The truth about cholesterol....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 1-31-2012

One simple way to put it is this.

You can lower your total cholesterol and your LDL cholesterol and not get much heart protection.

But it’s also quite true that if you do the things that do protect your heart, your total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol will tend to go down.

That may seem to not quite make sense. But it is quite true.

Here’s why.

a) Total cholesterol contains protective HDL AND potentially harmful LDL.

So, if you lower your total cholesterol by lowering your HDL, your total cholesterol goes down but so does your heart protection!

Large particle LDL that’s not oxidized or loaded with excess sugar is thought to be quite harmless. Small particle LDL tends to cause heart disease. So, if you lower large particle LDL without lowering the small particle LDL, your total cholesterol and LDL go down. But you get little if any added heart protection.

That means that there are two ways to lower your total cholesterol that worsen your heart protection or leave your heart protection the same.

But if you do the heart protective things that increase HDL and lower small particle LDL your total cholesterol will go down somewhat and your LDL will down more.

The four things that do that best by themselves are:

1. Completely stop eating hydrogenated oils. Because they lower HDL and increase small particle LDL, hydrogenated oils are basically heart attack starter. Earlier this month, Friday, 1-20-2012, we did a post on this and how to avoid eating this stuff since it’s still in so many foods!

2. Build up to it safely and a bit slowly to be sure. Take short breaks when you need to while exercising. But get into and continue doing vigorous exercise most days of every week. This directly increases your HDL and lowers your small particle LDL. Recent research even found that every year you keep exercising this way, your protection and this effect keeps getting better!

3. Completely avoid tobacco smoke. It both boosts your blood pressure immediately and causes heart disease directly and the plaque in your blood vessels tends to cause high blood pressure over time AND heart disease.

Tobacco smoke, lowers HDL and oxidizes your LDL and harms and inflames your blood vessel walls causing any small particle LDL you have to cause even more heart disease. Every puff or exposure does this damage. Worse, tobacco smoke triggers heart attacks too!

We did a post on this and on new ways to quit last week on Thursday, 1-26-2012.

4. Take niacin. Even 300 mg after a large meal once or twice a day can help, particularly if you do many other heart protective things as well.

(Some people with liver damage should not take it. And taking more than 1,000 mg a day can cause liver damage in some people. So it’s safest to have your doctor check your liver function if you take niacin.)

But we now know that if your HDL goes up and your triglycerides go down, that means your small particle LDL went down too! When you take niacin, that’s exactly the effect you see! Your HDL goes up; your triglycerides go down. And the drop in LDL you also get tends to be the small particle kind that causes heart disease.

Best of all, research found that people who take niacin tend to have a lower mortality rate. In plain language, you not only will be less likely to have a heart attack or an obstructive, ischemic, stroke, you’ll be less likely to die from one.

b) Taking statin drugs can lower your LDL and total cholesterol. But only some people get much heart protection.

Most people have a genetic type such that 100 people have to take a statin for years to prevent one heart attack.

There are also some people who have a genetic type where 41 times as many people get heart protection.

Cardiologist, Arthur Agatson, wrote an article in which he said the test to tell which category you are in was only $150.

If you are in the larger group, you will be more likely to get side effects than heart protection from statin drugs. And some of the side effects are obnoxious such as cataracts and a feeling of low energy and some serious such as fatal muscle breakdown.

In that category, your LDL goes down but you get very little heart protection for the cost and risks.

c) Eating many things like whole fresh fruit and raw and cooked vegetables and cooked beans and lentils and NOT eating high fructose corn syrup, much sugar, or foods made of refined grains and NOT drinking soft drinks tends to lower your risk of heart disease in many ways. Eating raw nuts if you aren’t allergic to them also helps.

You’ll be less fat.

You will be less likely to have high blood sugar or type 2 diabetes, very high blood sugar.

Your blood pressure will be lower.

Your triglycerides will be far lower. And, your HDL will be higher. That means your LDL will be lower and much of that drop will be the harmful small particle kind.

In fact, because the oils high in omega 6 and hydrogenated oils are in many foods made with refined grains you will stop eating, your drop in LDL from doing this will be unusually heart protective!

This tends to create excellent heart protection. Yes your LDL will go down.

But using this method to create that LDL drop gives you heart and health protection that drugs cannot begin to match.

d) Eating this way and getting the regular, vigorous exercise also make your LDL you still have far less harmful for another reason

Eating this way AND exercise tend to prevent high blood sugar. That’s huge because high blood sugar makes your LDL far more harmful.

Excess sugar tends to stick onto LDL and make it like traveling sand paper in your blood stream. In previous times there was a weapon on a chain that was a ball of iron with spikes sticking out of it. Really high blood sugar makes your LDL about that hard on your blood vessels. The plaque that builds up on the damage on your larger blood vessels helps cause heart disease and this sugared LDL begins to simply destroy your capillaries.

This may even mean that the larger fluffier kind of LDL that’s normally harmless can begin to harm you too.

The bottom line is that doing these several things that ARE protective will lower your LDL and total cholesterol.

But, for most people getting lower total cholesterol and LDL by taking statins is not that protective.

Worse, if people who do all these things wrong take statins, the risks and costs of statins or totally wasted.

Doing these things wrong will overwhelm any good the statins might have done.

I read there has been a recent debate on whether or not doctors should put people on statin drugs to lower their total cholesterol or LDL if they are just a bit high. This has become quite common and even the norm for some doctors.

This information shows that this is NOT a good idea and that it is bad medical advice.

Doctors should know to be prescribing these lifestyle upgrades instead and doing so.

If they aren’t good at teaching or persuading people to use these upgrades, they need to prescribe seeing someone who is to these patients.

For their patients who are unable or unwilling to take that advice, the next step is not prescribing statins. The same is true if their total cholesterol or LDL is quite high. (High triglycerides or low HDL also would add urgency since that means high levels of small particle LDL.)

The next step is to have them take the genetic test to see if they are in the minority who actually get worthwhile protections from statins.

If not, the more common result, the Berkeley Heart lab found that taking niacin is far more protective.

Only if they do test in the group that statins help and have quite high scores or have already had a heart attack do statins make sense.

And, for the most at risk patients, prescribing the lifestyle upgrades becomes more critical. That’s particularly true for the younger, seemingly healthy people who have dreadfully bad risk factors.