The Heart Health Project Facebook ad: “It all starts with protecting the heart”

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I'm an Iowa large-animal vet. The hog heart I cut open on a Tuesday looked exactly like the scan of my own. My doctor's answer was a statin. Here's what I did instead. My name is Dr. Gretchen Hoekstra. I'm 59 years old. I've been a large-animal veterinarian in Sioux Center, Iowa, for 31 years. Dairy cows and hogs, mostly. I've done hundreds of necropsies. That's what we call an autopsy on an animal. I learned the trade from my father. He ran this practice for 34 years before it was mine. He taught me one rule above every other. When a herd gets sick, you don't reach for the needle in the first 15 minutes. You walk the feed bunk. You smell the silage. You test the water. You find out what changed, and you fix that first. You don't medicate 300 cows to cover up whatever is making them sick. Four years ago, my partner, Dr. Jerry Haverkamp, retired. That made me the only large-animal vet within 70 miles. I'm not complaining. These are good farm families. There are good doctors in town, too, people I still respect. But that job wrote itself into my arteries, and that's the reason for this letter. I practically live in my truck now. My father's old stethoscope hangs from the rearview mirror. I've never taken it down. Nobody in my family thought of me as the one to worry about. Neither did I. I sling 80-pound mineral sacks off a tailgate. I can outlast men half my age in a calving barn. My LDL had sat at 116 for years. My mother is 88 and still puts in a garden every May. But somewhere along the way, I stopped eating like a farm kid. Breakfast pizza from Casey's at 5 AM, because it was the only thing open. Gas-station cappuccino to stay awake between calls. Beef sticks on the dashboard. Supper eaten one-handed at 10 at night while I typed up records. There was sugar in all of it. The creamer. The jerky marinade. The "healthy" granola bars I kept in the glovebox. Even the ketchup packets. I put on 19 pounds that first year and barely noticed. My coveralls just got snug. My checkup the second year showed my LDL had gone from 116 to 153. Triglycerides from 94 to 181. Fasting glucose from 89 to 103. I swore I'd straighten it out. I packed a cooler. I walked the section road at dusk when I could. The next year's labs were worse. LDL 168. Total cholesterol 244. Triglycerides 203. Dr. Kamstra had me in and out in 11 minutes. Dad never reached for the needle in the first 15. He wrote Lipitor, 40 milligrams. Recheck in 12 weeks, and we'd go higher if the number didn't come down. He never asked what I ate. He never asked what had changed. I asked him about oxidized fat. He smiled at me. "You're a vet, Gretchen. Leave the people medicine to me." I'd never treat a sick cow the way he'd just treated me. I folded the prescription into my coverall pocket and said I'd look into it. I already knew I would never fill it. I'm not against medicine. I give animals drugs every day. But I've also watched what happens when you medicate an animal to hit a number instead of fixing what's wrong. The chart looks good. The animal keeps getting sicker underneath. And some of those animals, I've had to put down. I also knew what Lipitor's muscle aches would mean for me. I pull calves with these arms. I hold 1,400-pound heifers still. A vet with sore, weak hands is a vet out of work. And I knew something else, from 31 years of reading feed tags. Every feed mill in this country mixes antioxidants into the ration. Not for flavor. They do it so the fat in the feed doesn't go rancid, and so the fat in the animal doesn't either. Rancid fat makes an animal sick, no matter how little of it there is. A farmer doesn't fix rancid feed by feeding less of it. He stops it from going rancid. The pill Dr. Kamstra handed me would lower how much cholesterol my liver made. It would do nothing to keep what was left from going bad. Six weeks later, I was at the Brouwer place at 3 AM. First-calf heifer, calf turned wrong. I was down in the straw with my arm in to the shoulder when my chest went tight. Like a strap cinched around my ribs. I couldn't get a full breath. I knelt there with my head against her flank and waited for it to pass. Their son Jesse is 16. He drove me to the hospital in Sioux Center in his dad's pickup, my boots still covered in manure. They kept me overnight. In the morning they ran bloodwork and a CT scan of my heart. LDL 