart disease, strokes, dementia, diabetes, high blood pressure cancers. And this accounts for up to one half of all deaths globally.
So it is a very important aspect to our healthcare. And again, a lot of times these are silent until it’s too late. So we have to go out and look for it. And so an educated patient who needs to understand well, what are the consequences of the disease? If I don’t have a problem, well am I set up for a problem? And I need to understand that as a physician in treating a patient, but I need to understand, I need to have the patient buy into it. And when they buy into it and they go out and start looking. And that’s why from this perspective, why I got into the whole BaleDoneen side of things is because on their website they have a phenomenal wealth of information of things that you can look for and anybody can go to their website and actually take a free cardiovascular risk assessment, see what are your risks, and then from there, get yourself educated, understand what you need to do as far as getting healthier and can I combat what I do?
A lot of patients, when I educate them, the other thing that I say to them is, you know what, we can actually reverse this. I can show you that we can reverse this. And that’s what got me into the whole thing. And over these years, I have personally been able to do that with my patients. And you can literally reverse cardiovascular disease, which when you tell a standard medicine doctor that it’s like, no, even a cardiologist, well we’ll just wait for the next shoe to drop and then we’ll deal with it as it comes along. And that’s just reactive medicine. And we on the other hand want to really focus on the preventive side of it and we can prevent events.
Sam Rohrer:
And Gordon, I can say as again, you’re patient and it’s nice to be able to give a little bit of a personal thing. You’re describing what you chose to do and you are one of a few. There are some others out, but there are one of a few physicians who have said, wait a minute, can I do what I’m doing for my patient better than what I have perhaps was trained to do or whatever? And the answer is yes. And now you’ve noted about 14 years, you said, well, I don’t know when I started years ago, but I started with you and I became a part of this plan. And I know from a data-driven person, which I do, I talk about research all the time, I have George Barna on the social science on this program, and we talk about data. Well, part of what you do in the wellness and helping patients to know what you say, they can go to that one site you’ll give again and they can actually take an assessment and have some tests done.
Part of that is to actually say, where am I? What is my status? And then have a benchmark. So for me, I know you’ve been able in all of your patients, I can look back 10 or 12 years and when we meet, we’d go over and then you can see, well, this changed this year and this improved. And actually none of ’em fortunately have gotten worse, but these things are there, but it’s all because it’s for the purpose of saying benchmark. Where are the areas that are inflammation, hot or heavy? And then you work towards them and you can actually look on paper on the graph and you can see it and the thing of it’s, you can feel it. So I’m attesting to what you are saying that patient health, it does take work. It does take a patient who is willing to do a little bit of work for themselves and think, and they have to be disciplined enough to actually take and make some changes in what they’re doing. Otherwise, all of this becomes theory. Now I’m just going to throw that out there, but add into that here in the last couple of minutes in this segment about an educated patient. Now there are many listening. If they don’t have a physician, we’ve already said there’s not many who like you. Where do they go to even begin becoming educated other than listening to this program? Of course.
Gordon Donaldson:
Well, with the Bele Don knee method, one of the things that we learned is what we call ed frog. And Ed Frog is basically stands for education. And in education then we look for the disease, we look for fire or inflammation. We then look for what are root causes that drive that. And then we come up with an optimal care plan and then we feed into that. What is the setup for that with the genetics? So that’s what Ed Frog stands for. And then we regularly assess that. And so with education, there are certain red flags that would indicate that you have a potential increased incidence of cardiovascular disease like family history, like diabetes, like insulin resistance, high cholesterol or high blood pressure, nicotine exposure, gum disease, which is extremely important. Our mouth is a very important aspect to our systemic health, which that’s a whole big topic in and of itself.
Sleep problems, migraine headaches, abdominal obesity, gout, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, lupus, just to name some. And then there are some that are specific to the different to genders, but it’s understanding that those red flags. So I look at myself, I look at the patient, does the patient have some of these red flags? And so the patient needs to do some self-reflection on that as well. And then is to then educate them and showing them how following the method can prevent the disease and events. And so if there’s a single one test that really looks at where we are at, it’s called the CIMT, which is the carotid intimate media thickness test, what that does is that assesses the wall of the artery of the carotid artery. And based on what we see there, we can then tell you really have an affinity towards that. We know from studies that were done that if there is a greater than 1.2 millimeter thickness buildup in the carotid artery, which is considered plaque, that individual has a 40% probability of having a cardiovascular event within the next 10 years if untreated. So that is really significant. Another test that we can also use to look at that to see if there’s disease is what’s called the coronary artery calcium score. And that looks for calcium in the arteries around the heart. If there is calcium there, that means absolutely there is plaque there. And so if we want to go there, we have to look for the disease. And if we find it, then we have to go after it.
