The Shocking Truth About Cholesterol & Why You Probably Don't Even Need To Test For It.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. Greenfield. And it is a little bit weird for me right now because I have a guy on the podcast who is usually the fellow who's doing the interviewing. The guy who you may be familiar with as a very prolific podcaster and also a voice in the health community. Prolific and very respected health blogger podcaster. And actually was a speaker at the Become Superhuman event last year with or earlier this year as well. I have none other than the world famous Jimmy Moore on the call with me right now. That's right. Living la vida Low carb man himself, Jimmy Moore. How you doing, Jimmy?

That's funny. World famous. My wife is back in the background laughing at you, Ben.

Well, you are. You did a full on like tour of Australia, right?

Yeah, that was pretty fortunate. Last year they said, mike, you want to come to Australia and you do speaking tours, right? And I said, sure. I'd never done a speaking anything in my life except for my podcast and it turned out okay. They liked it. They've already invited us back. So, yeah, I guess it is world famous.

You're like, sure all the time. Why not put another shrimp on the barbie?

For sure.

So the reason that you're on the call today is because you have written a book and you actually have a pretty cool story yourself on an amazing amount of weight that you lost by really kind of unlocking this pathway to losing weight by ignoring, frankly, a lot of conventional medical advice and kind of taking your own path that steeped a little bit more in a natural and ancestral approach to nutrition. So before we even jump into your book, tell me a little bit about kind of where you started several years ago with your path to get into all of this in the first place.

You know, it's funny. I'm going to start with my testimony that I gave before the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Committee. I went to Washington, D.C. to kind of, you know, they always put out every five years these dietary guidelines for all Americans, as if we're all a bunch of robots, Ben, and respond the same way to the same dietary changes. And I remember looking them in the eyes on the panel and saying, you know what? I was Successful because I did the exact opposite of all the things you've been telling us to do for all these decades. And I tried doing those things. The low fat diet, the high healthy whole grain diet, all of these avoiding meat. None of that works for everybody. Perhaps there's some people. I know you've had Rich Roll on your podcast before, and he does very well not eating meat, but I think he does vegan the right way, by the way.

Yeah, exactly.

So for me, it was finding the way that was right for me. And so January 1, 2004, I decided to start on the Atkins diet. My mother in law had bought me the book for Christmas and I read it and it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me from my conventional wisdom thinking. But the more I dug deeper into this, I'm like, okay, I can see this possibly being a sustainable way, not just for weight loss, but for health. And so I started on it. Lost £30 the first month I did it. I was £410 when I started. So £30 really wasn't a whole, whole lot. But by the end of the second month, I lost another £40. By the end of 100 days, it was £100 gone. And you know, that really been kind of clued me in. Okay, something good is happening. You know, when you can drop that much weight that fast. Something that was happening before with making the pounds pack on has now been taken away and now it's falling off. Something is happening that's right for my body. And even though I went through a little bit of a stall in that summer, I'd already lost £100. I wasn't complaining. I did end up losing a total of 180 pounds back in 2004. So almost 10 years ago. It's hard to believe it's been that long, but totally changed my life. And you know, people like, well, it physically changed your life. It did more than that. It emotionally changed my life. My career took a total change. Ten years ago, if you'd said you would be one of the leading voices in the health community, I would just laugh. It wouldn't have even computed in my brain. But here we are.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, taking this whole low carb approach, I mean, you've done literally hundreds of podcasts on a lot of the nitty gritty science behind it. But today we're going to kind of hone in on one of the real aspects that I think confuses a lot of people when it comes to doing something like you did, like limiting carbohydrates and instead kind of eating more healthy fats for weight loss. And what some of the concerns are about that. So your book is called Cholesterol Clarity. And I know that in that book you get into LDL and HDL and good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. But what I'd like to start by asking you is. And somebody wanders into their doctor's office, and they get their lipid panel and their cholesterol numbers back. Why is it that that really isn't as important as what most people kind of think it is?

