Balance, Not Lower, Cholesterol

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Welcome to the Virgin Diet lifestyle show with your host, celebrity nutrition and fitness expert and New York Times best selling author, JJ Virgin.

Alright, I'm going to talk to you about balancing your cholesterol naturally. Notice I said balance, not lower. Because one of the big urban legends out there is that we want to lower our cholesterol, drive that baby down. But I'll tell you that the research shows that it's just, just as bad to have too low of cholesterol as too high. And that actually cholesterol is really one small part of the picture. So what I'm going to talk to you about is everything you need to be really focusing on for overall heart health here. And so we're going to talk first about focusing on the right numbers. And remember, your total cholesterol is simply one measure of overall heart health and it's really not the best predictor of heart disease. You really want to pay attention to, to these numbers. First of all, hdl, high density lipoprotein. Now you want this number to be high. So for men, 40 to 50 mgs per DL and for women, 50 to 60 mg per DL. And here's the deal, it's not even just that it actually goes deeper than this. It's not just about having that number high. If you can get a particle size on that, you really want to have big fluffy HDL particles. Okay, next one, triglycerides. So you want this number to be low. Now normally you want to see this at 150mgs per DL or less. I actually would say let's go even lower than this, 100 or below. So triglycerides, what are they? It's a type of fat or lipid found in your blood. And when you eat, your body converts any calories you don't need to use right away as triglycerides, essentially, especially if you're eating fructose. And then those triglycerides are stored in your fat cells. And then later, if you've got the right hormones going on, your body will Release those triglycerides for energy between meals. One of the fastest ways to lower your triglycerides, because this is one you want to drive on down, is to lower your fructose and lower your overall sugar impact. All right, next one LDL particle size. Now, we talk about LDLs being bad and HDL as being good, but it's not so simple. There are good parts to LDL and bad parts to ldl. Turns out that small, dense LDL is bad, whereas big, fluffy LDL is good or productive. Because the small dense ldl, that's the stuff that pits your endothelial lining and makes that little scarring that creates the plaque or scar tissue over it. And when that builds up and a little bit of that breaks off, it can create that heart attack bad. All right, vitamin D. If I'm going to pick one, vitamin D is the biggie. So important you got to be testing your vitamin D levels. So a study in the journal Current Vascular Pharmacology linked vitamin D deficiency with cardiovascular disease. You want to ask your doctor to run a 25 hydroxy vitamin D test and you want your levels to be 50 to 80 ngs per milliliter. Now, I have a product, vitamin D that's got vitamin D plus K. You really want to take a product that has the both of them. Next one, Lipoprotein, little A. Now, this is a type of lipoprotein. It is the most atherogenic, bad damaging lipoprotein out there. This carries the cholesterol in the blood and high levels of this are a risk factor for heart disease. So you want to have this at below 14 milligrams per TL. Okay, here's a marker of inflammation. It's called CRP, or highly sensitive C reactive protein. And high levels of this inflammatory molecule are also a risk factor for heart disease. You want to have your doctor test HS CRP, and you want to be below 6mg L. Now, again, this is one that you want to go low on, as low as possible. Okay? Homocysteine. You want to normalize homocysteine levels because elevated levels of this amino acid are a major risk risk factor for heart disease. In fact, a study in the journal, the British Medical Journal found that lowering homocysteine levels could reduce your risk for heart disease, deep vein thrombosis and stroke. So how do you do this? Well, this is one that you're going to want to use a complex of complemented approach B6, B12 folate and 5mthfr n acetylcysteine and TMG have all been found to really help lower homocysteine levels. Okay, then you want to ditch some of the big cholesterol triggers. Now eggs in reality are a good food as long as they haven't been oxidized like buffet eggs. Beware of the buffet eggs because they probably contain damaged fats and oxidized cholesterols because they were cooked and then just sitting out there under a heat lamp. If you're going for eggs and you don't have a food intolerance for them, you've checked on the virgin diet. Go for soft boiled or poached eggs where they haven't damaged and oxidized the yolk. It's not the cholesterol that's the issue there. It's the damaging of the cholesterol that's the problem. Here are some other cholesterol raising culprits and they're not the usual suspects. You know, we tend to