Dr. Ajay Patel returns to continue one of the most practical conversations in cardiology: how what you eat is either slowly building or silently threatening your cardiovascular health. Dr. Patel is an interventional cardiologist and structural heart specialist at Adventist Health and Dignity Health Bakersfield — and one of the highest-volume operators for high-risk cardiac interventions in patients with multi-vessel disease. In this episode, he and Dr. Sandhu move through the real science on nutrition, supplementation, fasting, and the diagnostic tools that can tell you what your standard bloodwork never will.

Topics Covered

• Seed oils: red herring or real problem? What the population data actually shows
• Sugar, cereal, and breakfast — why variety beats any single "healthy" routine
• Keto and carnivore: short-term wins, long-term question marks
• Visceral fat: what it is, why it's more dangerous than what you see, and how to measure it
• Calcium scoring, ApoB, and Lipo(a) — beyond standard cholesterol panels
• Intermittent fasting, autophagy, and what 72-hour fasts actually trigger in the body
• New University of Texas research: flu and shingles vaccines linked to reduced dementia rates
• Beyond Meat vs. real meat: the one study that actually showed a benefit for ultra-processed food
• Alcohol and the heart: cardiomyopathy, dementia risk, and the wine myth cardiologists created

Mentioned in Episode

• Ornish Diet and reversal of heart disease
• Tulane University study on meat consumption distribution (12% of Americans eat the majority of beef)
• University of Texas — flu vaccine / shingles vaccine dementia study via propensity-matched cohort
• Impossible Burger / Beyond Meat industry-funded LDL study
• DEXA scan and FibroScan for visceral fat measurement
• PCSK9 inhibitors and plaque regression

Connect

Dr. Rasham Sandhu — @nextphasehuman | cacvinst.com
Dr. Ajay Patel — California Cardiovascular Institute | cacvinst.com
Next Phase Human — @nextphasehuman on Instagram

California Cardiovascular Institute — cacvinst.com | (661) 443-0088 | info@cacvinst.com | 8337 Brimhall Rd., Building 1200, Bakersfield, CA 93312

Guest intake: nextphasehuman@gmail.com