I think we've kind of put the focus on cholesterol because it's easy to measure and it's easy to see changes happen. And for some reason, I don't know if it's just human psychology, we like seeing numbers go up and down. I mean, think about all the women and men out there that step on a scale every day, and they expect that little machine to validate how they're doing with their fat loss program. That drives me crazy. I know it does. You too. You know, and the same goes with cholesterol. We get these cholesterol numbers. Oh, my Total cholesterol is 201. Oh, I'm. I'm at great risk for heart disease, but if it's 199, I'm not. We kind of have a strange look at things when it comes to health, and we think that that number is the be all, end all. And unfortunately, through researching this book and the different experts that I had in the book, that number does not tell the whole story. There are much more important things to be looking at than necessarily looking at total cholesterol and ldl, which is the. Unfortunately, what your doctor is going to say is the be all, end all. After I lost that 180 pounds in 2004, Ben, I went for a checkup to my doctor, and I got all my lipids and everything ran. And my HDL came back in the 70s. My triglycerides were in the 40s, but my LDL and total cholesterol were elevated. I want to say my LDL was something like 175 or something like that. And total cholesterol was 285. So that he was concerned. And he said, statin, statin, statin, right. And I said, but what about HDL being in the 70s? Isn't that good? Doesn't that mean heart health is great? Oh, yeah, it's good. Take a statin. And I said, well, what about the triglycerides? Isn't 43. Unbelievably amazing for triglycerides. Oh, yeah, that's great. Take a statin. So it was, like, all predicated on two numbers. LDLC and total cholesterol, and nothing else really mattered. Which kind of led me to start thinking about wanting to write this book that I wrote is okay. If that's all that matters, why are we measuring anything but LDL and total cholesterol?

Right. Right. So when we step back and we look at LDL and total cholesterol, Jimmy. I mean, what is that? What is that that's being measured exactly when we look at it from, like, kind of a scientific what's floating around in your bloodstream kind of standpoint.

Yeah. So total cholesterol is basically all of the hdl, ldl, and vldl. Now, we tried really hard in this book bin to make it extremely accessible, easy to understand. We explain. We have a glossary in the back of the book that all these terms, we kind of lay it all out. So the newbie that might be learning some of this stuff for the very first time, don't worry about this book overwhelming you. I mean, I'm a layperson, just like most people that would be reading the book. So I tried to come at it from that perspective so that people wouldn't get overwhelmed. But basically, that's your total cholesterol. It's just this total number of particles that are floating around in the. But the blood. And so you said ldl. What is ldl?

Yeah, when we're looking at ldl. So you get this printout right. When you leave the doctor, and you've got all your total cholesterol, your LDL and your HDL and whatever else. So these are basically particles that are circulating around in your bloodstream, transporting fats from one location to another, essentially.

That's right. That's right. And the HDL tends to serve a better purpose because it helps to move the ldl, you know, through the bloodstream. And where it needs to be, the LDL number that's on your standard cholesterol test. A lot of people don't realize this, Ben, but it's calculated. It's not an exact number, which is kind of funny because the goals that they have for ldl C, and the C is calculated is basically all predicated on a calculated number being less than 100. It really doesn't make a lot of sense to me that we would be treating people with a drug based on a number that's not precisely measured.

Yeah, that's Nuts. So when you're looking at your LDL and your total cholesterol number, like with you eating a low carb, high fat diet, like, it makes sense that those numbers would be elevated, right?

Well, I noticed that. And in the preparation for this book, I obviously know a lot of the heavy hitters in the low carb community. And so there did seem to be, among the practitioners that I had as experts, they said that they do see a trend, not necessarily across the board, of people that eat low carb, high fat, but a lot of low carbers and Paleo people are hyper responders to fat. And so the fat's going to raise the LDL and raise the total cholesterol. And yet, like I mentioned with my numbers earlier, their HDL is beautiful. Their triglycerides are also in a great place. Their A1C levels are just unbelievably good. They have inflammation levels. The CRP number is awesome. And yet it's these little outlier numbers that have been given all the attention for so long that all of these good things have been negated by the simplicity of looking at it through the prism of total cholesterol, ldl, that's all that matters. And if there are certain levels, you need to take a statin drug and eat a low fat diet.

