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The Five Key Things You Can Do to Lower LDL Cholesterol Healthfully
February 25, 2011
It is high time that people trying to improve their LDL cholesterol levels increase their understanding of the subject beyond the kindergarten level training of good and bad cholesterol, avoiding foods with cholesterol, and taking toxic high doses of statin drugs to knock down numbers.
By the time your body is making higher than normal levels of LDL cholesterol you do indeed have health problems. However, it is far better to get to the source of those problems and actually correct them than to put a toxic bandage on them and pretend they don’t exist anymore.
In this article, I will discuss the five most important solutions you can implement to actually change the source of the problems that are causing you to have high LDL cholesterol. I will explain to you the common reasons these problems come about, and the best non drug solutions for them. I will explain why statin drugs don’t solve the source of the problem and are often toxic, especially in higher doses. I will also explain why some commonly used medications, like blood pressure medication and antibiotics, may actually cause or contribute to cholesterol problems.
The Big Pharma propaganda machine has created a style of medicine that requires its participants to blindly follow instructions. It is not much different than being brainwashed by a cult. It is unfortunate that so many doctors are die-hard members, and live in fear of their Big Pharma sponsored licensing boards taking away their paycheck if they fail to follow the Big Pharma way. The best antidote for any cult’s propaganda is common sense. So I’ll provide the following explanation in an attempt to empower any person who wants to know.
Here are my five solutions:
Solution #1 – Stop Forcing Your Liver to Manufacture Excessive LDL Cholesterol
Solution #2 – Decongest Your Stagnant/Fatty Liver
Solution #3 – Stabilize Cell Membranes, Reduce Inflammation
Solution #4 – Restore Cellular Oxygen Utilization, Fix Thyroid Problems
Solution #5 – Reduce Your Toxic Burden, Especially from Your Own Digestive Tract
If your problem isn’t too serious, then maybe all you’ll need to do is implement Solution #1. However, most people struggle with two or three of these categories. Any person with a stubborn problem will likely need to work on all five. There are no quick fixes to improve your health. Be thankful that health can be restored.
Your liver is a manufacturing plant, a warehouse, and a primary distribution center. One of its many commodities are cholesterol bricks. If your cells need extra cholesterol beyond what they can make themselves, your liver is the primary place where cholesterol is made and then transported to them. Getting a fat-soluble brick to move through your watery circulation requires a transport vehicle, which is also known as LDL cholesterol (“bad” cholesterol). Compared to a cholesterol brick, LDL cholesterol is the size of a UPS truck. It picks up fat-soluble nutrition at your liver distribution center and takes it around your body, just as a UPS truck delivers its packages.
Your LDL-UPS truck specializes in fat-soluble packages. In addition to cholesterol bricks this also includes packages of dietary fat, essential fatty acids, and your fat-soluble antioxidants. This transport functionality of LDL cholesterol is absolutely vital to the health and survival of every cell in your body.
If you are beginning to wonder why a vital survival transport system, your LDL-UPS truck, has been called “bad” by the pill-pushing Big Pharma propaganda marketing machine, then common sense may be making an entry into your thought process. Yes, it is a rather sad state of affairs when your LDL-UPS trucks wind up in the ditch clogging your arteries. But shouldn’t this be your question, “How did the LDL-UPS trucks get in the ditch?” Or how about, “If the LDL-UPS trucks are in the ditch then how are the cells going to get the packages they need?” Big Pharma wants you to think that LDL-UPS trucks are evil and shouldn’t be on the road – a marketing ploy that is really good for selling drugs to a dumbed-down public.
Your cells and your liver use the exact same pathway to manufacture cholesterol bricks. It is a production line. Because making cholesterol is core to survival in your body, once this process is instructed to start, it must finish. There is no way to interrupt the process. The gatekeeper of this process is an enzyme called HMG CoA reductase. Think of HMG CoA reductase as a traffic cop controlling the production of cholesterol bricks. This traffic cop is trying to decide whether to give a go signal or a stop signal. In addition, this traffic cop receives phone calls from all over your body as well as from the production line itself, integrating multiple requests to determine the right amount of cholesterol for your body to make to be able to survive.
My five solutions are targeted at the most common reasons this system goes haywire and produces excessive cholesterol bricks.
Statins work by clogging the traffic cop’s phone system, thereby jamming the phone calls coming in so that he has no way of hearing what is actually going on in the body. All he hears is a stop message. A legitimate argument can be made that in situations of excess cholesterol production this generalized stop message could help slow down excess production of cholesterol bricks. As the dose of statins increases, which is now standard Western medicine, that argument loses value and the analogy is more like taking a sledgehammer to the head of the traffic cop.
The statin argument is weak in the first place, as it makes no attempt to solve the reason for phone calls coming to the traffic cop to make extra cholesterol bricks. Maybe some of those reasons are good. Maybe some of those reasons are reflective of other problems that should be solved. Doctors typically make little if any attempt to figure out what these phone calls are all about and determine the source of the problem. Rather, they prescribe what is a temporary solution at best and turn it into a way of life.
Keep in mind that the cholesterol production pathway that statin drugs target is not directly the production of LDL-UPS trucks, rather it is the cholesterol bricks. As it turns out your LDL-UPS trucks are themselves made up of a lot of cholesterol bricks. Thus, the process of short circuiting the production of cholesterol bricks indirectly starves the production of LDL-UPS trucks. You may wonder what else it is starving.
The cholesterol synthesis pathway in your liver has many branching pathways, it is a system of economy for your body to do many things related to survival at the same time. As your liver synthesizes cholesterol bricks it simultaneously produces coenzyme Q10 needed for cell energy production and heart health. One side street produces the selenoproteins that are the backbone antioxidant system of defense for every cell in your body, required for healthy immune function, and primary activators of thyroid hormone. This cholesterol pathway is also linked to the production of vitamin D, adrenal hormones, and sex hormones. It also makes many gene-signaling molecules in the isoprenoid family that are required for healthy cell function and the prevention of cellular mutation (cancer). All of these processes are indiscriminately interfered with by statins, potentially devastating to human health. The risks can increase along with the dosage.
