85 | Does Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease? - Big Pharma

Welcome back to another episode of the Real Health Podcast. Grant, I have nothing to comment on with college football, so we're just gonna move on through that. And we are gonna just dive right into today's episode. So we're starting a series now over the next few weeks about big pharma and, super controversial subject here when we start talking about medications and what we've been trained to to think and how we've been trained to think. And, and we're gonna kind of classify, I would say like a disease and medication associated with that, and we'll talk about some myths and then true facts of what causes that particular disease process and is the medication the best route for you?

I'm not gonna give you medical advice, but I'm gonna help you understand just the truth and facts about the disease itself, medications itself, and then and then obviously you take that to your provider and make a decision on what's best for you. When we talk about Big Pharma, gosh, we go so deep into a conversation about manipulation of research and, a money hungry, you know, company as a whole, but really we're gonna try to try to narrow in and create practical advice for you and not make an hour long podcast that just rambles and rambles on about all the bad things about big pharma. You guys obviously can do your own research no matter what country you're in; on your FDA, and determine whether or not, you know, again, if they're out to get you. So let's just be real, I wouldn't say they're out to get you, I would say they're out to get your money. And the best money maker is chronic disease.

It's the best money maker in our society. Think about this, if you're on a drug for the rest of your life starting at age 20, and it doesn't kill you, but you have to take it forever, you're talking about a multi-million product per person. Per person. On the flip side, if you get that 20 year old off of that medication or you never get them on the medication because they make lifestyle changes, you have robbed your pharmaceutical industry of millions of dollars per person. So does it make sense to do and put in a lot of money and resources into finding root causes? No.

Because there's no money in root cause disease care. There's no money in it. So when you start talking about functional medicine, why is it so expensive? Because insurances don't cover it. Why is it so expensive to go to a practitioner, you know, who's gonna run all of these different tests?

Because big pharma doesn't cover it, insurance companies don't cover it. So today, we're gonna talk about statin drugs and cholesterol. We're gonna talk about the great, in essence, cholesterol myth. Does cholesterol cause heart disease? Does cholesterol in and of itself, is it the biggest risk factor in heart disease?

And are statins, are they up as appropriately used in our general society today as they should be? When you think about statins, here's a stat, it is the biggest blockbuster drug ever. I mean we're talking about tens of millions, 30 million plus dollars per year are made from statin drugs. That is massive amounts of cash coming in from a single drug which is a cholesterol reducing medication. So does it reduce your risk of heart disease?

It's in essence the greatest question we could be asking. Right? So let's step back and let's talk about this idea of cholesterol. Let's talk about what it is. We'll get into if it causes heart disease and how it may contribute to heart disease, and then we'll talk about statins, and then we'll kind of button up the show in the end.

So cholesterol, what is it? Cholesterol is a- think of it like a fat. It's a fat and it is the backbone of so many important molecules in the body. For instance, vitamin d. You can't synthesize vitamin d without cholesterol.

Steroid hormones, like testosterone, can't make it without cholesterol. Cholesterol is a building block for nerve cells, your brain. It's a essential structural membrane to every cell in the human body. I mean, we're talking about a vital nutrient to the human body. That's what cholesterol is.

And when you think about cholesterol, we can go back probably into the fifties, sixties where fat was really starting to get villainized. And it was really shady research where fat was extrapolated out as the cause of heart disease because this researcher, who's a physiologist said, "Hey, this population doesn't have heart disease like the American population or x", you know, "Australian population, so therefore, what is the factor here?" What's the what's the common factor? And the common factor was they didn't consume what they perceived as was this type of saturated fat. So they said, "Hey, saturated fat must be the guy, it must be the issue, so we're gonna pull saturated fat out of diets."

And instead, what did they replace fat with? Well, if you were in the seventies, eighties, getting into the nineties, we saw that with the food pyramid, we removed fat and we replaced it with sugar. Just straight up fat for sugar, fat for carbs. And so a ton of people started to resort to carbs. And, you saw this like low fat, no fat.

Everything was no fat, low fat, no fat, low fat. And it became the craze. The problem is heart disease rates never decreased. And the number one killer in our country today is heart disease. It's the number one killer.

So think of it this way, if statins save lives, like if they really reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by what statins showed originally, when Lipitor came out, was 33%. Shouldn't we have seen a 33% reduction in heart heart attack related deaths? Why aren't we? Right? If that was the blockbuster drug to save heart attacks- people from having heart attacks, why aren't we seeing those those rates decline?

Because I'm gonna tell you now the great cholesterol myth. Cholesterol is a risk factor, and we'll talk about different types of cholesterol risk. Cholesterol is a risk factor, but it is not the most important risk factor associated with cardiovascular disease. It is not. And I'll tell you at the end of the episode what is the most important markers to look at for heart disease. When we look at cholesterol and like most of us would associate it with going to the doctor and look at your total cholesterol levels.