Yeah. It's kind of weird because I look at the biomarkers myself of a lot of athletes specifically, and I see that same thing over and over again. You know, cholesterol kind of through the roof, like total cholesterol through the roof.

Yeah.

I also see some other concerning things that I think you and I are gonna dig into that maybe isn't all that great if it goes hand in hand with high cholesterol.

Yeah.

But before we even get into some of those nitty gritties of some of the stuff thatthat maybe you should be looking at if you do have high cholesterol or beyond your high cholesterol. We talked a little bit about ldl, we talked a little bit about total cholesterol. But where do HDL and triglycerides fit into this scenario? Because those are typically always something that you'll see on a lipid panel as well, right?

Yeah. Chapter 10 of my book, I call it Forgotten and triglycerides and hdl. And I do think these two numbers, I know Jeff Volek, one of the researchers from UConn, has done a lot of great research into this ratio between the triglycerides and the HDL range really is a better indicator of heart health risk. Than looking at your total cholesterol or your LDL cholesterol. Ideally, you want that triglyceride to HDL ratio to be, you know, one to one, really optimally. But basically, anything under three or two is a good number. And what that indicates is you've got great blood sugar control, you've got your carbohydrate tolerance under control, and a lot of people don't realize, but your carbs that you consume are tied directly to that triglyceride. So if your triglycerides are in excess of 100, not 150 like the conventional wisdom tells you, but 100, you're probably eating way too many carbs for your metabolism. So maybe back off.

I want to interrupt you. We're talking about a lipid panel here.

Hello?

Oh, can you hear me?

Okay, Jimmy.

Okay, we're talking about. Hey, we might have a little bit of a delay. It's all good, though. We're talking about a lipid panel here. And you said that triglycerides would be elevated if you were eating more carbohydrates. Like, you said that that was one of the ways you get triglycerides down. How does that work? Like, how could eating fewer carbohydrates actually lower something that's measured on a fat panel?

Yeah, it's interesting because people have long been told fat is what raises your cholesterol. Well, that's true. Saturated fat can raise ldl, Although what it does, and we're gonna get a little techy, a little geeky on you here, but it does raise the large, fluffy, what they call pattern, a type of ldl particles. So that' sthat's a good thing. But carbohydrates, what they do is they flip that. They make the ldl particles smaller and denser. So when you eat more carbohydrate, you're having the bad kind of ldl, as well as this bad fat known as triglycerides that floats through your body. So you kind of get a double whammy. That's not a good thing. And it's all tied to your carbohydrate consumption. And I'm going to qualify it. You don't have to cut all carbs out of your diet, but certainly find your carbohydrate tolerance level. And one of the best ways you can find that is look at that triglyceride number. If it's over 100, you're probably eating too many carbs. If you drop the carbs down and can get that number that triglycerides number below 100, then you're in the ideal range for what your carb tolerance should be.

Yeah. It's so nuts that, you know, doing something like eating less, whatever whole wheat bread will actually lower triglycerides. It's like that's. It doesn't seem like logical thinking, but I think so many people don't take that into account. You also mentioned the large, fluffy cholesterol particles and like, how if you're eating a lot of good fat, you have those. Something that kind of blew my mind. And I don't remember if you were sitting there at the become superhuman event when Nora Gedgaudis said this. She was like, the higher numbers of those large, nice, fluffy LDL particles are actually associated with higher IQ and better brain performance. And people who have that LDL that's below 200, they're actually, you know, for lack of a better word, like dumber.

Yeah. And it's true. And a lot of that has to do with what happens when you raise fat in your diet and you reduce carbohydrate in your diet. You have those ketones that are fueling your brain. Andand I remember Nora also said something in that same talk that you'reyeah. You have 30% smarter. That was the quote that she gave. And I was like, okay, that's ketone power.

Yeah, yeah, it's nuts. It's crazy. That's actually. Well, I know that you and I are going to talk about this at the Ancestral Health Symposium a little bit.

Oh, yeah.

