Is CHOLESTEROL BAD For You? (Real Doctor Reviews The TRUTH)

12 truths about cholesterol to survive the HDL and LDL myths is there good

cholesterol is there bad cholesterol is cholesterol bad today went to give you

the bigger picture we're gonna give you 12 truths so that you can avoid all the

pitfalls and you can stay healthy coming right up

hey I'm doctor Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete

and if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really

works make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't

miss anything as all of you know cholesterol has been a big deal in the

news for the last 50 years and every so-called nutrition label has warnings

about how much cholesterol is in the food so that you can avoid that kind of

food well here's some news for you the first thing that you need to understand

about cholesterol is that your body makes it your body manufactures

cholesterol your body makes about two to three thousand milligrams every day

that's about 75% of all the cholesterol that your body needs yes

your body needs cholesterol so if you eat less cholesterol your body has to

make more cholesterol if you eat zero cholesterol in your diet then your body

will make a hundred percent of the cholesterol that you need so dietary

cholesterol has absolutely nothing to do with your blood cholesterol levels and

again we're going to talk about how the body is really really smart it has some

incredible wisdom and it would not manufacture a substance that is harmful

for you everything the body does is on purpose it's doing the right thing at

the right time in the right amount to the right degree depending on the

circumstances okay so your body makes cholesterol when it needs it

number two why does the body make cholesterol what is the body use

for why is it needed it's an essential nutrient it is a component of every cell

wall in every cell of your body so the cell membrane that's what determines the

properties the signaling ability of the cell the cells ability to determine the

difference between inside and outside that is what the cell wall does and

cholesterol is an essential component in that structure one of your most

important cell membrane is your brain because there is some very specific

signaling going on in the brain and again cholesterol is very important

there most of your hormones are cholesterol based have you heard of

steroid hormones that's the testosterone and the estrogen and so forth that's

where the stero in cholesterol comes from they're called steroid hormones

because they're made from cholesterol all right they are essential if you

don't have enough cholesterol then your body has a hard time manufacturing those

hormones your liver produces bile and that's like a detergent and emulsifier

to help you break down fats so it's essential for your digestion to have

bile if you can't break down fats properly also can't absorb the fat

soluble vitamins the vitamin A D E and K and vitamin D is actually a hormone

which is also made from cholesterol your body uses cholesterol for repair because

cholesterol is part of every cell wall every cell membrane any time that you

get damage to your tissues the body has to repair it has to repair the tissue

which has cell membranes so it has to have more cholesterol available for

repair and it's also important in wound healing and blood clotting so anytime

that you have stress and your body anticipates or prepares for additional

damage your LDL cholesterol goes up so your

body can prepare so it's so smart it will anticipate the damage and have a

little extra cholesterol handy just in case number three fact you have to know

there are a few unfortunate people to whom cholesterol is a problem and that's

called familial hypercholesterolemia that just means it runs in the family

they have a genetic defect that prevents them from reabsorbing and regulating the