And if there's a certain level they would say, oh no, you're at risk for heart disease, here's a statin drug. Back, a couple decades ago, that that marker was around 240, 250. So if you were at like, let's just say 255, 260, they say, "Hey, we need we may need to consider a statin drug and get you on getting on a cholesterol lowering medication like Lipitor is one of the first." Well, that has come down. Now it's like if you're over 200.

Oh gosh, yeah. We need you on a statin drug. And again, the lower your cholesterol gets, we're not seeing this direct relationship of decreasing cardiovascular related deaths associated with cholesterol. And here's what is wild. When you look at hospitalized heart attack patients, 75% of them had normal cholesterol.

So patient comes into the hospital, has a heart attack, they look at cholesterol levels and the and 3 out of 4 were normal. 3 out of 4 were normal. So is cholesterol the villain here? Okay. And when we look at the data, just the pure data that's not endorsed by Big Pharma, we can we can understand that it is not the villain.

It's not the villain. It may be on sight, it may be what we would what would I associate in terms of a word picture if a fire is burning down a home and there's firefighters on the scene and they're putting out the fire and you just stroll up and you see this incident and you look at the firefighter and you'd be like, "Well, he's on the scene he must have caused the fire." That would be the same logic in saying that LDL or cholesterol caused heart disease. There it's on the scene, but it's there to do a job. It has a purpose.

LDL has a purpose. HDL has a purpose. And what we've done is we've we've dumbed down data and said that, hey, HDL is good and LDL is bad. And this is still the thought process today that an obsolete test is obsolete testing. When you go to your your physical exam, you get a cholesterol panel, you get just HDL and LDL.

Those are the two markers you look at. And if if LDL is low and HDL is high and your cholesterol is under 200, you're like, yay, I'm healthy. That is so far from reality. You could be brewing a heart attack with normal quote unquote normal cholesterol, normal HDL, normal LDL. You could be brewing up a heart attack because of other risk factors that are way more important.

So what we saw was when statin drugs were introduced in our society and they said this was the claim of Lipitor. This was the claim. This is what this is what made it a multibillion dollar drug. They said, big pharma, Lipitor said, it reduces your risk of heart attacks by 33%. One out of 3.

Where did that data come from? The data came from this. When you take a sample of a 100 people, over the course of 5 years, 2 will have a heart attack. Okay? And what they did oh, sorry.

3 will have a heart attack. What they did was they took a 100 people, they all they gave them all Lipitor, and over the course of 5 years, 2 had a heart attack. So one less than the control group in essence. And they say, hey, 2 had a heart attack instead of 3. That's a 33% reduction in heart attacks relate heart attacks related to the study, but that's so far from true data.

I mean, at best at best, we got a 1% reduction, not a 33% reduction. We have 1 person and that's such a short term study, but out of that came this idea that statin drug Lipitor in particular had a 33% reduction in heart attacks, heart deaths related to heart attack. So when you if you were to be like, hey, sit down with the doc and say, "Hey, this will reduce your your risk of a heart attack by 33%," you better believe you're signing up for that drug.

Absolutely, and so did millions of people. But what if I were to tell you, "hey, there was one less case per 100, but the the side effects of Lipitor are muscle cramps, cognitive decline, memory loss, low libido, low sex drive."

Why? Because it depletes your levels of cocutent, depletes your levels of magnesium, robs your energy systems of the body, it robs the production of steroid hormones. Every steroid hormone collect, when you look at cholesterol, it is a precursor to testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, essential for your steroid hormones. So yeah, low libido. Okay.

Why low energy? Low testosterone. Why poor cognitive function and and decreased memory or memory decline? Why? Because it's robbing your brain of cholesterol.

60% of your brain is fat, so your brain makes up a very small percentage of your body in terms of weight, but but utilizes over 50% of the calories. That's how energetically strong your brain is and you're robbing it of a necessary nutrient called cholesterol and fat. So, yeah, that's why you're gonna have memory decline. That's in my opinion why we're seeing some some increases in Alzheimer's and dementia. And and what we know today is like the staple of of a healthy brain is healthy blood glucose.

Alzheimer's and dementia is kind of a rabbit trail, but Alzheimer's dementia is now being referred to as type 3 diabetes, which is insulin resistance of the brain. Why? Because you removed fat and all you did was ate sugar and carbs for the last 30, 40 years. So, yeah, your brain has burned out its insulin receptors and guess what? It's insulin resistant, hence type 3 diabetes also called Alzheimer's.

Insulin resistance, getting back to this idea of like, man, these side effects versus the benefit, is it right? You have to have this conversation with your primary care physician to determine where you're at, but here is the truth behind cholesterol. Here's the truth behind heart disease. What is the single greatest risk factor in heart disease? Insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance, your body's inability to process carbohydrates and regulate its own blood sugar. It is the most important factor marker in looking at cardiovascular events in the future. Insulin resistance can be studied. It can be tested. It can be drawn, blood draw, and we can look at actually what's called an insulin resistance score now and give us understanding of where you're at in this, you know, potential risk factors of cardiovascular disease.

