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Cholesterol Confusion

What about cholesterol levels? How can we increase the amount of fat we're eating without giving ourselves heart disease, right? We've all probably seen commercials or heard these little anecdotes where like saturated fat, for example, saturated fat is solid at room temperature, so you could imagine that like it gets solid in your arteries and clogs them up so tha this piece of asparagus is solid at room temperature does that mean it gets clogging your arteries and causes heart disease like that? Just some of these arguments just don't make any sense at all just cause a fat is solid at room temperature it doesn't mean it causes heart disease fat does not cause risky cholesterol levels it's never been demonstrated there's just a massive and factors about a billion dollars worth of research that has been conducted attempting to prove that low fat is healthy and that eating high fat causes risky cholesterol levels and increases the incidence of heart disease and it has never been demonstr...

ated beside in the face of a billion dollars worth of government funding trying to prove it right total cholesterol per se is not a risk factor in coronary heart disease at all from dr gordon in the journal american journal of medicine if it was true that cholesterol caused heart disease and that eating fat leads to risky cholesterol levels, we would need to prove three things and to prove that the pyramid diet and the plate my plate diet are good for us we would need to prove scientifically proved three things first, eating foods containing fat leads to a risky level of total cholesterol that this level of total cholesterol causes cardiovascular disease and that the pyramid diet reverses those cholesterol levels guess how many of those things have been proven by the science? None absolutely none ever in fact, this is a great encapsulation from professor over the university of california about what the mainstream has been doing. The approach of many mainstream investigators has been narrowly focused to produce and evaluate evidence in support of hypothesis that dietary saturated fat elevates ldl cholesterol and thus the risk of coronary artery disease. The evidence is not strong and overall dietary intervention by lowering saturated fat intake does not lower the incidents of non fatal coronary artery disease nor such a dietary intervention lower coronary disease or total mortality it just doesn't work. The data is never there, and in fact the american medical association back in the day was singing a much different tune than what they're singing today and that's the anti fat, anti cholesterol fad is not just foolish and futile, it also carries some risk we've never proven any steps in that chain, and the pyramid diet has never been proven to do anything beneficial to cholesterol levels in fact it's proven harmful to our cholesterol levels but just to empower you real quick with cem cem take home tools for cholesterol so first of all, we talked about cholesterol gonna go really high level here there's a great book called cholesterol clarity by a gentleman by name of jimmy moore I would recommend you read if you want to go deeper also anything by gary tops is fabulous, but from a very high level total cholesterol is completely irrelevant it's completely irrelevant let me give you a very concrete example so this graph illustrates a bit your your estimated risk of heart disease based on total cholesterol levels and it's broken down by how much of your total cholesterol was coming from hdl or the good cholesterol which we don't have time to talk about, but there ldl isn't bad cholesterol, there are different types of ldl we don't really have time for that, but hdl is unequivocally good for you, so nobody disagrees about that. So you've got your ldl levels down here you've got your hdl levels here. So if I were to come to you and say, hey, my total cholesterol is one hundred eighty five does that mean I have a high risk of heart disease or a lower risk of heart disease? Well, if eighty five of that one eighty five is coming from hdl, I had incredibly low chance of heart disease but if only twenty five of that one, eighty five is coming from hdl. I haven't extremely high likelihood of getting heart disease so total cholesterol in and of itself it's like measuring intelligence using eye color like it just it has no it'sjust completely irrelevant. In fact, there is a wealth of evidence that increasing the concentration of hdl cholesterol through diet will lower the risk of coronary artery disease. And if you want to increase hdl levels, your total cholesterol will go up. So why are we being told to bring our total cholesterol down if you want to bring your total cholesterol down, one way to do that is to eat a bunch of process starch because that will drop your hdl but dropping her hdl increases your risk of heart disease death so again, it's really important to look at the measurements were using because they can lead us down the wrong path in the ratio of total to hdl cholesterol is considered more important than total or hdl cholesterol concentrations in estimating the risk of coronary artery disease. So this is really, really high level but hopefully it's helpful as a bit of a take home message. If you combine the relevance of total cholesterol with the importance of hdl cholesterol, you could from a very high level stack rank heart healthy diets like this right? So a diet that major hdl cholesterol lower and your ldl cholesterol higher is from there's nuance here, right? But it's going to be the least heart healthy whereas a diet that increases your hdl and lowers or a ldl would be pretty universally recognized as being mohr heart healthy so increasing hdl doing nothing to ldl rake second increasing hdl and increasing ldl it's still up near the top because increasing hdl does more good than increasing ldl does bad and you can kind of see the progression on the way down where do you think the food guide pyramid diet stacks on this chart? I must get this slide and right there if you eat less fat and more starch it's not the worst but it will. That diet is really effective at lowering total cholesterol, but lowering total cholesterol by lowering hdl and ldl simultaneously is the third worst thing you could ever do for heart health and just really quickly to give you a sense of where you get hdl and ldl from again very high level but hdl uh is increased by unsaturated fats of course there's nuance here but plants fish white meats are going to raise your hdl drop your ldl which is of course great for your health. Saturated fats raise both your hdl and ldl generally and that's going to still be great for your health not as good for your health because remember, raising hdl is better for you than raising hdl is worse for you starched drops them both so again, if you're aiming at lower total cholesterol, you should eat more starch that's why you don't want to aim at lower total cholesterol this's more data this is the same diet which is great so sane diet happens to provide you with a dramatic amount of the fats that increase your hdl levels as well is a dramatic