Lower cholesterol may not
save you from a heart attack. elpt
Maybe President Clinton should have had lower
cholesterol. He made headlines in September 2024 because of chest
pains that signaled a possible
a heart attack. At the young age of fifty-eight, four arteries to his
heart were clogged. Some of them were nearly 90% blocked.
The consensus
of the medical community was that high cholesterol was the villain and
that it was President Bill’s love of southern fried cooking and fast food restaurants that caused his plumbing to stop up.
As the former president lay in the hospital awaiting the surgeon’s knife he commented that he was “a little scared.”
I can empathize with him.
A heart attack isn't much fun.
An "almost" heart attack.
My name is Gene Millen. Fourteen years ago a highly skilled heart surgeon, sawed open my chest and stitched in bypasses to six of my favorite heart arteries.
A six way heart bypass isn’t a record but it’s not bad for a 59-year-old non-smoker
with lower cholesterol,
normal blood pressure and no weight problem.
So what caused my "heart attack in the making"?
Even my favorite detectives, Hurcule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes would have an impossible task in solving this “crime”. I'll give you one clue though...it wasn't high cholesterol.
Some would say that my genes were responsible and that I would have been wise to chose healthier parents. Stanford University researcher and author, Walter Bortz, MD, disagrees.
“Heredity has little to do with how long you live,” says Bortz. Many scientific studies, including those, which study longevity records of twins, conclude that inherited genes are responsible for only about 20% of our health.
It's not what’s in the genes that causes high cholesterol and a heart attack but how we wear them."
For 30 years we have been bombarded with
lower cholesterol is the
answer.
"Lower cholesterol!" say the drug companies ads
and everything will be just fine.
Drug companies spend more
than 200 million dollars
annually for TV and print
advertising for cholesterol
lowering drugs!
They spend several times this amount for drug company representatives
"visits" to doctors and advertising in medical journals. There is one
pharmaceutical salesman for every 6 physicians in the United States.
Cholesterol is essential for a
healthy body and our liver
manufactures far more of it than
we eat.
Robert Superko, MD, director of
research at the Berkeley
HeartLab Inc. explains,
“Cholesterol is not the problem
we thought it was. Relying on
cholesterol levels as a risk
factor for coronary artery
disease may not be wise since
80% of coronary patients have
the same cholesterol as
individuals who do not develop
the disease.”
Certain members of the
pharmaceutical industry do not
look upon this finding as good
news. Drugs to lower
cholesterol
now have total annual sales of
more than $14 billion.
The conventional wisdom is that high cholesterol
is the primary cause of clogging the vital arteries that deliver oxygen
and nutrients to the heart which lead to a heart attack.
It's not so simple. There are a dozen or more characters who play leading roles in “The Heart Attack Melodrama.” The chief villains are
inflammation, oxidation, sugar and trans fats. Not
high LDL cholesterol. The hero is HDL cholesterol and a strong supporting cast includes antioxidant vitamins, smart exercise and essential
omega 3 oils.
An
illustration of what high
cholesterol can do.
What the above illustration
fails to describe is what causes the "bad" LDL cholesterol
to stick to the artery walls.
Dr. Nicholas Perricone, author
of “The Perricone Connection”
explains,
“To
visualize how LDL cholesterol
operates, think about rust. Rust
occurs when metal oxidizes. Rust
corrodes and eats away the
metal, ultimately destroying it.
Similarly, when LDLs are
oxidized in our bodies by free
radicals or sugar, the LDL
molecules create an inflammatory
cascade resulting in cell and
artery damage, irritation of the
artery walls, and fatty streaks.
More oxidized LDLs start to
build up at this spot, producing
an artery-blocking plaque.
Left
untreated, this plaque
eventually closes the artery
entirely, leading to a possible
heart attack or stroke.”
A new clinical study known as
the INTERHEART study compared 15,000 heart attack patients with a like number of subjects who had not experienced any heart problems.
In this study neither high cholesterol nor high LDLs appeared among the top risk factors.
It is rumored that makers of the statin drugs which lower cholesterol
but do little to improve the necessary HDL cholesterol, "trembled
in their boots" when this information was published.
HDLs also douse the fires of inflammation. It is this smoldering inflammation and oxidation that causes the cholesterol in our arteries to turn rancid and clog our arteries.
Need a solution to
that will lower cholesterol?
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