Lower High Cholesterol - User Manual For Humans S1 E16 - Dr Ekberg

good afternoon happy to see all of you here we're going to have some fun here

today I'm dr. Sten Ekberg and this is another installment in our series user

manual for humans and why do we have a user manual for humans well you have one

for your toaster you have one for your hair dryer you got one for your

microwave nobody gave you one for the full that you would be and that's the

most important one so today we're going to talk about cholesterol and this is in

my opinion when we look back at this one generation from now this will be

equivalent to the dark ages there is so much myth and misunderstanding and it's

been so vilified that it's it's unbelievable so we're going to talk

about what it is and what what really is good or bad about it so cholesterol I

call this the the good bad and the necessary so we're going to talk about

what is it what does it do why is it a natural thing and why is there really no

such thing as good or bad cholesterol

it's the greatest hoax sins low-fat diets and we'll look at the cartoon here

and this sort of illustrates the level of understanding a lot of people have no

HDL and LDL were not the robots in Star Wars so we'll hopefully erase our for

awareness a little bit and the history really isn't that important so I'm just

going to kind of race through it but it's important to understand that a lot

of this is coming from not necessarily from a need but from a desire to do

business so 1847 they first found a cholesterol as as a component of a of a

plaque and then a hundred years later they did something called a Framingham

Heart Study of home is a place where they have followed

people for decades and they've traced and studied their their heart conditions

and most of what the heart policy and guidelines that we have come from these

studies so in 1957 10 years into the study they said oh well these people are

having issues we need low-fat diets and then in 1971 they started isolating

different components that they thought could be useful but at this time they

didn't really do it for the purpose of finding cholesterol but they were it's

just part of research so they found something called meta Staten from a

fungus this caused tumors muscle deterioration and death in dogs so they

thought we must be on to something good here and then in 1978 Merck isolated

lovastatin from another fungus so these are related substances and in 1985

someone was awarded the nobel prize for clarifying the cholesterol production

pathway and this is important to understand the body actually

manufactures cholesterol and it manufactures most of the cholesterol in

your body then 1987 Merck releases a anti statin drug called mevacor there's

a six hundred million dollars a year advertising budget and there's some more

guidelines from the government and they're still talking about low-fat then

in 2001 now we're starting to see what's happening with with lobbying that these

companies they're saying well we're giving people these drugs but they still

have high cholesterol so we need to make stricter guidelines and this happens

through login that so the government changed and

because they tightened up the guidelines all of a sudden instead of 13 people 13

million people being candidates for these drugs now there's 36 million

people so through this lobbying they're increasing their market share and what

used to be a healthy level all of a sudden was too high so most of these

levels are artificially and arbitrarily created another thing that we're seeing

change is prior to this there have never been marketing of pharmaceuticals

straight to the consumer that have always been done to the doctors or to

the the health care field but now they're they're bypassing the doctor and

they're going straight to the consumer and they're saying you have this problem

you need this drug go ask your doctor and the doctor doesn't know he says okay

well I guess it's a good thing so now they're starting to put people on drugs

from the pressure of the consumer coming to the doctor instead and that's that's

an enormous increase in pressure so to speak to expand the market for drugs and

in 2010 there were 28 billion dollars in sales straight to 24 staff and drugs and

what they're talking about next is to release these over the counter I saw

some statistic what was it used you showed me one in four people over a

certain age and I don't know exactly what the HD was 40 50 somewhere around

there and what is all this based on well there is the research called a

Framingham study and they observed certain facts and they drew certain

conclusions so we'll go over those the fact was people with heart disease

usually have higher cholesterol than healthy people that's a fact to

atherosclerosis plaques can tane cholesterol 3 these people also

usually have a higher ratio of LDL to HDL cholesterol those who are the facts

that they observed now it depends on how what sort of philosophy and how you view

