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Podcast 390: Rubeplex

How we can build cardiovascular health? What are the physiological causes of heart disease in humans?

Martin: Hello everyone! This is Martin Pytela for the Life Enthusiast podcast, the internet, radio, and television show! Today we have the pleasure of talking to Spencer Feldman, the CEO and chief formulator at Remedy Link. Spencer comes to us with a very important message. Spencer, much like myself, had to develop his methods outside of the mainstream. He is not a classically trained medical scientist. He has come to his wisdom through the school of hard knocks, learning in the field, which from my perspective is way more valuable because when I was trying to get help with my medical problems, I certainly did not get help from the well trained professionals. Maybe he can tell us more about that. Spencer Feldman, good day!

Spencer: It is nice to be here again Martin! So I thought today we might talk a little bit about vascular disease, or heart disease – you know, what causes it, and what kinds of things we might be able to do to put ourselves on the track to healing.

Martin: Yeah! Well, vascular disease, that to me would be the most popular way of ending your life prematurely in North America, in the Western industrialized society, right?

Spencer: Yeah. One of the first things I remember reading was that humans are one of the few species that get heart disease. Guinea pigs, fruit bats, monkeys, and humans are an anomaly out of the 4,000 animal species. Only these four don’t make their own vitamin C. What it’s called is a pseudo gene; the L-gulono-gamma-lactone oxidase gene is what makes vitamin C, that’s a mouthful, right? And in us, it’s a non-operating gene, that’s why it’s called a pseudo gene. So to give you another example of a pseudo gene, we have the genes that code for tails and fur, but they don’t operate. So that’s what gives us our human form. I don’t really know if the people that end up with wolfman syndrome are people who maybe have those genes turned on. I am not really sure.

Martin: I’ve heard of people with a vestigial tail for example.

Spencer: Sure, right. There are pseudo genes that we don’t want on, you know, I don’t want a tail, but there are some pseudo genes that I think would have been good if we had fully functional. One of them is the one that makes urate oxidase, which is what helps a person to get rid of uric acid. And because that’s a pseudo gene in humans, we have a propensity towards gout. Another one is the photo lysate gene, which is what allows the DNA to be repaired from UV damage. And we don’t have that gene running, so we are prone to skin cancer. And the one for the vitamin C is not an operating gene, we can go through all the steps of creating vitamin C, except the last one, so we don’t make vitamin C.

Martin: I guess I would put on the margin here that our creator was pretty sloppy.

Spencer: Well, to be fair, what we do have instead is a spectacular vitamin C recycling system. Our red blood cells are different from most other animals in that on the surface of the cells there is a mechanism to recycle vitamin C very efficiently. So we don’t need that much, but we still need it. And so I believe this is the entryway for explaining why heart disease is so common in humans and so rare in the animal kingdom. What I’d like to do is I’d like to take your audience on the path of discovery I took about trying to understand why we have such a tendency towards heart disease as humans, how that progresses, and what we can do about it.

Martin: Before you launch that, I would just like to pre-frame it with the following. Heart disease is very prevalent, most people don’t know that they have it. In fact, for many of us, the first warning we receive is a fatal heart attack. It’s not that you think you don’t need to know, or you don’t need to listen to this, or you can ignore what’s coming in this message. In fact, most of us should pay attention because even so-called healthy runners, guys who are 52 years old, and are named Mr. Fox, all of a sudden they’re dead in the middle of their very popular life.

Spencer: That actually almost happened to a triathlete friend of mine, and I’ll explain exactly how that happens. So there are a few things to understand. When plaque develops in an artery, it’s not as if it’s a pipe with accumulations in the pipe, it’s in the wall, it’s in the actual wall of the artery.

Martin: Yes, because the wall is made of layers, and the plaque doesn’t sit on the inside of the pipe, but between the layers.

