Health Paradigms · Nutrition · Cardiovascular Health

🎙 Guest: Michael Gaeta, DAc, MS  ·  📅 Aired July 24, 2026  ·  ⏱ 55 min episode

Introduction

The US spends 20 % of its GNP on health care and has some of the worst outcomes. Over 50 % of adults and children have at least one chronic disease. In the 1960’s less than two percent had chronic diseases. We have 4.6 % of the world’s population yet use 50 % of the world’s pharmaceuticals.

Just because your doctor tells you that your lab results are normal, that is no reason to cheer as these values are based on 95 % of a very sick population.

For example, statins are given out readily, but did you know a doctor has to treat 100 patients for five years to get one patient to benefit? Did you know about the side effects of statins? Did you know that some studies show that statins have no benefits for women?

In the past there was a war on cholesterol. Yet one half of the heart attacks occur in people who have normal cholesterol. Cholesterol is actually protective. It is the source of our adrenal and sex hormones, for vitamin D and cell membranes and myelin the nerve protection. The LDL cholesterol particles rush to repair damage to the blood vessels lining.

His motto is nature first, drugs last

• Drugs are overused. There is a natural solution at least 95 % of the time.
• The underlying upstream cause needs to be addressed rather than eliminating symptoms
• 95 % of cancers are due to lifestyle choices which are manageable.
  • It is always better to prevent rather than treat
  • In some ancient Chinese traditions physicians were only paid when patients were healthy

Basics

• Sunlight, clean water, contacting the earth, breathing deeply, having good sleep, good food, moving the body every day, supportive relationships
• He advocates for a better diet (even if not organic). Does not have to be perfect for folks who cannot afford organic food
• All outcomes are better if the body is allowed to go through its natural cycles

Home Remedies

• It is important that people know basic home remedies
• It is important to consult with clinicians to know when referrals are needed
• Suppressing bodily functions through medications is not necessarily a good approach

Fevers

• Fever is an indication of increased metabolism. It is usually a sign of an underlying process
• Suppressing a fever through NSAIDs may get in the way of the body’s natural attempts to heal itself.
• In the olden days before antibiotics, they used:
  • Barley water (obtained by soaking barley in water overnight and drinking it)
  • The lemon juice cure: frequently feeding the person lemon juice (or orange juice, lime juice — anything with vitamin C)
• There are some fevers that are low-grade caused by a calcium deficiency:
  • This is seen often in teething children who are sending calcium to their teeth. This creates low levels of calcium in the rest of the body. This lack of calcium can lead to an infection or fever.
  • The children will get red cheeks, will be fussy and irritable
  • Giving these children calcium lactate will make the fever, fussiness and irritability go away.
• Often promoting heat through warming herbs such as ginger, garlic, cloves is useful with the idea that heat is life and the toxic things in the body can be expelled
  • Often promoting sweating to excrete pathogens is useful except in cases where the patient is depleted.
  • Purgatives, diuretics to make people poop, pee, sweat and vomit

Rashes

• Can put some raw honey on it
• The external skin reflects the internal skin (the gut lining)
• The skin is one of the five organs of detoxification along with the liver, kidneys, lungs and colon
• If there is a greater toxic burden than the body can handle, these toxins will come out through the skin resulting in a rash
• We want to facilitate this clearance (drainage) to facilitate toxic clearance:
  • For example, with herbs like burdock, sarsaparilla
  • In the early days, the country doctors used barley water — put barley into water and let it soak overnight to drink
• Babies do this easier than adults

High Blood Pressure

• Need to work with kidney, vascular, microcirculatory issues
• To help the kidneys:
  • Most blood pressure relates to the kidneys
  • Celery
  • Buckwheat improves vascular elasticity
  • Garlic helps open the circulation
• A healthy diet reset moving towards locally grown organic foods
• Managing stress:
  • Slow belly breathing for five minutes
  • This pulls them out of sympathetic state to parasympathetic balance
• Walking in fresh air and sun for 30 minutes or as long as can
• Get good sleep:
  • Dark, cool, quiet bedroom
  • Minimize devices in bedroom

