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https://twitter.com/KetoAurelius/status/1260204394035007490
https://twitter.com/KetoAurelius/status/1275114152017776645
Doctors' obsession with monitoring cholesterol and prescribing drugs to lower it must be among the most counterproductive trends in developed world healthcare.
— P. D. Mangan Health & Freedom Maximalist 🇺🇸 (@Mangan150) July 6, 2020
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17512433.2018.1519391
Here are some links to P.D. Mangan’s collected information about cholesterol. I also recommend using the search function at his site, or searching through his Twitter account @Mangan150, for related words such as coronary heart disease, insulin and cholesterol. We are told that eating meat, and consuming cholesterol, would give us heart disease – an assumption made entirely by faulty connections. (Such as noting high hamburger consumption and heart disease. Ignoring the fact that the hamburger contains sugar and carbs in the form of wheat bread, ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, etc.) This collection of research should dispel that assumption.
http://roguehealthandfitness.com/higher-cholesterol-associated-with-longer-life/
http://roguehealthandfitness.com/cholesterol-for-brain-health/
http://roguehealthandfitness.com/cholesterol-vs-blood-sugar-in-heart-disease/
Cholesterol is an organic molecule produced in all the cells of the body. The liver produces most of the daily cholesterol. It makes up 30% of the cell membranes and is used to build and maintain them. It enables the body’s production of Vitamin D and steroids, such as cortisol and aldosterone, and also hormones such as progesterone, estrogen, testosterone and more. It is crucial for transports and signals between the cells.
The brain produces its own cholesterol, which is fully 23 percent of the body’s cholesterol. It is needed to protect the brain cells and for the electric signals that direct thoughts, motion and the signals of the senses.
What we hear today about cholesterol supposedly being dangerous is based on old assumptions with no support in new research. We hear that the consumption of meat increases the body’s cholesterol values and that this in turn leads to atherosclerosis, the clogging of the arteries. Here a distinction is made between the “bad” cholesterol, LDL, low-density lipoprotein, and the “good” cholesterol HDL, high-density lipoprotein.
The Seven Nation Study
The notion that cholesterol would cause heart disease was spread by Ancel Keys, the man made famous by composing the “balanced K-rations” for U.S. soldiers in WWII. Keys found that cholesterol appears in the plaque that clogs arteries, and concluded that no cholesterol means no plaque. The plaque, however, is produced by the body to repair the arteries after they have been damaged, notably from the inflammation caused by sugar. Ancel Keys produced a Seven Nation Study, picking only nations that fit his assumption that low meat consumption means a better and healthier heart. To do this he ignored countries like Sweden, France and West Germany, with high meat consumption and low heart disease, and instead picked only the countries that fit, such as Yugoslavia. The “stars” in Keys’ study were peasants from Crete, who had low rates of heart disease and a seemingly low-fat diet. However, the isolated people on Crete had endured strongly calorie-restricted diets during and after World War II, naturally making them slim and thereby reducing heart disease. Ancel Keys also conducted his study partly during Lent … when the Greek-Orthodox peasants stay away from meat and cheese. Keys could therefore report that this healthy group of people ate little meat.
Ancel Keys was hired as a spokesman for Procter & Gamble, who started selling the first “shortening”, Crisco, a seed-based butter to replace ordinary butter. They called this “vegetabilic” butter, and still do. Procter & Gamble made the radio shows that housewives listened to, and promoted their products, such as soap, in the commercial breaks. That is why we have the expression “soap opera”. They leaned on Ancel Keys to promote Crisco in these commercials, and since it was cheaper than butter, and included the positive word “vegetables,” sales took off. This was in the beginning of the heart-disease epidemic. Ancel Keys also became the head of the American Heart Association, which was then a small organization. It became the go-to source for reporters writing about heart disease. The research funding of those involved increased. Those who disapproved saw a reduction in funding, and had no seats in the AHA. Only in later years has the AHA acknowledged that they were wrong in their assumptions.
This is a summary of the information in the links above. The links provide graphs to illustrate the findings, as well as links to the studies.
Cholesterol – New Research
Research from Japan shows that both older and younger people with high cholesterol values live longer. Those with the lowest cholesterol have the highest mortality rate.
A study from the Netherlands of 724 people aged 85 years or older shows a similar connection. The group with the lowest cholesterol, less than 193 mg/dl, had the highest mortality rate, year after year. The group with more than 252 mg had the lowest mortality rate.
490 old people were studied in Finland for six years. Mortality was highest for the group with the least cholesterol, less than 194 mg/dl. Mortality was far lower for the middle group, and lowest for the group with more than 232 mg.
