We have all heard that high cholesterol can cause heart disease and atherosclerosis. Heart disease is the #1 health problem for both women and men in the United States. Cholesterol can build up along the walls of your arteries. When too much builds up, it can block the flow of blood. Arteries that supply blood to your heart or to your brain can become blocked. This can cause a heart attack or stroke. 

We also know that having a high HDL (high density lipoproteins) level is good and a low LDL (low density lipoproteins) is bad, but have you ever heard of VLDL (very low density lipoproteins)? Did you know that diet can only effect a change of around 10 to maybe 20% to your overall cholesterol levels? The rest is determined by family history, genetics and age. Our cholesterol tends to get higher as we get older. 

There is also another important factor that you may not have heard about yet. That low fat diet you have heard so many good things about for years may be doing more harm then good. That it very well could be an excess of carbohydrates that does more harm then fat. Carbohydrates in your diet do lower your LDL levels, but can also increase your VLDL levels, which as I will explain in my next Blog is an even worse scenario. This is what we refer to as the “Carbohydrate factor”. Measuring total cholesterol does not provide us with the whole truth as to one’s propensity for heart disease as it tells us nothing about the status of VLDL in relation to LDL. 

Here’s something else to chomp on. Monounsaturated fats lower LDL levels and raise HDL levels right? But here is the rub…..the primary fat in red meat, eggs and bacon is the very same monounsaturated fat that’s in olive oil, not saturated fat as we have been told for over 30 years. 

Here is a perfect example of this scenario. Now stay with me on this. A broiled Porterhouse steak will typically be reduced to equal parts of fat to protein, 51% of that fat will be monounsaturated and 90% will be oleic acid, which means saturated fat will be 45% of the total fat, but 1/3 of that is steric acid. This in turn increases HDL levels with no effect on LDL. The last 4% is polyunsaturated fat, which lowers LDL levels. In a nutshell 70 % of the fat content of a Porterhouse steak will improve the relative levels of LDL and HDL. The 30% that is left over will raise LDL cholesterol and HDL cholesterol in equal proportion so it will have an insignificant effect overall. 

This scenario, which has been scientifically proven and reproduced in numerous nutrition studies by many top name nutrition scientists shows that a Porterhouse steak can actually help reduce heart disease. However, due to the confusion and pandemonium this new information would cause if released to the public we remain ill informed. In other words the earth is still flat and ignorance is bliss or in this case easier to control.  

I will continue this investigation into the relationship between cholesterol and LDL in my next Blog. 

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Michael George