Spencer: Exactly, there are layers called externa, media, and intima, and that’s where the plaque grows. Now you can see plaque forming in very young kids. What the medical establishment will define as plaque is equal to or greater than one and a half millimeters, but that’s an arbitrary number. It is something that we are just prone to as a species. So let’s talk about what’s actually happening, why it’s happening, and what we can do about it. You know that I do a lot of ultrasound with my clients, and the first thing I look at is the carotid artery and the plaque and calcium and all sorts of junk in there. When you look at plaque in an artery, if you look at where you are going to find plaque, or disease in the vascular system, it doesn’t show up equally in all places.

You’re going to see it mostly in places where an artery has a sharp bend, or a bifurcation, or branch. Now if you look at a river, in places where there are bends and branches, the flow is more turbulent. You have eddies, you have swirls. That’s the first clue as to what’s going on here. I will come back to that in a second. Now, blood has to be in a balance between being too thin and being too coagulated. If it’s too thin, a person gets hemophilia – they can die from a papercut, or from a hemorrhage. If it’s too coagulated, the oxygen doesn’t move properly in the blood, and it can cause other problems. And from my experience at doing blood work with people, a large number of people were on the more coagulated side. Now there are a couple of reasons for this.

Stress can cause it, inflammation, infection, but also tap water can cause it. Let me explain how this happens. When the municipal water supply utility wants to clean the water before it sends it into the pipes we are drinking from, they flocculate it. And what that means is that they put aluminum or something that has a very strong positive charge in it to make everything that’s floating in the water stick together, because then it’s much easier to filter it. The problem is that we now take in this water that still has a positive charge, and if it flocculates us, our blood stream, and all the little floaty things that are supposed to be separate all stick together.

So because of stress, poor diet, and the water we drink, we are all on the flocculating side, we are all on the sticky side. And if you look at the blood under the microscope, if you take a drop, and you let it sit there for five, ten, fifteen minutes, eventually you’re going to see it clot. And what you’ll see is a network of fibrin, spicules, and platelets, and it turns into this mass, you are basically watching the crystallization of the blood. So a lot of us are walking around with blood that’s been crystallized. The issue is that these crystals are sharp, they’re abrasive. Now remember I said that plaque shows up in places where there’s turbulence, at the forking and at the curves.What I believe is happening, Martin, is this abrasive blood is starting to swirl in certain areas. 

Now, one last part of the equation is the fact that arteries themselves are coated with albumin, which should have a negative charge. In the ideal case, the blood is negative, the artery is negative, so everything repels and nothing scrapes – it’s like a nonstick coating. But when we make our blood more positive, not only do we make our blood more abrasive, we get rid of the negative charge of the artery, so it can’t repel the blood, and where that swirling happens, we basically sandblast our arteries from the inside.

Martin: Yeah, scraping, it makes sense. We usually talk about zeta potential, it is the concept of all the particles being charged in such a way that they are creating a perfect colloid. All the particles within the dispersed fluid are repelling one another in the perfect manner. Is that the same sort of science?

Spencer: Yes, the blood should be a colloidal solution, and the municipal water utilities in the process of clearing the water, make our water non-colloidal. And what I would like to see done in the future is that the water utilities, after they flocculate it, after they clean it, they add the negative charge back into the water.

Martin: And until they do, we here at Life Enthusiast have a solution for you! Number one, filter your water. Number two, treat your water with the prills that we have, that actually help discharge all of this electropositive agglomeration. The water forms these latent liquid crystals. It’s the positive and negative ends of each water molecule that tend to connect with one another, making these little globs. And when we discharge that, it behaves a lot like if you were taking a pin and pricking these little balloons, so they pop and disperse. And so after you’re done treating the water, you end up with something like I have here in my water bottle I always keep by my side, I also add fulvic acid to my water. We have measured four things that we know happen with the water after we discharge it using these crystals. The surface tension is lower, the pH – the acidity – drops towards alkaline, the ORP, the oxidation-reduction potential, drops significantly, and finally the clusters becomes smaller in size, bringing the resonance lower. So until the municipalities solve this problem, I’m just here testifying that there’s a solution.