That's been like one of the downstream side effects of me kind of doing my whole experiment with ketosis is I just like, I wake up in the morning and it's just like, go, go, go. I'm so focused. It's amazing. Let's take a deep dive, man. Because we talked about LDL and total cholesterol and HDL and triglycerides and the stuff that people see on a normal lipid panel when they walk out of their doctor's office and they get that piece of paper mailed to them or, you know, in the digital era, their PDF emailed to them of their results. But what should your doctor be testing for when he's doing a lipid panel? When he or she is doing a lipid panel?

It's funny, I interviewed quite a few people, 29 in fact, total experts for this book. And then My Co author, Dr. Eric Westman, is a practitioner and researcher. And a lot of them said, just stop. Just stop measuring your cholesterol really? Because it really isn't as important as, say, what's your fasting blood glucose level, what's your inflammation like? You know, it seems like the more we test cholesterol, really all the testing of cholesterol is doing is perpetuating that cholesterol matters. And yes, cholesterol may be an indicator that there's something going on. And we say that quite often throughout the book that cholesterol itself is not a disease. It's not the be all end all of what's going on with your health, but it can be an indicator that there's other things going on with your health. So a lot of them are saying, if you're gonna focus on cholesterol, okay, great, let's do that. Let's look at triglycerides and HDL and look at that ratio. Let's look at your inflammatory markers, the crp. Let's look at blood sugar levels. I know Kate Shanahan, she's a practitioner out in California, and she said if your blood sugar starts to rise, your fasting blood glucose levels in the morning over 92, that's something to be concerned about. So there's so many more facets of health that are being overlooked because we've so obsessed about LDL and total cholesterol for so long, because there's a lot of money involved with prescribing prescription drugs that all these other things have just been ignored.

Wow. So it goes way beyond just like digging in and looking at, like. Because I honestly, what I thought you were going to say when I asked you that was maybe you'd talk about like, cholesterol particle size or something.

Yeah.

And you get a lot of these doctors, they're saying, like, test blood glucose and test hormones and stuff like that, huh?

Yeah. And certainly the particle testing, if you're going to test your cholesterol, get an NMR lipoprofile test or some other test that's going to give you, you know, that breakdown of what your LDL is. Because your LDL and your total cholesterol. I put this analogy in the book. It's like knowing your total cholesterol or the end of a baseball game is 25.

Yeah.

And so you don't know if it was a nail biter 13 to 12, or if it was a blowout of 24 to 1. You don't know what that makeup of that LDL is. And so what the particle size testing does. And we give you all the information about particle size in the book, but what it does is it kind of breaks down. Are you having more of the large fluffy kind, which are the good kind that you. That you, you know, would like to have if you're going to have LDL particles, or do you have a lot of those very small dents that can penetrate the arterial wall? LDL particles? And there's even questions, and we address this in the book as well, whether it's the total amount of particles or it's the size, there's kind of debate on both sides. And because it's not settled science, we. We present both sides and let you decide for yourself.

Yeah, yeah. And that's. That's really interesting, the NMR lipoprofile test that you just mentioned, because I think maybe a lot of people aren't even aware of what that is.

A lot of doctors aren't.

That's what I. That's exactly what I was going to ask you. Like, if somebody's listening in right now and they give their doc a call on the phone or the next time they're in at their doc, they ask about that. Like, are they even going to be able to get one? I mean, how could somebody actually do something like that?

Any doctor in America. And it's only in America that you can get the NMR because it's out of a lab in North Carolina. Internationally, unfortunately, they can't ship it internationally. The blood wouldn't survive until it got to Durham, North Carolina, or Raleigh. Raleigh, North Carolina, is where the liposcience is. But, yeah, you should be able to have it run. LabCorp basically pulls the blood. And we also include in the book several websites. And this is becoming the wave of the future. Ben, as people. I can't get health insurance because my cholesterol. Cholesterol's too high. Isn't that ironic? And so I have to do my own testing online. So we provide a few of the different online places where you can order your own test. And the NMR LiPo profile is one of those tests that you can have run. I think it costs about $125. You know, obviously no insurance, so that's pretty good.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you. Do you do a lot of these tests on yourself? Like, do you order tests online?

Oh, yeah.

Just kind of a total Sedgwick here. But do you use, like, a flexible savings account or something like that?