179. Total cholesterol 263. My highest ever. Calcium score 412. That number means plaque. A lot of it. Hard deposits built right into the walls of the arteries that feed my heart. Dr. Kamstra's office called the next morning. Start the Lipitor today. He was doubling it to 80 milligrams. The next Tuesday, I did a necropsy on an 8-year-old boar that had dropped dead in his pen. Old pigs carry plaque the way old men do. Researchers use pigs to study human heart disease, because their arteries clog the way ours do. Surgeons sew pig valves into human hearts. I opened his heart and held it in my gloved hand. Then I pulled up my own scan on my phone. They looked the same. I sat in my truck afterward with the scan printout on the seat beside me. I wasn't thinking like a vet anymore. I was scared. I've seen inside hundreds of animals. I know exactly what that looks like once it goes further. And I know exactly how my father went. He called it heartburn for a year. Chest tightness on the haymow ladder. Short of breath carrying buckets. Then one morning in March, my mother found him on the barn floor. He was 62. His stethoscope was swinging right there in front of me on the mirror. My daughter Lena is in her third year of vet school at Iowa State. She's coming home to practice with me. That was always the plan. I wasn't going to hand her this practice the way my father handed it to me. Dr. Kamstra's office called twice more that winter. I let it ring. I ran my own body like a feed trial instead. No gas-station food. Oatmeal every morning. Fish oil. Red yeast rice. A pound of walnuts a week. I walked four miles a day, even in February. I dropped 13 pounds in four months. My LDL went from 179 to 164. Total cholesterol from 263 to 247. Better. Nowhere near good enough. Then I remembered something from a feed-science conference at Iowa State years back. Researchers had been testing beet pigments in animal rations. The deep red compounds in beets, called betalains. They were being studied for one reason. To keep fat from going rancid. I bought beetroot capsules at Walmart. Two a day for eight weeks. My numbers didn't budge. I tried a different brand online. Six more weeks. Same thing. I figured my arteries were too far gone for a beet to matter. That turned out to be the wrong diagnosis. About ten months ago, I was at Henk Vander Ploeg's dairy for a herd check. Henk is 82. I've treated his cows since 1994. He's been on Lipitor for 11 years. His cardiologist in Sioux City had started talking about adding Repatha, the shot. He waited until we were done in the milking parlor. Then he pulled a folded lab sheet out of his bib overalls. "Doc. Look at this." Total cholesterol 251 down to 197. LDL 172 down to 119. Triglycerides down 76 points. Same lab. Same Lipitor. His cardiologist had dropped the Repatha talk. I asked him what he'd changed. He reached into the other pocket of his overalls and set a bottle on the rail. Beetroot capsules. "Didn't figure you'd think much of it, Doc. But my daughter-in-law Marijke kept reading about it." "The drugstore ones did nothing. Then she got to asking about Oma's beet." Henk's grandmother came over from Friesland in 1911 with beet seed sewn into the lining of her coat. He said it grew small and so dark red it stained every dishrag in the house. The family grew it on that farm for 40 years. Then in the 1950s, his father started buying seed from the co-op like everybody else. Bigger beets, sweeter, easier to sell. Nobody saved the old seed. "Marijke went looking for anything still growing like Oma's. Took her three bottles to find it." I told him to keep doing whatever he was doing. That night I sat in my truck outside a farrowing barn at 1 AM, waiting on a sow, and read on my phone the way I should have months earlier. What I read that night changed how I saw every necropsy I'd ever done. Your LDL number doesn't build plaque by itself. It only tells you how much cholesterol is in your blood. What matters is what happens to that cholesterol once it's there. Processed food, sugar, cheap oils and constant inflammation flood your body with free radicals. Those are unstable molecules that attack whatever they touch. When they attack your LDL, the cholesterol oxidizes. It's the same thing that happens to fat in a feed bin when it goes rancid. It's the same reaction that rusts a gate hinge. Normal cholesterol travels through your blood, and your liver clears it. Rusted cholesterol turns sticky. It slips