Looking for natural ways to promote healthier blood flow and reduce clotting? Tune into our latest episode where we explore nine methods to make your blood thinner naturally. We delve into everyday lifestyle changes like staying hydrated and regular exercise, alongside dietary modifications incorporating Omega-3 fatty acids, garlic, ginger, green tea, and vitamin E-rich foods. Intriguingly, we discuss the potential benefits of less-known supplements like serrapeptase and N-Acetyl Cysteine (NAC).
Remember, these tips should not replace professional medical advice, especially if you're on blood thinners or have a clotting disorder. Always consult a healthcare provider before making significant changes to your lifestyle or diet for health purposes.
In this episode, we cover:
00:57 – Blood tests to look at blood clotting
05:41 – Natural ways to make your blood thin
08:03 – Eat Omega-3 Rich Foods
09:16 – Consume Garlic
10:12 – Incorporate Ginger
10:45 – Drink Green Tea
11:07 – Include Foods High in Vitamin E
11:46 – Take Systemic Enzymes
14:37 – Supplement with NAC
17:51 – Takeaways
Hey guys, Dr. Justin Marchegiani here. Today we're going to be talking about the best ways to naturally reduce blood clots and improve your blood thinning capacity. It's going to help your cardiovascular system. It's going to help your body's overall inflammation levels. I'm excited to dive into this topic. Before we do, please smash that like button. It really helps the search algorithm. Love to see your comments down below guys on the topic.
Alright, so let's dive in. We have more clots in the body, and more clots in the vascular system. The question becomes, why? Usually, there's going to be inflammation. We're going to be talking about some of the ways that we can improve blood thinning. At the same time, to improve blood thinning, you have to also reduce inflammation. So we'll hit it from all sides of the equation here. Now, a couple of things that you can do to assess and test if you have an increased risk for clots or an increased risk for your blood being more viscous and thicker: a couple of lab tests that we can do out of the gate.
So we can run a fibrinogen test. Fibrinogen is the building block of fibrin, which actually makes clots. So if you see lots of fibrinogen, usually that reference is going to be usually around 200 to 400. If you're in the upper 300s to 400-ish range, you're at a higher risk of clotting. So fibrinogen is a good cursory overview. If you're overweight, if you have high blood pressure, that's a good general look-in-the-mirror kind of sign that you have risk.
If your belly sticks out more than your shoulders, so to speak, right? Guys, you should have that V-taper. If that starts to look more like a U or out like a reverse V, then you probably have some blood thinning issues out of the gate. You're probably at more risk for clotting. Fibrinogen's a good one. A CRP, hsCRP is better because it can run under three. CRP is a good inflammation marker. Usually, it goes three and higher. hs-CRP will go lower. You want to be below one. Ideally, that's a good way to look at it. Sed rate or ESR, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, is an inflammation marker.
The more inflamed we are, the more platelets are likely to aggregate and stick together in clots, and so that's a big sign there. Inflammation – CRP, I would say below one's ideal, above one starts to increase your risk. Again, if you're 1.3, 1.2 – not a big deal. But think of everything as s whole. Homocysteine is another good one because homocysteine is a good inflammatory vasculature marker. Homocysteine goes high when you have inadequate levels of B vitamins, especially folate, methylated B12, and B6. These are important things to look at as well. And usually, if you're eating a processed food diet, you're going to have those things in there.
High levels of insulin, if your fasting insulin's above 10, if you have a functional glucose tolerance that's dysfunctional, meaning your fasting blood sugar coming into a meal should be below 100. Within that first hour, you should be 140 to 120 or below. Within an hour or two, you should be below 120 to 100. By hour three, definitely back into that below 100 range. If your blood sugar stays up higher or longer, it means you're making more insulin and there's insulin resistance because your cells are not pulling that glucose into the liver, into the muscles, or burning it. It's hanging out in the bloodstream too long, which means your cells are starting to get numb, receptor site-wise, to insulin.
