Cholesterol isn't the main culprit in heart disease; chronic inflammation from poor diet, stress, and inactivity is. A famous study linking saturated fat to heart attacks excluded France, which ate the most saturated fat but had the fewest heart attacks. Small dense cholesterol particles damage inflamed arteries, while big fluffy ones pass through harmlessly.
If you've ever been told your cholesterol is too high and you need to be on medication for the rest of your life, today's interview is going to challenge everything you thought you knew about heart health. So today he's going to talk us through why cholesterol is not the villain and how chronic inflammation driven by poor diet and lifestyle is the real cause of heart disease. Like, what woke you up to the fact that you were in a broken medical system? So I would love for you to just share with these women because I know a lot of them are hearing this for the first time and they're skeptical. What the heck is inflammation and why is it really the root cause of all of our chronic diseases that we're dealing with right now?
Yeah. Well, in a nutshell, the way I like to describe it to folks is just like in your vehicle, same thing in the human body, in your cells. That combination, lower ATP energy production, higher exhaust or free radical production, that equals inflammation. So now this extra exhaust, free radicals, float around and they start to damage your cell. But I just— I want to talk about more in general. Cholesterol has gotten a bad rap. Pre-1912, people were eating saturated fat— tallow, lard, coconut oil. A different form, heavy whipping cream, real butter, not margarine. It turned out though that it was a fraudulent study because it was really a 22-country study including France, had the highest saturated fat intake of any country, ate the most butter of any country, and had the lowest amount of heart attacks. So that didn't fit his theory, so he just removed France from the data set. And he removed 14 other countries that didn't fit. So he manufactured this curve artificially and fraudulently. I want to, you know, just highlight this, go back to inflammation. Big fluffy like a cotton ball rolling down your artery wall, keeping it clean, versus a small dense like a BB scraping a little inflammatory spot on the inside of your artery wall. But it's the standard American way of eating, living, thinking, stressing, sitting, all the things that compress it down to the BB, and that's inflamed cholesterol.
We say cholesterol is not the villain. He was actually trying to patch and repair that inflammation at the site of the artery, right? The real enemy isn't cholesterol, it's chronic inflammation. And the good news is you have the power to address it.