into the lining of your artery walls and gets stuck there. Your body treats it like an injury. Immune cells rush in to clean it up. They swallow the rusted cholesterol, swell up, and die right there inside the wall. That pile is plaque. With every heartbeat, more rusted cholesterol lodges in it. The artery stiffens. It narrows. And one day the plaque cracks open, a clot forms, and that's the heart attack. That's what I see in those hog hearts. That's what was on my scan. It isn't how much cholesterol you carry that builds plaque. It's how much of it has rusted. Lipitor lowers how much cholesterol your liver makes. It does nothing to stop the cholesterol you still have from rusting. The number on your chart drops. The rust keeps building plaque underneath. Oatmeal, fish oil and walking lower how much fat is in your blood, too. None of it stops the rust either. That's why my numbers barely moved. An Iowa hog farmer protects his hogs' fat from rusting better than your doctor protects yours. Nobody puts a hog on Lipitor. They stop the fat from rusting. If your numbers kept climbing while you did everything right, that's not your failure. You were handed tools that were never aimed at the rust. Then I went back to the betalains. Betalains are what give a beet its deep red color. Peer-reviewed research has shown them neutralizing the free radicals that oxidize LDL cholesterol, before those free radicals ever reach it. No free radicals, no rust. The cholesterol stays in its normal form, and your liver clears it the way it was built to. That's why the number comes down on its own. The liver isn't being forced to stop. It's finally able to clear what's there. That's when the Walmart capsules finally made sense. I've fed beet pulp to cows for 30 years. Beet pulp is what's left after the sugar plant takes the good out of a sugar beet. Most beets grown in this country have been bred for over a century for sugar, size and shelf life. Nobody bred them for betalains. That goes for the red beet in the produce aisle, too. It was bred to grow bigger, taste sweeter and last longer on the shelf, the same way Henk's father traded Oma's seed for the co-op's. The betalains got bred down to a fraction of what the old beets carried. And betalains don't survive heat. Boil a beet or roast it, and most of them are gone before it ever reaches your plate. Most beetroot powder gets blasted dry at high temperatures, because it's fast and cheap. The betalains are cooked out before the capsule is ever sealed. That's what goes into most cheap beetroot capsules. You get red powder that says beetroot on the label, with the part that fights the rust gone. The two brands I tried failed on one count or both. So I needed three things. An old seed line with the full betalain content. Dried without heat. And enough of it to match the dosing in the research. At 1:30 AM, I texted Marijke. She answered in the morning. Rosabella. Under it she'd typed out what she found. A handful of Amish families in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, still grow an heirloom beet from seed their great-grandparents brought over from Bavaria in the 1890s. They call it Blutwurzel. Blood root. They've saved the seed by hand for over a century. Never crossed it with the sugar beet. Then she sent a photo of one cut in half, so dark red it was almost black. The last line of her text said Henk took one look at that photo and said, "That's Oma's beet." I called the company before I ordered anything. I read feed tags and lab analyses for a living. I don't put anything into an animal without seeing the paperwork. I wasn't going to put anything into myself without it either. I asked for the Certificate of Analysis. I asked where the beets came from and what seed line they were grown from. I asked how they were dried. I asked how much was in a serving compared to the research. I asked for heavy metal testing. They sent all of it the same day. Heirloom Blutwurzel grown by Amish families in Lancaster County, never crossed with the sugar beet. Shade-dried after the first frost, never heated, so the betalains survive. 