So I like fasting insulin, I like homocysteine, I like fibrinogen, I like CRP. These are all really good markers. Other markers that you can look at would be like prothrombin time or an INR test. These are good tests that look at clotting as well as a D-dimer. D-dimer is another good test as well to look at clotting. These are good things to assess, you know “Hey! Where's my risk at right now?” So then you can start to incorporate more of these things.
So, I'm going to dive in and kind of pull out my short list of things that you can do. Again if you already are on blood-thinning compounds that are medication-based right? Blood-thinning medication things, whether it's Coumadin, Warfarin, or some of the new pharmaceutical ones. I think Plavix is one of the newer ones that's been out for a while. Be careful. Talk to your doctor about this stuff first before you jump on it because you could make your blood too thin.
Now, I'm always kind of of the adage that you're better off being on natural things and reducing inflammation and getting to the root cause of why your blood's coagulating and getting thicker than being on a medication. But if you're going to start making changes, make sure you talk to the prescribing doctor so they know what you're doing. Then, they can monitor it with prothrombin time or a D-dimer. So as you start to reduce your medication, you can incorporate a healthy lifestyle, and they can make sure your clotting is not going too low where if you're at risk for, let's say, a simple cut bleeding out because you're not clotting well, you have to just make sure you're being responsible. Let the prescribing doctor know, ‘Hey, I'm trying to get healthier. I'm trying to do things outside of just taking a medication. Please monitor me, and if I get healthier, let's adjust that medication downwards.' So, be responsible about it.
Alright, I'm going to put on screen here in just a second my little list, and we'll dive in and talk about our options, guys. Alright, very good. And I guess if you want to dive in deeper, if you have more questions or you want to look at your own situation to get healthier and really take these functional medicine principles to the next level, there'll be coordinates down below where you can reach out to my team to schedule a functional medicine support consult with me worldwide.
Alright, guys, I'll try to get this up here on screen, and we'll dial in. If you guys like this new formatting of me putting notes on screen—I used to have a dry erase board here years ago — I may go back to that really soon. But I'm just trying to put some other engagement up here, so you guys can follow along because I know it's kind of complicated. It's nice to have some notes up, so it's easier to follow. Alright, let's see here. Perfect, let me know when you guys can see that, and we'll have it up on screen in just one sec.
Okay, here we go. So, the best natural way to reduce blood clots and make your blood thinner — that's the first thing we're going to be talking about. That's the overall topic. This is common sense, but stay hydrated. Seventy to eighty percent of all the fluid in your bodies and it comes from water. We need good water. The thicker your blood is, you'll see high levels of red blood cells. You'll see higher protein levels in your blood. You're going to see higher iron levels in your blood. Just having enough water, good hydration, good electrolytes (sodium, chloride, potassium, magnesium) — good electrolytes and good hydration. Clean filtered water is going to be key.
Just maintaining hydration will do wonders for allowing your blood to flow. Again people are consuming sodas, guess what? They're going to have a diuretic effect. Not to mention, they have tons of phosphoric acid, so your body's going to be peeing out lots of magnesium and potassium and alkaline-rich electrolytes to buffer the acidity. And so, number one, when you're doing lots of diuretics, too much coffee, too much tea, that's going to be problematic, at least those have health benefits. We'll talk about that, but things like your sodas and things like that are going to have lots of phosphoric acid.
I mean, you can use those compounds to clean engines that are dirty, right? Because the phosphoric acid's pH is so low, your body's going to use lots of potassium magnesium to buffer it. So, good hydration, half your body weight. Now, this is pretty darn good. Exercise, obviously, that's good. That's going to get your heart stronger, that's going to get your heart pumping harder. So if you want it to help your stroke volume, okay, that's a big thing to get your heart pumping more blood per pump.
Number two, you're gonna reduce, you're going to increase this enzyme called endothelial synthase, which produces nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator. It's going to open up your blood vessels and it's also going to help improve mitochondrial density so you have better aerobic metabolism. So lots of benefits from exercise. I'm not talking about it specifically here, but I'm just gonna foundationally.
