A man's LDL cholesterol stayed above 500 mg/dL for seven years, peaking at 574, yet a CT scan found zero arterial plaque. His case contradicts the standard medical model that high LDL inevitably causes plaque buildup, especially when compared to young plant-based influencers with low cholesterol who still show measurable plaque.
For 7 years, I've been running an experiment that I was consistently told would kill me. For the better part of a decade, my cholesterol has been higher than most doctors see in their entire careers. Let me give you a sense of scale, some numbers. Most cardiologists consider an LDL cholesterol below 70 to be good. 100 is okay. 190 is terrifying. My LDL has been sitting above 500, as high as 574, for the better part of a decade. So according to everything I learned in medical school, my heart should should be clogged with plaque. But I just got an advanced heart scan, and the results were astounding. Zero. It's a zero. Zero millimeters cubed of plaque anywhere. Soft or calcified, none of it. And to be clear, I'm young is not a good explanation for my astoundingly clean arteries. If you compare me to children with devastating genetic conditions that push cholesterol this high, they're developing plaque in their hearts within a couple years of life as toddlers. They're having heart attacks by ages 8 or 10. And there are also young people, including prominent plant-based influencers with low cholesterol, also in their 30s, who have measurable plaque burden using similar technology to the one I used, around 60 cubic millimeters in some cases. And remember, I have zero. So what does this mean? Well, either I'm truly a medical anomaly and got lucky, or maybe cholesterol is not the whole story. To get the whole story, click here. Oh, and we did publish a peer-reviewed paper on it too. I'll drop the link below.