LDL so LDL just keeps going up and up and up and up

so they have a genetic defect that prevents them from regulating it so now

cholesterol does become a problem and the genetic defect could be heterozygous

meaning that one out of the pair of genes is faulty and that happens in

about one in five hundred people and then there's something called homozygous

defect and that's when both parts of the pair is faulty so if you have one part

faulty then your cholesterol is going to run between 350 to 550 if you have both

of them wrong then it's going to run 650 to a thousand your total cholesterol

level so these are levels that we're done we're not going to see in the

general population right most times we're talking about cholesterol we're

talking they consider it marginally high from 200 up to 280 that's where 98% of

people are going to fall this is a diseased condition this is a problem and

these people do want to seek some medical attention because this will

typically shorten their life span but again it's even though these are

disastrously extremely high levels there's still a lot of these people who

never notice anything even at these levels number four fact about

cholesterol lower is not better oK we've been told we've been made to believe

that lower is better I've had patients come in with a cholesterol of a hundred

and thirty and they're still on a stand drugged because their doctor tells them

lower is always better well if we look at the graph of all-cause mortality that

meaning that all the reasons that people die the overall death rate of for

whatever reason when people have a cholesterol level of a hundred and

thirty they have a very high death rate then it drops the death there all cause

mortality drops down to a point of cholesterol about 220 and then it starts

going up again but it's more dangerous to have a cholesterol of 130 than it is

to have a cholesterol of 300 now this graph doesn't tell us everything because

a lot of these people with the cholesterol of 300 they're gonna have a

very unbalanced cholesterol ratio which we'll talk about in a little bit so you

could have even though 220 is the bottom of the graph you could still be very

healthy even with a higher level of cholesterol as long as you have a good

ratio number five dementia brain health cognition your thinking ability your

mental capacity is directly related to cholesterol so when they checked people

as they get older once they get into their 80s they found that the people

with the lowest cholesterol had the highest rates of dementia they had the

lowest cognitive function and the late rate of dementia decreased and the

people who had a cholesterol of total cholesterol of 240 had a better

cognitive function than anybody with a lower cholesterol so cholesterol is

neuroprotective because it's an essential nutrient to the brain it makes

your brain function better as you age number six what is HDL and LDL well HDL

is not even cholesterol LDL is not even cholesterol

they are what's called carriers they are vehicles HDL stands for high density

lipoprotein it's a protein with some fats mixed in and it helps the body

carry the cholesterol around why does it do that why doesn't it just dump the

cholesterol in the bloodstream because cholesterol is not water-soluble blood

is mostly water-based and cholesterol is not water-soluble it's what's called

hydrophobic so the carriers are there to help the fat mix with water so we can

transport the cholesterol where they need to go so we often hear that HDL is

good and LDL is bad why why do we call it that well they say that HDL goes to

pick up it brings excess cholesterol back to the liver and therefore we

consider it good whereas LDL delivers cholesterol to the tissues and therefore

increases cholesterol deposits and the tissues and therefore we call it bad but

that's assuming that they're doing it for no reason whatsoever it's assuming

that it's a bad thing to deliver cholesterol and why does it deliver

cholesterol because we need it for these reasons especially repair so if we have

a repair to perform and the LDL brings repair materials is that bad of course

not it's about a balance the body makes appropriate cholesterol and it makes

appropriate cholesterol it depends on the circumstances your body is not the

stupid one so an analogy would be if you've ever been to Disney World or one

of these amusement parks where they have huge parking lots and there's a hundred

thousand people in the morning or trying to get to the amusement park and then in

the evening there's a hundred thousand people trying to get back to their car

that's what a carrier does it carries something so these carry

cholesterol the parking buses trains carry people so in the morning they send

empty carriers out to the parking lot to pick up two people so that would be like

the HDL it's it's empty it's ready to pick something up and then in the

evening they bring the empty ones with the people and they deliver them back to

the car so in the morning it's like HDL bringing it bringing people one way and

then in the evening its LDL but we would never call those parking trains good or

bad they are appropriate depending on the situation so number seven the mix-up

how did we get so confused about this stuff well it's because we tend to not

think in terms of cause and effect humans can be kind of short-sighted and

just observe something and say oh look there is a person with heart disease

they have a lot of cholesterol that cholesterol must be the problem they're

confusing cause-and-effect they're observing an association and then

they're just implying they're guessing they're assuming that whatever shows up

at the problem site is the cause and one of my favorite analogies of how

ridiculous that is is every time that I see a traffic accident I also see

emergency vehicles okay there's police there's ambulance

and there's fire trucks every time so if I just used Association then I would

assume that the blinking lights the vehicles with the blinking lights cause

the accident because they're always there every time there's an accident

there are those vehicles those evil bad vehicles are always present

so obviously the emergency vehicles didn't cause the problem they came after

the problem and they're trying to help same thing with cholesterol the LDL the

deposits come after the problem and they try to help they're there to help the

body is intelligent it doesn't do things that are stupid it doesn't randomly send

