Maybe not. With a total of a trillion dollars spent on controlling cholesterol in Americans, there are many vested interests who want you to believe that “cholesterol clogs your arteries.”
Traditional View: A significant amount of research has linked high levels of bad cholesterol to the thickening of arteries, eventually making them too narrow to carry enough blood. But are scientists being paid to support this view? It’s hard to say for sure.
Opposing View: Cholesterol is actually needed by the body to repair damaged arteries. The thickening of arteries may result from scar tissue building up rather than from cholesterol itself.
As usual, the truth likely lies somewhere in the middle. You need to keep your cholesterol under control, but it may not be as deadly as it’s often portrayed.
Family doctors are quick to prescribe statins to “correct” your cholesterol. However, almost half of the people who start taking statins quit within a year, partly due to side effects (20% experience them) and partly because of the cost. Statins are not highly effective either. While they do lower cholesterol and may earn you a nod of approval from your doctor, over the course of five years, they only reduce the likelihood of a major cardiovascular event by 1%. If you have a cholesterol level over 200 and take statins consistently for 25 years, some studies suggest you might extend your life by three years. However, if you’re concerned enough with your health to do that, you’re probably making other healthy lifestyle choices that would contribute to a longer life even without statins. Another study found that taking a statin daily for five years results in living, on average, just three to four days longer.
But doctors have accepted the status quo, billions of dollars have been spent on marketing, and as a result, the use of statins has jumped from 12% of Americans (over age 40) in 2009 to 35% in 2019.
Personally, I think you should take a balanced approach and try to control your cholesterol naturally. Aim for levels that are not too high and not too low. I recommend the following:
– Our delicious Vanilla Fiber powder for your smoothies. Fiber absorbs toxins and cholesterol so you can eliminate them in your stool. The more of this I add to my kids’ smoothies, the more they love it.
– Five drops of lemongrass oil in a capsule with our SuperFood Drink (see below). Lemongrass is about half as strong as Statins, but instead of side effects, lemongrass has health benefits. I’ve seen people knock +30 points off their total cholesterol with this alone.
– Boost your GOOD cholesterol with omega-3s which are highly beneficial for your heart and brain. Be careful though, most of the fish oil on the market is rancid so the best source is from Algae (see below). If your burps smell like catfish vomit… your fish oil is spoiled. Toss it out. Not tryna brag but… my doctor said that I had the highest HDL (good cholesterol) that she’d ever seen. Get the good stuff.
Why Don’t I Fully “Trust the Science” on Cholesterol?
In the 1960s, doctors debated the causes of rising heart disease. Ancel Keys won the debate by highlighting seven countries where lower levels of saturated fats in the diet were associated with less heart disease (e.g., Japan, Italy). However, if he had chosen seven other countries, like Sweden, Finland, and Israel, he would have found the opposite—more saturated fat correlated with less heart disease. This was confirmed in a large study where patients swapped saturated fats for vegetable oil. While their cholesterol dropped by 30 points, their heart disease risk increased by 22%! https://www.statnews.com/2016/04/12/unearthed-data-challenge-dietary-advice/
So why did Ancel Keys cherry-pick those countries? It seems likely that he was paid to do so by the sugar industry https://www.npr.org/…/50-years-ago-sugar-industry… In my opinion, sugar, and seed oils (like vegetable oil) are bigger problems here. Yet doctors were given a fancy app to calculate your heart attack risk, which was later found to exaggerate the risk by 600%. When patients complain of muscle pain and weakness from statins, studies attribute it to the “Nocebo effect,” suggesting that the only reason people believe statins caused harm is that they were tricked into imagining the injury. The proposed solution? Tell them the symptoms are all in their heads.
I could go on, but I’ll stop here. I’m not advising anyone to change their medications. I’m simply saying that we all need to make every effort to take care of ourselves with the safest medicine in history: well-rounded organic foods, exercise, fresh air, and using modern medicine to supplement that effort—not the other way around. Don’t take my word, or anyone else’s, as gospel. Question everything and read both points of view.
How to buy the products mentioned above…
Pure Lemongrass Essential oil – https://bit.ly/BigLemongrass15mL
500 Empty veggie capsules – https://amzn.to/46WiGb8
SuperFood Drink – 6 Best Berries for your Cholesterol – https://bit.ly/51NingXiaPackets
Vanilla Smoothie Powder (Fiber)- https://bit.ly/VanillaFiberSmoothiePowder
Get Your Omegas where Fish get their Omegas, from Algae https://bit.ly/CleanOmegasFromAlgae
