Jul 2, 2026 · 17 min · 6 segments
In this clip from my conversation on The Primal Podcast, I explain why visceral fat is one of the most dangerous types of fat for heart health. I’ll break down what actually causes visceral fat to…
You are an interventional cardiologist, a heart doctor, and you really love fasting.
Absolutely, because visceral fat is connected to coronary artery disease, and that's what I work on all day long.
Visceral fat has been identified as a major risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease.
Not only cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, brain function, even some cancers.
So that data came later on, but I saw that it's the visceral fat patients who are having the worst coronary artery disease, the highest coronary calcium scores, the highest incidence of plaque rupture.
And on plaque analysis, I was seeing the correlation between the two and worked out the chemistry.
And sure enough, visceral fat is inflammatory, and that's became the root of my prevention program, that if I get rid of that, will my outcomes get better? 'Cause ultimately, I just got tired of stenting patients all day long and seeing that they keep coming back with new and new progressive disease.
So recently, we put in a DEXA scan machine in my office to specifically look at the amount of visceral fat that you have.
And we now can quantitate it on the DEXA scan and follow it longitudinally with the interventions that we'll talk about, because I do wanna get rid of visceral fat.
And in your design, it was the intermittent fasting that actually gets rid of visceral fat.
The first one is the regular fat, the fat that people have under their butt, for example, or in their thighs or under their arms, and that's just subcutaneous fat.
So if I did a biopsy, I'll find some fat cells in it, but there's not much inflammation.
This fat is in your liver as well, and there's fat in your omentum and around your pancreas, and the belly protrudes outwardly.
You are an interventional cardiologist, a heart doctor, and you really love fasting.
Absolutely, because visceral fat is connected to coronary artery disease, and that's what I work on all day long.
Visceral fat has been identified as a major risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease.
Not only cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, brain function, even some cancers.
So that data came later on, but I saw that it's the visceral fat patients who are having the worst coronary artery disease, the highest coronary calcium scores, the highest incidence of plaque rupture.
And on plaque analysis, I was seeing the correlation between the two and worked out the chemistry.
And sure enough, visceral fat is inflammatory, and that's became the root of my prevention program, that if I get rid of that, will my outcomes get better? 'Cause ultimately, I just got tired of stenting patients all day long and seeing that they keep coming back with new and new progressive disease.
So recently, we put in a DEXA scan machine in my office to specifically look at the amount of visceral fat that you have.
And we now can quantitate it on the DEXA scan and follow it longitudinally with the interventions that we'll talk about, because I do wanna get rid of visceral fat.
And in your design, it was the intermittent fasting that actually gets rid of visceral fat.
The first one is the regular fat, the fat that people have under their butt, for example, or in their thighs or under their arms, and that's just subcutaneous fat.
So if I did a biopsy, I'll find some fat cells in it, but there's not much inflammation.
This fat is in your liver as well, and there's fat in your omentum and around your pancreas, and the belly protrudes outwardly.
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