Spencer: Yes, great! Now back to the blood issue. We now have this bloodstream that is abrasive, the arteries no longer have their negative protective shield, and then there are locations where the blood is swirling and that abrases the arteries. And the next thing is cholesterol. We all have heard of LDL, low density lipoproteins, that goes in the arteries, and it has been demonized. But let me tell you what LDL does for you. LDL stimulates wound repair. Arterial plaque damage is basically a wound. LDL is a growth stimulant; it acts as a growth hormone in a way, it reinforces and stabilizes the area. And LDL also stabilizes the fibrous cap, which is the one or two cell layer between the plaque and the bloodstream. If that fibrous cap were to burst, all those inflammatory foam cells and everything would come out, and a person could have an embolic stroke.

Spencer: If the artery wall wasn’t strengthened with the help of LDL, then a person could hemorrhage again, having internal bleeding. So the LDL is trying to protect against hemorrhage. And it does a great job. LDL doesn’t cause heart disease, but it appears when the body is trying to deal with it. But as it’s dealing with it, the arterial wall narrows by the presence of LDL, so there’s less blood getting through.

Martin: LDL in the artery is like an ambulance being called to an accident. And by demonizing the LDL, we are basically chasing the ambulance instead of the problem that caused the accident, right?

Spencer: Yeah, exactly! And the plot thickens. The body is making LDL to make up for the vitamin C loss. What is the body going to do to deal with the LDL? Because now the plaque is going to start to grow, and grow, and grow. You may have heard of people who said that they had a 95% blocked artery and didn’t know. But the heart cannot survive this! A section of the heart cannot survive with a 5% coronary flow. And then you have other people who dropped dead of a heart attack with arteries that are 20-30% blocked, right? That is a mystery. But here is the answer. The body in its great wisdom says:  “yes, I’m going to seal up this artery, and yes, it’s going to decrease the amount of blood going through, but relax, I’m going to give you a natural bypass. I’m going to take some of the capillaries that are nearby, I am going to expand them, so that they can now act as bypasses for the blood to get around what may end up being a completely blocked artery at some point.” One more thing, and then we’re going to talk about the flaws in the model.

One of the things you’ll see, and it is easy to see on ultrasound, is a line of calcium in the arteries. The heart is not, from an engineering perspective, large or strong enough to move all the blood. It is moving blood, clearly, and timing things, but there are other things that move blood as well. Muscles, when they flex, especially the calf muscles, help with the venous return of blood from the legs. A huge player is the diaphragm, as it comes up and comes down during breathing, it creates positive and negative differentials in a thorax, in the torso, which suck in and push out more blood. This is how giraffes with their really long necks are able to get blood to their head, their heart alone will not do it!

So we’ve got breathing as part of the blood flow. And I believe that the arteries themselves are peristaltic – like intestines – that they squeeze. And I think what happens, it is just my theory, is that as a pulse of blood goes through the artery and stretches it, the artery responds a split second later by squeezing.

Martin: Like an elastic, involuntary, pre-programmed reaction.

Spencer: Exactly! So the artery is expanding, and then it squeezes, and ends up pushing the blood through the artery. Because arteries have muscles on them. But again, it is just my theory. So, between the venous return from the muscles, the diaphragm, the heart, and the arteries, all of it goes towards moving the blood. But if the arteries have been calcified, if they have lost their flexibility, they can’t squeeze as much, and now we have lost one part of our circulatory system.

Martin: Okay. But that should lead to low blood pressure rather than high.

Spencer: Well, the heart has to make up for that by beating harder. If someone is calcified, their membranes are less flexible, less permeable, so the body will have to push harder to get things from point A to point B, so now you’re putting a double whammy on the heart!

Martin: Yeah, I hear you. So the systolic has to go up to make up for the hardening.

Spencer: Right, which is why you will see pulse pressure increase, and I imagine the diastolics coming up too, the whole system starts to have a problem. So now let’s talk about the flaws in the body system. The body says:  well, we don’t have vitamin C, so I will recycle it, but it is still not enough, I will fix it with LDL, block out the artery, and I will make a collateral vessel. Okay, sounds good. But there are two issues.

