Stay Off My Operating Table

Stay Off My Operating Table

I was a morbidly obese heart surgeon. All through high school, college, med school and surgical training, I followed the U.S. dietary guidelines for both diet and exercise. Yet nothing I did kept the weight off. I just kept getting fatter and fatter. Each day in surgery, I would split open the chests of people just like me. I knew I was heading for the operating table myself if I didn't find solutions that worked. In 2016, I finally found a way to lose 100 pounds and keep it off. Now - in addition to doing heart surgery - I work to help people just like me get healthy, lose the weight and keep it off. I'm Dr. Philip Ovadia, the rebel M.D. and cardiac surgeon who is working to keep people off my operating table. http://ovadiahearthealth.com/whitepaper/ Any use of this intellectual property for text and data mining or computational analysis including as training material for artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without express written consent from Dr. Philip Ovadia. bumper-verify-2663bea2

Episodes

June 16, 2026 53 mins

Craig Emmerich spent a decade eating low-carb and feeling great — until he wasn't. What followed was a quarter-million dollars, a chronic Lyme diagnosis, and a hard-won education in what diet alone simply cannot do.

In this conversation, Craig and Dr. Ovadia pull apart one of the most seductive myths in the metabolic health space: that the right food is always the right answer. They talk protein thresholds, personal fat limits...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

The science of what to eat has never been clearer. The problem was never the biology — it was everything else. Dr. Ty Beal, a global nutrition scientist who helped author the new U.S. Dietary Guidelines, has spent his career mapping where modern diets fail and why they keep failing. His Nutritional Value Score ranked foods with a rigor that finally puts organ meats in their proper place, calls out the grain mythology for what...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

You've done the work. You cleaned up your diet, fixed your sleep, addressed your metabolic health — and something is still wrong. Brain fog you can't explain. Fatigue that won't move. Weight creeping up for no apparent reason. Personality changes your family notices before you do.

Nurse practitioner Ally D'Amico spent 14 years watching patients spiral through specialists, collect diagnoses like fibromyalgia and chronic depress...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Your body already knows how to heal itself. The question is whether anyone is giving it the right signals.

Dr. Adeel Khan trained as a conventional physician before following a thread most doctors ignore: what if we could restore the system, not just manage the symptoms? That thread led him through sports medicine, global laboratories, stem cell research, and a fundamental rethinking of what aging actually is at the cellular level.

I...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Nick Norwitz has an MD, a PhD, and a cholesterol level that should have killed him — at least according to the standard model of cardiovascular disease. For seven years, his total cholesterol held above 700. His LDL sat in the high 500s. Every clinical algorithm flagged him as a cardiac emergency. He took none of the prescribed medications.

His just-published case report shows zero coronary plaque. Not reduced. Not minimal. Ze...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

You got the tests. You got the diagnosis — maybe more than one. You took the medication. And you still don't feel like yourself.

Reed Davis has spent 30 years working with exactly those people. As the founder of Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, he's trained over 5,000 practitioners in a methodology built on one counterintuitive premise: chasing a diagnosis may be the wrong move entirely.

Instead of narrowing in on a label, Reed...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Medicine has always positioned itself as the authority — the place you go when something is wrong, on its terms, in its building, by its schedule. But the infrastructure built to support that model may now be its biggest liability.

Dr. Ami Bhatt, Chief Innovation Officer of the American College of Cardiology, has a front-row seat to what's breaking down and what's quietly beginning to work. What she sees isn't a technology pro...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Darius Sharpe has spent over two decades watching the same patients cycle through emergency rooms with the same conditions, the same medications, and the same unaddressed root cause. As a paramedic-turned-ER nurse, he started asking a question nobody around him wanted to answer: why are we treating the result instead of the cause?

What followed was years of self-experimentation — continuous glucose monitors, serial lab draws, ...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Every woman will go through menopause. Every partner, spouse, child, and close friend will feel it too. And almost none of them will understand what is actually happening — or why the standard medical response of "just add hormones" so often falls short.

