Chapter 3 - Cholesterol, an Essential Nutrient: It Is Good for You!
What you need to know about cholesterol
Cholesterol is not the enemy. In fact, it is essential to good health and wellbeing. Every cell in the body needs cholesterol in its membrane, where it plays a critical role in cell communication. Without cholesterol, cell membranes are incomplete and, as a result, their functional role deteriorates.
Cholesterol is also used in the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, and plays a vital role in cell energy production, not to mention its essential role in the brain structure and function. Cholesterol is the starting material of many essential chemicals including vitamin D, steroid hormones and bile acids for digestion. Do you see how important it is? Without adequate cholesterol and sunlight your body can't make vitamin D. Vitamin D deficiency is one of the major nutrient deficiencies in the Western world and is linked to many diseases and disorders, including type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, CVD and the process of inflammation.
Cholesterol is metabolised* into vital body steroids such as the steroid hormones, including: sex hormones, oestrogen, progesterone, testosterone and DHEA, as well as the adrenal hormones aldosterone and cortisol.
[*to change (food) into a form that can be used by your body : to process and use (substances brought into your body) by metabolism. metabolizing nutrients. Food is metabolized by the body.]
These are essential to your health and wellbeing and none of these can be made without cholesterol. Their production changes in relation to the levels of cholesterol in the blood.' Low levels of these hormones can have a significant impact on an individual's health and, in fact, low testosterone is associated with an elevated risk of all-cause mortality as well as other chronic illnesses including insulin resistance.
What the drug companies don't want you to know
FOREWORD
TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO physicians routinely bled, purged, and plastered their patients. Bloodletting was the standard treatment for a host of diseases and had been so since the time of the philosopher-physician Galen almost 2,000 years before. The theory was that there were four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Blood was dominant, requiring the most balancing for returning an ill patient to health.
Every doctor's kit was equipped with a variety of lancets, brutal-looking scarificators, and, starting in the early nineteenth century, leeches 🪱🪱. In fact, the latter were used so often that physicians were themselves commonly referred to as 'leeches'.
Learned physicians conferred on the best veins to tap for given diseases and the optimal placement of leeches for the most therapeutic value, and countless protocols dictated the proper amount of blood to be let or number of leeches 🪱 to be applied. Doctors wrote lengthy papers describing their own bleeding techniques and presented them at august medical conferences.
The whole idea was nonsense, of course, and has been shown to be so in the early 1600s by William Harvey, the discoverer of how the circulatory system actually works. But the fact that the "scientific" basis for bloodletting was nonexistent didn't give pause to physicians 200 years ago, some of whom applied as many as fifty leeches to a single patient and, in the case of George Washington, relieved him of almost two quarts of blood in an effort to treat the throat infection that, coupled with the physician-caused anemia, ultimately killed him,
We look back today and can only shake our heads. And be thankful we, ourselves, don't have to worry about getting bled by lancet or leech or that with today's modern, truly science-based medicine, we would ever be exposed to such nebulously grounded treatments. Surely with all the scientific studies performed in great institutions the world over, today's doctors would never ignore the actual evidence and pursue unnecessary and possibly even harmful treatments. Would they?
Sadly, many doctors today have the same herd mentality as those doctors of yore. By the tens of thousands, they treat a nonexistent disease with drugs that are far from benign. And they do so based not on any hard scientific data, but because they, like their colleagues of 200 years ago, are firmly in the grip of group think. What is the nonexistent disease? Elevated cholesterol.
Cholesterol is an essential molecule without which there would be no life, so important that virtually every cell in the body is capable of synthesizing it.
The vast majority of laypeople have been bombarded with so much misinformation about cholesterol that most take it as a given that cholesterol is a bad thing and that the less they have the better. The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth.
Cholesterol is an essential molecule without which there would be no life, so important that virtually every cell in the body is capable of synthesizing it. Among its other duties, cholesterol is a major structural molecule, a framework on which other critical substances are made. Were we able to somehow remove all its cholesterol, the body, would, in the words of Shakespeare, "melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew." And that's not to mention that we wouldn't have bile acids, vitamin D, or steroid hormones (including sex hormones), all of which are cholesterol-based.
