Dr. Michael Roizen: 'How to get and stay healthier with a focus on combatting heart disease' (Long)

In this presentation, Dr. Michael Roizen, Chief Wellness Officer and Chair of the Wellness Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, talks about what has been done at the Cleveland Clinic to help employees, and other people in the community, to get and stay healthy -- with a focus on atherosclerosis and heart disease.

Dr. Roizen explains why getting a handle on health care costs is so important.

In short, tackling healthcare costs should be a strategic national priority because it's the main driver of costs in our budget. If we don't take control of diabetes, obesity, and atherosclerosis, it threatens to drive up the cost of healthcare to the point where we lose our manufacturing base, our service jobs, and everything that's not strictly local. So "we'll need to either 'ration', or get rational." Getting rational means getting healthy and saving a lot of of money -- it's estimated that $1.5 trillion per year is wasted.

Dr. Roizen shares the challenges and success stories of creating a smoke-free and sugar-free environment, and why getting rid of saturated fats and trans fats is so important -- to reduce the incidence of high blood sugar, chronic inflammation, and acute inflammation.

"Food is not 'Let's make a deal'. Until we can get society to get rid of all the sugar in the foods, the added sugar, we are not going to win this battle in America."

Dr. Roizen shares his formula for the 5 pills (or maybe 8) you can take daily as an insurance policy against an imperfect diet. These include: DHA, D3, calcium/magnesium, half a multivitamin twice daily, childrens aspirin with warm water, a probiotic, maybe a BBB statin & CoQ10, and purified Omega 7.

He also shares how the "odd omegas", particularly purified Omega 7 (palmitoleic acid) can potentially help in the fight against diabetes, obesity, and atherosclerosis. This is exciting news because Purified Omega 7 "antagonizes" all three because it has been shown to decrease insulin resistance, decrease hepatic fat accumulation, and decrease chronic inflammation - with no evident side effects.