1,300 milligrams per serving, matching the dosing in published research. Third-party tested with published results. Heavy metal screening. Made in the USA. No fillers. I read it like a feed analysis. It passed every line. I ordered six bottles that afternoon. I started on a Monday. Two capsules with breakfast, washed down with truck coffee. Nothing else changed. Week 1, I was clear-headed on 3 AM calls in a way I hadn't been in years. Within four days, the afternoon slump in the truck was gone. Week 2, I was sleeping straight through the nights I wasn't on call. Week 4, I climbed the haymow ladder at a dairy north of town without the tightness. I stood at the top and waited for it. It never came. Week 6, the cappuccino cravings were gone. And I was down another 4 pounds without changing anything else. Week 12, Dr. Kamstra ran my labs. Total cholesterol 179. LDL 108. Down from 263 and 179 at my worst. Triglycerides 92, down from 203. Fasting glucose 88. My blood pressure at that visit was 122/78. He read the sheet twice. Then he looked up at me. "Gretchen, what are you on?" I slid the bottle across his desk and told him about Henk. He took a pen out of his coat and asked me how to spell betalains. I never filled the Lipitor. My father would have started exactly here. You fix what they're eating before you ever reach for the needle. I'm telling you this because I've spent years watching the families I serve. Farmers who've been on Lipitor for a decade, doing everything they were told, watching the number creep anyway. They think their bodies are letting them down. Their bodies aren't failing. They were handed a tool aimed at the wrong thing. Most doctors were trained to lower the number. Stopping the rust was never part of that training. They do what they were trained to do. The research is out there. You don't need your doctor's permission to read it. I've told 23 farm families about Rosabella since then. Every family that ordered has shown me a better lab sheet since. Arlan Dykstra, 61, raises hogs west of town. He'd been on Lipitor for nine years. His LDL went from 157 to 106. Total cholesterol from 236 to 174. He told me, "Doc, I got my wind back." Last month I got called to the Brouwer place again. 3 AM. Another heifer, another calf turned wrong. Lena was home on break. She held the light. I went down in the straw with my arm in to the shoulder and pulled that calf out alive. No strap around my ribs. No kneeling and waiting for it to pass. When I climbed back in the truck, my father's stethoscope was swinging on the mirror. I think he would have liked to see that. If I could go back and tell myself one thing in that truck, it would be this. The beet research is real. But most of what's on the shelf is the wrong beet, dried the wrong way, at the wrong dose. That's why so many people say they tried beetroot and nothing happened. Rosabella is the heirloom Blutwurzel, the old seed line Amish families in Lancaster County have saved by hand for over a century, never crossed with the sugar beet. Shade-dried after the first frost so the betalains survive. 1,300 milligrams per serving to match the research dosing. Third-party tested with published results. Made in the USA. No fillers. That's what Henk's bottle had that mine didn't. If he hadn't pulled it out of his overalls that day, I'd still be chasing a number while the rust kept building in my arteries. If you've been on a statin for years, Lipitor, Crestor, Zocor, any of them, and your LDL keeps creeping up. If you've been told your cholesterol is well-controlled, but your chest tightens on the stairs and your energy keeps slipping. A higher dose won't fix this. Stopping the rust will. Nobody pays me to say this. I get nothing from Rosabella. I tell people because the mechanism makes sense, the research backs it, and I've seen it work in my own labs and in the lab sheets of the families I serve. 90-day money-back guarantee. Two capsules with breakfast. No prescription. Every farmer in this county knows you fix the feed before you lose the herd. Nobody ever told you to fix yours. Stop the rust. ~ Dr. Gretchen Hoekstra, DVM, 31 years https://track.tryrosabella.com/e73e2b82-57e8-45b3-b98f-f257632c842b P.S. My most recent panel showed LDL 94. Total cholesterol 166. Triglycerides 69, down 134 points from my third-year labs. That Lipitor prescription is still folded in my coverall pocket. P.P.S. Don't make my Walmart mistake. Most cheap beetroot is sugar-bred stock with the betalains bred out, then heat-dried until there's nothing left to fight the rust. A whole bin of that wouldn't equal one capsule of heirloom Blutwurzel that's been shade-dried and properly concentrated. https://track.tryrosabella.com/e73e2b82-57e8-45b3-b98f-f257632c842b

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It all starts with protecting the heart