For decades, mainstream medicine told us to avoid cholesterol to prevent heart disease. This faulty recommendation led millions of Americans to give up healthy foods like eggs and replace them with unhealthy carbs. It also led to a massive upswing in people taking the potentially lethal metabolic poisons known as statin drugs.
Well, the real science on cholesterol is finally seeing the light of day. And it’s a complete reversal for the mainstream. Turns out, heart disease may actually stem from low cholesterol.
I heard my old friend Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) say that a current news story is like a centipede because more and more shoes keep dropping. The same can be said of cholesterol and statins. The other shoe keeps dropping.
Of course, I first learned that cholesterol in the diet doesn’t relate to blood levels of cholesterol when I was in medical school 40 years ago. Since then, I’ve told anyone who would listen that blood cholesterol levels don’t go up (or down) in response to the cholesterol content of the foods you eat.
Furthermore, the idea that LDL cholesterol is the so-called “bad cholesterol” is another ridiculous myth. And lowering blood cholesterol with statin drugs does no good, and a lot of harm. I also exposed the myth that saturated fats cause heart disease years ago.
I am finally beginning to hear many people (other than my good readers) question the cholesterol myth and reject taking statin drugs. That development still works out alright for big pharma, since their “blockbuster” statin drugs are going off patent anyway, after years of outrageous profits based on a dangerous myth.
Of course, the government helped promote the cholesterol myth in the first place. For 40 years, government health experts claimed (without any real evidence) that eating cholesterol-rich foods, such as eggs and certain seafood, would raise your LDL cholesterol and cause heart disease.
But, as I said above, the real science, worked out 35 years ago, shows no correlation between dietary cholesterol intake and blood cholesterol levels. Nevertheless, the government persisted in this erroneous and dangerous myth. (Persistence isn’t a virtue when you’re wrong, as illustrated this year in the U.S. Senate.)
The government finally relented with the New Dietary Guidelines for 2015, stating that “cholesterol is not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.”
Yet, I still see clueless dieticians, nutritionists and physicians all over the internet pontificate about how many eggs you can “get away” with eating. Eggs are the perfect food for a poorly nourished population. So the real question is: How anyone can get away with not eating enough eggs?
Cholesterol is an essential nutrient
First of all, every cell in your body needs cholesterol. It is a key building block for all cell membranes, hormones and vitamin D, another nutrient lacking in most people today. When sunlight shines on your bare skin, your body ultimately photo-converts cholesterol into active vitamin D.
Plus, cholesterol plays a critical role in brain health and memory. Consequently, the government’s decades-long recommendation to avoid cholesterol played a role in the growing crisis of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia over the last four decades. The two failed “decades of the brain” government research didn’t help much either.
These faulty recommendations to reduce cholesterol and rely on statin drugs also contributed to the increasing rates of Type II diabetes, obesity and cardio-metabolic heart disease.
Saturated fats are good too
The government may have backtracked on cholesterol, but it still clings to outdated myths about saturated fats in dairy, butter and meat. Science shows that saturated fats increase the safe, “fluffy” LDL particles in the blood, as well as increase HDL, which benefits for your heart. Fats also provide the necessary insulation for our brains and entire nervous systems.
Saturated fats first came under the gun during the mid-20th century when a physician named Ancel Keys claimed that they caused heart disease. Of course, we now know the sugar industry funded and promoted his faulty science. Yet some of Keys’ own follow-up research discredited his hypothesis. But those results remained buried for 40 years, as I reported several years ago.
The data actually show that replacing saturated fats with vegetable oils did lower total cholesterol levels by an average 14 percent after one year. However, this lower cholesterol did not result in improved health or longevity.
Instead, the lower the cholesterol, the higher the risk of dying.
In fact, for every 30-point drop in cholesterol, there was a 22 percent higher risk of death. These results are consistent with worldwide population studies linking lower cholesterol with reduced longevity.
We also found data at the National Cancer Institute in the mid-1980s linking lower cholesterol with a higher risk of cancer. Nonetheless, the Food and Nutrition Board report on diet and cancer gave scant attention to avoiding sugar, instead putting all their faulty focus on avoiding fats.
Statisticians like to manipulate disease “endpoints,” but they can’t manipulate death rates. And the data clearly show that lowering cholesterol, avoiding saturated fats, and taking statin drugs did not lower death rates, but increased them. In other words, these approaches did not increase longevity, as promised, but reduced it. In fact, these misguided approaches were only “anti-aging” in that they killed patients before they got old.
One of the real culprits for heart disease is chronic inflammation, which the body produces in response to oxidized cholesterol in heated, processed vegetable oils. Many studies, dating from 1968 to 2013, show this correlation. Some scientists now believe that heart disease is a cholesterol deficiency problem.
I’ll tell you all about the natural steps you can take to prevent and reverse heart disease in my upcoming on-line learning protocol. I’m in the final stages of pulling all of the research together, and will keep you posted on my progress so that you will be the first to know when it’s ready. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, you can read more about how to avoid the deadly risks associated with statin drugs — and the steps you need to take to heal the damage they may have already caused in your body — in my special report The Insider’s Guide to a Heart-Healthy and Statin Free Life. You can learn more about it or order a copy today by clicking here.