Additionally, statins can indiscriminately block cholesterol synthesis in any cell anywhere in your body. Cells make cholesterol to repair themselves. This is especially important to nerve cells, which do not split and divide like other cells in your body and therefore must repair themselves in order to survive. The receptors on nerve cells enable them to receive neurotransmitters, thereby enabling you to have cognitive function and memory. These nerve cell receptors require cholesterol bricks as part of their proper three-dimensional structure. Statins interfere with this process as an undesirable side effect, inducing slow and progressive memory loss the longer they are used – a form of slow poisoning of your brain. If asked about memory loss after being on statins for a few years doctors will just blow it off as aging. Most doctors do not understand what they are doing to people. In fact, people who follow the Big Pharma/American Heart Association propaganda to lower their LDL cholesterol to less than 90 have placed themselves into an abnormally low level of LDL cholesterol that directly correlates to an increased risk for Parkinson’s disease. It is vital for your brain to use cholesterol bricks to maintain its health. Statins get in the way.
What I have tried to do thus far is give you a different perspective on the issue of cholesterol than you typically hear. Cholesterol is part of the foundation that assists survival for your body. LDL cholesterol is far from bad. With that brief introduction let’s now get on to the actual problems and how to solve them.
It is interesting that statin drugs, essentially acting as a poison to HMG CoA reductase, can enable a person to pig out on food and still have lower LDL cholesterol. This is definitely not the case for dietary supplements that assist cholesterol metabolism. Eating too much food will not allow them to help lower LDL cholesterol.
When you eat excess food, fat starts to pile up in your liver. This is extremely detrimental to healthy liver function. As a self defense mechanism your liver synthesizes VLDL and packs it with fat blobs (triglycerides) as a compensating strategy to get the excess fat out of your liver. If you take statins and block this self defense mechanism, while continuing to eat too much, your liver will really take a beating and your health will deteriorate regardless of your LDL number.
The only solution is to quit eating so much. I recommend following the Five Rules of the Leptin Diet, which automatically helps your liver function much better.
*** Nutrients have been removed from parts of this article due to nutrient health cliaim regulations. ***
Not only are Americans eating too much, they are also typically deficient in ***. *** is the key mineral that the HMG CoA reductase traffic cop needs in order to function normally. If your traffic cops are lacking *** then they can’t stop the production of cholesterol bricks. If you leave a gate in the fence open, then all the cows can inappropriately run out. A lack of *** is like leaving the gate open for excessive cholesterol production.
In terms of your diet, increase fresh fruit and green leafy vegetables to boost *** intake, along with eating less food. These two simple steps would help reduce cardiovascular disease risk.
I am a big proponent of using dietary supplements to help manage cholesterol metabolism. These do not replace a good diet or exercise. No single supplement is a magic cure for lowering cholesterol. However, supplements can be quite helpful for those who desire to use them, and extra *** is a great place to start.
Another top choice for traffic cop assistance is the *** form of ***. This form of *** - and no other - directly communicates to your HMG CoA traffic cops and tells them to slow down the production line. Unlike statins, which clog and congest the phone system, this is a very clear phone call as if coming from the end of the production line and saying, “We now have enough cholesterol bricks at this end of the line, so we don’t need you to start the production of so many new ones.” This is a consulting action with the traffic cop, not a sledgehammer to the traffic cop’s head. There is a huge difference.
In addition to their support for more normal cholesterol synthesis, *** and *** are indispensable to cardiovascular health for many reasons. Both act as anti-inflammatories and promote the health of arteries. Both inhibit damage to LDL cholesterol. Unlike statins, these nutrients have no adverse side effects.
Foods high in cholesterol don’t raise your cholesterol level, unless you are eating them as part of a diet too high in calories and lacking in fiber, which is common. Your liver will make as much LDL cholesterol as it sees fit, regardless of how much cholesterol you eat. You do not need to avoid healthy foods that contain cholesterol in order to lower your cholesterol. You do need to eat less food if you are overeating and eliminate snacking. You especially need to cut down on excess sugar.
If you are overweight, this means you must engage a steady process of weight loss. Simply eating less food and more fruits and vegetables may be all you need to gradually degrease your liver as the months go by. If that is the case, then your problems weren’t too bad. More often than not, Solution #2 can really benefit from some extra help. While excess food consumption invariably causes this problem, it also occurs in normal weight people for any reason of toxic liver stress (such as excess alcohol, medication damage, infection, etc.).
The most basic dietary change you can make to support this step is to increase your dietary fiber. Even the FDA can see the value in fiber, allowing a cardiovascular risk reduction health claim for soluble fiber intake. It is a dietary basic that you should never ignore. This is especially helpful for degreasing your liver once your LDL cholesterol is elevated.
*** acts like a sponge to absorb cholesterol that is being cleared out of your liver in your bile. Thus, it helps your liver clear out its stagnation, and has been shown many times to help lower LDL cholesterol8. I suggest using supplemental *** in addition to your diet, to reach a total of 50 grams per day.
Low fat protein is very helpful to a fatty stagnant liver. That is because protein is the primary calorie that makes your liver go. A great source of such protein is ***, which has been shown to help people lower their LDL cholesterol. I suggest it at least at breakfast. A recent study showed that 20 grams of ***, taken three times a day, lowered fatty liver by 20% after one month while reducing cholesterol. This rather impressive finding provides a strategy to help jump-start a stagnant liver.
Additionally, a number of nutrients help fat flow out of your liver (lipotropic nutrients), such as *** and ***, and have been shown to help reduce fatty liver.
My favorite nutrient in this category is the co-enzyme form of vitamin *** known as ***. Many studies show *** helps lower cholesterol in doses ranging from 600 mg to 900 mg per day. In a study of 16 patients with fatty liver and high triglycerides participants were given 600 mg of *** per day for at least six months. Nine of 16 were free of fatty liver5 at the end of the study, and also had reduced abdominal fat. *** is to sluggish fat what an engine is to box cars – it provides the energy to haul it into metabolic action, thereby helping reduce the backlog in the liver. *** is an energizing supplement that boosts adrenal function. It is especially helpful if you are also tired or stressed.
Almost all indigestion that “requires” acid-blocking medication is not caused by high stomach acid. It is caused by a fatty liver dumping excess bile and cholesterol into the digestive tract as a coping strategy to get rid of the buildup of fatty sludge in your liver. The excess bile refluxes backwards, burning your stomach, and even your esophagus.
