Does Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease?
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In this 77-second video, Dr. Malcolm Kendrick proves that there is absolutely no correlation between heart disease and cholesterol.
I challenge you to watch this video and try to go on believing that the lipid hypothesis is valid.
You might want to send this video to the people you know who are still living the Low-fat Lie. All those poor souls who are deathly afraid of butter, dutifully taking their statin drugs, still drinking skim milk (what I call “white water”) and eating low-fat frozen yogurt (I mean really, what is the sense of that, when you can have ice cream?).
Then bring on the triple cream cheese, the butter, and the bacon.
I think I’ll have Eggs Benedict for breakfast. With extra Hollandaise sauce. And extra cream in my coffee.
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26/08/2009 at 10:43 am Permalink
Yeah! I am so glad someone it saying this out loud. I do however think that perhaps there’s a difference between cholesterol from healthy fat and that from trans fats and processed fats. Perhaps that what studies should be looking at.
Fat is good for you in so many ways and we need to spread the word! I agree, we eat a fat-rich diet and our friends are amazed that we’re so thin. They see us eating real butter, drinking raw whole milk, saving bacon grease and using it for frying eggs & potatoes and they scratch their heads since they all eat “low-fat” granola bars for snacks, processed foods with added vitamins etc and they’re sick more often and have trouble maintaining a healthy weight. Not to mention all of our food tastes great! No cardboard here.
26/08/2009 at 12:54 pm Permalink
interesting. i have been eating high fat low carb for a few yrs now. since then my good chol has gone up but so has my bad chol which i have to say concerns me a bit. i’ve also started having some problems with my digestion – gallbladder.
monique
26/08/2009 at 1:36 pm Permalink
Can you believe this – I’ve never had my cholesterol checked. And you know what, I doubt I ever will.
26/08/2009 at 9:19 pm Permalink
Monique – Are you also eating/drinking fermented veggies and drinks? Do you make broth from scratch?
I eat or drink something fermented with all my meals and make sure my young sons do too.
I’m no expert on food at all but I do think if one is eats a “Nourishing Traditions” diet, one needs to make sure to eat fermented foods/drinks to aid digestion.
26/08/2009 at 10:01 pm Permalink
I really find this interesting. This is a topic that I am very concerned about because heart disease is a big problem on my father’s side. My dad has had two open heart surgeries and has lived to be 70 (which is longer than any other males in his family). Heart disease is a big problem on that side of my family. I am 34 and have had high cholesterol since I was about 30, but not high enough to be put on a statin drug, thank goodness. I am also hypothyroid and when my thyroid isn’t were it should be I know it can affect my cholesterol. My husband has high cholesterol and has high triglycerides, so much so that he has what is considered a “fatty” liver. We have slowly started following a NT diet in the past few months. In fact two weeks ago I made a deal with my hubby that if he could give up Mountain Dew he can buy the new trailor he’s been wanting. He’s been off it for almost two weeks, which is a huge accomplishment for him. Don’t get me started on how addicting soda is!!
Anyway, I guess what I want to ask you is what, in your opinion, do you think does contribute to heart disease? What part of the NT diet should we be focused on? We both need to lose about 50 lbs, which I know will also help our hearts, but what else? Thanks so much.
27/08/2009 at 8:05 am Permalink
Love this. Thanks for sharing!
Lanise, I know that Ann Marie will have a lot of info to offer, but I’m going to gander and say trans fats and sugars/simple carbs that turn to fat when they aren’t burned off.
As for Monique, I’d want to know what kind of fats. They aren’t all created equal.
It’s an interesting debate.
27/08/2009 at 8:29 am Permalink
Ann Marie,
I agree with you on not checking your cholesterol levels. What for? Do you actually think the doctors even know what the numbers mean???
27/08/2009 at 9:24 am Permalink
Hi, Lanise,
Please read this article on the Weston A. Price Foundation website: What Causes Heart Disease?