the body what sort of conclusions you draw from that so their conclusion was

cholesterol causes heart disease and too they concluded LDL is bad and HDL is

good and from this we have these terms of good and bad cholesterol now here's

the problem as it is with with most of the research when when it comes to drugs

and the medical research they do first problem there was only a correlation no

one ever suggested or prove that there's a causative relationship between one and

the other all they did was they observed one and they observe the other so they

said we see these two they must go together and one must be the cause of

the other that has never been the case so they assumed a causative relationship

so here's another thing like I said the body produces most of your cholesterol

so nobody here was asking why is the liver making too much cholesterol

they're just assuming that that you're eating too much of it and that must be

the problem and as usual they blamed it on the DNA there must be something wrong

with your jeans right my favorite analogy for this is to illustrate the

thing between correlation and cause every time there's a traffic accident I

see blinking blue lights so because I see them at the same time they must

belong together and one must be the cause of the other so the blinking blue

lights must cause traffic accidents because I see them

there every time right that's this level of sophistication of thinking the

thinking process that led them to believe that cholesterol causes heart

disease so with this we can say oh well if the blinking blue lights cause

traffic accidents and I see those policemen driving those cars with the

blinking blue lights it must be bad policeman okay bad Fire Department bad

Police Department they're causing traffic accidents and that's absurd like

we can all see and it's equally absurd with the cholesterol so we're going to

talk about why that there's no such thing as as good or bad what are and

here's a question that they don't ask before they put these labels and draw

these conclusions these are questions they don't ask what is it cholesterol

does what is the function of cholesterol are we supposed to have it in our bodies