You know, I looked into that. At the end of the day, I write them off on my taxes. I just pay it straight out of pocket and have, like, a money set aside for Those kinds of things. Thankfully, my low carb lifestyle has kept me pretty healthy, so I haven't had anything, knock on wood, you know, major happen to my health. So I'm able to pay most things out of pocket. I would love to have some sort of catastrophic health insurance, but again, my total cholesterol, they say, puts me at great risk, and they're not gonna insure me.

Yeah, yeah. It's crazy what insurance will and won't cover. I'm going through this right now just because I'm going in for this big fancy heart scan to kind of see, like, how much damage I've done to my heart. Being an iron man, I did the.

Heart scan too, man, and it came back zero.

That's good.

Absolutely zero.

That's awesome. I'm nervous that mine is not gonna be such good news.

You'll be fine. You'll be fine.

So let's say that your cholesterol is up. Okay? So let's say that maybe somebody doesn't even heed the advice that you just gave, and they're like, well, darn it, I'm gonna go test my cholesterol anyways. They find out cholesterol is high, and they're pumping their fist because whatever. Now they know that they've got a high IQ and you know, everything that they need. But are there some other red flags? Like, if your cholesterol is high, could there be other things going on in your body that makes cholesterol actually dangerous?

Cholesterol dangerous? I wouldn't say necessarily. Having high cholesterol in and of itself makes it dangerous. We do address in the Chapter 9, Chapter 14 of my book, Nine Reasons why Cholesterol levels can go up. Because there are some basic things. I mean, did you know if you're losing weight, you can have elevated cholesterol? It's a temporary thing that, you know, as your body is releasing fat stores, that fat has to go somewhere, Ben, so it can float around in the form of cholesterol throughout your body. So try to become weight stable for a few months. Retest again, and yourand your cholesterol levels should come back down. As you know, I've been doing nutritional ketosis over this past year, and in December, I had my cholesterol run right in the middle of. While I was still just burning fat like crazy, My total cholesterol came back as 419. I had it tested again. I've been pretty weight stable the past three or four months. I had it tested again about a month ago, and it was 306. That's how quickly it can shift. So, you know, if I had showed my doctor that, I would not dare show my doctor what my cholesterol is now. But if I'd shown him that in December, I mean, he would have, like, pushed for, you know, oh, you need 100 milligrams of statin drug right away. And yet what would that have done? For me, it would have been a band aid on a temporary situation. So that's one example. But there's many things, you know, low thyroid function. You know, one other thing personally that I've been dealing with is a bacterial infection in my teeth. You know, people don't think about, you know, if you got, yeah, tooth pain and I had mercury amalgam. So I had all of that stuff removed, got the infections out of my mouth. And in fact, one of the experts in my book is a holistic dentist out of Australia, Dr. Ron Ehrlich. And he was telling me, yeah, bacterial infections. I mean, and it makes sense, Ben, whenever you have an infection in your body, what is the cholesterol doing? It's going to try to heal where that infection is happening. So you're going to show elevated levels in the blood. And yet it's a good thing. People think cholesterol is the bad guy, but you stop and think about it, cholesterol is like, the firefighters going to put out the fire. Are we blaming the firefighters for the fire? No, they're there to save you. Yeah, they're there to save you from the fire. So having a higher cholesterol level, I don't see as necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but it may indicate there's other things going on.

Wow. And what about if you have high cholesterol levels and you have inflammation going on? Like, this is something that I've always wondered with a lot of the athletes that I work with who maybe, you know, because I do the high fat thing, and I know a lot of people that I coach and who listen to what I say, they do it, too. But then they go out and just, like, destroy themselves in training or they've got a ton of inflammation. Can that be an issue?

Absolutely. In fact, we hit that one right between the eyeballs in chapter two, that you really should forget about cholesterol, because that's not what the issue is. It really is all about the inflammation. You cannot get atherosclerosis without inflammation, and there's a major marker. We talk about this in the book as well. There's many ways to measure inflammation but there's a major one called the HSCRP High sensitivity C reactive protein test. You can pretty much get that measured anywhere. And those online places I was talking about earlier as well, you can have it measured there, but it will give you the number that will show you your inflammation. And for example, my HSCRP number is 0.55, which is unbelievably good.