Excerpt:
The interesting thing is that most cases of heart disease in the twentieth century are of a form that is new, namely heart attack or myocardial infarction—a massive blood clot leading to obstruction of a coronary artery and consequent death to the heart muscle. Myocardial infarction (MI) was almost nonexistent in 1910 and caused no more than 3,000 deaths per year in 1930.
It’s very interesting to me that heart disease was unheard of before 1900, and at that time people were eating large amounts of saturated fat. Just look at a cookbook from that time period. Everything was cooked in lard or tallow or butter, and served with butter and heavy cream.
See my post on beef tallow French fries — I listed the fats that were commonly used in cooking in 1890, compared to the fats that were used in 1990 (credit to Dr. Mary Enig):
http://www.cheeseslave.com/2009/08/07/beef-tallow-french-fries/
Prior to 1910, dietary fats primarily consisted of butterfat, beef tallow, and lard. Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat
Crisco was introduced in 1911.
You might want to read Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride’s book on the topic, Put Your Heart In Your Mouth. You can it on the GAPS Diet store — it’s listed on my resources page.
One thing I want to mention. Mountain Dew is particularly bad for the thyroid — and of course, being hypothryoid slows your metabolism and makes it hard to lose weight.
Read this: http://www.naturalthyroidchoices.com/MtDew.html
Also, regarding high cholesterol and hypothyroidism — those two things go together like peanut butter and jelly. The thyroid controls your cholesterol level, so if you have a sluggish thyroid, your cholesterol will naturally be higher.
http://thyroid.about.com/cs/hypothyroidism/a/cholesterol.htm
An interesting anecdote:
Last spring, my in-laws both saw a huge, sudden drop in their cholesterol levels about a month or two after they started eating baked oatmeal that had been soaked in kefir 4 times a week. That was the only change they made to their diet. They have always eaten oatmeal a few times a week so they knew it wasn’t the oatmeal. They thought at first maybe it was the soaking in kefir.
That particular recipe has a lot of coconut oil in it — they were eating around 1-2 TBS of coconut oil 4 times per week.
I think maybe that is what caused the drop in cholesterol numbers. Coconut oil is very nourishing to the thyroid gland. It makes sense that if they started eating coconut oil regularly and nourished their thyroid glands which would make them work better, their cholesterol would drop.
This is why they say coconut oil is also good for weight loss — because they say it helps to nourish your thyroid, which would speed up your metabolism.
Here’s the post I did on that:
http://www.cheeseslave.com/2009/04/20/nutrition-news-roundup-coconut-oil-lowers-cholesterol-improves-thyroid-function/
27/08/2009 at 9:56 am Permalink
Ann Marie -
I have been really getting into all these traditional food ways and was looking to see if there are any nutrition schools that you know as a WAPF chapter member (leader?) that actually practice and instruct in national food ways and healing modalities?
Thanks so much,
Lindsay Young
lindsayrose.y@gmail.com
27/08/2009 at 10:01 am Permalink
Lindsay – I was wondering the same thing!
03/09/2009 at 6:03 am Permalink
Interested in the reference on Australian Aboriginals. Their traditional diet would be animals and animal fat and whatever else they could find in their local environment, which is another point, Australia is vast, and the food available will be slightly different, eg Torres Straight Islanders have a a seafood based diet, which can be high in cholesterol, ie crustaceans. So is his reference to Aboriginals on SAD (Standard Australian Diet)? I know that the aboriginals like any native population introduced latently to a European diet high in simple carbs and lots of alcohol almost immediately become overweight and diabetic.
24/09/2009 at 5:57 am Permalink
What you may not know about cholesterol
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8140456102398881820#docid=1725508023557801994
20/03/2010 at 7:23 pm Permalink
Kevin here, age 56. Ok, So what are the risks? A professional mate sent me this and has told me this several times. What I want to know is, if it’s not cholesterol level, what is it that causes plaque buildup? What would we still be wise to watch on our blood tests? High LDL levels, low HDL and high triglycerides? These are what I watch and try to bring into the healthy range. Or am I completely off track and is it some other factor?
What would be the average LDL and HDL and Triglycerides in Aust Aborigines, as separate from their actual cholesterol level? I’d like that to be on your graph too.
