Dr. Danielle Belardo

When we talk about coronary artery disease, so the plaque that builds up in the heart arteries, a lot of those risk factors are not, you know, necessarily controlled, especially for people that are younger that aren't even getting their risk factors checked, things like their cholesterol, diabetes, their blood pressure.

And then, of course, we have, you know, an obesity epidemic, and that leads to a lot of these risk factors as well.

I also think we're diagnosing it, not in everyone, but in a substantial amount of people earlier because now our imaging and detection has gotten much better.

Now we can use things like a CT calcium score to see if someone has coronary artery disease before they even have their first heart attack and stroke.

So as the diagnostics have gotten better, so has the interventions earlier and earlier.

And so I think that it may be like a twofold.

But what's really interesting is that even some of our best medications for heart disease, when you look at the data about even the uptake, people will be prescribed them, and then we find that 40% to 60% of people at two years aren't even compliant or taking their medication.

So it's kind of like we have a lot of the tools for heart disease prevention, both diagnostic and early diagnosis and early intervention.

But whether or not we're actually getting people to do it is kind of the tricky part.

Yeah.

So first and foremost, that, you know, I have to start out by saying that when people I have empathy for people that go on a carnivore diet or any sort of diet and they feel better.

Right.

So if you are someone that is going on a carnivore diet because you are like feeling, you know, unwell, you have autoimmune disease, they have whatever GI symptoms for whatever reason.

And they go on a carnivore diet and they feel better.

The reason why we see that often is not because a carnivore diet is beneficial.

It's because it's essentially an elimination diet.

Right.

So this is a very strict elimination diet in which someone is really just focusing on eating a small group of foods and probably eliminating other foods that do make them feel unwell, such as like, you know, hyper palatable processed foods and things like that.

But with regards to the actual evidence, so whenever we talk about whether or not, you know, what dietary recommendation we have for patients, when we wrote our nutrition clinical practice statement, we published it in 2022, you know, we essentially, you have to synthesize multiple levels of research when you're making a nutrition guideline for, you know, the general public because

Important to know that any study and things that we look at, there is no placebo nutrition because everyone eats.