Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Does Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease?

 

 

https://www.tiktok.com/@mohanaturoholistics/video/7202991888549350683

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQPfYghxXQI

 

Dear Dr (Mrs) N. Kandiah,

Thank you for requesting my comment on the article you sent below in parenthesis and in different colours.    

 “Pharma companies extracted USD 2 trillion from consumers in the name of cholesterol level treatment.   What a shame on medical research fraud and authorities. Their incompetency costed USD 2 trillion to people those who were fit and healthy.    *Cholesterol* is finally officially removed from Naughty List. The US government has finally accepted that *cholesterol* is not a _nutrient of concern_. *doing a U-turn* on their warnings to us to stay away from high-cholesterol foods since the 1970s to avoid heart disease and clogged arteries.   This means eggs, butter, full-fat dairy products, nuts, coconut oil and meat have now been classified as *safe* and have been officially removed from the _nutrients of concern_ list.   The US Department of Agriculture, which is responsible for updating the guidelines every five years, stated in its findings for 2015: "Previously, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommended that cholesterol intake be limited to no more than 300 mg/day.  

 "The 2015 DGAC will not bring forward this recommendation because available evidence shows no appreciable relationship between consumption of dietary cholesterol and serum (blood) cholesterol, consistent with the AHA/ACC (American Heart Association / American College of Cardiology).  The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee will, in response, no longer warn people against eating high-cholesterol foods and will instead focus on sugar as the main substance of dietary concern.   US cardiologist Dr Steven Nissen said: _It's the right decision_. _We got the dietary guidelines wrong. They've been wrong for decades_."   When we eat more foods rich in this compound, our bodies make less. If we deprive ourselves of foods high in cholesterol - such as eggs, butter, and liver - our body revs up.    

The Real Truth about Cholesterol. The majority of the cholesterol in you is produced by your liver. Your brain is primarily made up of cholesterol. It is essential for nerve cells to function.    Cholesterol is the basis for the creation of all the steroid hormones, including oestrogen, testosterone, and corticosteroids.    *High cholesterol in the body is a clear indication which shows the liver of the individual is in good health*   

Dr. George V. Mann M.D. Associate Director of the Framingham study for the incidence and prevalence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and its risk factors states:  _Saturated fats and cholesterol in the diet are not the cause of coronary heart disease. *That myth is the greatest deception of the century, perhaps of any century*_   *Cholesterol is the biggest medical scam of all time* There is no such thing as *bad Cholesterol*   

So you can stop trying to change your Cholesterol level. Studies prove beyond a doubt, cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease and it won't stop a heart attack.   *The majority of people that have heart attacks have normal cholesterol levels. *   OUR BODY NEEDS 950 mg OF CHOLESTEROL FOR DAILY METABOLISM AND THE LIVER IS THE MAIN Producer. ONLY 15% OF CHOLESTEROL IS BEING DONATED BY THE FOOD WE EAT.    

 

If the fat content is less in the food we eat, our liver has to work more to maintain the level at 950 mg.   *If the cholesterol level is high in our body, it shows the liver is working perfect. *   Experts say that there is nothing like LDL or HDL.  ………….. ….. *Cholesterol is not found to create blocks anywhere in the human body*.   Please share the recent facts about CHOLESTEROL”  

 

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/10/feds-poised-to-withdraw-longstanding-warnings-about-dietary-cholesterol/utm_term=.1982832f86fa

 

Thank you for the post above.   

 

I have written many times in the past that cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease, and neither egg, brain or liver food all containing high cholesterol have anything to do with high blood cholesterol, or with heart disease.

In fact, the homeostatic feedback mechanism of the liver can cause the liver to produce 10 times more cholesterol endogenously than all the cholesterol we can eat through food every day. 

This means the amount of cholesterol from food pales into nothing compared to what the liver can synthesize.   

 

For instance, one large egg contains about 186 mg of cholesterol all found in the yolk. Suppose we consume 10 eggs a day. The intake from 10 eggs alone amounts to 1860 mg.   

 

An adult weighing   68 to 82 kg should have about 4,500 to 5,700 mL. of blood.    Let us use 5 litres (5,000 mL) as an average for easy calculation for illustration.   

 

This implies that even if he eats 10 eggs a day, his dietary contribution from eggs would only raise his blood level of cholesterol by only 37 mg per 100 mL, not even wanting to consider that about 0.4 g (400 mg) of cholesterol is being excreted through the bile each day.   

