Weekly Q&A with Dr. Simone GoldYour weekly health questions answered by Dr. Simone Gold, one of the nation’s top physicians and medical freedom advocates.Every week, the GoldCare HealthDesk receives questions from readers looking for answers about their health. Our team selects three submissions for Dr. Simone Gold to answer, offering clear medical insight, practical guidance, and the straight talk she’s known for.“Due to its vascular health benefits, I take cacao powder in my coffee. I alternate between the cacao and creatine monohydrate. Does dairy – such as Half and Half or yogurt – interfere with the absorption/efficacy of either the cacao or the creatine? In other words, is it better to drink black coffee with these additives than to add dairy?”Dr. Gold: Short answer: For cacao, black coffee is the better choice. For creatine, dairy is fine.On creatine days, dairy works. Creatine dissolves in water and gets into your muscles through its own dedicated route, so the fat, calcium, and casein in dairy don’t get in its way. Stir it into your coffee and drink it fairly soon after mixing. Your usual cup of coffee won’t undermine it either, and what really counts is hitting your 3-5 g of creatine every day, not what it’s dissolved in.On cacao days, go black. The blood vessel benefits come from flavanols, especially one called epicatechin. They help your vessels relax by boosting nitric oxide, and they nudge blood pressure down by a few points. The catch is that milk proteins can latch onto those flavanols and keep your body from absorbing as much of them. A well-known study found that dark chocolate raised antioxidant levels in the blood, but the effect dropped sharply when it was eaten with milk. Later human and animal research points the same direction, especially with higher-fat dairy like cream. Half-and-half and yogurt both fit that description.So skip the dairy when you’re consuming cacao, and use natural cacao rather than Dutched (alkalized), which has far fewer flavanols to begin with.The trade-off: If a little cream is what keeps you taking cacao every single day, that consistency still counts for a lot. But for the full vascular payoff, keep the cup black on cacao days.“As Hippocrates once said, ‘All disease starts in the gut.’ Why is it that our doctors and veterinarians aren’t schooled in nutrition? This is how we build up our immune system, how we stay healthy. I hope you include nutrition in your efforts. I love Dr Simone Gold!”Dr. Gold:Thank you, and I love this question. Hippocrates was right: the gut is the foundation of health. Most of your immune system lives there, and the food you eat shapes the bacteria that keep it strong.And you’re right that doctors aren’t taught this. In medical school, we learned biochemistry, but nobody taught us that food is medicine. We never learned how ultra-processed foods, seed oils, sugar, and refined carbs drive heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. Today’s students learn less than 20 hours of nutrition across their entire degree. That’s under 1 percent of the curriculum.Medical training is built around the sick. It focuses on late-stage disease and hospital care, not on keeping people well. Take kidney disease: students learn about dialysis treatments for kidney failure, but not the everyday eating that helps prevent it.This has been in the making for over a century. The Flexner Report of 1910, and the Carnegie/Rockefeller money that followed, pushed medicine toward drugs and procedures and pushed nutrition aside. Today, Big Pharma funding shapes research, continuing education, and the guidelines that define “standard of care.” There’s no profit in teaching a doctor how real food builds immunity. There’s enormous profit in managing the chronic disease that follows. Big Food reinforces the same bias.That’s why I founded GoldCare. Health shouldn’t mean managed sickness. It’s a state of wellness built from a pattern of good decisions.And medical education is moving in the right direction. Under RFK Jr., the federal government is pushing medical schools to take nutrition seriously. So far, 73 schools have pledged to require at least 40 hours of nutrition education for students starting this fall. Major accrediting bodies, including the LCME, have also committed to strengthening nutrition in medical training. A real shift is happening.“Is there a natural way to reverse calcium and cholesterol buildup on the inside of your arteries?”Dr. Gold:Yes, to a degree. You can slow plaque and even shrink some of it naturally, but the cause is bigger than cholesterol or calcium alone.Let’s start with the cause, and it’s not cholesterol. Your body needs cholesterol for cell membranes, hormones, vitamin D, and brain function. Plaque starts when the lining of your arteries is damaged. Chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, smoking, and a diet heavy in ultra-processed food, refined carbs, and seed oils all do that damage. Once the lining is injured, oxidized fats and immune cells move into the artery wall, and calcium follows. The body uses calcium as “cement” to wall off the plaque. If you want to tackle plaque, start with your metabolic health. Poor blood-sugar control and insulin resistance are among the most powerful modifiable drivers of atherosclerosis—and the damage begins long before someone is diagnosed with diabetes. Chronically elevated blood sugar and the metabolic abnormalities that accompany insulin resistance promote inflammation, damage blood vessels, and accelerate plaque formation. Preventing or reversing insulin resistance and prediabetes—and improving metabolic health if you already have diabetes—is therefore one of the most important ways to protect your arteries.This is where even modest changes in eating habits can make a meaningful difference. One of the most important is to avoid eating carbohydrates “unopposed”—for example, a bag of pretzels on its own. Instead, carbohydrates are generally better eaten with or after protein, fat, and fiber, which can blunt the resulting glucose and insulin surge.Other strategies may also help, including allowing 12–16 hours between the last meal of one day and the first meal of the next. The GoldCare Health Desk will continue to discuss these strategies—and the science behind them—in much greater detail. Research suggests that these eating patterns can improve insulin sensitivity, lower blood pressure and inflammation, and promote healthier handling of blood fats.Calcium is the harder part. Calcified plaque is stable and rarely goes away. But an aggressively healthy diet and lifestyle, including intermittent fasting, can help pull the liquid fat and inflammation out of the plaque. As the soft tissue shrinks and dries out, the remaining calcium becomes more tightly packed and much denser. On a scan, this looks like “more” calcium, but clinically, it means the plaque has transitioned from a highly dangerous “vulnerable” lesion into a safe, inert scar. This is called The Statin Paradox.The post GoldCare HealthDesk: Q&A With Dr. Simone Gold appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.