That's really low.

Anything under 1.0 is optimal. Once you start going over 2 or 3 is when you need to start being concerned.

Mine was at six last time I tested. Oh.

Oh, yeah.

But that was. And that was one day after a half iron man, which.

Oh, well, there you go. And you've been doing keto for several months now. So once you get into ketosis, I bet you the next time you measure Ben, it's gonna be remarkably good.

Yeah, yeah. I've actually been measuring every week with talking 20, but I haven't gotten any of the results back yet because they're still running them and everything. But. Okay, so cool. So high cholesterol by itself not necessarily a good thing. Like you gotta not a disease account, some other things. Okay, so you mentioned you dropped the term statin drugs earlier and you made it sound like you didn't wanna get on em. I think probably a lot of people listening in kinda might know that statin drugs might not be thethe best thing since sliced bread. But in what are some of the like the shockers that you found writing your book when it comes to statins?

Well, I personally did take statin drugs when I was that 410 pound man. Before I started Atkins, I was on both Crestor and Lipitor. It was so funny, Ben, because I took Lipitor first. And I started having these massive joint pain, you know, muscle aches, all of these things. And I was having trouble forming thoughts. It was just really horrible. And I didn't know what was going on. I thought, okay, what's going on with my body? And I realized it was the drugs. And it didn't dawn on me until I was playing a pickup game of basketball at my church and I went up for a rebound and my right hand thumb just went straight backwards. That freaked me out. I'd never seen anything like that happen. I drove myself to the emergency room and they said, do you take statin drugs? I said, yeah, your joints might be a little bit weak. I went, whoa. That was the first time I'd ever really been exposed. And keep in mind, this is long before I was into health and all this I didn't. I was totally oblivious. I was just following doctor's orders. And so I go to my doctor. I'm like, I got to get off of these Lipitor, because it's killing my joints, my muscles. I got to get on something better. And he said, oh, well, we'll give you a better one. Let's put you on Crestor. Never mind. It's the same class of drug, statin and I had the same issues, Ben. And, you know, it was within nine months of being on Atkins that I say, you know what? This sucks, being on these drugs, that I came off of them. And now that I've done research for this book, I learned that I actually got off pretty easy, only having joint and muscle pain. There's A gentleman named Dr. Duane Gravlin, who's probably the world's renowned guy that's kind of exposing all these side effects of statin drugs. But he himself had this very rare condition, like global transient amnesia is what they call it, and where he would just kind of go into this other land and he'd wake up as a 13 year old again, or it's just really weird. And brought on all these neuro. Neurodegenerative diseases, that this is a drug that's supposed to be making us healthier, and yet it's doing that. And Dr. Ufe Ravenscoff, another one of my experts, said it induces cancer. So would you rather have a heart attack or would you rather have cancer? It's one of those things that there's not unintended consequences without a reason. I mean, these things are doing bad damage to our bodies, and yet people are taking them like tic tacs, thinking they're a safety net against heart disease.

Yeah. You know, I think it's. It's Tim Ferriss, I believe, is the guy who says there's no such thing as a biological free pass.

Right.