Our bodies have little evolutionary experience being poisoned by too much food. To the contrary, we have elaborate systems for extracting fat from the diet to get it into our bodies so we don’t starve. Thus, we don’t have a lot of systems for efficiently dealing with excess. However, one solution involves a signaling system that is a type of fat-disposal thermostat called the farsenoid X receptor6. To make a very complex story extremely short and simple, if you can turn this receptor down then you can dump out excess cholesterol and fatty sludge into your gut without excess bile that burns your gut. Only one nutrient is known to do this, ***, which is extracted from the gum of the sap from the myrrh tree), and has been used in Ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years. Studies have shown that *** can lower LDL cholesterol8 and assist with weight management.
When you are trying to fix health problems you have to pace yourself according to your body’s ability to handle what is going on. For example, while you may agree that jogging five miles a day is really good for aerobic fitness and cardiovascular health, you may not have the ability to do so. If you made your body do it you could suffer a lot of adverse side effects. On the other hand, if you gradually build up your aerobic fitness you could eventually do it and feel great. Likewise, this issue is especially important to consider when you are degreasing a stagnant liver and gall bladder.
A lot of people who lose weight too fast end up needing their gall bladders removed because they are trying to force so much extra fat sludge through an already congested system. Many people with high LDL cholesterol already have significantly congested gall bladders reflected by nausea or even vomiting after eating fat-containing foods. The greater the indigestion in general, the more a stagnant system is likely. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do something about it, it just means pay attention. Strategies to help your liver and gall bladder degrease themselves typically improve any existing issues until they are all gone. On the other hand, if your attempts at improvement seem to flare up symptoms then go slower. This issue must be solved in order to solve one of the most important reasons LDL cholesterol is inappropriately elevated.
I should also point out that many people with this problem don’t have indigestion. The degreasing of fatty buildup in your liver is consistent with the size of your waistline, as it shrinks you are improving the problem. Because this is a long-term project for many people it is important to establish a trend in the right direction and then maintain that trend. The stress of elevated LDL cholesterol will likely improve before your liver is fully degreased. However, if you are overweight this problem is not really solved until you eventually reach a reasonable goal weight. While a flat stomach is best, it may be unrealistic for some. We do know that when your waistline in inches is more than half your height in inches you have significant problems in this category.
When cells around your body are exposed to excess alcohol, the alcohol, which is fat soluble, will cross cell membranes and induce toxic damage within the cell (excess alcohol kills brain cells). This has a deflating effect on the three-dimensional structure of your cells. Your cells respond by trying to prop their three-dimensional structure back up, which requires cholesterol bricks.
Constant exposure to excess alcohol repeats this process, causing several major problems:
1) Since the cell struggles to make enough cholesterol itself it is sending a 911 phone call to the HMG CoA traffic cop in your liver to make more cholesterol bricks and send them by overnight delivery via the LDL-UPS truck, thereby elevating LDL cholesterol levels in response to cellular damage.
2) The repetitive injury to cells causes too many cholesterol bricks to become part of the cell membrane, drastically impairing the healthy function of the cell. In essence the cell becomes stiff. This process going on in many cells of a tissue type or organ causes generalized stiffness (stiff brain, stiff arteries).
Here is another example: The fat cells within your white adipose tissue are getting crammed full of fat blobs (triglycerides) as you gain weight. Your fat cells are now bursting at their seams. In order to stabilize their expanded size they must synthesize cholesterol bricks. As weight gain continues, a crisis occurs and a 911 phone call is now going from your bursting fat cells to your HMG CoA traffic cop for more cholesterol, again raising LDL.
This mechanism is invariably involved in every person with elevated LDL cholesterol regardless of weight or alcohol intake. That is because there are many possible sources of inflammatory wear and tear, ranging from emotional stress to a lack of sleep to fighting chronic low-grade infection (like periodontal problems). The bottom line is that cellular irritants of any type induce low-grade inflammation while depleting the antioxidant reserves. It is very important to understand that this process has to be going on in order for LDL cholesterol to form plaque in your arteries. Only damaged LDL cholesterol forms plaque.
It is true that if you have elevated LDL cholesterol, you are more at risk for having damaged LDL. However, LDL damage can be going on regardless of your number.
In addition to LDL functioning as a UPS truck, it also does double duty and functions as a police car. While this system of economy wouldn’t go over very well in our politically correct society, our bodies always try to employ efficiency. While the antioxidants that are loaded on board your LDL-UPS truck are intended for cells, (assuming you have any on board due to consumption of them), they can also swing into action to help deactivate inflammatory or toxic problems encountered in the blood stream or elsewhere in the body. This requires your LDL to engage a problem and attempt to neutralize it with its antioxidants. If LDL wins the battle, then you are protected. If LDL loses the shoot out, then it becomes damaged itself. If you don’t have enough HDL to tow truck the damaged LDL back to your liver in a hurry, then it can be absorbed into the walls of your arteries to become plaque.
The idea behind taking a statin is to lower the LDL so this is less likely to happen. But what about all the cells that need extra cholesterol to fix themselves?
Taking antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients can be extremely helpful in this situation, to address the source of the problem. In your diet this means higher levels of fresh fruit (especially berries), vegetables, and whole grains. Keep in mind, the overarching issue is one of wear and tear. This means you must figure out how to balance your stressors and demands, compared to your relaxation and rejuvenation, as a primary strategy. While dietary supplements can protect you in hard times, they will not replace stress management and lifestyle management skills over the long haul. I should also point out that this same issue is behind the elevation of blood pressure as well, which often occurs in tandem with elevated LDL.
Thousands of studies on a vast array of nutrients show that dietary supplements can protect your LDL, boost your HDL, protect your arteries, protect your liver, and reduce inflammation. Don’t think of any single nutrient as a magic bullet or cure, rather consider them as part of your stress management team. You can use as many as you like. A combination of a wide variety of them is often helpful because they work in different ways. The greater the demands on you and the greater the wear and tear you feel, the higher should be your intake of a variety of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients.