 

I have eaten at least two eggs almost every day all my life since I was a child and until today at the age of 82, I have never had any high cholesterol or heart problems.   Furthermore, in 1969 when I started working at the Institute for Medical Research, for at least 10 years I used to go an Indian food stall behind Indian money lenders shop in Lebuh Ampang in Kuala Lumpur and have my favourite lunch of Indian curry goat’s brain cooked with curry and eggs there every day.   

 

But when I checked my blood level cholesterol, it was always normal, and its level has never been raised despite so much curried goat’s brains.  I have eaten daily for 10 years. 

 

I might have at the same time consumed a large amount of choline from the eggs and brain which is supposed to be excellent for the brain and nervous system?   Brain has the highest amount of cholesterol among all the cholesterol-rich foods like egg yolk and liver. I never till today have any problem with high cholesterol or heart disease all my life. 

 

In fact, eggs and brain food are very high in choline which is very essential for brain function and neurological development throughout life. See my write up attached on the benefits of eggs here:  

 

 http://flfam.org.my/files/Dr%20Lim%20Ju%20Boo%20presentation%20-Hen%20Egg.pdf

or here in alternative link:

https://taionn.blogspot.com/2017/09/dr-lim-ju-boos-slide-presentation-on.html

 

 When I was studying in London in 1964 my late professor, Professor John Yudkin who was a Professor of Nutrition, University of London already told us cholesterol does not cause heart disease, but refined white sugar does.   

 Prodessor John Yudkin here: 

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yudkin


It was at the time when this theory that cholesterol causes heart disease was rampantly believed among doctors who influenced the lay public to believe the same. 

 

 When i was working in various Divisions - the Nutrition Division, Community Medicine, Epidemioloigy and Clinical Research  at the Institute for Medical Research (IMR) in 1968 - 1994, I used to sign not just one, ten, or a hundred, but tens of thousands of analytical reports on blood cholesterol levels in blood samples sent to us by tens of hundreds of government hospitals every day.   

 

They were sent to IMR from all over Malaysia, from East and West Malaysia, and from hospitals near the Thai border in the north to those in Johore and Johor Bahru in the south.   In our analysis we found no relationship between what the doctors wrote there in their clinical notes about patients suspected of having heart disease, ischemia and heart attack and their serum cholesterol levels There were 3 parties involved here: 

 

1. The Patient 2. The doctor 3. 

 

We, the analyst helping out the doctor   Initially, among the three parties we put the blame on ourselves first. We thought we were wrong due to an analytical error. However, when we saw what the doctor wrote there in their clinical notes did not tally with our findings, we requested our medical lab technologists to repeat the analysis.   The return results were the same each time for tens of hundreds of repeated analyses. 

 

The repeat results each time showed only one or two milligram per litre of blood difference from the original.   Not satisfied, we requested a recovery analysis to be done in case the analytical techniques were unreliable. We then used known amounts of pure cholesterol added into the blood samples, and the recovery amount was exactly the same as what we added. 

 

So there was no analytical error involved on our part.   So, there are only two remaining parties left: either the doctor's preliminary diagnosis was wrong, or the patient lied to the doctor.   In any case we did not see other investigations such as ECG to look for ST elevation, and cardiac enzymes such as myoglobin, troponin and creatine kinase being done by the clinicians which would have greatly helped us with the diagnosis.   

 

They only requested for serum cholesterol. So, we just did that, and, in most cases, we found no relationship between what the clinicians wrote there and our lab findings.  

 

I already knew by then John Yudkin was dead right, but I could not voice this out because of the very strong belief and mindset of the doctors who still believe cholesterol was the cause of their patient’s heart problems because of that very influential and famous longitudinal Framingham Heart Study that started in 1948 and is still going on till today on cohorts that initially found cholesterol caused heart disease. 

 But as the study was followed up years later, they found there were other factors such as diabetes, stress, high blood pressure, infection, sedentary lifestyles, obesity... etc. etc., that were the causative root causes of heart disease, and not just cholesterol. 

 

I already suspected there was no relationship at all between ischemic heart events and cholesterol by then, but I could not voice this out because of the very strong ingrained belief among doctors that high blood cholesterol was the cause.   

 

Then around 1970’s the Board of Directors of the same Framingham Heart Study issued  an official statement that cholesterol is not the primary cause of heart disease but other factors they later found were the  causes But by then the big drug companies have already capitalized on Framingham earlier study, and they started to produce their various types and generations of  statin groups of anti-cholesterol drugs such as atorvastatin fluvastatin, lovastatin, pitavastatin, pravastatin, rosuvastatin, simvastatin into the market. The amount of these statins prescribed rose to US $88 million in 2002 to US $ 60 billion annually due to such rampant beliefs among doctors and the lay public who believed the same.      