I think he says that when it comes to smart drugs and, like, all these people that are, like, popping smart drugs nowadays, and he's like, might, you know, we might find out in a few years that that's not the best plan on the face of the planet. But, yeah, that's. That's crazy. With the statins and your thumb with the basketball. I don't. I don't know if I've heard that story before. That's nuts. So now when we step back and we look at diet and like, the kind of diet that's going to put you in the best boat when it comes to your cholesterol Levels like we want. We want low levels of these small LDL particles. We want a lot of these big fluffy ones, and we want healthy triglycerides. We want good HDL and low triglycerides and all this stuff. What kind of diet do you find or did you find writing the book? Kind of seems to work really well when it comes to, to getting your cholesterol in line.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing because we've long been told cut your fat, eat more healthy whole grains, exercise till you drop, you know, all of these things that kind of have become the typical conventional wisdom when it comes to what we call heart healthy. And yet all of those things ironically make the numbers worse. And so when you eat more healthy whole grains and all of these things, guess what happens? Triglycerides go through the roof. When you cut your fat, guess what happens? HDL drops. And that's not a good thing, by the way. And when you eat these vegetable oils, and we hadn't really got into the vegetable oil part of it, but when you consume vegetable oils, yes, your LDL and total cholesterol will indeed drop. But that doesn't come without consequences. When the LDL drops because you drank, I say drank because people take a lot of vegetable oils. When you do that, it makes the ldl, what they call oxidized, kind of rusty. And you're more prone to heart disease with that oxidized LDL than you ever would be if you ate real food based butter, coconut oil, you know, real food, full fat meats and cheeses from the best quality sources. You know, those are the kind of things that are going to improve all of these numbers. Your HDL will go above 70, that's the optimal level. Your triglycerides will drop below 70. That's the optimal level. Your small, dense LDL particles will virtually go away. I know Dr. William Davis of Wheat Belly fame was one of my experts for the book as well. And he says in his practice he's had people hit zero on small dense LDL particles simply by having them eat lower carb to their tolerance level, higher quality fats. And it's amazing, Ben. It works.

Wow. What about like when you get some of these particles? I've never heard of that before. Like your small particles being zero. Were these people like taking a boatload of supplements or anything like that? I mean, are there kind of some things flying under the radar here or.

Yeah, he didn't elaborate on any supplementation that was helping make that happen. I think it happened pretty much nutritionally. And I know the lowest that I've seen my small LDL go to is right around 200, and that's good. By the way, anything really under 500 is pretty darn good for small LDL. But the key is let's get it as low as we possibly can and as a percentage of your total LDL particles. If you get it under 20% of your total LDL particles, you're probably in good shape.

Got it. Okay, cool. And I know you go into all this stuff in a lot more detail in your book, which of course we'll link to in the show notes, but I've got another question for you.

Sure.

So there are a lot of people that we're starting to read about on blogs, or at least I'm starting to read about. I don't know if there's a lot of other geeks listening in who go and read this stuff like I do, but like you and me do, Jimmy, we see like physicians and researchers and nutritionists who are starting to think that treating cholesterol numbers is pretty much irrelevant. You hinted at this a little bit when you said that a lot of folks think that testing it is kind of, you know, maybe not all that important or as important as we thought it was. But why do you think it is that so many people now are thinking it's just kind of like, irrelevant?

I think it's the failure of seeing any measurable differences. There was a study I cite in the book that says three out of four people who were admitted to a hospital for a heart attack had cholesterol levels of 200 or below. So whether that was a statin induced drop or if they just naturally had lower cholesterol, they still had a heart attack. So these people that try to force these numbers to these arbitrary levels of below 200 for total cholesterol, how's that working for you? As Dr. Phil would say, to prevent a heart attack from happening. It did not prevent. And so I think a lot of these doctors are now opening their eyes and saying, well, dang, if this is happening. And they're probably seeing it in their patients. In fact, my grandmother in law just had a heart attack back in January. What was it, Christine? A couple of heart attacks within a week's time, three days, she says, and, and throw three heart attacks in like a week's time. That's what it was. And she was on Lipitor for 15 years, Ben. And so here she is taking this, thinking it's a safety net against having a heart attack, and yet it didn't prevent a heart attack. Now she's in her upper 80s, so it's not like she's a young pup. But still, the point is, these doctors are becoming frustrated. And I think that growing swell of doctors is going to continue to grow. And hopefully this book will help open a lot of the eyes of these doctors that unfortunately have been clueless because their education on cholesterol has been mostly from the pharmaceutical reps who come in dressed nicely and good looking people and say, oh, this is the latest wonder drug for lowering cholesterol. And so they put those messages to doctors and then they go on television and they have, ask your doctor about going lower with this cholesterol lowering drug. And so it's a very salacious propaganda campaign that goes on. You ask your doctor about it because you see a TV commercial, your doctor obediently gives you the drug that you asked for. The drug companies sit there and shrug and let's say, well, y' all are talking to each other. We're not really involved. And yet they're heavily involved.

Right? Yeah, it's nuts. So when did your book come out, by the way?

August 27th.