Thyroid hormone sets the pace of metabolic activity within cells, the rate at which oxygen and calories are combined to produce energy. This highly influences key gene signals involved with cellular cholesterol and fat metabolism, sterol-regulatory elementary binding proteins (SREBPs12) and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs13).
The primary solution for fixing this problem is not taking thyroid hormone; it is exercise – especially improving aerobic exercise consistency and intensity. The supporting role of nutrition in this capacity is to enhance energy production within cells and to help you get a better response to exercise. Any time you build more muscle, you have more cellular engines that can combust oxygen and calories, thereby improving gene conditioning for both cellular cholesterol and fat metabolism. Every time you successfully get a good response to aerobic exercise you have delivered more oxygen to your cells, burned more calories, and taken your cholesterol and fat burning genes out for a test drive.
No nutrient by itself, and certainly no drug, will fix this reason for elevated cholesterol better than exercise fitness. And that includes helping to correct all manner of thyroid problems – even for people on thyroid medication who would like to get off (assuming they still have a thyroid gland).
This issue is linked to the previous three topics in this article. Excess food causes leptin resistance in your brain, in turn signaling your cells to run in starvation mode thus setting thyroid at very slow pace. Unfortunately, the excessive calories showing up at your cells don’t match up very well with the faulty brain signaling that has instructed your cells to go in slow motion. Thus, following the Five Rules of the Leptin Diet along with implementing Solution #1 and Solution #2 will go a long way to taking stress off this issue. Solution #3 revolves around inflammation and free radical damage, which throw a monkey wrench into thyroid function at the gland level, the liver activation level, and the cellular level.
Nutrients that help your cells implement thyroid instructions by enhancing the production of energy can go a long way toward normalizing SREBP activity within cells and thereby help out with normal cellular cholesterol balance and function. This is where nutrients like ***, ***, ***, and coenzyme *** can really come in handy. A faltering energy level is the key sign you are having a problem in this area. Thus, anything you do to help your energy, helps to fix it. This includes getting a better night’s sleep or not cutting your sleep short.
The key nutrient that helps activate your PPAR in cells is the ***. Another novel compound that helps is ***, found in small amounts in blueberries and typically extracted from the bark and heartwood of the Indian kino tree (***) for use as a dietary supplement.
The tendency during aging is to lose muscle and aerobic fitness, which readily contributes to poor cell function and elevated cholesterol. Unfortunately, blood pressure medication can cause the cholesterol to go up or make the existing problem worse. This is because blood pressure medication actually reduces the flow of oxygen to cells, inducing poor thyroid function within cells (the opposite of exercise fitness). I’ve seen this in clinical practice a number of times and I’ve never seen a study on it (nor do I expect one any time soon).
The bottom line is, physical fitness enhances thyroid functionality at the cellular level, which directly impacts the key genes in your cells that govern a cell’s use of cholesterol as well as fat burning in general. When cells don’t use cholesterol properly it tends to pile up in your blood and force the improper elevation of LDL.
Use it or lose it. This solution hinges on improving your energy level and improving your physical fitness. There are no short cuts or quick fixes.
Let me use the example of LPS (lipopolysaccharide) because it is an example the medical profession can understand. LPS is a very well understood toxin, coming from the cell wall of gram-negative bacteria. Thus, in an acute sense the degree of poisoning (toxemia) from any gram-negative bacterial infection, like food poisoning, is based on how high the LPS levels rise in your blood.
The metabolic problem is not so acute, so you don’t feel ill in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a low-grade poisoning that is a primary source of wear and tear that contributes to any disease of aging. It is adequate to interfere with metabolic activity, like throwing sand in the gas tank of a car.
This becomes very important in terms of cholesterol health when you consider the following findings:
1) Just about all overweight people have elevated LPS in their blood coming from imbalances in their digestive tract that are interfering with metabolism.
2) Normal weight or under weight people with digestive problems also have elevated LPS due to hostile “germ gangs” in their guts.
3) LDL cholesterol will elevate14 to protect your circulation against this highly inflammatory and toxic compound – a vital aspect of defense.
4) The problem of elevated LPS, elevated inflammation, and elevated cholesterol is now proven in type 2 diabetic patients15.
5) You can even get a fatty liver from this problem.
Antibiotics have now been proven to alter bacteria in ways that produce elevated LPS, possibly for an entire lifetime following their use. The more times they have been used the greater the risk for a problem. This places antibiotic use clearly at the center of the obesity epidemic and the metabolic syndrome of which elevated LDL cholesterol is a part.
Friendly flora and extra fiber are a great place to start in terms of improving this topic. Many other strategies to improve digestive health and detoxification may need to be employed, depending on the individual. I am simply pointing out that this is an important topic that most likely relates to anyone’s elevated LDL cholesterol and simply lowering LDL with a drug could actually expose the body to a higher level of toxic LPS damage. Unfortunately this goes on all the time.
Lowering LDL cholesterol levels is a good idea if they are over 130. Lowering them by addressing the reasons LDL is elevated not only solves the problem but is also associated with a return of health. In my book, that is common sense.
By the time your body is making higher than normal levels of LDL cholesterol you do indeed have health problems. However, it is far better to get to the source of those problems and actually correct them than to put a toxic bandage on them and pretend they don’t exist anymore.
In this article, I will discuss the five most important solutions you can implement to actually change the source of the problems that are causing you to have high LDL cholesterol. I will explain to you the common reasons these problems come about, and the best non drug solutions for them. I will explain why statin drugs don’t solve the source of the problem and are often toxic, especially in higher doses. I will also explain why some commonly used medications, like blood pressure medication and antibiotics, may actually cause or contribute to cholesterol problems.
The Big Pharma propaganda machine has created a style of medicine that requires its participants to blindly follow instructions. It is not much different than being brainwashed by a cult. It is unfortunate that so many doctors are die-hard members, and live in fear of their Big Pharma sponsored licensing boards taking away their paycheck if they fail to follow the Big Pharma way. The best antidote for any cult’s propaganda is common sense. So I’ll provide the following explanation in an attempt to empower any person who wants to know.
