#170: Cholesterol is NOT the Villain

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Hi, I'm Dr. Tabatha, the Gutsy Gynecologist. I'm a triple board-certified OB-GYN and functional medicine physician. I've embraced the world of functional medicine and wellness through my own personal health journey, and I'm super excited to share my wisdom and unique perspective as it pertains to women's health. After caring for thousands of women, I've come to realize that your gut health determines your gyne health and your overall health. And it's a super gutsy thing for me to go against conventional gynecology practice to bring you the truth. No more Band-Aid medicine, ladies. We're talking root cause resolution on this show. So if you're struggling with hormone imbalance, weight gain, period issues, anxiety, insomnia, you name it, then you've come to the right place. And I wanna be your gutsy gynecologist. So welcome.

Okay, today I want to talk about how all of our systems are interconnected and the really important link of cholesterol. Cholesterol is vastly important for not only women but men too, and it does so many important jobs, and it has gotten such a horrible bad rap. It really has been villainized, and everyone is confused. Even doctors and healthcare providers in the medical system are confused from all of the bad recommendations that have come out over the years. So I really want to clear some things up because this is really important. So all of our systems are connected, and. Yet conventional medicine puts all of these systems in a silo, right? If you have stomach issues, you go to the gastroenterologist. If you have period issues, you go to the gynecologist. If you have joint pain, you go to the rheumatologist or the orthopedic surgeon. And none of those specialties are talking to each other or are evaluating what's going on in the other systems and realizing that it's all connected. They're all talking to each other. So when I think about cholesterol, I just want to give you a little bit of a background. Okay. In 1983, the recommendation was to have your total cholesterol less than 260. In 1986, that dropped to 240. Then statin drugs became very popular, and in 1993, they decreased the recommendation to 220. And unfortunately for us, statins became the most prescribed medication on the market and were making Billions upon billions of dollars, and they thought, okay, if people are handling having a cholesterol of 220, why don't we decrease the recommendation to 200? And that way more people will require statin medications. So as of 2013, the total cholesterol recommendation is 200 or below. And it is very much taught in conventional medicine that if your numbers are above that, you should go on a statin medication to decrease those numbers. Okay, there are multiple problems with this recommendation, and unfortunately, this really destroys our health. Especially women's health. And let me explain why. So cholesterol, it's actually mostly made by our body in the liver. It's not even what we're eating. So that's a small piece of it. And triglyceride levels are more of an accurate representation of your diet and what you're consuming. Triglyceride levels will increase With a highly processed diet. So if you're eating a lot of boxes and bags or inflammatory seed oils, which I'm going to talk about, that will elevate your triglycerides. And LDL is villainized. They call it the bad cholesterol and HDL the good cholesterol. But there's way more to the story for when it comes to LDL. So the standard lab work that gets done tells you these totals, and it says if you're over a certain number, you're bad and you need a medication. But LDL comes in large particle LDLs and small particle LDLs, and that's really important to understand because big particle LDLs don't have the same risk associated with them as the small particle LDLs. So this is what I want you to understand. When we think of our coronary arteries, those are the tiny little arteries that are supplying blood to the heart muscle. Those are what can get blocked and spasm and cause a heart attack. And so we, for a long, long time, thought that elevated cholesterol caused these plaques or these blockages in coronary arteries, and that's what caused heart attacks. Because when we went and did autopsies and, you know, did catheterizations and things, we would see these plaques, these blockages. And so it was— everyone was quick to assume, oh, the cholesterol is the problem. There it is. It's blocking The artery. But here's the problem. Cholesterol is a Band-Aid. What your body— oh my gosh, your body has such an amazing innate intelligence. So if you have damage in the endothelial cell, this is the cells that line those coronary arteries. If they get a little tear, a little damage in them from Some kind of inflammatory process. We now understand that is from a high-sugar diet, a high simple carbohydrate diet, gut dysbiosis, things that drive chronic inflammation cause damage to the artery. Your body sends cholesterol to that damaged site to patch it and repair it. Okay, so imagine you threw something at your wall and damaged the wall. You would have to do a little patch job, and before you painted it to fix the wall, that's what your body is doing. It's doing a patch job on that endothelial area inside the artery with cholesterol. To heal it and close it off so that it can function again. If you continue to put a hole in the wall or to damage your arteries from chronic inflammation and other processes, your body keeps sending cholesterol to that area to fix it. And so, yes, the patch can get too big and start to block the blood flow. Because it's just trying to fix and repair that area. It's not trying to hurt you. So cholesterol buildup is actually a warning sign that your body is inflamed and has damage going on. Your body's trying to repair it. So we have been villainizing the wrong thing for all of these decades. It's not the cholesterol. The