Anti-inflammatory, low toxin, nutrient-dense diet. That's essential. Some kind of a Paleo template or a whole food diet that emphasizes good healthy proteins, good healthy fats that are anti-inflammatory, not the excess omega-6 processed vegetable oils or junkie trans fat. Those are going to be highly inflammatory. Anything that causes inflammation is going to cause your cells and your platelets to aggregate, stick together, and that's going to decrease blood flow and increase blood clotting. So really important on that.
Omega-3s, now this is important. So the big one is going to be high-quality fish. So whether it's a wild Alaskan sockeye, salmon, or some tuna, these are all going to be really good high-quality fish. Don't worry about the excess mercury in there as long as you're consuming fish that have a high selenium-to-mercury ratio. Selenium will naturally chelate mercury. The benefit of consuming fish three to five times a week if it's going to be of good healthy quality, whether it's wild Alaskan sockeye or salmon, these are going to be excellent sources. They're going to have high selenium to low mercury ratio.
And again, try to get wild. So like, flash-frozen is really good. Costco has some good deals on some of these things. Just keep an eye out. You can just Google selenium to mercury ratio and fish and you'll see things like skipjack tuna is good, salmon's good. Just stay away from the fish that are going to have high mercury, the low selenium. That's going to be your swordfish, that's going to be your pilot whale, it's going to be your shark, those kinds of things. And you'll be in pretty good shape.
But Omega-3s from cod liver oil, which has lots of good vitamin A and vitamin K2, excellent sources to help your blood stay nice and thin. Consuming fish is going to be ideal, if not supplementally. In my line, we use Omega Supreme, about two grams a day. You can go up to four as well, four to six if you need that extra bit of clotting as well.
Garlic is awesome. A lot of times we'll use garlic or alicillin and a lot of killing protocols because it's wonderful for knocking down bacteria and bugs. I love it for that. But it has really good compounds in there that are going to help decrease those platelets from aggregating and sticking together. So alicillin is wonderful. That's very antimicrobial, has benefits of lowering cholesterol as well. Not that we need to lower cholesterol, that's kind of a misnomer. You're all about lowering the inflammation that may drive cholesterol out of balance or lower in the particle size of cholesterol that comes from processed foods, processed omega-6, processed vegetable oils, and trans fats.
Those are the things we want to reduce the cholesterol with. And that's usually going to be your particle size B cholesterol. So if we run a particle size test, we'll be able to see if you have A or B, and if you have high cholesterol and it's particle size B, then we definitely want to work on reducing that. But typically, statins aren't going to change the particle size. You have to make diet changes to reduce that.
Next, ginger. Love ginger. Any of my patients listening know that I use ginger tea a lot in my die-off reaction kind of protocols because ginger has amazing anti-inflammatory benefits. It has amazing motility benefits. It helps with the gut lining, especially with Manuka tea. It really works and helps that gut lining that may have some atrophic gastritis or some generalized gut inflammation. Really works great at that. Natural blood thinning effects as well. Again, ginger has all kinds of compounds in there. Gingerall another anticoagulant properties that are going to prevent clotting, help thin things out. Love that as well.
Green tea, right? Green tea has a compound in there called epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) that works amazingly to help reduce coagulation, decrease clotting. Again, they're going to have all kinds of wonderful benefits. Guys use topical green tea in the hair to reduce DHT as well and help with hair blood flow, so that works great too. So green tea is another excellent compound there as well.
Vitamin E is great. It's going to have natural blood thinning effects. It's going to have vasodilating effects, that means opening up the blood vessels. Again, amazing benefits there. Again, from a food standpoint, high fructose corn syrup is going to decrease endothelial synthase, thus cause more constriction. So lots of high fructose corn syrup will be a problem. Again nutrient-dense foods, vitamin E is going to be amazing for that. Nuts, seeds, spinach, broccoli, grass-fed meats, high-quality fish, these are going to be foods that are very high in vitamin E. And again, cod liver oil is great because usually you want to get vitamin A, D, E, and K together. So good high-quality fat-soluble vitamins together are going to work amazingly.
Now, systemic enzymes, these are special kinds of enzymes that we take away from food. We are not taking these for digestive purposes, right? These are things we're actually taking on an empty stomach, typically 45 minutes to an hour away from foods. The goal is to get them to pass our tummy, go into our bloodstream so they can break up clots, they can reduce inflammation.