BMJ Open, a “mega journal” for scientific studies, owned by the British Medical Journal which is published by the British Medical Association, has published a study that found that LDL, “the bad cholesterol,” had no connection to mortality. Or even had a negative connection. The negative connection was seen in most of the people above the age of sixty. In other words, more LDL cholesterol meant a lower mortality.
Why? It is possible that cholesterol protects against infections, and also against cancer.
A strong correlation has been found between low cholesterol and a high rate of violence. For people with a cholesterol value of 180 mg/dl or lower, the “odds quota” was 15.49.
Several studies have found a connection between low cholesterol and a high suicide rate. One study found that the quartile, the 25%, of people with the lowest cholesterol level had a more than six times higher risk for suicide than the quartile with the highest cholesterol level.
However, fully 23% of the income of pharmaceutical companies comes from statins, which are used to “treat” high cholesterol levels. These are the primary financiers of cholesterol studies. Research shows that studies that are funded by a particular branch, are more likely to favor that branch.
In 2004, the EU introduced new rules where scientists had to show their processes in a more transparent fashion. The effects that statins have on heart conditions fell drastically in newer studies.
Another factor to consider is that governments, and the UN, have no interest in telling people to eat more meat and eggs, instead of cheap food like grains, when the population is constantly growing. Even though we know that wheat and other grains lead to inflammations in the joints and arteries, which lead to health problems in adulthood.
It should be mentioned that humans ate primarily meat and fish for more than two million years. Wheat consumption appeared as a way to produce more meat and store it over the winter – it was more efficient when competing with other tribes, but it was not healthier food. As soon as we started eating grains, people turned shorter, and it is only in the modern era that we have grown taller again. We see from old bones that grains also caused inflammated joints, and teeth were worn down from chewing.
Doctor Ravnskov’s Findings
The Danish doctor Uffe Ravnskov at the Swedish Lund University, specialist in internal medicine and nefrology (the field studying the kidneys and kidney disease), with several prominent titles and awards in medical research, has taken part in several of the above studies. He has written an article with the simple name People With High Cholesterol Live the Longest, where he summarizes the advantages of high cholesterol.
Dr. Ravnskov points out that old people with low cholesterol levels die from heart attacks twice as often as those with high cholesterol levels, which was first reported by Harlan Krumholz at the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Yale University. Ravnskov has found eleven other studies showing the same result. While he did his research, seven studies showed that high cholesterol does not increase mortality, and more studies have appeared since then.
Ravnskov writes that at least fifteen studies have found that mortality has a negative correlation with either the total amount of cholesterol or LDL cholesterol. In other words, higher cholesterol – longer life.
Nineteen large studies of more than 68,000 deaths showed that low cholesterol leads to a higher mortality rate through digestive disease, or disease related to respiratory circulation, as noted by a meta study at the Division of Epidemiology at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. Jacob’s researchers at the University of Minnesota followed more than 100,000 individuals in fifteen years, and found that those with low cholesterol were more often hospitalized by infection-related disease in the respiratory system, or due to some other infection.
A study over sixteen years shows that those with the lowest cholesterol had four times the mortality rate due to AIDS than those with the highest cholesterol. Just like earlier sexually transmitted diseases, or liver disease, lead to a higher risk of young men catching the HIV virus.
Children born with the Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome have a very high infection rate, and a very low cholesterol rate. When the cholesterol rate is increased by injections or by egg consumption, the infections are reduced and become less severe.
137,000 patients at 541 hospitals, who had suffered heart failure, were studied at the University of California. Their cholesterol values were lower than normal. The average value was a low 174 mg/dl, and the “bad” LDL cholesterol was much lower than usual. This was the largest study of cholesterol in heart patients ever to have been published.
One can argue that cholesterol is lowered after patients have suffered heart failure. But this reduction comes after two to three days, and the low cholesterol values were noted before that. Also, the late reduction is at the most 15 percent.
A study at Henry Ford Heart and Vascular Institute in Detroit came to similar findings. Fully half of 500 patients hospitalized for a heart condition had an LDL cholesterol value lower than 105 mg/dl. Three years later, 26 patients in the low-cholesterol group had died, compared to only 12 in the high-cholesterol group. Note that the 15 percent of patients with lower cholesterol had received more statins than the others.
Dr. Ravnskov has published a study together with fifteen international colleagues, examining nineteen studies of older individuals who had been followed for several years. Not a single one of these studies found that “bad” LDL cholesterol would lead to heart disease. To the contrary, most of the studies found that those with the highest LDL levels lived the longest.
Cholesterol vs Blood Sugar in Coronary Artery Disease
The average U.S. patient with coronary artery disease has the following values:
Total cholesterol: 174
LDL cholesterol: 105
HDL cholesterol: 40
Triglycerides: 161
The total and “bad” LDL cholesterol levels are considered excellent, while the HDL and the triglycerides (found in most of the body’s fat tissue) are considered abnormal. This means these heart patients don’t have a high “bad” cholesterol. The numbers come from a study of 136,905 patients.