One – we still have to deal with a fibrous cap. And if someone is taking an LDL inhibitor, then the cap on the plaque can become unstable, and if it ruptures, that’s an issue. The second flaw in the model is what happens if a person doesn’t make collateral vessels. So as an example, I have a friend, he was a triathlete and he ended up getting two stents put in, and he was trying to understand what’s going on. And what we finally figured out was that he had lead poisoning from shooting at an indoor shooting range, and mercury poisoning from contact lens solution he used years ago (note:  contact lens solutions today do not contain thimerosal, a mercuric derivate causing this issue). Lead and mercury inhibit collateral vessel growth. So if you have toxic metals in the system, the body may not be able to grow new blood vessels. That’s why somebody who’s got that 30% blockage actually dies, not having enough collateral vessels, and the guy has got the 95% blockage and doesn’t know it is still alive, because he is full of collateral vessels. So a huge thing is understanding that the collateral growth must be protected and nourished and nurtured.

Martin: You put your finger on something really important! Somewhere in our original design, I’m speculating that somewhere on the Savannah, there were no mercury or lead deposits, and we were just not exposed to any of it. And we have no detox pathways that successfully deal with that.

Spencer: So here is the smoking gun I would say to this. I talked about metals causing problems with collateral growth. Let’s talk about chemicals. There’s a chart and we can put it up on the screen right now, this is the chart showing heart attacks in the United States in the last century. And what you will see is that it’s pretty steady up until the 1930s, then it’s coming up, peaking in 1960, and then it’s coming down, down, down. Here’s another chart, of cigarette smoking in the USA. Now, if you put one chart on top of the other, you can see this is the same chart.

Martin: Fully correlated.

Spencer: So we know that cigarette smoking causes heart disease, and we could argue also inflammation and all those things. But the main thing I don’t think is being talked about is that nicotine, that chemical, that toxin, interferes with collateral vessel growth. So if someone is smoking cigarettes, they are irritating their system, lowering the zeta potential, causing irritation. At the same time they’re knocking out their ability to grow collateral vessels. That’s why cigarettes are so dangerous for the heart. It is not just cancer, it is also heart disease.

Spencer: So, we want LDL to be under a hundred, but we want it to be under a hundred naturally. If we force it down…

Martin: …we just stole the body’s ability to control the damage.

Spencer: Well, as I understand the concept, you want to keep that artery open.

Martin: But that’s just like saying:  I want to keep the firefighters and ambulances off the highway, they cause traffic jams on the way to an accident.

Spencer: Right. Let’s see if we can get the best of both worlds. Let’s recap the problem. We have vitamin C deficiencies, because we have a pseudo gene. We have low zeta potential, which causes coagulation and the loss of the arterial wall protection. We have the LDL causing the growth, and the plaque narrowing the artery. We have the calcium lining up, causing the hardening of the arterial walls. We have the unstable fibrous cap, which is ready to burst, and then the lack of collateralization. So let me tell you things we can do regarding these issues. In terms of vitamin C, go take some vitamin C, it doesn’t take much. Remember, we have a spectacular capacity to recycle it. As a day to day thing, even just 500 milligrams taken regularly is fantastic.

Martin: My understanding is that vitamin C has a fairly short shelf life, like three, four hours. It gets excreted pretty quickly. So it is recommended to take a small dose in the morning, a small dose at midday, and a small dose in the evening, not just one bigger dose once a day.

Spencer: Yeah, it’s water soluble. The next thing is the low Zeta potential. We have this positive charge in our body and my favorite way to work with that is based on the work of Thomas Riddick, who did the original work on Zeta potential, and Dr. McDaniel. The solution they came up with was potassium citrate. Potassium citrate has a negative three charge – that’s a very strong negative charge. It is able to reinstate that negative charge, so the blood goes back into colloidal solution, and arteries get their negative charge back. If you need stronger than that, EDTA (Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid) has a negative four charge, which is even stronger. But negative three is a good maintenance thing. I wouldn’t do EDTA every day, but I would and do take potassium citrate daily. I take a quarter teaspoon in a glass of water three times a day.