If there's inflammation in there — inflammation compounds like interleukins and cytokines and inflammatory compounds— it'll help break some of these things down, which is amazing. We can see, we can find people that have maybe clots or risk of cardiovascular incidences, maybe they have an echocardiogram issue, they have some high calcium plaque testing. We may come in there with high levels of systemic enzymes. Again, work with your cardiologists, work with your doctor, your conventional MD on this.
Again, they're usually going to just provide, prescribe a Statin, maybe a blood pressure medication. Maybe they'll go do a blood thinner. But we want to actually see if we can break down some of these plaques. And again, it's not a perfect process. You can't just take these enzymes and live a crappy diet, crappy lifestyle, and expect improvements. But there's been some data showing that it helps with clotting, breaks down the clots, it's going to have natural process of how it works. It's going to reduce inflammation because it's going to hit these cytokines, it's going to hit these interleukins and reduce them.
Now if we can hit it holistically where you're making healthy diet and lifestyle changes so that reduces it and then we also use these compounds to break it down even more and then also hit the clots. So my favorite enzymes are going to be serrapeptidase, whether it's from the silkworm, nattokinase, we can throw lumbrokinase in there, bromelain. These are amazing enzymes. I'll put some links down below for the ones that I personally use to really help improve blood flow, make the blood slipperier, thinner, and also add more elastase to the collagen, right?
So you have collagen, an active tissue, and you have elastin. And bringing that elastase enzyme up in the skin will allow skin to heal better with less scar tissue too. So we'll use systemic enzymes to help improve scar tissue. Now you have to imagine, it's possible to have scar tissue potentially in your vasculature, right? If you're creating lots of inflammation and you have endothelial fissures in there, it's possible, right? And so if you can help break down that tissue, break down that scar tissue in the vasculature, right, and add more elastase around it, that may help improve the integrity of those blood vessels.
Also, if you consume vitamin E and then you also consume high-quality collagen peptides, that gives a greater chance to have better integrity of the vasculature itself. Most people do not get good connective tissue amino acids in their body. We're not consuming bone broths and getting the skin of a lot of the meats. So we're missing a lot of these good building blocks, the glycine, the hydroxyproline, the proline. These are important building blocks. Getting good collagen peptides is amazing. I'll put a link down below to the one that I personally use.
Next, I love NAC. NAC works amazing. It has natural antiviral qualities to it. So if you're sick or you're ill, you can reduce your viral load significantly with NAC. So I love that one. Here, let me see if I can pull that down a little bit more for you guys. Okay, hold on. I'm going to pull this up just a little bit so you guys can see it. I'm going to put this above here. Yeah, here you guys go.
So NAC, right? Works amazing. It's a powerful antioxidant building block. NAC is a precursor to glutathione. Glutathione is your major endogenous antioxidant, right? Your body needs NAC to make glutathione. So we talked about earlier with collagen. Guess what? The major amino acid in collagen is? Glycine. And glycine is an important building block for glutathione. But even more important is NAC or cysteine. Cysteine is natural. They've added an acetyl group to it that just increases the absorption of it. And that's going to increase your glutathione levels, which is a natural antioxidant. It's endogenous. Your body makes it.
So NAC won't be the antioxidant, but it will give you the building block for it. Now, NAC also has other great benefits of reducing viral load. It's a powerful antioxidant overall. It's going to reduce mucus thinning. So if you have any breathing issues or lung issues or allergies or cold issues or potential lung tightness, that can really help break down a lot of that mucus. They've used it with cystic fibrosis patients for many years in a nebulizer to break up mucus to help their lungs function better. They use it in the ER since the 1970s with patients that have overdosed on Tylenol. They can go into liver failure. Tylenol wipes out glutathione. They'll put IV NAC in, and it will bring people back from liver failure that have OD'd on Tylenol. So that's really important.