Cynthia Thurlow joins Stay Off My Operating Table to explain why so many women hit midlife feeling like their bodies suddenly stopped cooperating, despite doing “all the...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Dylan Gemelli went from prison to Milan runways to millions of YouTube subscribers — and then a calcium score of 120 and an LP(a) of 330 stopped him cold at 40 years old. In this conversation with Dr. Philip Ovadia, he breaks down what both the biohacking and conventional medical worlds are getting wrong, why confusion is the real enemy of public health, and how he dropped his LP(a) from 330 to 94 without following his doctor...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Dr. Lori Calabrese is a psychiatrist whose trajectory changed when a patient with 15 years of treatment-resistant anorexia went into full remission after a ketogenic diet. What followed was a research journey — pilot studies, peer-reviewed case series, and a now-funded randomized controlled trial — consistently showing that depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder, and other conditions could achieve complete remission...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Dave Feldman, a software engineer turned citizen scientist, went on a ketogenic diet and watched his LDL cholesterol spike dramatically while his family members on the same diet saw no such change. Unable to get cardiologists or lipidologists to study the phenomenon, he built a public charity from scratch, crowdfunded the research, and designed the Keto CTA study — enrolling 100 metabolically healthy people with very high LDL...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Moira Newiss spent 20 years running hospitals for the UK's National Health Service before her body and mind staged a slow, invisible collapse that no blood panel could explain — and the system she'd devoted her career to had nothing to offer but a prescription she didn't want to fill. What she found instead was a framework rooted in mitochondrial biology that reframes mental illness, chronic fatigue, and burnout as problems o...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Kemi Blake started training contortion as an adult with a body that wasn't built for it — no childhood conditioning, no natural flexibility, just a fierce refusal to quit and an unusual willingness to pay close attention to what her body was doing in the moments before she lost consciousness. What she found wasn't a performance hack. It was a map of the nervous system, the body's hidden pressure architecture, and the emotiona...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Sally K. Norton, a Cornell-trained nutritionist with a master's in public health, spent decades sick while eating all the "right" foods before connecting her arthritis, chronic fatigue, sleep dysfunction, and other symptoms to oxalate accumulation. Her research — drawing on tens of thousands of peer-reviewed articles — reveals that medical and nutritional institutions have long known oxalates cause problems, but the inf...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Dr. Sandeep Palakti spent years at Harvard and Mayo Clinic before realizing the American healthcare system isn't designed to keep people healthy. In this conversation with cardiac surgeon Dr. Philip Ovadia, he breaks down why 70% of physicians are now employed by large health systems or insurers, how that institutional capture prevents real preventative care, and what both doctors and patients can do about it. He explains how he br...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Two cardiac specialists—one who performs open-heart surgery, the other who places stents in blocked arteries—sit down for an honest conversation about what they see on the operating table and in the cath lab. Dr. Philip Ovadia and Dr. Arasi Maran treat patients at the end stage of heart disease, often when it's too late for interventions to make a meaningful difference. Both physicians share the same conclusion: you don...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Dr. Amie Hornaman to discuss one of the most underdiagnosed and misunderstood health issues affecting millions—especially women over 35. Dr. Amie shares her personal journey from being a misdiagnosed fitness competitor who gained 25 pounds despite extreme dieting and exercise, to becoming a leading thyroid hormone specialist.

Discover why 95% of hypothyroidism is actually Hashimoto's disease, why standard TSH testing fails mos...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Julia Greenblatt shares how she overcame chronic illness and pain and restored her own vibrant health by adopting a carnivore diet. She highlights her rapid recovery from debilitating hemorrhoids, mental clarity, and overall life improvements.

Send Dr. Ovadia a Text Message. (If you want a response, you must include your contact information.) Dr. Ovadia cannot respond here. To contact his team, please send an email to team@ifixhear...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Carnivore diet recovery takes center stage as Bella Ma (Steak and Butter Gal) returns to share her transformation from sick vegan to thriving carnivore. After six years on a plant-based diet that left her without a period, covered in cystic acne, and constantly starving, Bella made a dramatic overnight switch to eating only animal foods. The results speak louder than any nutrition debate.

Send Dr. Ovadia a Text Message. (If you want...

Listen
Watch
Mark as Played

Popular Podcasts

    Hey Jonas! The official Jonas Brothers podcast. Hosted by Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas. It’s the Jonas Brothers you know... musicians, actors, and well, yes, brothers. Now, they’re sharing another side of themselves in the playful, intimate, and irreverent way only they can. Spend time with the Jonas Brothers here and stay a little bit longer for deep conversations like never before.

    Dateline NBC

    Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

    Stuff You Should Know

    If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.

    The MeatEater Podcast

    Building on the belief that a deeper understanding of the natural world enriches all of our lives, host Steven Rinella brings an in-depth and relevant look at all outdoor topics including hunting, fishing, nature, conservation, and wild foods. Filled with humor, irreverence, and things that will surprise the hell out of you, each episode welcomes a diverse group of guests who add their own expertise to the vast world of the outdoors. Part of The MeatEater Podcast Network.

    The Joe Rogan Experience

    The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.

Advertise With Us
Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2026 iHeartMedia, Inc.

  • Help
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
  • AdChoicesAd Choices