Martin: Potassium citrate, isn’t that something that lemon juice would provide?

Spencer: It would, but not nearly enough to counter what our environment is creating for us. But yes, lime and lemon juice has vitamin C and has potassium citrate.

Martin: Could you estimate the equivalencies? Like how many lemons would it take?

Spencer: You know, I tried that, I did that once and it wasn’t enough. What was suggested by the people that were working with Zeta potential was a quarter teaspoon of potassium citrate in a liter of water once a day. I do three, four times that amount, personally. And here is an interesting story, for years I would have to go to the dentist every three months because I had so much calcium building up on my teeth. And I went back last time, and I’m listening to them NOT scrape anything off my teeth. And I’m saying:  do I have less calcium on my teeth than normal? They’re like: yeah, you have hardly any.

So let’s, let’s go through it again, we’ve got vitamin C, you can take that, liposomal vitamin C is great too. You can make that yourself. Potassium citrate for Zeta potential. If you’re really in a hard place, meaning if you need to move it very quickly and aggressively, yeah, sure, maybe a couple of months of EDTA, but for maintenance, potassium citrate will do enough. Then you’ve got the actual damage to the artery. How do we supply it with what it needs to be able to repair itself? Conjoint sulfate has a great track record at supplying the raw materials needed to do the repair work. What about the LDL? Let’s say we want to lower the LDL but not lose its benefit. Linus Pauling, the only scientist to win two unshared Nobel prizes, along with his student, Matthias Rath, discovered that when the artery became damaged, it’s kind of like a tear in a piece of fabric, little pieces of lysine would become exposed in the arterial wall, and this is what the LDL attached to. And they reasoned that if you had enough lysine in your bloodstream, the LDL would preferentially attach to what was in your bloodstream over what was in your artery.

Martin: You mean like washing it out?

Spencer: Neutralize it. Wash it out, sure. But this is not a complete solution, because it still didn’t address the reason why the artery was damaged, nor does it necessarily completely reverse the arterial damage. But in terms of the plaque not growing anymore, because the LDL is not getting in to trigger the growth, that’s a fantastic idea. But again, don’t just do that without understanding what the LDL is doing for you. So one thing I like to do to stabilize the fibrous caps is gotu kola.

Spencer: That’s been shown to make the cap stronger, like LDL does, so it’s less likely to rupture and cause an aneurysm or a stroke. Another thing that you can do would be arginine, or for some people citrulline is better, for nitric oxide production to relax the arterial walls, and increase the flexibility. We have already talked in other videos about how to detox, you know, that I like to use Medicardium and Xeneplex, if I’m dealing with metals and chemicals, these are my go-to.

The other thing you want to work with is vitamin K2. You don’t want to do a heroic dose of vitamin K2, unless you’re monitoring yourself, because it is a blood coagulant. If I see a lot of calcium in the artery and I need to really move it out quickly, I would do a high level of K2, but I’m going to check the prothrombin time, and look at the blood under a microscope, just to make sure that it is not getting too coagulated. When I see that happening, either back off the K2, or add in something to counter it. And what we’ve done at Remedy Link is take all of those things that I mentioned, the potassium citrate, the conjoined sulfate, the lysine, the arginine, the citrulline, the gotu kola, and the vitamin K2 in the nattokinase, and we put them all in one place. And it’s something that I take five days a week. I don’t think someone should take anything every single day, because the body needs a chance to bounce back from things. But as an example, when I check my arterial age, I’m 50 years old, and I checked it yesterday and I believe I was 26 in terms of arterial age. And that’s not genetic because I’ve got heart disease on both sides of my family.

Martin: Great! So what about cholesterol? How does that relate back to the LDL?