Here are my five solutions:
Solution #1 – Stop Forcing Your Liver to Manufacture Excessive LDL Cholesterol
Solution #2 – Decongest Your Stagnant/Fatty Liver
Solution #3 – Stabilize Cell Membranes, Reduce Inflammation
Solution #4 – Restore Cellular Oxygen Utilization, Fix Thyroid Problems
Solution #5 – Reduce Your Toxic Burden, Especially from Your Own Digestive Tract
If your problem isn’t too serious, then maybe all you’ll need to do is implement Solution #1. However, most people struggle with two or three of these categories. Any person with a stubborn problem will likely need to work on all five. There are no quick fixes to improve your health. Be thankful that health can be restored.
What is LDL Cholesterol?
Let’s begin at the beginning. The production of cholesterol occurs in every single cell of your body and is absolutely vital for cellular survival. Cholesterol is a small rigid substance. Think of it as a brick. You need bricks in a foundation. Your cell membranes use cholesterol bricks so that your cells have a three-dimensional structure. You have about eight ounces of cholesterol bricks distributed in cells everywhere. If you didn’t have them you wouldn’t exist because you would be as flat as a pancake on the floor. These bricks are also essential structural components of cell parts, including receptors that enable a cell to communicate properly. Your sex hormones and your adrenal hormones require high numbers of cholesterol bricks to work properly.Your liver is a manufacturing plant, a warehouse, and a primary distribution center. One of its many commodities are cholesterol bricks. If your cells need extra cholesterol beyond what they can make themselves, your liver is the primary place where cholesterol is made and then transported to them. Getting a fat-soluble brick to move through your watery circulation requires a transport vehicle, which is also known as LDL cholesterol (“bad” cholesterol). Compared to a cholesterol brick, LDL cholesterol is the size of a UPS truck. It picks up fat-soluble nutrition at your liver distribution center and takes it around your body, just as a UPS truck delivers its packages.
Your LDL-UPS truck specializes in fat-soluble packages. In addition to cholesterol bricks this also includes packages of dietary fat, essential fatty acids, and your fat-soluble antioxidants. This transport functionality of LDL cholesterol is absolutely vital to the health and survival of every cell in your body.
If you are beginning to wonder why a vital survival transport system, your LDL-UPS truck, has been called “bad” by the pill-pushing Big Pharma propaganda marketing machine, then common sense may be making an entry into your thought process. Yes, it is a rather sad state of affairs when your LDL-UPS trucks wind up in the ditch clogging your arteries. But shouldn’t this be your question, “How did the LDL-UPS trucks get in the ditch?” Or how about, “If the LDL-UPS trucks are in the ditch then how are the cells going to get the packages they need?” Big Pharma wants you to think that LDL-UPS trucks are evil and shouldn’t be on the road – a marketing ploy that is really good for selling drugs to a dumbed-down public.
Your cells and your liver use the exact same pathway to manufacture cholesterol bricks. It is a production line. Because making cholesterol is core to survival in your body, once this process is instructed to start, it must finish. There is no way to interrupt the process. The gatekeeper of this process is an enzyme called HMG CoA reductase. Think of HMG CoA reductase as a traffic cop controlling the production of cholesterol bricks. This traffic cop is trying to decide whether to give a go signal or a stop signal. In addition, this traffic cop receives phone calls from all over your body as well as from the production line itself, integrating multiple requests to determine the right amount of cholesterol for your body to make to be able to survive.
My five solutions are targeted at the most common reasons this system goes haywire and produces excessive cholesterol bricks.
Statins work by clogging the traffic cop’s phone system, thereby jamming the phone calls coming in so that he has no way of hearing what is actually going on in the body. All he hears is a stop message. A legitimate argument can be made that in situations of excess cholesterol production this generalized stop message could help slow down excess production of cholesterol bricks. As the dose of statins increases, which is now standard Western medicine, that argument loses value and the analogy is more like taking a sledgehammer to the head of the traffic cop.
The statin argument is weak in the first place, as it makes no attempt to solve the reason for phone calls coming to the traffic cop to make extra cholesterol bricks. Maybe some of those reasons are good. Maybe some of those reasons are reflective of other problems that should be solved. Doctors typically make little if any attempt to figure out what these phone calls are all about and determine the source of the problem. Rather, they prescribe what is a temporary solution at best and turn it into a way of life.
Keep in mind that the cholesterol production pathway that statin drugs target is not directly the production of LDL-UPS trucks, rather it is the cholesterol bricks. As it turns out your LDL-UPS trucks are themselves made up of a lot of cholesterol bricks. Thus, the process of short circuiting the production of cholesterol bricks indirectly starves the production of LDL-UPS trucks. You may wonder what else it is starving.
The cholesterol synthesis pathway in your liver has many branching pathways, it is a system of economy for your body to do many things related to survival at the same time. As your liver synthesizes cholesterol bricks it simultaneously produces coenzyme Q10 needed for cell energy production and heart health. One side street produces the selenoproteins that are the backbone antioxidant system of defense for every cell in your body, required for healthy immune function, and primary activators of thyroid hormone. This cholesterol pathway is also linked to the production of vitamin D, adrenal hormones, and sex hormones. It also makes many gene-signaling molecules in the isoprenoid family that are required for healthy cell function and the prevention of cellular mutation (cancer). All of these processes are indiscriminately interfered with by statins, potentially devastating to human health. The risks can increase along with the dosage.
Additionally, statins can indiscriminately block cholesterol synthesis in any cell anywhere in your body. Cells make cholesterol to repair themselves. This is especially important to nerve cells, which do not split and divide like other cells in your body and therefore must repair themselves in order to survive. The receptors on nerve cells enable them to receive neurotransmitters, thereby enabling you to have cognitive function and memory. These nerve cell receptors require cholesterol bricks as part of their proper three-dimensional structure. Statins interfere with this process as an undesirable side effect, inducing slow and progressive memory loss the longer they are used – a form of slow poisoning of your brain. If asked about memory loss after being on statins for a few years doctors will just blow it off as aging. Most doctors do not understand what they are doing to people. In fact, people who follow the Big Pharma/American Heart Association propaganda to lower their LDL cholesterol to less than 90 have placed themselves into an abnormally low level of LDL cholesterol that directly correlates to an increased risk for Parkinson’s disease. It is vital for your brain to use cholesterol bricks to maintain its health. Statins get in the way.