LDL there number eight so the treatment for cholesterol is and

again the problem is that they think lower is better even though we

definitely know that it's more dangerous to have very very low cholesterol than

it is very high but still the treatment is just to lower cholesterol

indiscriminately and they use statin drugs and what the statin drug does it

goes in and it blocks a step in the liver where the body converts something

into cholesterol preventing the liver from producing the necessary amount of

cholesterol so in the analogy of the traffic accident the treatment would be

like let's shoot the messenger let's set up road blocks for the fire

trucks let's put out some spike strips for the police car so they can't get

there let's let's reroute the ambulance so it never finds the accident okay it's

it's ridiculous we're interfering with the solution and

leaving the problem unattended that's what we're doing so I'm going to try to

get an idea of what sort of videos are out there I was shocked I was it was

frightening how 90 plus percent of all the videos just talked about how to

lower cholesterol this is how you lower cholesterol and we're just assuming we

hear this we take this association instead of a cause effect this loose

association which is not true and we assume that it's true and then all the

effort goes to lowering cholesterol as if that was a good thing it's like

saying we don't believe intelligence is good

we think that your kids are too smart and now everybody goes out and make

videos on how to lower your child's intelligence or how to lower health in

the body or how to lower muscle mass lower vitality we hear that's a good

thing everybody should go make videos on how to lower it it's not about that okay

it's about balance the body makes the right amount the right amount of HDL the

right amount of LDL for the situation at hand so what we're looking for is

balance number ten you can have a balanced cholesterol when there is the

appropriate amount of delivery and the appropriate amount of bringing back of

recovery and that is usually in healthy people it's a three to one ratio of

total cholesterol to HDL they have found that anyone with a about a three or less

than a three point three ratio has less than half they have a fraction of the

average risk of heart disease regardless of what the total levels are because the

HDL is considered protective it's not the total level that matters it's about

the balance are we in a situation where there's balance between how much we take

out versus how much we bring back and again that's just an indicator of health

it's not the cause of health when you're healthy when your body is in balance

your body will produce these ratios of cholesterol so you could have a 270 over

90 and be healthy you could have a 180 over 60 and be healthy and right now

last time I checked my cholesterol was 225 over 75 it was a 3.0 and I'm very

very happy with that even though according to the official guidelines I

have high cholesterol so what is the problem then if these are just

indicators if there's no such thing as good or bad cholesterol and what's the

real problem the real problem is called inflammation inflammation produces

damage to the body there's a balanced amount of inflammation just like

everything else needs to be in balance but when we have excessive inflammation

the body has to create excessive repair responses and now when the LDL is always

out there repairing then we have excess damage now

we get excess plaquing and the so called the only so called bad LDL is when LDL

gets oxidized from inflammation and we have what's called a small LDL so

there's large LDL it'll kind of large and fluffy there are perfectly healthy

they're good and those are typically the ones that increase when you go on a

low-carb diet so some people see that the cholesterol levels are going to

climb usually that's temporary it'll come up and and it will come right back

down again but what's increasing is not the bad

small oxidized it's typically the fluffy ones but regardless as you reduce your

inflammation your body gets into balance so if the cause is inflammation then

obviously the solution is to reduce the things that cause the inflammation so

the twelfth truth that you have to know about cholesterol is that the cause of

inflammation is sugar and starch and allergens grain and dairy are the top

two allergens especially modern wheat we've never seen people so many people

being sensitive to it so many people having a low-grade inflammation to a

food as to the modern wheat so if you want to reduce inflammation obviously

reduce sugar reduce grain and reduce anything else that you might be allergic

to and what do you eat instead you eat foods that are anti-inflammatory or

inflammation neutral so you eat good saturated fats

such as egg including the egg yolk if you're gonna throw something away throw

away the egg white because that's a more common allergen you want to eat

grass-fed butter grass-fed beef and especially you want to eat fish fatty

fish or take a fish oil supplement you've got to be a little careful with

the fish because some of the larger predatory fish have a lot of mercury and

toxins in them since they live in the water for a long time salmon and small

fish like sardines and mackerel are the best choices for fatty fish and then you

can also eat the flat small white fish that are very low in mercury so if you

understand these twelve truths then you also understand that for most people the

lifestyle intervention is the most appropriate thing to do and for most

people a lot of the cases that are being called high cholesterol is not a problem

the people that have a problem like we said are people with extremely high

cholesterol levels they have a genetic defect and the treatment in their case

is appropriate because when you do a treatment and you lay out in the analogy

if you lay out road blocks for the fire truck then that'll be appropriate

because they have so much of the cholesterol the fire truck is out

running over people all right so then it'd be a good thing to put some road

blocks out but that's an extreme situation all right most people do not

fit in here it's 1 in 500 so 499 out of 500 people do not have that problem even

though it's often quoted as a major issue if you learn something and enjoyed

this video you'll probably love that one thank you so much for watching I'll see

you next time