Anxiety

• Could be a signal that there is an issue we are ignoring
• Not sufficiently active — go walk in the sunshine, need fresh air, movement
• Could be sympathetic dominance
• People who don’t sleep well are anxious and people who are anxious don’t sleep well
• Diet: avoid caffeine
  • Black and green tea are balanced with theanine so the “ups” and “downs” are more gradual
• Avoid sugar, stimulants

Cholesterol

• Blaming cholesterol for heart disease is like blaming the fireman for the fire
• Cholesterol is made in every cell by every animal species
• Cholesterol is needed for:
  • Sex hormones (estrogen, progesterone, testosterone)
  • Adrenal hormones (aldosterone, cortisol, pregnenolone)
  • Estrogen is protective
  • We make about one gram of cholesterol daily: vitamin D, bile
  • Every cell membrane bilayer contains cholesterol
  • Cholesterol levels go up with age as we need more protection as we age
• Cholesterol was demonized by a scam in the early 1990s after cholesterol-lowering statins were invented:
  • A fake disease was created
  • In 1984 the upper limit for normal cholesterol for a 59 year old was 330
  • They chose an upper limit of normal cholesterol that was below the national average
  • In the national panel of nine cholesterol experts, eight worked for the drug companies

Statins

• There is no benefit of taking any statin medications
• Statins have catastrophic side effects:
  • Ten percent suffer nerve damage
  • Ten percent suffer muscle damage
  • A large percentage suffer brain, neurological and cognitive damage
  • For post-menopausal women who take a statin for five years, the risk of diabetes goes up 48 %
  • The risk for diabetes goes up for anyone on statins for five years
• The American Academy of Pediatrics proposed adding statins to the drinking water and starting children as young as 8 years old on lifelong statins
• He refers to John Abrason’s book, Overdosed America

Diabetes

• High insulin levels (found in insulin resistance which occurs on the path to type 2 diabetes) is pro-cancer, pro-inflammatory
• Diet — eliminate added sugars:
  • Eating fruit is OK. There is an inverse relationship between fruit consumption and diabetes
  • Seven day food diary because we might not be aware of high carb sources such as drinks
  • A Snapple has nine tablespoons of sugar
  • Intermittent fasting: work towards eating all of your food within an eight hour period
  • Eating healthy fat and proteins
  • Add ½ cup berries per day — berries, because of their thin skins, absorb pesticides to a great amount
  • Eat more vegetables, fruit and eggs — will have a health benefit even if not organic: “perfect is the enemy of the good” — doing something better than what you are doing now is better even if it is not perfect
• Move body for at least 30 minutes per day: walking in sunlight, breathing deeply, swinging arms
• Home remedies: bay leaf tea, cinnamon, garlic — simmer 5 bay leaves for five minutes then drink
• Good sleep: poor sleep is a risk factor for metabolic syndrome. They are now calling the metabolic syndrome the “circadian syndrome”
  • With artificial lights people stay up late
  • Avoid blue light at night. Blue light is great for the morning

Stomach Problems

• Drink ginger tea with some chamomile; press the acupuncture point pericardium 6

Synthetic Fluoride

• Well water containing fluoride is harmless as the fluoride is tightly bound to calcium
• Fluoride in toothpaste or added to water is different and is a neurotoxin

Vaccines

• All studies show the unvaccinated are healthier than the vaccinated
• There is only one immunity. That is natural immunity
• Aninconvenientstudy.com — put out by the Henry Ford Health System
• The healthiest children in America are unvaccinated
• The sickest kids in human history are the US fully vaccinated kids
• The more vaccines a child gets, the sicker the child is: asthma, eczema, autism, neurodevelopmental problems, skin rashes
• Children who have a childhood disease with a fever have fewer chronic diseases, less cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases
• The measles mortality dropped to almost zero in 1962 before the measles vaccine came out although the incidence of measles increased — in the 1960s almost all kids got measles
• The measles vaccines have killed thousands of times more children than measles itself
• Vaccines have never been tested against a control
• There are no valid safety studies for any vaccines
• Vaccines cannot get society to herd immunity — only natural immunity can