Dr. Mark Hyman explains why high cholesterol alone doesn't cause heart disease. Sugar and inflammation matter more than cholesterol numbers, and the standard medical advice misses the real drivers of cardiovascular problems.
Lowering cholesterol can be harmful to your health. In fact, a study in the New England Journal yesterday showed that even if your bad cholesterol or LDL was under 70, if your good cholesterol was low, then the statin drugs like Lipitor don't protect you. So that's obvious if you know the real cause of heart disease, which is actually sugar and not fat. It's sugar that drives the good cholesterol down and causes metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes. And that is the true cause of most heart attacks, not LDL cholesterol. Hi, I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, welcome back to my blog. Now the reason you don't hear about it is that there are no good drugs to raise HDL. Only the statins like Lipitor and Zocor which lower LDL. And billions are spent advertising them even though they're the wrong treatment. So if you're like most of the patients whom I see in my practice, you're convinced that cholesterol is the evil that causes heart disease. And if you monitor our cholesterol levels and avoid the foods that are purported to cause cholesterol to go up, you hope that you'll be saved from America's number one killer. Now why are you afraid of cholesterol? Because for years, well-meaning doctors, echoed by the media, have emphasized what they long believe is the intimate link between cholesterol and death by heart disease. Would it be that it were so simple? But the truth is much more complex. Cholesterol is only one factor, and not, I think, even the most important one, contributing to your risk of getting heart disease. Now first of all, let's take a look at what cholesterol actually is. Well, it's a fatty substance, it's produced by the liver, and it's used to help perform thousands of bodily functions. It helps the body build our cell membranes and covers our nerve sheets and it helps build most of our brain. It's a key building block for hormones like testosterone and estrogen. And without it, we wouldn't be able to maintain adequate levels of hormones. Now think cholesterol is the enemy, think again. Without cholesterol, you would die. In fact, those with the lowest cholesterol throughout the aging process are at the highest risk of death. And higher cholesterol under certain circumstances can actually help increase lifespan. Now when I convey this to the simple reality to my patients, they often gasp. Okay, so let's debunk the cholesterol myths. There's so many, right? Although most of them have been taught that fat diets cause cholesterol problems, it's not entirely true. It's not the amount of fat, it's the type of fat. So trans fats and saturated fats are worse while omega-3 fats actually help. But the biggest source of abnormal cholesterol is not even fat at all. It's sugar. That's right. The sugar you consume converts to fat in your body. And the worst culprit is high fructose corn syrup, which is in most processed and junk food. And that's the primary nutritional cause. So what kind of cholesterol do you have? Now, many people who are health conscious know what their total cholesterol is, but it's actually not as critical as knowing the level of your good cholesterol or HDL, your triglycerides, your ratio of triglycerides to HDL, and your ratio of total cholesterol to HDL. That's way more important, those numbers, than your total or bad LDL cholesterol. And what's more, we know there are even different sizes of cholesterol. There's big and light fluffy ones which are not dangerous and small dense hard ones which are. So this is very important to understand. And also if your cholesterol goes rancid or is oxidized, it's more dangerous than if it's just not damaged by free radicals. So the big contributors to cardiovascular disease are inflammation, blood sugar problems, and free radicals. And to control these functions and keep them in balance, you need to look at the overall picture as well as your genetic predispositions that underlie these types of different diseases you have that you're most likely to develop. And it's the interaction between your genes and the environment in your diet is called nutrigenomics. that can make the biggest difference in the outcome. So we need to look at your diet, your nutritional status, your stress level, your activity, and then we need to look at some key tests to see what's going on with heart disease. So if you look at the blog today, I'm going to list the key tests that you need to do to identify whether or not you have a high risk of heart disease. It's not just cholesterol. Don't get stuck in that. It's inflammation, it's blood sugar, It's free radicals, it's homocysteine, it's folate status, it's so many different things that you have to focus on. So have a look, see what tests you've had and what you haven't done. And if you haven't had these tests, be sure to go to your doctor and ask for these tests. Next week I'll tell you what to do about your high cholesterol. So stay tuned and I'll see you next week.