Sam Rohrer:
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I hope if you’re listening, you’re not tuning out and saying, oh, I don’t understand some of those words perhaps. But if you’re listening to this program, I know you do, and you get the understanding this is part of being an educated patient. This information that we’re sharing here is available other than just here, but we’re trying to move through and tie some things together. Again, our theme is preventive healthcare and inflammation. We come back, we’re going to talk more about the specific disease. Alright, Gord, let’s pick up where we were. We’ve gone over a lot of things relative to the concept of treating patient health with the concept of achieving health and wellness and maintaining it in that there is a way to do it. There is a role for the physician. There is clearly a role for the patient, even if the entire world system tells them something totally opposite, the patient can do that.
That’s the education part of it. But when it’s put together, the point being we don’t have to be chasing symptoms of sickness our entire life. And that’s a very biblical thing. I are just talking about it. Why should we even be thinking about this kind of an approach? Well, because God’s given us free will. He’s given us intellect. He’s given us a body made in the image of God. We have a responsibility for stewardship. We’re going to give an account to how we have dealt with all of our lives and all of our decisions. And just like we can’t go and before the Lord one day and say, well, my neighbor made me steal that or whatever, we can’t stand and say, well, you know what? I could have known the truth and what to do. But that one doctor I went to years ago, he told me something and I followed that and I never checked it again.
Ladies and gentlemen, you get the idea. So that is something that’s a challenge, but it’s also to be an encouragement. Now, in the last segment, you defined and described inflammation. You kind of compared it to rust in the system and waterline or whatever time, but how it drives disease. You’ve described the element of patient education, how that fits into the health and wellness process. We talked about some fundamental aspects of all of that in the first segment. But that takes us now to the concept of in the frog illustration, you use the RI think is the root causes fundamentally distinct from the way the world system comes at. Anything from politics, I used to be involved in to medicine to anything. It’s more of how can we just fiddle around and treat the symptoms rather than what’s the cause of this problem? That’s the root cause. So if inflammation is the driver of disease, and you’ve talked about that, it makes sense to determine the areas of inflammation, for instance, within the body, then the sources or the causes of inflammation at starting place for prevention and treatment as a part of the wellness approach to healthcare, what we’re talking about, how do you integrate the concept of inflammation and root causes as then moving into identification of what you can treat and then the treatment made for that.
Gordon Donaldson:
So with that, what we do is that we take the next step. We see that there’s disease. The only way that that disease got there was because of inflammation of some sort. And so what we then have to look for is, is there inflammation? How active is it? Is it hot, is it cold? And from there, we then can know how to address it. But the way that we do that is that in looking at the carotid artery, because that is the single best thing or the single best study that we can do to look for that. And if it is there, it’s not like we kind of look at it. It’s either you’re pregnant or you’re not. For a woman, it’s not like there’s grades of disease, no. We have to then deal with the disease as it is. It’s the mirror. It is the mirror as James would say.
So here from that standpoint, then we go to the lab tests. Lab tests are extremely important and we use Cleveland Heart Labs to look for inflammation. There are certain tests again on the website, they are outlined very adequately and they can be done through Quest as well, through the Quest Cardio IQ program, they can be ordered. And so you can go out there and get those tests done on yourself and then look at where they’re at. Are they high, are they low? Where do they need to adjust things? So what are the things that then can drive all of these different or that can drive this inflammation and oxidative stress? Well, the root causes are very, very important. And some of the very important ones are some of the same ones that we talked about in red flags. But some additional things is like gut dysbiosis, the imbalance of the good and bad bacteria in the gut, sleep apnea, insulin resistance, and a lot of people don’t understand, but that is a hugely important driver because the average person who becomes diabetic has been insulin resistant for 15 to 20 years.
We also know from studies that if you go out and by standard medicine, you get a blood test done, the hemoglobin A1C, which is the long-term one, and it’s below 5.7 and your doctor says, oh man, fantastic, you’re just great. Well, we’ve actually gone and done the gold standard study on them, which is a two hour glucose tolerance test. And 40% of those people are actually insulin resistant, even with a normal definition of they’re perfectly healthy with their sugar. And then you can have high levels of a very genetic specific lipid protein called lipoprotein little. A high stress can do it, high stress in job, high stress in home situations, high stress in caring for somebody who has a caregiver. So caregivers, it’s a real problem. Low vitamin D, underactive thyroid, bad bacteria in the mouth that causes systemic inflammation, infectious diseases, a sedentary lifestyle, high cholesterol and high blood pressure.
