By George Savastio, ND
We recently attended a conference with a few interesting presentations, one of which dealt with the topic named in the title of this article.
For most of our baby-boomer lifetime, we’ve been told that cholesterol in the blood has been scientifically identified as the cause of heart disease, and that lowering said cholesterol is the key to avoiding the main killer of American citizens. This conclusion was reached by a “guilt by association” logic based on the finding that cholesterol is a major component of the plaques that tend to build up in the arteries of the heart and elsewhere. By the 1970’s, it seemed everybody wanted to know what their cholesterol number was, and advice to eliminate dietary sources of cholesterol such as beef, shellfish and eggs along with statin medications was widely seen as the path to ending the cardiovascular disease scourge that was then (as now) claiming so many lives.
The trouble was, it didn’t work. Eliminating cholesterol-rich foods didn’t really do much to lower blood cholesterol values or the death rate from heart disease. Reducing cholesterol with medications proved to reduce cardiac deaths by one percent in white middle-aged to elderly men with multiple risk factors such as diabetes, obesity, smoking, family history, etc. Other men don’t seem to benefit, and women and minorities were not included in the research.
The cardiology community reacted slowly, if at all, to these disappointing results. The failure was ascribed to an inability to reduce cholesterol values to low enough levels, although other research indicated that death rates begin to increase once total cholesterol is lowered below 150. This is because the body needs cholesterol in more ways then are currently known, and lowering it makes it unavailable for its many positive uses. But, science and medicine tend to think with one-track minds, and the quest was on to find new medicines that would lower cholesterol even more dramatically than the now-familiar statin drugs.
That medicine now exists and has been unleashed on a largely trusting public ready to do whatever their doctor tells them. These new wonder drugs, called “PCSK9 Inhibitors” (trade names Praluent and Repatha) are capable of lowering low density lipoprotein (LDL, or “bad” cholesterol) to levels never seen before. The “old” target was to get the LDL below 100, but now it can in some cases be lowered to under 10. We should expect amazing benefits, and many lives will be spared. Right?
To be fair, these drugs haven’t been in widespread use long enough to see how they will truly affect the long-term health of those prescribed them. Both drug-makers followed the usual modern strategy of attempting to find out how high they could price them, and because of their prohibitive expense they aren’t yet approved by the insurance companies for general use. According to the cardiologist who did the presentation, the rarity of their use is a blessing. He reports an increase in pneumonia and strokes in his personal experience of seeing them used with patients, as cholesterol is required for proper immune function and (wait for it) repair of damaged interior walls of arteries. When cholesterol is reduced drastically, the immune system weakens. Many independently thinking cardiologists believe that the role of cholesterol in the coronary arteries is to repair damage to the interior walls, and that it is for that reason it is found in the “plaques” that may line them. It’s quite possible that cholesterol, at least when it isn’t oxidized, is protective against strokes!
It’s been clear to many for a long time that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, although there is so much money invested in the cardiology-pharmaceutical industrial complex that it may be many years and many dollars before we switch tracks and search for new ideas. In the meantime, the wise course is to stop attempting to fix the problem with the wrong solution, and let our bodies have the cholesterol they need!
