Today on the root cause medicine podcast.

Just from the listeners of this podcast, I'm going to clue you into the dirty secret of cardiology.

Don't tell anybody.

But the calcified plaques are not the ones that rupture and cause heart attack.

And this is why I think when people have a zero calcium score, I'm still afraid.

Because non-calcified plaque, or what we call

soft plaque, you have not yet built those walls around the prisoners, so to speak. So you have

all those enzymes that are trying to digest the walls. Those are the 20, 30, 40, 45% lesions that don't

cause symptoms, that don't cause chest pain or shortens of breath or toothache or whatever symptom might be, those are the ones that rupture. So that's where a calcium score alone, I mean, don't get me wrong, a zero calcium score is great, but you need to always do that in concert with, or at least in my clinical practice, what I did was always check it with markers of vascular inflammation because it's a very different thing to have a zero calcium score with normal markers of vascular inflammation than to have a zero calcium score with sky high markers of vascular inflammation. Because if you have those sky high markers, we've got some work to do still. Well, hello there. I'm Dr. Kate, your host for today. And today we've got an amazing guest for you, Dr. Sanjay Bodroj. Now, Dr. Bodroge is one of our educators at Rupa Health. He teaches the Cardiomenobal section of our clinical decision guides for functional medicine lab testing boot camp that we do in partnership with the Institute for Functional Medicine. It's happening in a few weeks, and so if you want to learn more from Dr. B after listening today, make sure you go sign up for that if you're a practitioner. We have a lot to talk about. So this is actually going to be a two-part episode. In the first part, we're going to talk about things like the ideal panel to ask your doctor for if you want to find out your cardiovascular risk. And if you want to see if you're inflamed or have metabolic issues or if your cholesterol is the bad

kind or even oxidized. In the second part, we're going to talk about lifestyle. How do you actually

implement this? And we're going to dive a little bit deeper into some of the testing. So do you

benefit from a cardiovascular test like a calcium score? Stay tuned to figure that out. Dr. V's got

the answers for you. He's one of my favorite

people to talk to you about cardiovascular health because he has such a cool way of describing

things that really helps you remember them. More importantly, Dr. B is someone I trust and who's

helped some of my family members over the years. He's a wonderful asset and you can enroll

in his clinic, Well 12 Health, if you're looking to get the most advanced care available

in cardiovascular medicine and stay healthy as long as you can. Let's get started.

Dr. Sajadre Boudraj, welcome to the Rukkaz Medicine podcast. Dr. Kate, thank you so much.

It's so great to be here and thank you for having me on the podcast. You're one of our favorites at Rupa. I met you through our IFM boot camp the first time and just

watched you captivate an audience. And I learned your story about being an interventional

cardiologist for 20 years and now running a functional medicine practice. And I'm so thrilled to have you here to teach us about cardiology today and metabolic health.

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