cholesterol is part of the solution, unfortunately. The problem is coming from our highly processed diet called the Standard American Diet and our major gut issues associated with that diet. And so if you can stop all that inflammation that's coming from the gut and coming from your diet, your body will stop sending cholesterol to those areas to fix them. So I hope that makes sense. Cholesterol is super important for so many functions in our body. So our hormones, you know, when I say hormones, I can be referring to our sex hormones like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol, our stress hormone, aldosterone, our blood pressure hormone. So many of these sex hormones, they are all made from cholesterol. Cholesterol is literally the backbone ingredient, the basic starting point to make those sex hormones and all those steroid hormones. So if you don't have enough cholesterol, you can't make those hormones properly. And we saw this wreak havoc in the '90s with the low-fat, no-fat diet recommendations. Women's hormones went crazy. That was the beginning of all these hormone imbalances. Before that recommendation in the '90s, there was no such thing. Nobody talked about hormone imbalances. We didn't learn about that in medical school. That wasn't in the literature. That has stemmed in part, a huge part, from this low-fat, no-fat diet recommendation that destroyed us. So our hormone production decreased drastically and became very imbalanced. And so I really want you to understand that cholesterol is necessary for a woman to have a balanced hormone cycle and balanced health. Cholesterol is also the backbone of our trillions of cells. So our cells that make up our organs, that make up our systems that make up our body at the cellular level. There is something called the cell membrane that is like the coating, the COVID the wall of the cell. It has a phospholipid bilayer that is made of cholesterol. Without that healthy phospholipid bilayer, hormones cannot bind to their receptors and send signals. Things cannot be transported in and out of the cell, like minerals, vitamins, energy, toxins that get released. All of that cannot happen if you have an inflamed cell membrane or a cell membrane that does not have a healthy phospholipid bilayer. So that is one of the huge driving factors of chronic disease, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, all of these. Conditions were driven and exacerbated by this lack of cholesterol that we were, you know, trying to force really low. So cholesterol is hugely important for your health. Like I said, a lot of it comes from our liver. Our liver can't properly make cholesterol or even keep it balanced and metabolize it properly If our liver is full of stored carbohydrates called fatty liver, or if it can't do its detox processes properly because of all the toxins coming in, too much alcohol intake, too many medications to break down, all kind of things will cause the liver to not be able to handle its cholesterol. So the liver is very much a huge part of how healthy your cholesterol patterns are. Another piece of it, which is super important for women, is our gallbladder. So our gallbladder stores bile. It's connected to the liver. Our liver makes bile, puts it in the gallbladder. When we eat fat, our gallbladder squeezes out some bile into our intestines to help us absorb those fats. We need that. Bile also sequesters, meaning it grabs onto bad stuff. Like toxins, and it helps move around all of our steroid sex hormones. So for us to have proper estrogen levels, progesterone levels, testosterone levels, our gallbladder and liver have to be doing their job appropriately. And if the gallbladder can't release the bile and the bile can't carry things around the body the way it's supposed to, Then our hormones become imbalanced. A key issue is that estrogen dominance, or too much estrogen in the body, causes the gallbladder to slow down. And then the gallbladder, if it doesn't contract and release the bile, you don't absorb your fats, and that can affect you. And so you get stuck in this vicious cycle. And the bile that is sitting in your gallbladder, if your gallbladder is not contracting and releasing it on a regular basis the way it should, That will sit in there and create stones, and those cholesterol stones can get stuck in the ducts and cause pain. And so it's a really common scenario for women to have elevated estrogen, have a sluggish gallbladder, end up having their gallbladder removed for gallstones. And then the vicious cycle of estrogen dominance continues, and they continue to not have enough bile to handle their cholesterol, and their cholesterol patterns get really, really out of whack. So it's super important for us to not villainize cholesterol, to not be afraid of it, to embrace it and realize that it is Such an intricate part of having a healthy body. So when we talk about eating fats, we want to focus on healthy fats. There's saturated fats, which means at room temperature it's a solid, like butter, like lard. Those are saturated fats, like the fat in a steak. It looks white when it's sitting there at room temperature because it's a saturated fat. Monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, those are liquids at room temperature like olive oil, things like that. And then you get into trans fats, which are a man-made version that are used in processed foods to stabilize and give shelf preservation to cookies, crackers, baked goods, breads, all of these things. That's how they can live on the shelf forever. But those are very toxic and inflammatory. And so it really does matter the types of fats that you're having. Things like seed oils, those are very inflammatory. They create way too many omega-6s as opposed to omega-3s, which are made by like Olive oil and such. So I really want you to swap out and get rid of vegetable oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, palm oil as much as you