think that it's the fat, it's actually the sugar, especially the fructose, that causes the problem. A study in the journal Lipids in Health and Disease found that among other damage, high fructose diet elevated total cholesterol and and triglyceride numbers. Things you want to do is you want to increase fiber and you want to increase good fats, the right kind of fats, like avocado and coconut. Yes, it's saturated. It's going to help here. And wild caught fish, these can actually lower cholesterol. And you know those claims that certain oatmeal and cereals make about lowering cholesterol. Well, that's because the fiber in these foods, fiber is a huge one for you because fiber can bind cholesterol and help your body excrete it. A meta analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition showed that soluble fiber could both reduce total and LDL cholesterol. But I want you to make sure you skip the high sugar impact cereals and use therapeutic amounts of fiber like things found in chia seeds, my extra fiber product. Freshly ground flax, flax nuts, legumes. There are plenty of other places you can get your fiber without getting a big sugar hit along with it. Okay? Another really important thing that you can do here, fish oil. You know, I'm a big fan of fish oil for brain health. Well, it also can help here because omega 3 fatty acids help reduce blood pressure and blood clots and both of these lower your risk for heart disease. A study in the Journal of the Mayo Clinic Proceedings found a combination of fish oil and red yeast rice could lower cholesterol just as effectively as a prescription drug. Now, I have a fish oil product called omega ultra. And also I want to talk a little bit about red yeast rice, because what red yeast rice is, try saying that three times fast, is it's got the active ingredient that statin drugs use. Here's a little important thing here. That ingredient can lower your body's CoQ10 content, which is why you see a lot of the side effects of these statin drugs where you have all the muscle weakness. So whether you're taking a statin drug or red yeast rice, you got to make sure that you're supplementing with additional CoQ10. Another critical thing to do to manage your lower risk of heart disease is to manage your blood sugar. In fact, if I was going to pick one thing, this would be it. High blood sugar is another huge risk factor for heart disease. A study in the journal hypertension found cholesterol and high blood sugar together adversely affect your risk for heart disease. So to keep blood sugar balanced, make sure every meal you're eating from the sugar impact and virgin diet plate. That means clean, lean protein, leafy green veggies, slow, low carbs, and of course, healthy fats. And I gotta include exercise. And of course, burst training is my favorite here. You can do it in just minutes a day, and it will help lower your cholesterol. A study in the journal of strength and conditioning research found that burst training could both improve your HDL or good cholesterol. And if you use burst training with weight resistance, that's even better. So you can get Both in my 4x4 workouts. And you can do that in just 15 minutes a day. Okay. Then make sure you're supporting liver health. Your liver regulates cholesterol and high cholesterol levels, then could signify an unhealthy liver. So you might want to consider doing a detox once or twice a year. And also do things that help support good liver function. That means lowering your alcohol and other liver types of stressors, like all of the different toxins that you could be getting, like eating from the dirty dozen, you know, eating anything that's got pesticides on it. And also think about the nutrients that really help your love your liver. And those are things like dandelion and milk thistle and n acetylcysteine and lipoic acid, which is amazingly helpful for your liver and also helps with insulin sensitivity. And another one is make sure that you maintain hormonal balance. Estrogen is hugely important here. It protects you against heart disease because it increases nitric oxide production and decreases smooth cell contraction through muscle cell contraction. You know when estrogen levels decline during menopause, your HDL is going to go down and your LDL goes up, which means it's a double whammy for increasing your risk for heart disease. So you want to work with an integrated physician when this starts to happen to help maintain hormonal balance and healthy estrogen levels as you age. And finally, I know I just gave you loads of stuff, don't stress out over it because stress itself can raise your cholesterol levels and raise inflammation. So look at all this stuff and I think what it should tell you is there's a lot more to heart health than just looking at one number. It's really getting that overall picture then looking at what you can do here in each area to optimize to lower your risk of heart disease and live an awesome, fabulous, healthy life.

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