August 27th. Okay, so if I, if I play this podcast for folks before then, they would be able to go and listen to the replay, right? Or not listen to the replay.

I know what you mean.

They would be able to do that, but they would be able to go pre order.

Yeah, it's on Amazon.com right now. The Kindle version will be available the day it releases. So it'll be out on Kindle and Nook and iPad and all those other versions the day that it releases.

Okay. Okay, cool. So I got one other question for you. Sure. You're not a doctor. And like, you know, you know, I'm saying, like, you're, you're not a doctor. You wrote this book about health. How'd you get around that fact that you're actually not a doctor?

And I take great pride in not being a doctor, by the way. Ben, I've told people because they're like, why don't you go get your. Get an RD or become a PhD in nutrition or get an MD and I said, no, I relish in being the everyman. I relish in being that person that's an educated layperson. Because once I have a PhD, an MD, an RD or whatever D after my name, then I think I might lose a little bit of that relatability in people's eyes. Right now I'm just Jimmy Moore, educated layperson. And I think that relates so much more, especially with my story with weight loss and health change. That relates so much more to people than trying to have credentials after my name. But the cool thing, Ben, is because I'm able to be behind the microphone five days a week on my own podcasts. I've interviewed literally all the real experts out there. So I don't pretend to be the expert, but I know the people behind the scenes. The health researchers, the medical doctors, the dietitians, all the people that are making the decisions for real patients. So I've talked to them. I've had the greatest education in the world. I tell people I have like six or seven, you know, like honorary doctorates kind of waiting in the wings there because I've just learned so much from all these people. So I went and found 29 of the best of the best around the world experts on this subject of cholesterol. We did little moment of clarity quotes from them. I wrote most of the book in very easy to understand everyday language because that's quite frankly, who I'm trying to reach. But then these experts go a little bit deeper, provide a little more of the complicated information. So that my goal, Ben, is hopefully people that have never heard this stuff before could read what I've written, then kind of go and educate themselves a little more, come back to the book, read it again. But then read the moment of clarity quotes and understand what all these doctors and researchers and dietitians are saying. And so that's kind of how we formatted the book to make it both accessible to the entry level person and then to people like you and me who are just geeky about this stuff.

Right, and you had a doc on board when you wrote the book too, right?

Oh, absolutely. Dr. Eric Westman is a medical doctor in Durham, North Carolina. A lot of people may know him as a popular low carb researcher. He was one of the co authors on the new Atkins for a New you. So he's a heavy hitter and he sees patients on a daily basis as well. So when I asked him to come on board writing a book about cholesterol, he's like, man, oh man. Yeah. So he contributed throughout the book, obviously read everything that I was writing. And it was funny, Ben, because I sent him the first copy of the manuscript, send me some notes, kind of ripped this to shreds, and he said, dude, this is good. So it was really an honor to have him come on board. And so throughout the book, in addition to the moment of clarity quotes from all my experts I also had Dr. Westman do doctor's notes, so as he's reading through the book, he added in some little commentary here and there as well. And you'll see those as doctor's note commentaries throughout the book.

Awesome. Awesome. Okay, cool. It's a good tagline, too. What the what? What's it called? What's the what? The HDL is wrong with my numbers.

Yeah, that was fun. That was fun. A guy at my church came up with that, so I have to give him kudos on that one.

Nice. All right, cool. So we'll put a link in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com you can grab this thing off Amazon. It's pretty much kind of like the last book you'll ever need on figuring out the whole cholesterol issue and kind of wrapping your head around it. So I highly recommend that you check it out. Jimmy's a great guy. He's also got a podcast, so of course, when you grab the book, go look at his Living la Vida Low Carb.com website, too. He's got some good stuff over there. So, Jimmy, thanks for coming on the call, man.

Thank you, man. It's been a lot of fun. And keep up the great work. I really admire the great work you're doing. And, you know, let's knock Jillian Michaels out of number one on health podcast. And we've all been trying. We're, like, all around her, so she's surrounded by paleo peeps.

That's right. That's right. All right, cool. Well, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Jimmy Morris signing out For Ben Greenfield.

Fitness.Com visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition, and performance advice.

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