There's another marker that we always look at with cardiovascular events and it's called CRP. So this is inflammation, insulin resistance inflammation, CRP. CRP or "C reactive protein" is a great marker of systemic inflammation. House is on fire, inflammation. Firefighters on scene, LDL.

That's what we're kind of having a conversation about here is insulin resistance, inflammation are the primary drivers of true heart disease. And then we see, yeah, plaques in the arteries, sure we're gonna see some cholesterol in that plaque. Why? Because there are different types of cholesterol. Looking at just HDL and LDL is such a a small picture of this massive understanding of what cholesterol actually is or what we call these proteins, lipoproteins actually are.

So when we look at HDL and LDL, is it good, is it bad? That's not the conversation we should be having. You can actually test these lipoproteins and look at the size or the pattern, the size of these molecules and size matters. Size matters when it comes to cholesterol. When we look at these lipoproteins, the smaller size of these lipoproteins are definitely at increased risk of cardiovascular events because these smaller like bb size get caught and get stuck versus these large fluffy cholesterol molecules are easy to like kind of move around throughout the bloodstream.

They don't get caught. They don't get stuck. So when we look at proper cardiovascular testing, yes, we're looking at quote unquote cholesterol, but really what we're assessing are lipoproteins and and not only LDL, but the type of LDLs and the type of HDLs, the pattern, the size of them. We're looking at insulin resistance. Are you insulin resistant?

Can you regulate blood sugar properly? We're looking at inflammation levels, CRP, and another one to ask is called homocysteine. Homocysteine is a great inflammatory marker to look at to determine if you have adequate, we call it methylation, but in essence, do you have enough B vitamins to to kind of quench this, this like biomarker in the bloodstream and neutralize its effects on the body? B vitamins are necessary for that. So looking at at this like picture of heart disease, gosh, I mean to just say, hey, we're gonna lower your cholesterol below 200 and you're gonna reduce your risk cardiovascular events by 33% is is a total myth.

But to tell someone if they improve their insulin resistance, regulate blood sugar, go into like more of a ketogenic state probably and for most people, creates balanced blood sugar, reduce inflammation, change the size of your of your, lipoproteins, can you reduce your risk of cardiovascular better than anything else in the market? If you were to put that in a bottle, it would be the number one selling drug because that is true healing and that will truly reverse your risk- reduce and reverse your risk of cardiovascular events. That to me is true medicine. So should you or shouldn't you take this drug, right, statin drugs? That's a conversation we had with your primary care physician, but we have to look at the data.

And when you say like, "Hey, research shows this and research shows that," the question I would ask you is, "Okay, who's funding it? Who's funding that data?" You know, when we when we say, "Hey, research says this," the research honestly, unless I see it, I know who's behind it, I won't believe it. It's important to not even take the information I'm telling you, right? Take my information and say, "Hey, this is Bible" or another person's information say it's Bible.

Just because it's on Instagram, just because it's in a book, whatever. Hey, who's funding it? What's the intention behind it? What does the true data show? So if you're looking for a great book, there is a fantastic one that was done years ago called the called The Great Cholesterol Myth and it'll help you understand more about cardiovascular disease as a whole.

We talk about statin drugs and cholesterol and fats, and how we've removed healthy fats and put vegetable oils, which are so rancid, so toxic to our body. And when we look at, you know, true cardiovascular disease, what are the risk factors? It's insulin resistance, inflammation as your primary drivers behind heart disease. And so what do we do nutritionally? Alright.

How do we how do we how do we like the reverse heart disease? Well, paleo diet. Like if you just give me a general recommendation, it's a paleolithic diet. It's eat lean meat, nuts seeds, vegetables, fruits, drink water, eat fermented foods, you're gonna live a super healthy, have a super healthy life. Can we reduce inflammation through other sources and sauna, cold plunge, reduce cardiovascular events?

Absolutely. Do we need to be adjusted? Yes, because it has an influence on the nervous system's health and how it relates to heart disease, high blood pressure even. What else should we do? Well, when we look at, you know, fasting, it's a great way to help balance blood sugar and create a healthy insulin resistance.

But probably more importantly, work with a practitioner, get quality lab testing and then basically set up a plan to improve these biomarkers that you find in your blood work and create an individualized plan, for your body. So, first drug we're tackling is that statin drug, multibillion dollar drug, all based on cholesterol being the greatest risk factor associated with heart disease. And the truth is it is not. So hey, I wanna encourage you, change your nutrition, create healthy habits, eat healthy fats, remove hydrogenated oils, reduce your inflammation, balance your blood sugar, and you'll absolutely impact heart disease for the future. Hey, thanks for listening to another episode of the Real Health Podcast.