so first of all cholesterol is a hormone precursor all of the male and female

hormones are built from cholesterol we need that cholesterol as the raw

material to make estrogen and progesterone and testosterone we can't

do it without so the function of our ovaries and testes and adrenals are

stress coping ability depends on cholesterol vitamin D cannot be produced

in the body we get it from sunshine but it cannot be produced without adequate

cholesterol in the body and now they found vitamin D as the number one

vitamin that everybody needs that it's linked to all

sorts of problems when you don't it is needed for digestion the bile in the

liver that helps you emulsifying process fats contains cholesterol and most

importantly now we're getting to it's a component of the cell membrane and when

I can get into detail on the cell membrane but the cell membrane is the

microprocessor of the body it's the brain of the body the cell membrane is

what determines the outside and the inside of the cell is the barrier that

decides what goes in and what stays out so because of that it's the decision

maker in the body in all regards and that's the function of the brain and the

nervous system the function that the reason the brain can makes decisions is

that it has a cell membrane that can tell the difference between inside and

outside and cholesterol is a vitally important component of the cell membrane

so we cannot make proper cell membranes without the cholesterol so the

permeability and the fluidity of cholesterol depends on this so if we

don't have enough then signaling and nervous system function of the nervous

system can suffer if we have a lack of cholesterol it's been linked to

depression and cholesterol is also indispensable for making Milan and

myelin is a fatty substance that surrounds the nerve fiber and this is

like the insulation if you have an electric wire it's always insulated by

plastic well the body does the same thing but it does it with Milan

containing cholesterol so the insulating and signalling properties of the

depends on this and it's it's vitally important for brain maturation so when

they're saying that all these kids are so unhealthy we need to get them on

statin drugs while they're teenagers this would be incredibly devastating

because it would keep their brains from maturing properly ingested versus

manufactured using a complex thirty seven step process so I mean it's 37

steps this is not something that accidentally happens in the body for no

good reason that if it goes through all those steps the body has a reason to

make this stuff the liver produces approximately a thousand milligrams a

day while another two or three hundred milligrams are ingested on average

however this ingested cholesterol the stuff that you eat is not absorbed very

well so it's actually even though you eat two to three hundred milligrams not

all of that is getting into your body so that makes the importance of the

ingested cholesterol even less in comparison but furthermore cholesterol

because it's so important and most important substances in the body they

circulate so the body releases them at some point so the gallbladder releases

cholesterol into the intestine but because it's an important substance it

is being reabsorbed so we're saving so we don't have to make so much of it all

the time the body is economizing with this important substance and because of

all these factors there is virtually no effect on the cholesterol level in your

body of the cholesterol that you eat because when you eat more of it your

body is going to make less when you eat less your body is going to make

or so the ingested cholesterol has virtually no bearing at all on the

cholesterol in your body okay so what what is it that that does determine well

let's look at a little more specifically what they do these guys LDL and HDL

stands for low density lipoprotein and high-density lipoprotein so as the name

implies light bulb protein is something that contains lipids and protein it has

fat and protein in it but it has different components so depending on how

much protein it has it's either high density or low density so something

that's low density the LDL it's lighter because it has more fat and less protein

and and vice versa so what these carriers what these do they are carriers

they're their vehicles it's like a bus and the purpose of that bus is to

transport things so LDL and HDL these lipoproteins are carriers they're like

buses and what they do is they either carry cholesterol out to the tissues if

the tissues need cholesterol or they bring cholesterol back if the body has

had enough so LDL means that the bus is already full of people it's already full

of cholesterol so if you need to transport these people some place and

drop them off that's the function of that bus then if the people are out

there and then they need to be picked back up then you need

sent an empty bus so that you can pick them up and bring them back this is

exactly what LDL and HDL does there's nothing good or bad about it if the body

needs cholesterol in the tissues deliver make more LDL so it can deliver

cholesterol to the tissues if there is enough at the tissues or too much then

the body makes HDL so we can bring the cholesterol back to the liver for

reprocessing so that's the purpose there's no good or bad that's just what

it does it's a carrier and the volume makes whichever one you need at the time

what's the situation then where the body makes more LDL or HDL well what's the

purpose the purpose of cholesterol is like we said it's all of those hormone

functions and all that but remember it's part of the cell membrane so anytime

that we have damage in the body the body needs more cholesterol to repair the

damage and what is it that causes damage primarily in the body it is inflammation

