Dr. Danielle Belardo

I always tell patients of mine that the internet's amazing because I love when patients come to me.

You know, there's some memes out there where doctors say like, your Google search doesn't equal a medical degree.

I like hate phrases like that because the thing is, is that I love when patients come to me with information that they found on TikTok or something like that because it's important to be able to sit down with people and explain what is kind of fact versus fiction when it comes to that.

And there's a lot of misinformation out there about heart disease.

Thanks for having me.

Yep, yep, yep.

I'm here and hoping your audience is gentle with me.

Yeah, sure.

So I am a cardiologist.

I'm a preventive cardiologist.

I work in Los Angeles, California.

And I focus on heart disease prevention, cardiometabolic health, so things like

hyperlipidemia, high cholesterol, what we call primary prevention, so preventing heart disease, as well as secondary prevention, so taking care of patients with heart disease.

I'm very interested in nutrition and cardiovascular disease, so I was actually the lead author of our latest, our Nutrition and Cardiovascular Disease Prevention

statement from the american society of preventive cardiology so very also interested in the lifestyle factors for heart disease prevention as well as you know evidence-based medicine so do a lot about evidence-based medicine and um how you know everyone can kind of advocate for themselves to get the best care on social media nice um since you've started have you seen an increase in heart disease like i see these stats online i never know what to believe but

Yeah, so heart disease is certainly, you know, overall we've seen, you know, a reduction in somewhat in the severity of disease.

But I think that, of course, heart disease is still present.

It's the number one cause of death for men and women.

I would like to actually even say it's probably the number one through, you know, five and then, you know, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

That's how far off everything else is.