can. Try to use MCT oil, olive oil, coconut oil. Those are all better options for you. So. You need healthy fats. You need at least 3 to 4 servings of them a day so that you can have healthy cell membranes. You can make your hormones. You can make your bile and sequester your toxins and move your hormones and your toxins out of your body. All of that is super, super important. So Don't be afraid of fat. And I tell every woman, read Eat Fat, Get Thin by Dr. Mark Hyman. It's a great book that explains all of this for you. And know that fat is so much more satisfying and filling. So when you eat fat, you get 9 kilocalories per gram, as opposed to eating a carbohydrate, you only get 4 kilocalories per gram. So you get more energy content per gram when you eat fat as compared to carbohydrates. That's why you feel full longer. You're not hungry as soon. Carbohydrates do not give you as much energy or nutrition as fats and protein. So that's just a little side note, but I hope this was helpful. Don't be afraid of cholesterol. You know, it's a difficult conversation to have. With your conventional doctor because they have not been updated on all of the myths and things that we have come to understand are not true. The research is there, the literature, the studies, they're all there. But because the drug companies very much run the medical system and the medical institutions and what is taught and what is practiced, It has not been brought into conventional medicine as of yet. So unfortunately, doctors are still practicing with this bad information from 20 years ago, and it's really common for cardiologists and primary care doctors to still villainize cholesterol and tell you it's bad, and it's just not True. It's not the truth. So it might be difficult for you to navigate that. You might have to search out a physician who has gone on to study and learn the up-to-date science. We're out there, you know. Look for an integrative doctor, a functional medicine doctor, someone who is updated on all of the science. They— we're out there, I promise you. Statins are, by and large, not safe. They deplete your CoQ10, which is one of the primary ingredients necessary to make your energy. It wipes out your electrolytes and causes muscle cramps. That's a huge one, and weakness and fatigue. And those are really big side effects that you don't want to sign up for because that impacts your whole life, right? It takes women out of the game a lot of times when they go on statins. A lot of women give up working out because they can't tolerate all these side effects. And it's very sad for me to see this. And, you know, their doctors just say, well, that's how it's got to be. And literally, exercise has been shown time and time again to be way more beneficial than taking a statin and not have those bad side effects. They only have good side effects, like good mental health and longevity and, and everything else. So please think twice before you take another medication recommended by your doctor for something that your body should be able to do. Oh, and the other piece that I wanted to mention, this is so important for Women going into menopause, your cholesterol numbers are going to increase when you go into menopause. The cardiologists do not understand this. This kills me because your ovaries are no longer making all of the estrogen and progesterone and testosterone that they were. Your cholesterol numbers go up because you're not using the cholesterol to make the sex hormones. So it takes a while for your body to go, oh, she doesn't need this much cholesterol production anymore because she's not going to take it and make hormones anymore. And so there's a major adjustment period where you stop making the hormones, but you're still making the cholesterol levels to the same amount. And so your cholesterol levels look higher. You don't need to freak out about that, I promise. We just need to optimize what your body's doing with it. cholesterol. Okay, so know that when you go into menopause, your cholesterol numbers are going to go up. And once you don't have the protection of estrogen for all of your systems, we do see that you increase your risk of insulin resistance, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, all of those things. And it's not because your cholesterol went up, it's because you don't have the protection of estrogen throughout your body like you did previously. So there is a lot of argument to doing bioidentical hormone replacement, but at least I want you to understand the premise behind what the heck is happening and why all these numbers shift, because doctors freak out on women about it, but they don't understand the physiology behind it. So I want you to understand what's going on in your body. I hope that was a really good aha golden nugget for you. Let me know in the comments, in you know, in the reviews, what else you want to hear about. I am doing this for you guys because I'm so passionate about helping you take back control of your body and and realize that your body is working. For you. God created your body as a miraculous, amazing body with potential that we just don't even tap into. Instead, we villainize it and we act like our body is abandoning us or working against us. And that is just simply not the case. We need to figure out what it's trying to say to us and give it what it needs. So the more that you can understand all this physiology, the more empowered that you're going to be to say, you know what, I love my body. My body is capable of all kinds of transformation and thriving, but I'm not giving it what it needs. So let's flip the script, okay, and take back control. You've got this. You can have an amazing— life if you realize that God gave you an incredible body that's capable of so much that you're not tapping into. So start tapping into that. Go do something amazing for your body. Love your body. You can't heal a body you hate. So go and love your body. I'll see you soon.