 

Unfortunately doctors hardly read medical journals and papers published on new discoveries but they just listen to drug salespeople who promote their products.   After all the big statins producing companies have already invested tens of US $ billion to produce these anti-cholesterol drugs, and hence they need to continue to push them to the doctors to get back their investments despite Framingham Heart Study earlier retraction.   

 

What can we do as they are so powerful financially to overpower the medical profession and brain wash them thoroughly with their drug of choice. We all in research and in the pharmaceutical industry know what is going on between the drug industry and the doctors as they work hand in gloves together.  

 

Numerous studies following the Framingham Heart Study also showed that many other factors such as stress, obesity, sedentary lifestyle, unhealthy food and harmful nutrition are the main causes of cardiovascular events, and not cholesterol. 

 

 Citing just one example will do, it was found that stress may be more important than cholesterol as the causation of cardiovascular disease, and this is explained below in No 1: 

 

1.       https://www.stress.org/why-reducing-stress-is-much-more-important-than-lowering-cholesterol

 

The second one is a video on "The Town of Allopath" highlighting the deception by drug companies to treat non-existing causes of disease.

 

2.       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZUPYZ2ICvU

 

The second one may also be accessed by typing "The Town called Allopath" directly into Google search. Thank you.

 

The release of harmful stress hormones such as adrenaline in the fight or flight response may be one of the causes.   When the stress “fight or flight” response episode is over, the stress hormone adrenaline breaks down and releases cascade of extremely damaging free radicals into the bloodstream causing extensive damage to all the cells, tissues, organs and systems in the body including the inner intima linings of the coronary blood vessels to the heart. This causes an inflammatory lesion in the coronaries to block blood flow to the heart. 

 

 This has completely nothing to do with cholesterol deposits as there are other deposits that cause atherosclerotic plaques to be formed as well.   What it actually does is, the free radicals as an singlet oxygen radical oxidizes the low density cholesterol in particular to make them become very sticky and gummy allowing other deposits to adhere to the already damaged intima of the coronaries, and this may compound to further damage 

                 

Atherosclerosis and cholesterol: 

 

Pure cholesterol monohydrate is a very pale-yellow substance practically insoluble in water (less than 0.5 mg/100 ml of water).

 

But it is slightly soluble in organic solvents such as ethanol (1.29% w/w at 20 °C), methanol, dimethylformamide (DMF), chloroform, and pet ether.

 

When pure cholesterol powder is touched with the fingers, it does not stick onto the fingers at all. It is neither gummy or sticky but just powdery to feel, and it floats in water.

 

Hence there is no reason why it must stick onto the inner surface of blood vessels to form a cholesterol plaque there unless oxidized by free radicals, especially the low-density lipoprotein cholesterol that may cause it to be gummy trapping other substances such as fibrin (from blood clotting), dead blood cell, fatty materials, calcium, etc to form an atherosclerotic plaque there. When plaque (fatty deposits) clogs your arteries, that’s called atherosclerosis. 

 

Hyo-Soo Kim of Seoul National University and his team characterized different types of cells that play a role in calcium accumulation in blood vessels. 

 

 They reported the novel concept that immature, stem-cell like cells have the potential to become either osteoblasts or osteoclasts, and that a drug can push these cells toward becoming osteoclasts instead of osteoblasts.   

 

Their study offers new insights into how calcium builds up in the walls of blood vessels during advanced stages of atherosclerosis and paves the way for long-sought therapeutic strategies to combat this common problem. To study the cause of calcium build-up in vessel walls, Kim and his team focused on calcifying progenitor cells—immature cells that can turn into specialized cells capable of either promoting or reversing calcium accumulation (osteoblasts or osteoclasts, respectively). 

 

They isolated these cells from the aortas of mice and sorted them into two groups. Both groups originated from bone marrow—spongy tissue found inside bones—and expressed a cell surface protein called stem cell antigen-1 (Sca-1), but only one group expressed another cell surface protein called platelet-derived growth factor receptor alpha (PDGFRα). 

 

 Moreover, both types of cells had a tendency to turn into osteoblast-like cells and thereby promote atherosclerotic calcium build-up. But cells expressing both Sca-1 and PDGFRα were more committed to the osteoblastic lineage, whereas those expressing only Sca-1 were bidirectional:   they could also become osteoclast-like cells.   

 

The findings suggest that these bidirectional cells could be targeted by new therapies that shift their fate toward the osteoclastic lineage, thereby preventing calcium accumulation in blood vessels. 

 

 Their study did not show any cholesterol being involved in plaque formation. Hope this comment helps answer your article and question you sent. 

 

Jb lim


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