And if you ever give your kid Tylenol, one, I'm not a huge fan of Tylenol for that purpose, but if you give your kids Tylenol because of pain kind of methods or because you have pain issues again, Tylenol is a central nervous system suppressant, and it doesn't decrease inflammation, but it will decrease fever and decrease the sensation of pain. Give an NAC along with it. So I typically recommend two grams of NAC a day for adults. You can go around 500 to 800 or so for kiddos. If you do too much NAC, you typically, you'll have dry eyes, dry mucous membranes, those type of situations. So NAC usually between a gram to two grams for adults is great.
A lot of studies on it being helpful for breathing and hair loss is usually around 1800 milligrams. NAC is also helpful for graying of hair because you have essentially hydrogen peroxide accumulate around the hair follicle that can bleach it a little bit, and that creates oxidative stress. And so by adding NAC in there, that helps with the pseudocatalase enzyme, which is glutathione-based, and that can help neutralize hydrogen peroxide and help with hair health. It also has natural blood thinning effects. It's shown to be as effective as Rogaine or minoxidil for helping to stimulate hair growth. And so I like NAC for its all kinds of benefits, and guess what? It helps thin out the blood. It breaks down clots. It reduces clumping of platelets. So lots and lots of good benefits there, guys. Amazing benefits there.
So hope you guys enjoyed today's little video. We'll turn it into a podcast. I think we went pretty deep on this here, just to kind of look at it from a framework. The first thing I always recommend is simple stuff like what's foundational. Foundational stuff out of the gate is going to be good hydration, good water consumption, good clean, filtered water. Ideally reverse osmosis water if you're doing it from home or some kind of a gravity system that's going to filter all the junk out. Number one, add some good electrolytes back in. That's amazing, because your body needs good sodium and chloride, maybe some added potassium, magnesium. Some of that may be taken supplementally. You may add some into your water. So just keep an eye on some of that stuff out of the gates.
Next thing after that is a good anti-inflammatory, nutrient-dense diet. That's going to be essential. We've got to get the insulin levels down. We've got to get the nutrient density up. If your diet is really good and really anti-inflammatory, guess what? You're going to naturally get some vitamin E in there. You're going to naturally get things like vitamin D. You're going to naturally get cysteine and glutathione building blocks and all those really important nutrients that are going to be helpful for reducing inflammation. I'll love, love, love that out of the gate.
And so then, outside of that, then you can look at working with your functional medicine doctor in doing some of the testing we talked about, right? We talked about C-reactive protein, hscrp. We talked about fibrinogen. We talked about D-dimer or Prothrombin time test. We talked about SED rate, ESR. We talked about, we mentioned D-dimer already, homocysteine, right? Talked about a fasting insulin test. These are all good tests to see where your inflammation's at, how you're doing with a lot of the compounds that can drive vasculature problems, right? So very important for you guys out of the gate.
I want you thinking about this holistically, so you have a good perspective on what's happening. It's really important that you look at things holistically, so you understand what's happening. And again, if you have issues out of the gate, work with your conventional medical doctor. Just tell them, say, “Hey, here's the deal. I'm on these medications. I'm gonna start getting healthier, and I know as I get healthier, my blood pressure may go down, my heart may get stronger, I may feel better, and I don't want these medications to overly thin out my blood or overly reduce my blood pressure.”
And just let them know, “Hey, I'd like to run tests more frequently with you, so we can monitor this. And if I'm getting healthier, if I'm losing weight, if we have good markers of blood pressure improving, cardiovascular health improving, inflammation going down, I'd like to gently knock down those medications.” Make sure they're comfortable with it, and then make sure they're monitoring you so you do it the right way. Again, you don't want people coming in there coming off all their medications. They're not able to make a diet change, then they're, their physiology is way out of whack because they haven't gotten good health down yet. So I want you guys to think about this holistically and do the right thing.
All right, guys? Hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you have questions, feel free to chime in. We'll be able to answer those for you and make sure you guys feel good about the topic and you guys feel empowered as well. Let me know what you guys think, and then again, we'll put down the links below so if you guys want to reach out, you'll have access to all of that down below. Awesome, guys. All right, wonderful chat with you guys today. Here, links below, and then links below to access myself and my staff, my team. All right, guys, have an awesome day. Take care, y'all. Bye.
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