Dr. Luca Mascitelli and his research group notes that treatment that reduces cholesterol, but does not include statins, has no effect on coronary mortality. The treatments consisted of clofibrate and hormone treatments for women. (Clofibrate is no longer used, since it lead to 47% higher risk of death, including a higher risk of suicide.)
Blood Sugar
Acute coronary syndrome is either a heart attack or unstable angina. 57 percent of patients hospitalized with ACS have an abnormal glucose metabolism. 25-30 percent of these patients are diabetic. The rest have a reduced ability to metabolize blood sugar.
When 1,300 patients with a reduced glucose tolerance were treated with the diabetes medicine acarbose, the risk of heart and artery problems was reduced by more than half.
Acarbose doesn’t just reduce blood sugar, but reduces insulin, and increases insulin sensitivity. In other words, the body needs less insulin. Deadly coronary disease occurs twice as often in men and three times as often in women with diabetes. Diabetes includes low insulin sensitivity, in other words high insulin resistance. Which we know comes from a high consumption of sugar and carbohydrates. (A high amount of sugar/carbs reduces the insulin hormone’s ability to transport sugar to the body’s cells. The body then produces more insulin, but when the body no longer manages to produce more insulin, blood sugar can rise to deadly levels. This is Type 2 diabetes.)
Gerald Reaven is the doctor who discovered the pre-diabetic conditions. He and his colleagues studied 208 healthy men and women for 6.3 years. They found that those in the lowest “tertiary”, the lowest third, of insulin resistance did not suffer from a high blood pressure, cancer, heart disease, diabetes or stroke. The middle tertiary had twelve people with these conditions, and the highest tertiary had twenty-eight patients.
In other words, there was a strong correlation between sugar consumption (which increases insulin resistance, thereby raising insulin) and heart disease and other conditions. To avoid these conditions, eat less sugar and carbohydrates, not less fat and cholesterol.
As an aside, intermittent fasting drastically lowers insulin, both during the fasting period and later. Fasting does this by increasing insulin sensitivity, reducing insulin resistance.
Cholesterol for Brain Health
The brain is only 2 percent of our body weight but includes 23 percent of the body’s cholesterol. The cholesterol protects the cells and the signals between the cells.
Among the elderly, a high total cholesterol value and a high LDL cholesterol leads to better brain functions. While studies show that it is possible that a low cholesterol level leads to a reduced cognitive ability.
Among those 85 years old or older, those with the highest serum cholesterol have the lowest risk of dementia.
Among healthy middle-aged women, there is a connection seen betwen better memory functions and a high total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol.
A study of Finnish men shows a connection between cholesterol intake and egg consumption, and a lower risk for dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease. Every additional half egg per day led to 11 percent less risk of dementia.
Dr. Beatrice Golomb has read through studies between 1965-1995, and found a clear connection between a low or lowered cholesterol level, and increased violent behavior or exposure to violence. Even men without a heart condition were at greater risk of dying from violence when they had been randomly selected to participate in studies where their cholesterol was lowered. Apes with lowered cholesterol showed more aggressive behavior. (Possibly because lower cholesterol reduces the central serotonin activity in the neural system, which has some connection to violent behavior.)
25 percent of patients with the lowest cholesterol level (less than 162 mg/dl) are at six times higher risk of suicide.
Lower cholesterol is associated with increased depression among older men.
Cholesterol values are very low among the severely depressed.
In Mexico, low cholesterol and high triglycerides are associated with a 4.3 times higher risk of severe depression, and a 5.4 times higher risk of attempted suicide.
Regarding statins, the drugs used to lower cholesterol, half of sixty patients suffered from a reduced memory capacity after two months of use. Fourteen of twenty-five patients reported an improved memory when they stopped taking statins. Four of these patients, who started using statins again, reported a lowered memory capacity.
Approximately 90 percent of 174 patients with cognitive difficulties experienced an improvement when they stopped taking statins, sometimes after just a few days. Among some patients who had been diagnozed with dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease, the illness seemed to be reversed.
A connection has been seen between statins and a doubling of the risk of Parkinson’s Disease. While a high cholesterol level cuts the risk of Parkinson’s in half.
A large increase of dementia and other cognitive difficulties has been discovered when using statins: an increase in hyperlipidemia (86.3%), hypertension (69.6%), diabetes mellitus (36.0%), osteoarthritis (31.5%), coronary artery disease (26.1%), hypothyroidism (21.5%) and depression (19.3%), compared to a group of patients that did not use statins.