and they're finding out more and more and more and more that all these

degenerative diseases from Alzheimer's to heart disease diabetes is a state of

low-grade inflammation heart disease is an inflammatory condition and when you

have inflammation in the tissues and you get cell damage to the cell membranes

and you need to repair those cell membranes the body makes more LDL

cholesterol to deliver it to the tissues so the LDL is not the bad guy it's the

inflammation so if we want to change anything about this then we just

need to find out what are the lifestyle factors that are causing the the high

inflammation and one thing that we talked about in this office is stress

because stress has been linked to virtually every disease and it's linked

in this function as well that you're sitting at a picnic you're having a good

time and your your stress and your healing your sympathetic and your

parasympathetic are in balance and then the grizzly bear shows up for your

picnic and now things are not so peaceful you get into a state of stress

and some of the things that will happen is your heart rate goes up your blood

pressure goes up your muscle tension goes up your blood sugar goes up but one

more thing that happens is you check out those claws on the bear and they look

pretty sharp so your quality you're infinitely smart body says there's

probably going to be some bleeding before this is all over so just in case

I'm going to prepare to stop the bleeding and in order to stop bleeding I

have to increase the blood clotting factors and what's included in blood

clotting factors cholesterol is part of that cascade and once we have the damage

we're going to need cholesterol for the wound healing to create new cell

membranes to create all of that so whenever as soon as we see that grizzly

bear we have an increase in LDL cholesterol because the body is planning

ahead and saying we better deliver some cholesterol to the tissues just in case

so even though we don't have them any grizzly bears we have quite a bit of

other stress okay so when you see that grizzly bear and your LDL is going on

your body is doing exactly what it's supposed to you are not missing a statin

drug your body is behaving exactly the way it's supposed to

stress so the problem again is stress and inflammation it's not about the food

that meat unless the food of course creates inflammation that's a different

story but it's not about how much cholesterol is in there what are some of

the ways to bring it down obviously reduce the need for it so even though

cholesterol isn't good or bad obviously having high cholesterol is not a good

thing because it means that we have inflammation in the body so as we get

healthier as we learn how to be healthy meaning eat better move better feel

better as we talked about in our long series of user manual then inflammation

goes down and we need less cholesterol to repair the damage the other way to

bring it down is to use a statin drug a cholesterol-lowering drug and what does

it do what's the mechanism well the statin drug interferes with the livers

ability to manufacture cholesterol so your body is saying we want this

cholesterol and it signals the liver to make some more and we take a drug that

destroys delivers ability to make it so we have to basically choke the living

daylights out of the liver and if you notice on all the commercials what do

they say never ever take this if you have any problem with your liver because

we're going to choke it some more so if it had any sort of problem then we're

going to squeeze the life out of it so you have to have a perfectly healthy

liver so it can sustain the damage we're about to do to it that's why they say

that and what's the effect of the drug as well it's going to lower your

cholesterol so it's going to look on the blood test

is going to look like a good thing happened but what really happened is you

still add the stress you still have the inflammation you just don't have the

ability to make the cholesterol so you're not healing yeah and this is how

most medical research is done they don't ever look at are you getting healthier

they're looking at one measurement they're looking at blood pressure or

cholesterol or some some aspect and they're saying can we change that one

aspect they don't care at all about anything else that they might be

changing in the process Jenny's really don't know affect that yeah I'm missing

with one thing yes yes and we'll do another talk on on drugs and their their

mechanism just so you can see a little bit more that what are some of the stat

and side effects liver damage muscle damage and what's one of the more

important muscles it's the heart and it can affect memory concentration and

cause depression it can create pain and peripheral neuropathy again if you don't

have the cholesterol to repair the damage now your nerves are going to get

yet have issues sleep problems sexual dysfunction fatigue if you don't have a

cholesterol to manufacture your sex hormones then you get sexual dysfunction

and one thing that's really important that we've talked a lot about is

mitochondrial function is absolutely guaranteed that these statin drugs will

interfere with your body's ability to use Co Q 10 so if you ever ever get on a

a statin drug for whatever reason if you if you get talked into it make sure you

double up and triple up on your coat 10 because your body is going to need it

and with that reduction of coq10 of course your body the mitochondria are

not going to be able to make this the energy that's so essential for for every

cell function and what's where you have most of your mitochondria well in the

most active organs which is the brain the heart and the liver and then the

right one Co Q 10 yes yes yes the ubiquinol it the active form so here's

here's just a little bit of what I mentioned up front that the guidelines

that the drug companies they obviously want to make money so the more clients

they have the more the potential target market the better for them so they're

lobbying they're saying hey we're doing all this stuff people are still getting

heart attacks we must we must tighten the guidelines so over the years they

manage to change these guidelines so that more and more and more people get

in the into the target zone become a target market so then this guy at the

fast food dining table says my heart has survived 16 girlfriends seven fiance's

and four ex-wives you think my heart is afraid of a cheeseburger so we want to

start understanding the body a little bit differently all of the traditional

risk factors the things they talk about as risk factors they're not really risk

factors at all some of them are quite ridiculous actually and being male

that's not a risk factor it's a correlation again smoking it's not a

risk factor it's because increases free radicals and decreases oxygen

hypertension is not a risk factor it's an association it's it's just another

effect of poor health that's that's observed in correlation diabetes the

same thing family history got nothing to do with it HDL of course it's it's

another effects of all of the things that they're talking about or not the

risk factors there's just other things that you observe in conjunction with

poor health and we need to start understanding what the true risks are if

we're ever going to get to the source of the problem the real risk factors are

free radicals inflammation and degeneration what are they caused by

chemical stress structural stress and emotional stress it's what we talk about

in all the other installments of the series and we talk in details about how

each of the work and what we can do about them so that is all we have on

cholesterol and we encourage you to learn more and come to other other talks

that we have and feel free to ask any questions