So it is very important that we look at each one of these root causes. The key to that though is that it only takes one of these root causes. We can go and we can try to say, okay, it’s not like, oh, well let’s look at the root causes and let’s just say we deal with the blood pressure and we deal with the cholesterol, but we don’t deal with the insulin resistance. And oh, that’s okay. No, because that insulin resistance can still drive the buildup of plaque. And so there are two very important blood tests that I look at when it comes to that. And it’s one called the Myeloperoxidase. The other one is called the plaque activity level. Those two blood tests are very important to tell us what is happening in the wall of the artery. And rather there is continued plaque buildup or not. We have to get those things under control. And so with the root causes, again, getting each one of them under control and addressing each one of them on a level that is very important. And then we’ll talk a little bit about genetics, but again, getting into optimal.
Sam Rohrer:
Okay, well let me ask you a question here. Root causes, let me go just a little bit deeper on that. People may be listening say, well, if root cause, is it blood pressure? Is it insulin resistance that you’ve mentioned? Is it sleep apnea cent is an example, is that the root cause or are you really going to the root, root cause of why can’t I sleep? Why am I under stress rather than seeing, it almost sounds a little bit like some of what you’re saying are almost indicators of the presence of inflammation, but not necessarily the cause. It seems to me that some of these could be what I’m eating, it could be where I’m working. Maybe it’s my spiritual relationship, I don’t have one with God and I’m living in a life of denial. We know that affects the body too. So those kind of things are you talking about those kind of root things that goes right, for instance, to the heart of the spiritual condition of people? How do you deal with those things?
Gordon Donaldson:
Well, absolutely each one of those root causes, then you have to drill down on them and each root cause has its own issue of how you treat it. So yes, these are the root causes. It’s like, okay, I have stress for example, let’s just say I have stress in my life. Well, what is the stress? What is the cause? How do I then work with that root cause? And we kind of talked to that in the next segment about optimal treatment. But meditation, obviously for those of us listening to this program, it’s especially biblical meditation. Get away from the fear narrative. That is a huge driver of all of oxidative stress is this whole fear driver. And that’s what they want us to be under. They want us to be fearful and we’re told we should not have a fear anxiety issue if we’re Christians. Now, it can be there, but again then insulin resistance. Okay, what is it that I need to drill down on with that? And how do I work with it? How do I go after it? Why do I have it? Is it because I’m overweight? Is it because I have a predisposition to it? Is it because I have high blood pressure? Is it because I have cholesterol? That can be multiplicity. We have situations where it can be diet related, it can be genetic related.
Sam Rohrer:
Dr. Donaldson, before we get out of this segment, let me come back and follow up on that. Alright, so yes, if somebody’s listening, there are root causes that can go all the way down to those precipitators that are causing things in our life. Alright? But the fact that there is rust in the system, that there are things that are evidence and measurable in my credit artery and that what you’re talking about as an example, that’s why the proper tests can give an indication of where that inflammation is occurring as a way to then back further into the root causes of now how can I address those things that are fueling it? Is that correct?
Gordon Donaldson:
That is absolutely correct. That’s where we’ll get into.
Sam Rohrer:
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, stay with us because it’s a logical progression in thinking. That’s what we’re trying to do When we come back, we’ll try to deal with now how to actually practically mitigate deal, steer some of what we’re talking about. Say you can have better health. Well, as we go into the final program, let me remind all of you who are listening, I know for sure unless you are a well-informed healthcare provider yourself, you’ve heard a lot today and probably you’ve heard a lot of it bits and pieces before, but putting it all together is a difficult thing. I understand that we all do, but that’s the advantage of being able to go pick up this program again on our website or off of our app, pick up the transcript, which you can find there and walk through and read what has been said and listen to the program again.
Now, if you are a well-informed patient, and I’m going to say that if you understand as a believer most listening to this program are Christians, not all, but I’ll say this, that the Christian, the biblical approach is taking individual responsibility, understanding that well, that choices have consequences and that we’re going to give an account to God for the choices that we make. Not just an area of finances, but yeah, what we eat, what goes into our body, where we go, what we say, what we think. Yeah, all of those things. We’re going to have an account that makes a big difference as the motivation to say, I am not just going to blindly listen to what somebody says on the radio. Even this program. I’m saying we’re giving you the truth, but we’re telling you where you can go. And fundamentally, that’s biblical truth, but it extends out through all aspects of life and living.