What I have tried to do thus far is give you a different perspective on the issue of cholesterol than you typically hear. Cholesterol is part of the foundation that assists survival for your body. LDL cholesterol is far from bad. With that brief introduction let’s now get on to the actual problems and how to solve them.
Solution #1 – Stop Forcing Your Liver to Manufacture Excessive LDL Cholesterol
The most common reason for your LDL cholesterol level to be elevated is that you have been poisoning yourself with excess food. This is typically high sugar, high fat, low fiber junk food. However, you can also poison yourself with too much of even the finest quality food.It is interesting that statin drugs, essentially acting as a poison to HMG CoA reductase, can enable a person to pig out on food and still have lower LDL cholesterol. This is definitely not the case for dietary supplements that assist cholesterol metabolism. Eating too much food will not allow them to help lower LDL cholesterol.
When you eat excess food, fat starts to pile up in your liver. This is extremely detrimental to healthy liver function. As a self defense mechanism your liver synthesizes VLDL and packs it with fat blobs (triglycerides) as a compensating strategy to get the excess fat out of your liver. If you take statins and block this self defense mechanism, while continuing to eat too much, your liver will really take a beating and your health will deteriorate regardless of your LDL number.
The only solution is to quit eating so much. I recommend following the Five Rules of the Leptin Diet, which automatically helps your liver function much better.
*** Nutrients have been removed from parts of this article due to nutrient health cliaim regulations. ***
Not only are Americans eating too much, they are also typically deficient in ***. *** is the key mineral that the HMG CoA reductase traffic cop needs in order to function normally. If your traffic cops are lacking *** then they can’t stop the production of cholesterol bricks. If you leave a gate in the fence open, then all the cows can inappropriately run out. A lack of *** is like leaving the gate open for excessive cholesterol production.
In terms of your diet, increase fresh fruit and green leafy vegetables to boost *** intake, along with eating less food. These two simple steps would help reduce cardiovascular disease risk.
I am a big proponent of using dietary supplements to help manage cholesterol metabolism. These do not replace a good diet or exercise. No single supplement is a magic cure for lowering cholesterol. However, supplements can be quite helpful for those who desire to use them, and extra *** is a great place to start.
Another top choice for traffic cop assistance is the *** form of ***. This form of *** - and no other - directly communicates to your HMG CoA traffic cops and tells them to slow down the production line. Unlike statins, which clog and congest the phone system, this is a very clear phone call as if coming from the end of the production line and saying, “We now have enough cholesterol bricks at this end of the line, so we don’t need you to start the production of so many new ones.” This is a consulting action with the traffic cop, not a sledgehammer to the traffic cop’s head. There is a huge difference.
In addition to their support for more normal cholesterol synthesis, *** and *** are indispensable to cardiovascular health for many reasons. Both act as anti-inflammatories and promote the health of arteries. Both inhibit damage to LDL cholesterol. Unlike statins, these nutrients have no adverse side effects.
Foods high in cholesterol don’t raise your cholesterol level, unless you are eating them as part of a diet too high in calories and lacking in fiber, which is common. Your liver will make as much LDL cholesterol as it sees fit, regardless of how much cholesterol you eat. You do not need to avoid healthy foods that contain cholesterol in order to lower your cholesterol. You do need to eat less food if you are overeating and eliminate snacking. You especially need to cut down on excess sugar.
Solution #2 – Decongest Your Stagnant/Fatty Liver
Typically, by the time you have elevated LDL cholesterol, your liver and gallbladder are all gummed up with fatty sludge. It will take a bit of time to get them working again. It is not simply a matter of a nutritional deficiency. The fatty congested sludge needs degreasing.If you are overweight, this means you must engage a steady process of weight loss. Simply eating less food and more fruits and vegetables may be all you need to gradually degrease your liver as the months go by. If that is the case, then your problems weren’t too bad. More often than not, Solution #2 can really benefit from some extra help. While excess food consumption invariably causes this problem, it also occurs in normal weight people for any reason of toxic liver stress (such as excess alcohol, medication damage, infection, etc.).
The most basic dietary change you can make to support this step is to increase your dietary fiber. Even the FDA can see the value in fiber, allowing a cardiovascular risk reduction health claim for soluble fiber intake. It is a dietary basic that you should never ignore. This is especially helpful for degreasing your liver once your LDL cholesterol is elevated.
*** acts like a sponge to absorb cholesterol that is being cleared out of your liver in your bile. Thus, it helps your liver clear out its stagnation, and has been shown many times to help lower LDL cholesterol8. I suggest using supplemental *** in addition to your diet, to reach a total of 50 grams per day.
Low fat protein is very helpful to a fatty stagnant liver. That is because protein is the primary calorie that makes your liver go. A great source of such protein is ***, which has been shown to help people lower their LDL cholesterol. I suggest it at least at breakfast. A recent study showed that 20 grams of ***, taken three times a day, lowered fatty liver by 20% after one month while reducing cholesterol. This rather impressive finding provides a strategy to help jump-start a stagnant liver.
Additionally, a number of nutrients help fat flow out of your liver (lipotropic nutrients), such as *** and ***, and have been shown to help reduce fatty liver.
My favorite nutrient in this category is the co-enzyme form of vitamin *** known as ***. Many studies show *** helps lower cholesterol in doses ranging from 600 mg to 900 mg per day. In a study of 16 patients with fatty liver and high triglycerides participants were given 600 mg of *** per day for at least six months. Nine of 16 were free of fatty liver5 at the end of the study, and also had reduced abdominal fat. *** is to sluggish fat what an engine is to box cars – it provides the energy to haul it into metabolic action, thereby helping reduce the backlog in the liver. *** is an energizing supplement that boosts adrenal function. It is especially helpful if you are also tired or stressed.
Almost all indigestion that “requires” acid-blocking medication is not caused by high stomach acid. It is caused by a fatty liver dumping excess bile and cholesterol into the digestive tract as a coping strategy to get rid of the buildup of fatty sludge in your liver. The excess bile refluxes backwards, burning your stomach, and even your esophagus.