Spencer: The LDL is the body’s response to the damage in the arterial wall. Now cholesterol is required in the body, the brain is made of cholesterol, it’s a base cell starting point, hormones are made with cholesterol, cholesterol is very important. Sterol, testosterone, estrogen, estradiol, these are all cholesterol based hormones. Cholesterol is sort of like a global anti-inflammatory in a way. When you see it going up, again, rather than lowering the cholesterol, ask yourself why is it going up? Where is the infection, the inflammation? Where is the toxicity? What’s going on that is triggering this? The statin drugs lower cholesterol. When you look at the studies that look at the IMT, the intima media thickness, thickness of the arterial wall, I didn’t see any results of statins, until people got two very aggressive statin doses, and then you would see maybe a few percent decrease per year in arterial wall growth.

Martin: Right, and at the same time, those high levels of statins will cause significant side effects.

Spencer: Very high levels of statins are going to suppress CoQ10, which is one of the main enzymes for life, vitality, longevity. I told my own mother: please don’t take those. She insisted on it, and a year or two later, her muscles are collapsing under her, and there is some evidence associating statins with mental conditions.

Martin: Oh yeah, dementia, people get very stupid on statins.

Spencer: I can tell you personally, I’m not a doctor, but statins are nothing I would ever want in my body or near me. I would try to understand what was going in my body, why was the cholesterol going up, and what I could do to work on it from that perspective, from a natural perspective.

Martin: Right, I mean, from where I stand, I just see it as a very evil ploy concocted by the pharmaceutical industry. I mean, they sell over a billion dollars worth of it annually. And I see it in my conversations with my clients, and it’s causing a lot of problems.

Spencer: Yeah, do you really treat the patient, right? I’m glad that there are alternatives, let’s say that.

Martin: Yeah, that’s what we’re trying to do here. This show, and our website, and this channel is all about helping people find alternatives to thinking that symptom control equals healing.

Spencer: If you have an opportunity to look at your arteries under ultrasound, and take a look at the blood flow, do it. One of the things that happens is a doctor might say, or a practitioner might say: okay, 50 years old, and you are fine for 50, but that might be arteries that are starting to clog. So I don’t want to be “fine for 50,” because I don’t want to be “fine for 90,” because “fine for 90” is almost dead. Your arteries are almost blocked. I want a model after health, not after the norm. Our body has the capacity to repair itself, it’s a remarkable instrument. And if you just give it a little bit of help, give it the right raw materials, take away some of the stress, it’s amazing just how quickly things can start to turn around.

Martin: Right on! But you are failing to mention the name of the product that you are talking about that has all of these ingredients put together!

Spencer: Right! The name of the product that has all those ingredients is called Rubeplex. It’s a powder that you can mix with a little bit of water or juice. It’s been said that humans aren’t good at risk assessment. And I, like a lot of people, have lots and lots of supplements, half of them I might try for a little while, and then they just sit on my shelf and I never finished them. So I thought:  what do I really have to worry about? What’s really the risk here? Well, heart attack is a huge risk. So let me do something for my vascular system daily. The other big risk, of course, is cancer.

So these are to me the two things that I want to focus on. I don’t want to become so focused on my health that I have a thousand supplements and I think about it all day long, but I don’t want to ignore it and have it catch me unaware in my sixties with something bad. So to me, my balance is doing something for my vascular system, something to deal with the human potential for cancer, and then maybe one or two other things that are particular to my body that I might have an issue with, and then I get on with my life.

Martin: Right, I hear you. I mean, it’s the statistical game, right? One-half of US deaths right now are caused by cardiovascular failure, and 33% are caused by the broad definition of cancer. That’s a lot. When you take care of those two most important failures that we have in our design, that’s major. I totally agree with you that the number one insurance policy should be to take care of your cardiovascular system, and to take care of your cells living and dividing normally. 

So let’s just wrap up this interview here, I think it’s a beautiful spot to say goodbye to our listeners, we have educated them about the cardiovascular system, what they can do about it, and we will come back soon with more information about other major health problems. So thank you very much! If you want to learn more information, come to www.life-enthusiasts.com, or call me on the phone, (866)-543-3388! This is Martin Pytela, joined by Spencer Feldman, closing out! Life Enthusiast is restoring vitality to you and to the planet. Thank you!

Note: this interview and the information provided is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with your medical professional(s) if you are dealing with a specific medical issue.