We’re talking health today. So that’s the connectability and Gordon as we talk here. Now the mitigating of this, now you take your test whether the physician prescribes it under the wellness program or the individual pursues it on their own. There are certain tests you talked about that where they can provide the indicators, the picture looking into the, as you talked about, the apostle James looking into the pure word, the mirror to get an idea of where we are. Okay, you take the test, you find out you got hotspots of inflammation, you have areas that are creating disease, fueling disease, creating illness. Alright? And then from there, then now what do I do about it? But that allows a person to know, all right, I have areas of concern. I have areas where what I’m feeling tired from or I don’t have any energy, whatever that is, these may in fact be the places that are causing me to feel this way. Okay? That’s like taking your car to the garage and the guy says, hook you up to the diagnostic system and say, well you got this, you got this, you got this. Alright, I think we’ve explained that ladies and gentlemen. So that being the case, Gordon, how do you and the wellness approach to healthcare actually integrate then patient knowledge, the things we’re talking about, truthful education and move that into both choices the physician makes and the patient chooses. So move us now into what to do after we’ve gone through the process we’ve just talked about.
Gordon Donaldson:
So for us, we want to address and treat those root causes in the most optimal way. And that’s what kind of drove me away from standard medicine because standard medicine does not do that. And as we are going along and as standard medicine approaches, the approaches that they take is that you have less time with the physician and understanding, educating patients, having them understand what is going on, takes time with the patient. And so standard medicine generally does not do that. And instead, what is the big word that standard medicine does put you in a protocol? And a protocol almost always is most efficiently done with a prescription. So what is the quickest thing that a physician can do? Oh, you’ve got this problem, you’ve got high blood pressure, you’ve got high cholesterol, you’ve got insulin resistance. Hey, have we got a medicine for you?
And you just feed into the system, you feed into big pharma and that’s exactly what they want. And so that’s what we want to get away from. So the first place we always start is lifestyle one, lifestyle two, which is the most difficult because they are disciplines and good diet and exercise takes time, it takes discipline, it takes some information. So again, with the whole diet, and we know that with lifestyle, good lifestyle alone, we can reduce cardiovascular risk better than any single medicine can reduce cardiovascular risk and we can reduce it by 50, 60, 70% depending on what you’re dealing with, just with good lifestyle. And so we really, really emphasize that in the method that is, as we would say, prime number one issue that we deal with. And so to quickly kind of with the diet, you want to focus on whole foods, lean protein, good fats, complex carbs, and high fiber.
And so with a caloric breakdown of that is you want to balance, so I usually recommend your caloric balance. That should be 50% protein fats 20 to 30%. And that is dependent on what your genetics are, which we’ll talk about and carbs, complex carbs at 20 to 30% with at least 30 grams of fiber a day. And then the good old exercise, which is 30 minutes involving aerobic and strength training at least five days a week. So those are the basics as to where you start. And so I would like to jump a little bit to the genetics. So in order to get optimal control and in order to treat someone optimally, if we understand where they are genetically, that makes a difference as to what we recommend. Because I can actually give, if I don’t know somebody’s a genetic what’s called an APOE gene, I may be giving them bad advice by saying, oh, you can have more fats rather, they’re good or bad.
I can be giving bad advice if I don’t know their genetics. Same way with another one is the haptoglobin gene that is very important with sugar. And each one of the genes has what I call a risk assessment for cardiovascular disease. And it has a practical side to it. In other words, for example, the nine P 21 gene, which is the heart attack gene that tells us that, okay, if you have one or two of those genes, your incidence of cardiovascular disease is extremely high. And on the flip side though, what that tells me is on the practical side is I better look for every single possible way to get all of your inflammation under control if you have that gene, because you can have good numbers, you can have good things going on there, but if you have that gene, guess what? Cardiovascular disease is going to be in your foreseeable future at some point time.
And so the genetics in looking at that is very, very important. We use Boston Heart Labs to do our genetic testing. And the really important thing is this can be done very inexpensively with both the, going back to the tests, coronary artery calcium score, the carotid thickness, the CIMT and with genetics. So you can get all of the major cardiovascular genetic studies done for $150 and you only ever have to do it one time, sadly, is about genetics. You can’t switch out your parents for better genes. And so again, how we approach it on the BaleDoneen side of things is we say it doesn’t matter what hand you are dealt is that you can play to a winner. And so for them, it’s outlined very nicely in two of the books that they’ve written. Their first book was Beat the Heart Attack Gene, the second being Healthy Heart, healthy brain. And of course all of us want healthy brains to think critically with common sense and a biblical worldview.
Sam Rohrer:
There you go. And wow, well packed a lot of information and they, ladies and gentlemen, come back and listen again to the program again, the books that it was named and some of the tests we talked about, you’ll find in the transcript. And I hope, I really, truly hope that this has been a helpful program today. That’s been our prayer. And anyways, if it was good for you, let us know. Write to us this week and as always say, pray for us. Partner with us financially, both essential to keep this program on the.
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