Our bodies have little evolutionary experience being poisoned by too much food. To the contrary, we have elaborate systems for extracting fat from the diet to get it into our bodies so we don’t starve. Thus, we don’t have a lot of systems for efficiently dealing with excess. However, one solution involves a signaling system that is a type of fat-disposal thermostat called the farsenoid X receptor6. To make a very complex story extremely short and simple, if you can turn this receptor down then you can dump out excess cholesterol and fatty sludge into your gut without excess bile that burns your gut. Only one nutrient is known to do this, ***, which is extracted from the gum of the sap from the myrrh tree), and has been used in Ayurvedic medicine for thousands of years. Studies have shown that *** can lower LDL cholesterol8 and assist with weight management.
When you are trying to fix health problems you have to pace yourself according to your body’s ability to handle what is going on. For example, while you may agree that jogging five miles a day is really good for aerobic fitness and cardiovascular health, you may not have the ability to do so. If you made your body do it you could suffer a lot of adverse side effects. On the other hand, if you gradually build up your aerobic fitness you could eventually do it and feel great. Likewise, this issue is especially important to consider when you are degreasing a stagnant liver and gall bladder.
A lot of people who lose weight too fast end up needing their gall bladders removed because they are trying to force so much extra fat sludge through an already congested system. Many people with high LDL cholesterol already have significantly congested gall bladders reflected by nausea or even vomiting after eating fat-containing foods. The greater the indigestion in general, the more a stagnant system is likely. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do something about it, it just means pay attention. Strategies to help your liver and gall bladder degrease themselves typically improve any existing issues until they are all gone. On the other hand, if your attempts at improvement seem to flare up symptoms then go slower. This issue must be solved in order to solve one of the most important reasons LDL cholesterol is inappropriately elevated.
I should also point out that many people with this problem don’t have indigestion. The degreasing of fatty buildup in your liver is consistent with the size of your waistline, as it shrinks you are improving the problem. Because this is a long-term project for many people it is important to establish a trend in the right direction and then maintain that trend. The stress of elevated LDL cholesterol will likely improve before your liver is fully degreased. However, if you are overweight this problem is not really solved until you eventually reach a reasonable goal weight. While a flat stomach is best, it may be unrealistic for some. We do know that when your waistline in inches is more than half your height in inches you have significant problems in this category.
Solution #3 – Stabilize Cell Membranes, Reduce Inflammation
Alcoholics typically have fatty liver and elevated LDL cholesterol even if they are normal weight or under weight. This is partly due to direct damage to the liver. But it is more than that and serves as a great example for another important point about why LDL cholesterol is elevated in so many people.When cells around your body are exposed to excess alcohol, the alcohol, which is fat soluble, will cross cell membranes and induce toxic damage within the cell (excess alcohol kills brain cells). This has a deflating effect on the three-dimensional structure of your cells. Your cells respond by trying to prop their three-dimensional structure back up, which requires cholesterol bricks.
Constant exposure to excess alcohol repeats this process, causing several major problems:
1) Since the cell struggles to make enough cholesterol itself it is sending a 911 phone call to the HMG CoA traffic cop in your liver to make more cholesterol bricks and send them by overnight delivery via the LDL-UPS truck, thereby elevating LDL cholesterol levels in response to cellular damage.
2) The repetitive injury to cells causes too many cholesterol bricks to become part of the cell membrane, drastically impairing the healthy function of the cell. In essence the cell becomes stiff. This process going on in many cells of a tissue type or organ causes generalized stiffness (stiff brain, stiff arteries).
Here is another example: The fat cells within your white adipose tissue are getting crammed full of fat blobs (triglycerides) as you gain weight. Your fat cells are now bursting at their seams. In order to stabilize their expanded size they must synthesize cholesterol bricks. As weight gain continues, a crisis occurs and a 911 phone call is now going from your bursting fat cells to your HMG CoA traffic cop for more cholesterol, again raising LDL.
This mechanism is invariably involved in every person with elevated LDL cholesterol regardless of weight or alcohol intake. That is because there are many possible sources of inflammatory wear and tear, ranging from emotional stress to a lack of sleep to fighting chronic low-grade infection (like periodontal problems). The bottom line is that cellular irritants of any type induce low-grade inflammation while depleting the antioxidant reserves. It is very important to understand that this process has to be going on in order for LDL cholesterol to form plaque in your arteries. Only damaged LDL cholesterol forms plaque.
It is true that if you have elevated LDL cholesterol, you are more at risk for having damaged LDL. However, LDL damage can be going on regardless of your number.
In addition to LDL functioning as a UPS truck, it also does double duty and functions as a police car. While this system of economy wouldn’t go over very well in our politically correct society, our bodies always try to employ efficiency. While the antioxidants that are loaded on board your LDL-UPS truck are intended for cells, (assuming you have any on board due to consumption of them), they can also swing into action to help deactivate inflammatory or toxic problems encountered in the blood stream or elsewhere in the body. This requires your LDL to engage a problem and attempt to neutralize it with its antioxidants. If LDL wins the battle, then you are protected. If LDL loses the shoot out, then it becomes damaged itself. If you don’t have enough HDL to tow truck the damaged LDL back to your liver in a hurry, then it can be absorbed into the walls of your arteries to become plaque.
The idea behind taking a statin is to lower the LDL so this is less likely to happen. But what about all the cells that need extra cholesterol to fix themselves?
Taking antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients can be extremely helpful in this situation, to address the source of the problem. In your diet this means higher levels of fresh fruit (especially berries), vegetables, and whole grains. Keep in mind, the overarching issue is one of wear and tear. This means you must figure out how to balance your stressors and demands, compared to your relaxation and rejuvenation, as a primary strategy. While dietary supplements can protect you in hard times, they will not replace stress management and lifestyle management skills over the long haul. I should also point out that this same issue is behind the elevation of blood pressure as well, which often occurs in tandem with elevated LDL.
Thousands of studies on a vast array of nutrients show that dietary supplements can protect your LDL, boost your HDL, protect your arteries, protect your liver, and reduce inflammation. Don’t think of any single nutrient as a magic bullet or cure, rather consider them as part of your stress management team. You can use as many as you like. A combination of a wide variety of them is often helpful because they work in different ways. The greater the demands on you and the greater the wear and tear you feel, the higher should be your intake of a variety of antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients.
