I had a heart attack this past August. I was overweight, I wasn’t taking any medications at the time, but I had exercised quite a bit in the roughly 18 months prior to that and also had passed a stress test in my cardiologist’s office with flying colors. I was supposed to reach the target rate at eight minutes based on my age and weight, but I went for over 12 minutes until they finally shut the machine off.
What I have found in studying heart disease, and the medical treatments surrounding it since that time is that a lot of what the medical establishment tells us is pure garbage (FYI, both my father and my mother’s father were doctors, along with many other family members and friends, so I have respect for individual docs who genuinely care about their patients). For instance, a stress test has extraordinarily little predictive value for future heart attacks. It measures blood flow, and that’s all. It doesn’t talk about the actual cause of a heart attack (or a stroke, for that matter), which is the bursting of soft plaque which, when it hits your bloodstream, creates blood clots. If the clots are large enough, they will either cause a heart attack or a stroke. What people need to do to find out if they are at real danger of a heart attack or stroke is to do a CIMT to determine the extent of actual blockage in the artery or, better yet, a test to determine how much of your plaque is calcified (which is low risk plaque) versus soft plaques.
I have also found that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, despite what the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession have been trying to jam down our throats for the last 50 or so years. First, cholesterol is only one of several components of plaque. But that’s not even the real issue. The real issue is why is plaque developing in your arteries in the first place. The answer to that is inflammation and micro cracks caused by high blood pressure and excess blood sugar and insulin. The simple fact is that plaque is your body‘s way of repairing the damage caused by inflammation. If your body didn’t self repair in this way, eventually the damage would cause blood leakage from your arteries into the rest of your body, and you would literally bleed out internally. Cholesterol can be analogized to firemen who are present on your street when one of the houses has burned down. They didn’t cause the fire, they were there to put the fire out. Similarly, cholesterol didn’t cause the plaques to form, cholesterol and the plaques are there to repair pre-existing damage. So, the key here is to prevent the damage from occurring in the first place, by significantly reducing carbohydrate consumption. Stopping smoking and stopping drinking alcohol will also help to reduce inflammation in one’s arteries. As far as the composition of fats, eliminating processed “vegetable” oils like canola, soy, corn and peanut, is also critical, as all of these oils that are supposedly healthy for you because they have no cholesterol, are actually the cause of an immense amount of inflammation, and not just in your arteries. The simple fact is that processed vegetable oils not only cause heart disease, but they also cause premature aging.
Also, I have found that the rabid insistence of the medical establishment about reducing the intake of dietary cholesterol is sheer nonsense. Our livers manufacture something like 4 to 5 times the amount of cholesterol as we consume daily, and the liver manufactures this cholesterol from carbohydrates. If we have a lot more cholesterol through our diet, the liver will produce less. It is a fallacy that dietary cholesterol causes causes a long-term increase in blood levels of cholesterol in the first place, which doesn’t actually seem to matter anyway. For what it’s worth, I generally have three eggs per day, with butter and cheese, and my cholesterol has actually dropped significantly (down to 110, which is why I cut my statin dose in half, because that is TOO low - cholesterol is part of every cell in the body, is a critical fraction of the nervous system including the brain, and is a critical precursor for all sex hormones.
If cholesterol - and ONLY cholesterol - actually caused heart disease and strokes, statins would be an impressive tool, though not one without some potentially serious side effects. There is Alzheimer’s or dementia of various types, there are liver problems, muscle aches (which are indicative of damage being caused, and a serious risk of causing diabetes. I am playing my doc’s game for a while, taking 10 mg/day of rosouvastatin (even though he prescribed 20, I am not telling him or my wife) plus blood thinners (because I have 3 stents and know that they can get clogged) and some blood pressure meds (I wasn’t high, but I want it lower to prevent damage to my arteries). I am also taking colchicine, which I suggested to my doc because it lowers inflammation in the arteries. Most importantly, I am severely restricting my carbohydrate intake, and trying to consume fat and protein before eating some carb crap so as to ameliorate the spike in both blood sugar and insulin.
“Most importantly, I am severely restricting my carbohydrate intake, and trying to consume fat and protein before eating some carb crap so as to ameliorate the spike in both blood sugar and insulin.”