A brilliant article by my good friend, fitness professional and back pain coach to fitness professionals, Austin Lawrence…
We’ve all been conned into believing that cholesterol is this sinister compound that causes heart disease and destroys health. We’ve been conned into believing that dietary cholsterol raises blood cholesterol and we’ve also been conned into believing that satuarted fat will raise blood cholesterol levels and lead to heart disease.
You’d think there would be tons of evidence to support the notion that high cholsterol leads to heart disease, after all big pharmaceutical companies invest hundreds of billions of dollars in research to find effective drug treatments to lower cholesterol.
However the truth is a little surprising.
The US Surgeon Generals Office,after 11 years of trying to collect evidence that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, gave up!! You know why? Because there is no link, never has been, never was, never will be.
Here’s how the history of how saturated fat and cholesterol causing heart disease came about:
*150 years ago a German Dr called Virchow found plaque/streaks in arteries of dissected corpses and said it was from cholesterol
* In 1913 Nikolay Anichkov and Semen S. Chalatov fed cholesterol to a bunch of rabbits and their arteries furred up-but rabbits are vegetarian and not human beings-so never have cholesterol in their natural diet!!
*In the 1940′s Ancel Keys came up with the Seven Countries Study which was rubbished by his peers. Basically he cherry picked 7 countries with high saturated fat consumption and high rates of heart disease. That’s right just 7 countries out of nearly 200 countries in the world-SHOCKING!! Slowly though his study become accepted as ‘fact’!
This is the fuel for the saturated fat/cholesterol-heart disease HYPOTHESIS. That’s all it is a hypothesis -it’s just a theory-a theory that has been disproven time and time again without fail!!
*Ancel Keys, in 1997, even stated that dietary cholesterol has no impact on blood cholesterol levels!
As a side note, you CANNOT have your cholesterol measured-you do not have a cholesterol level, cholesterol is not freely floating around in the blood, it is bound up, along with saturated fat in lipoproteins; Chlyomicron, VLDL, IDL, LDL & HDL. HDL is considered ‘good’ cholesterol whilst LDL is considered ‘bad’ cholesterol-total BS! Lipoproteins transport saturated fat and cholesterol around the body so they can do what they are meant to do like make hormones, cell membranes, bile etc
Think about it, if cholesterol was really that bad why would your body, each day, make 6-8 x the amount found in in an egg? It obviously has an important role in bodily functions.
Studies have shown time and time again that when cholesterol levels drop, mortality rates,from all diseases, go UP!!
So if cholesterol is not so bad, then what causes heart disease, because saturated fat and cholesterol DO NOT!
If cholesterol-sorry lipoprotein or should I say HDL (‘bad’ cholesterol) were so bad at causing furred up arteries, why doesn’t every artery, and all parts of the artery walls get gummed up?
This plaque formation only ever occurs in arteries, not veins, even though they are made of the same stuff. It only occurs in arteries where they branch off -like in the heart and carotid arteries and where there is a lot of ‘turbulence flow’. These arteries become damaged and need repairing. Artery walls need collagen to repair and collagen needs Vitamin C, but we are woefully deficient in Vitamin C (the RDA is a pitiful 40mg), so cholesterol tries to do a repair job that Vitamin C should be doing.
So what does cause heart disease?
2 things
1) Stress
2) Vitamin C deficiency
(which are both related)
Stress
When countries or regions of countries have high rates of heart disease it always follows massive social upheavel. It’s happened in Finland and it’s happened in Glasgow, in fact it’s happened all over the world. 20-30 years of this upheavel heart disease rates peak and then slowly decline.
The stress response leads to to an increase in LDL and a decreae in HDL.
Because of this pharmaceutical companies deemed LDL as bad and HDl as good. Plonkers!! Or very clever marketers!!
Vitamin C
Humans, along with fruit bats, chimps and ginea pigs are the only mammals that cannot produce their own Vitamin C, we need it from our diet, but our diets woefully deficient When we are under huge stress the adrenals need GRAM quantities of Vitamin C. So the arteries walls need Vitamin C to help repair them, the adrenals need them when under stress and stress is a major causes heart disease.
Linus Pauling, the only ever person to win the Nobel prize TWICE, was talking about the link between heart health and Vitamin C decades ago
But Vitamin C can’t be patented, whereas statins can, and the leading brand of statins makes over $6 billion per year!!!
Big Pharma does not want to let go of the cholesterol hypothesis because it generates SO much money for them.
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