In this video you’ll discover whether high cholesterol actually causes heart disease.
Hi, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Dr. Zyrowski and welcome back to the channel. Now if you’re
new to the channel as always it's a pleasure to have you here. Be sure to subscribe, hit
that bell notification and join our notification community. So I can help you excel your health
and your life. In this video we are going to discuss high cholesterol and heart disease.
This is a confusing topic for a lot of people and I know this because we get a lot of questions
on it. Many people believe that high cholesterol is going to cause heart disease and early
death and many people believe that. That is an absolute myth. So what we're going to do
is go through this video kind of debunk this whole high cholesterol heart disease issue
and at the end I will tell you what the top cardiovascular experts today are saying are
the real cause of heart disease in early death. So stick around to the end. Let’s dive in.
When we look at cholesterol in general it’s absolute insanity to think that cholesterol,
some evil thing to the body because it’s absolutely critical and it’s an essential
molecule for many functions in the body. It’s necessary for a lot of hormones like vitamin
D, steroid hormones, sex hormones.
If you want to have optimal levels of hormones like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone,
you need the cholesterol and it’s also absolutely necessary for neurological health. A lot of
people who go in and start taking these different statins to lower their cholesterol they’ll
also notice a decline in their brain function, their focus, their memory because essentially
when you start dropping that cholesterol low the nervous system, the brain struggle. So
that’s something to take into consideration especially when we look at elderly. Who in
many cases may be struggling with issues of neurological decline and problems with memory
things such as Alzheimer's and then you take and you take that cholesterol and drop it
down, it can be very devastating for them. So let’s look at this myth misinformation
of high cholesterol causing heart disease. Where did it come from? There’s a couple
landmark studies that have been done in the past that this information really came from
and justifies the you know, where we’re at today with this whole thing. There was
a lipid hypothesis by Ancel Keys. Now this was basically going in and saying that high
cholesterol causes heart disease. He went out around to many different countries and
at those different countries this is what he found. Now he was criticized highly by
his peers because basically he had a narrative that he wanted to fulfill that narrative was
that high cholesterol causes heart disease. So, what he did is he focused on the countries
where this tended to correlate but he took all the different information that he had
from the other countries out of the study.
So basically like I said his peers criticized him highly for it and this is why it has remained
as the lipid hypothesis. The bad part of it is that much of what he had said has become
truth today when it comes to you know how high cholesterol is dealt with and so this
is really where it all started along with the Framingham Heart Study. Now this study
is pretty interesting because it’s the same thing basically saying high cholesterol causes
heart disease but they found a couple other interesting things out in the study. And what
they found is that first of all regardless of the dietary cholesterol your serum cholesterol
remained pretty much level. So it had a pretty much insignificant impact because we’re
told all the time that if you eat saturated fats that you’re going to increase your
cholesterol and cause heart disease. Well in this study regardless of how flawed it
was they did find that really didn’t matter that much.
Now when we look at the Framingham study basically one of the doctors involved with it by the
name of George he basically went and said that this was the greatest scam ever perpetrated
on the american public because it was another study that was used to justify all the cholesterol
medication based on their findings and so it was a flawed study, lots of problems but
either way this is where a lot of the truth that we believe today on cholesterol has come
from. Once again another little interesting fact here 50% of people hospitalized with
heart attacks have normal cholesterol and about 50% with high cholesterol have healthy
hearts. Okay, so we’re just seeing these facts just don’t add up if you want to believe
in the studies that say high cholesterol cause heart disease it consistently doesn’t add
up again and again.
Let’s talk about some of these different debunking studies now. First there was the
lyon diet heart study which was also an incredible study that debunked that high cholesterol
causes heart disease. They basically took a whole bunch of people put them on the meditation
diet and they found that the deaths reduced by 70%, the cardiovascular deaths were decreased
by 76%. Now the interesting thing about this whole study is that cholesterol didn’t budge
okay. So if we want to believe the narrative that high cholesterol causes heart disease
what we should have seen is that well with this study that their cholesterol dropped
really low and all of a sudden people lived longer. But they didn’t, the cholesterol
remain the same but they were healthier individuals because they were following a healthy diet
probably because they decreased inflammation and oxidative and a few other things that
are very important for heart health.
Now the next study that was also a really big one was th eNurses Health Study and this
was done by Harvard University. They took 120,000 females and what they found was that
there are 5 factors that are absolutely critical if you want to have good heart health. First
of all you want to keep your BMI under 25 and I think these are good factors. You want
to not smoke seems pretty obvious. You want to exercise daily moderate to vigorous exercise
for 30 minutes. Eat low sugar and high omega 3s.
So making sure that you’re eating a low sugar diet getting lots of healthy fats and
then also drink alcohol in moderation which seems like pretty good rules to live by. Now
is this a scam the whole high cholesterol and heart disease is it because you know there’s
a couple studies that weren’t very good that were very flawed that you know most of
the information is based on when you talk about high cholesterol and heart disease.
Then there’s tons of studies that debunk it but still in traditional health care they
have determined that high cholesterol causes heart disease.
So is it a scam? Well, first of all when we look at the medications for cholesterol this
is a thirty billion dollar plus industry a year. Okay. The next thing is very interesting
is the national cholesterol education program lowered the optimal levels back in 2004. So
this is always interesting when they do this because they’ve done it with many different
other conditions you know whether its high blood pressure or whether it’s you know
blood sugar levels, they’ll go and they’ll lower them overnight and what happens is they
create a multi billion dollar industry overnight because all of us and everybody needs to be
on these different prescriptions. So they did this in 2004.
Here is the thing that was very you know, deceptive to the people in you know wrong
in a lot of ways. 8 of the 9 panel members had financial ties to the cholesterol pharmaceutical
industry. So anyways I think that that’s you know really bad stuff and when we look
at high cholesterol and heart disease it has been debunked many times. So I don’t want
people, especially follow my channel to get hung up on it now when we look at the major
factors that cardiovascular experts say today are the determining factors whether or not
you have heart disease first of all it’s a high sugar diet. So we want to make sure
we’re eating a low sugar diet. Also if you have a lot of inflammation and so we want
to make sure that we’re focusing on decreasing inflammation because it causes oxidation in
the body it causes a lot of different oxidative stress in the cardiovascular system. So basically
what is happening is if you have a lot of inflammation in your cardiovascular system
you will cause oxidation of that cholesterol in the arteries and there is where you are
coming up with your problems. So it really comes back to inflammation. So we really want
to make sure were reducing stress because that was a major factor stress, low sugar
diet, and we also want to make sure that we’re decreasing inflammation throughout the whole
body because it decreases inflammation in the cardiovascular system, decreasing the
risk of cardiovascular disease greatly.
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you haven’t done so yet. And be sure to check out my other videos on how you can improve
your health. I’ll see you in the next video.