Solution #4 – Restore Cellular Oxygen Utilization, Fix Thyroid Problems
Thyroid problems are invariably associated with poor metabolic pace within cells, which includes the rate that cholesterol is used by cells for normal function. Subclinical hypothyroidism is associated with elevated LDL cholesterol. Most people with elevated LDL cholesterol have many symptoms of poor thyroid function whether their thyroid lab test numbers are fine or not. What is going on?Thyroid hormone sets the pace of metabolic activity within cells, the rate at which oxygen and calories are combined to produce energy. This highly influences key gene signals involved with cellular cholesterol and fat metabolism, sterol-regulatory elementary binding proteins (SREBPs12) and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs13).
The primary solution for fixing this problem is not taking thyroid hormone; it is exercise – especially improving aerobic exercise consistency and intensity. The supporting role of nutrition in this capacity is to enhance energy production within cells and to help you get a better response to exercise. Any time you build more muscle, you have more cellular engines that can combust oxygen and calories, thereby improving gene conditioning for both cellular cholesterol and fat metabolism. Every time you successfully get a good response to aerobic exercise you have delivered more oxygen to your cells, burned more calories, and taken your cholesterol and fat burning genes out for a test drive.
No nutrient by itself, and certainly no drug, will fix this reason for elevated cholesterol better than exercise fitness. And that includes helping to correct all manner of thyroid problems – even for people on thyroid medication who would like to get off (assuming they still have a thyroid gland).
This issue is linked to the previous three topics in this article. Excess food causes leptin resistance in your brain, in turn signaling your cells to run in starvation mode thus setting thyroid at very slow pace. Unfortunately, the excessive calories showing up at your cells don’t match up very well with the faulty brain signaling that has instructed your cells to go in slow motion. Thus, following the Five Rules of the Leptin Diet along with implementing Solution #1 and Solution #2 will go a long way to taking stress off this issue. Solution #3 revolves around inflammation and free radical damage, which throw a monkey wrench into thyroid function at the gland level, the liver activation level, and the cellular level.
Nutrients that help your cells implement thyroid instructions by enhancing the production of energy can go a long way toward normalizing SREBP activity within cells and thereby help out with normal cellular cholesterol balance and function. This is where nutrients like ***, ***, ***, and coenzyme *** can really come in handy. A faltering energy level is the key sign you are having a problem in this area. Thus, anything you do to help your energy, helps to fix it. This includes getting a better night’s sleep or not cutting your sleep short.
The key nutrient that helps activate your PPAR in cells is the ***. Another novel compound that helps is ***, found in small amounts in blueberries and typically extracted from the bark and heartwood of the Indian kino tree (***) for use as a dietary supplement.
The tendency during aging is to lose muscle and aerobic fitness, which readily contributes to poor cell function and elevated cholesterol. Unfortunately, blood pressure medication can cause the cholesterol to go up or make the existing problem worse. This is because blood pressure medication actually reduces the flow of oxygen to cells, inducing poor thyroid function within cells (the opposite of exercise fitness). I’ve seen this in clinical practice a number of times and I’ve never seen a study on it (nor do I expect one any time soon).
The bottom line is, physical fitness enhances thyroid functionality at the cellular level, which directly impacts the key genes in your cells that govern a cell’s use of cholesterol as well as fat burning in general. When cells don’t use cholesterol properly it tends to pile up in your blood and force the improper elevation of LDL.
Use it or lose it. This solution hinges on improving your energy level and improving your physical fitness. There are no short cuts or quick fixes.
Solution #5 – Reduce Your Toxic Burden, Especially from Your Own Digestive Tract
LDL cholesterol--in addition to its UPS truck and police car duties--also acts as part of your poison control center. It's like having little livers floating around in your blood that help bind up toxins so they can be removed from your body. The reason this is so rarely appreciated by Big Pharma is that lowering LDL with statins, if this problem is going on, will cause organ damage and increase cancer risk by stripping away a primary defense against being poisoned. Unfortunately, this problem is common in people who have elevated LDL cholesterol.Let me use the example of LPS (lipopolysaccharide) because it is an example the medical profession can understand. LPS is a very well understood toxin, coming from the cell wall of gram-negative bacteria. Thus, in an acute sense the degree of poisoning (toxemia) from any gram-negative bacterial infection, like food poisoning, is based on how high the LPS levels rise in your blood.
The metabolic problem is not so acute, so you don’t feel ill in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a low-grade poisoning that is a primary source of wear and tear that contributes to any disease of aging. It is adequate to interfere with metabolic activity, like throwing sand in the gas tank of a car.
This becomes very important in terms of cholesterol health when you consider the following findings:
1) Just about all overweight people have elevated LPS in their blood coming from imbalances in their digestive tract that are interfering with metabolism.
2) Normal weight or under weight people with digestive problems also have elevated LPS due to hostile “germ gangs” in their guts.
3) LDL cholesterol will elevate14 to protect your circulation against this highly inflammatory and toxic compound – a vital aspect of defense.
4) The problem of elevated LPS, elevated inflammation, and elevated cholesterol is now proven in type 2 diabetic patients15.
5) You can even get a fatty liver from this problem.
Antibiotics have now been proven to alter bacteria in ways that produce elevated LPS, possibly for an entire lifetime following their use. The more times they have been used the greater the risk for a problem. This places antibiotic use clearly at the center of the obesity epidemic and the metabolic syndrome of which elevated LDL cholesterol is a part.
Friendly flora and extra fiber are a great place to start in terms of improving this topic. Many other strategies to improve digestive health and detoxification may need to be employed, depending on the individual. I am simply pointing out that this is an important topic that most likely relates to anyone’s elevated LDL cholesterol and simply lowering LDL with a drug could actually expose the body to a higher level of toxic LPS damage. Unfortunately this goes on all the time.
Summary
I have suggested five strategies to improve LDL cholesterol levels. They center around eating less food, helping your liver deal with stagnation, reducing inflammation and oxidative damage, improving cellular energy, and boosting digestive health. Each solution is helped by a better diet and exercise, which are always the foundation for lasting improvement. Lifestyle and stress management also play important roles. Dietary supplements can be used as tools to assist this process, as desired.Lowering LDL cholesterol levels is a good idea if they are over 130. Lowering them by addressing the reasons LDL is elevated not only solves the problem but is also associated with a return of health. In my book, that is common sense.
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