I am a lay person. My father and grandparents all died of heart attacks.
My cholesterol is 6.6 to 7 and hovers around there but my LDL’s are down a lot due to a change in diet years ago. Exercise level is lower now I’m semi retired.
Something must be the cause?
Is it the type of fat or is it something in processed foods, or a lack in our diet?
Thanks. Kevin
21/03/2010 at 4:04 pm Permalink
Kevin -
Good questions.
Here’s a question to consider — did your great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents die of heart attacks? If you look into it, you’ll find the answer is no.
Both your parents and grandparents were (I’m guessing) born after the introduction of industrial foods like Crisco and margarine. Heart attacks were non-existent until the late-1800s or early 1900s. They did not become commonplace until the middle of the last century.
Paul Dudley White was President Eisenhower’s personal physician in the fifties when the president had two heart attacks. White was a Harvard educated heart specialist. He’d published a textbook titled Heart Disease in 1943. In that book, Dr. White wrote, “When I graduated from medical school in 1911, I had never heard of coronary thrombosis.”
Now this was the President’s doctor. The reason he’d never heard of coronary thrombosis in 1911 was because the first article about it, detailing four unusual cases of this new phenomenon, was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1912. Source
Crisco was introduced in 1911. It was originally made of hydrogenated cottonseed oil produced by brothers-in-law Procter & Gamble in an attempt to use up the cottonseed oil they had been using to make candles when the candle business dried up after the advent of electricity. They had invested in a lot of cotton plantations, and subsequently used the leftover cottonseeds (which otherwise they would have had to pay to have someone haul away) to make oil which they used to make candles. When people no longer needed candles to light their homes, Procter & Gamble figured out a way to salvage their investment — they marketed the cottonseed oil as food.
When William Procter and James Gamble started the company Procter & Gamble they hired chemist Edwin C. Kayser and developed the process to hydrogenate cottonseed oil, which ensures the shortening remains solid at normal storage temperatures. The initial purpose was to create a cheaper substance to make candles than the expensive animal fats in use at the time. The candle market began to diminish with the introduction of electricity and, since the product looked like lard, they began selling it as a food. This product became known as Crisco, with the name deriving from the initial sounds of the expression “crystallized cottonseed oil”. Source: Wikipedia
This practice of turning industrial waste products into food has continued over the past century — we’ve seen the same thing happen with margarine and more recently, high-fructose corn syrup and soy milk and other modern soy products.
I could write a whole post about this but to me, if the diet of most people a couple hundred years ago was not causing heart attacks, and now our diet is causing heart attacks (number one killer worldwide), and considering the fact that our diet has radically changed in the past hundred years, why wouldn’t we question our modern diet? Why would we listen to doctors telling us to eat low-fat diets and cut out saturated fats?
If you look at a cookbook from the 1800s or early 1900s, all the recipes contained plenty of butter, cream, lard, beef tallow and other saturated fats. They also ate plenty of eggs, fatty meats and seafood and whole raw milk.
One other thing to consider — vitamin K2 used to be very prominent in our diet. It is primarily found in the organs, fat and eggs from animals on pasture. Animals today are kept in confinement and their fat, eggs and organs contain considerably less vitamin K2.
Vitamin K2 is what helps the calcium know where to go in the body. Doesn’t matter how much calcium you ingest — if you don’t get enough K2, your body won’t deposit it where it needs to go — in the bones and the teeth. Instead the body deposits the calcium in the organs.
This is a possible and very likely explanation for why so many people today have heart disease (calcium deposits in the heart), Alzheimer’s and stroke (possibly caused by calcium deposits in the brain), kidney stones (calcium deposits in the kidneys), as well as weak bones, osteoporosis and hip fractures.
I think this is why people like Michael Pollan recommends that we eat “real food” — he says we should only eat foods that would be recognizable to our great-grandparent. Not our grandparent — but our GREAT-grandparent.
For more info on vitamin K2 and following a pre-industrial diet of real food, check out the Weston A. Price Foundation.
http://www.westonaprice.org/