Despite the essential nature of cholesterol,doctors the world over administer billions of dollars' worth of drugs to try to prevent
its natural synthesis. The fact that only a
tiny minority of patients actually extend
their lives by taking these drugs is lost on
the multitude prescribing them, but not,
of course, on the pharmaceutical industry
making and selling them. How did we come to
this sorry state?
Sixty years ago a researcher, little known
outside of academic circles, singlehandedly
set uS on this path of cholesterol paranoia:
Ancel Keys, Ph.D., a proponent of what has
become known as the lipid hypothesis,
concluded that excess cholesterol caused
heart disease. He started out thinking that dietary fat in general drove cholesterol levels up, but as the years went by, he came
to believe that saturated fat was the true cholesterol-raising villain. (This idea of saturated fat as villain is so ingrained in the minds of health writers that the words "saturated fat" are almost never written alone but always as "artery-clogging saturated fat.") Which is more or less the basis for the lipid hypothesis: Saturated fat runs up cholesterol levels, and elevated cholesterol leads to heart disease. Nice and simple, but not true. It has never been proven, which is why it is still called the lipid hypothesis.
Because of Keys's influence, researchers for the past five decades have been beavering away in labs the world over, desperate to find enough actual proof to convert the lipid hypothesis into the lipid fact. But so far, they've fallen way short. In the process, however, they have vastly expanded our knowledge of the biochemistry and physiology of the cholesterol molecule. Thanks to their efforts, we now know that cholesterol is transported in the blood attached to carrier proteins, and that these protein-cholesterol complexes are called lipoproteins. Their densities now describe these lipoproteins: HDL (high-density lipoprotein), LDL (low-density lipoprotein), VLDL (very-low-density lipoprotein), and a number of others. Some of these lipoproteins are considered good (HDL) and others bad (LDL). And. of course, the drug companies have developed medications purported to increase the former while decreasing the latter.
But they jumped the gun. Researchers have discovered a type of lipoprotein called small, dense (or type B) LDL that may actually end up being a true risk factor for heart disease. Problem is, this small, dense type B LDL is worsened by the very diet those promoting the lipid hypothesis have hailed for decades as the best diet to prevent heart disease: the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. Turns out that fat, especially saturated fat, decreases the amount of these small, dense LDL particles while the widely recommended low-fat diet increases their number. The opposite of the small dense LDL are large fluffy LDL particles, which are not only not harmful but are actually healthful. But the LDL-lowering drugs lower those, too.
Cracks should have appeared in the firm entrenchment of the lipid hypothesis (that now basically posits that elevated LDL causes heart disease) when a recent study showed that of almost 140,000 patients admitted to the hospital for heart disease, almost half of them had LDL levels under 100 mg/dL (100 mg/dL has been the therapeutic target for LDL for the past few years). Instead of stepping back, scratching their heads, and thinking, Hmmm, maybe we're on the wrong track here, the authors of this study concluded that maybe a therapeutic level of 100 mg/dL for LDL is still too high and needs to be even lower. Such is their lipo-phobic herd mentality.
Nutritionist Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., and cardiologist Stephen Sinatra, M.D., have teamed up in this book to slash through the tall thicket of misinformation surrounding cholesterol, lipoproteins, and the lipid hypothesis. They wrote their fact-based book using easy-to-understand terminology, and present a much more valid hypothesis of what really causes heart disease and a host of other diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity, which will open your eyes to the emperor's state of undress. If you are worried about your cholesterol level or contemplating taking a cholesterol-lowering drug, we urge you to read this book! This book will put the facts in your hands to make a more informed decision. And we're confident you will enjoy their book as much as we did.
Michael R. Eades, M.D.
Mary Dan Eades, M.D
May 2012
Incline Village, Nevada, USA 🇺🇸
