Cholesterol

I feel a bit like the Grinch raising health issues around Christmas time when hedonism is how we celebrate.  Who wants their Christmas parade to be rained on by a natural health zealot?  Too bad though...

High cholesterol can contribute to heart attacks, strokes, and vascular dementia.  

Bringing cholesterol under control is not a function of reversing your physical deficiency for statin drugs, much as conventional doctors push those at people.  Bringing cholesterol down involves (in order of importance): 

1. Controlling stress
2. Reducing simple sugars and starch
3. Exercise
4. Diet

Sadly, conventional medicine reverses the order and wants you to alter your diet, whereupon when that doesn't do enough of the job they offer the drugs that kill off your liver so your bad heart doesn't get you.  This is a sad state of affairs!

Control your stress as much as possible.  The body recruits cholesterol -- i.e. stimulates your liver to make more cholesterol -- to make stress hormones.  Reduce stress, increase stress coping and the demand for those stress hormones declines and cholesterol goes down.  Exercise goes a long way in helping the body cope more efficiently with stress!

High glucose and sugar levels prime the cholesterol pathways and sugar rattles through biochemical pathways in your body to create higher triglycerides, which in turn get cranked over into cholesterol as a fat storage process.  Reduce sugar intake and amazingly the cholesterol numbers will drop.

Exercise works because of the stress coping connection I just mentioned, but it also alters the cholesterol makeup.  There is good and bad cholesterol -- cholesterol that sticks to vessels as opposed to cholesterol that carries fats, etc. back to the liver for processing.  Exercise increases the good cholesterol.

Diet only controls about 20% of the total cholesterol.  This means you can eliminate all cholesterol from your diet and your total cholesterol will only come down 20%.  If you are just slightly over then, diet change will help.  Most are not in the slightly over category.

Herbal/natural supplements for reducing cholesterol include: plant sterols, guggulipids, and fiber.  I have seen a number of patients completely drop their very high cholesterol numbers doing nothing but go on very high fiber diets.  So, bottom line here is:  nobody should really NEED a statin medication of any kind for high cholesterol when all of these effective alternatives exist!