amount of vegetables that will help to lower your ldl levels as well as to change the composition of your ldl particle size to make them even healthier to begin with so that's good, so eating food containing fat does not cause risky cholesterol levels unhealthy, imbalanced and fattening doctor man in the american journal of clinical nutrition put it best when he said the pyramid is a nutritional debacle, but again here's us here's a here's a secret for the for the audience this is this will make you a billionaire if you can do this. Step one is to get people to believe that the only way to deal with a problem is to do something that's completely impractical over and over and over again and then sell them products and services that make that impractical thing that doesn't actually work slightly more doable because they'll never actually achieve their end result and they will be completely dependent on your product while they continue to fail, your market will never, ever go away common sense is to fix the problem, but what makes commercial sense is to treat symptoms while perpetuating the problem. We have to take the common sense approach which is to remove from our diet that which breaks our metabolic system and clogs it up and to do that most easily by eating an abundance of the food that does the opposite it's not about eating less talk our jeffrey cannon who's ah well known author a few decades ago put it really well, he said, what could be better than an industry who products do not work or work on leah's long as you use them for as long as you live but whose customers believe they have no other choice and then the are wonderful friends in the lobbying arena tell us that policies that's a clear foods good or bad or counterproductive from the grocery manufacturers of america or that all foods have a place in a balanced diet from the sugar association or that all foods and beverages can fit into a healthy diet from the national soft drink association how can people say things like this? Well, it's hard to get someone to believe one thing when they're paid to believe another right bottom line so hopefully a little bit amped up a little bit riled up you have little bit of background of how we got into this place to begin with one of the leaves in time for questions questions, questions? No yes, we absolutely have questions little c let's start in our studio audience if you guys have any final questions of the day if not, we have plenty from the internet okay let's go ahead and the question is which one toe ask not let's see so one, two, three four has a question you've been talking a lot about like smoothies and integrating those into life and other something cannot actually cares about herself as well how do you feel about juicing teo get those those nutrients in and drink it that way as opposed to the smoothie method my general answer any question like this and I'll give specific one is if any programmer approach is helping you to achieve the health outcomes you're after keep doing it right so that's great if juicing isn't helpful for you or if you just want to know what I personally would recommend what I personally recommend is always blending over juicing because remember we're about whole foods were about fiber and why not eat the whole food pureed rather than extracting all of the fiber from food which is a core part of a sane lifestyle and drinking the juice doesn't mean juices bad for you. I would argue that if you're juicing fruits that's a bad idea because that's as we talked about a great a great way to get a lot of sugar into your body juicing vegetables if you want to do that, you know anything you can do to increase nutrient intake is good I would recommend you blend them in a high quality blender such as the vita mix would be my preference a great big one that's on everybody's mind because this is something that is about changing lifestyle and is about seeing results and so the question is, when do we see results? So if today I were to start completely changing this, when does when does my body weight start dropping? When do I start feeling more energized? Is there an adjustment period where I'm going to feel really tired and uncomfortable and then I'm going to start feeling great what's the process like to go to adapt to this so uh, in answering that question, I'm gonna also outline some some ah framework that will help you to understand how your rate of change or progress may be different from another person's because there are some things that are bizarre biology is a bit different so first and foremost age how often you've yo yoed in the past because that's a proxy for the general metabolic clogging that is going on in your body gender sleep levels uh stress on and medication slash overall health uh okay, so I'll get into those in a second high level upon going saying within forty eight hours you will feel different dramatically different your mind will be clear you sleep better, you'll have a better sex drive your skin will look better your nails will look better your eyes will look better your hair will look better your quality of life like that which actually matters how you feel, how you're able to rock your mission how you're able to live on the planet earth will be better within forty eight hours and why you're giving your body more of what it needs and less toxic stuff obviously that is quickly going to result in goodness it can't not now when it comes to changing your appearance two things one throw away your scale I urge everyone to throw it away completely because like total cholesterol, your weight is in no way indicative off anything. What is indicative of let's say health outcomes or even appearance would be your waist circumference and that's as easy to measure as your weight. So measure your waist circumference at the same time on the same day every other week at most that's much more indicative of health outcomes and also right I technically am obese according to my weight and my height I do not consider myself to be an obese person, but according to my weight I am obese that's why don't you use that as a measure and the reason it's really important to is as you go saying and get e centric which is the approach to exercise will cover tomorrow you're going to build muscle, you're going to burn fat, but for some of us we will actually build muscle more readily than will burn fat due to all the metabolic dysfunction we're experiencing so you may even gain weight for the first two weeks potentially but you'll shrink, so make a goal around pants, sizes or waist circumference. Now, when it comes to how quickly you will burn fat and build muscle, that is a function of your age, whether not you ve yo u in the past, gender sleep stress if you're on other forms of medication as well as let's call it level of sanity and smarter exercise as the older you are, the more challenging is going to be doesn't mean it's impossible. It just means that which worked for you as a sixteen year old might not work for you is a sixty five year old and that's why we also see a lot of people who were in their twenties being like, oh yeah, like I do this and it works and it's great, and this is so hey, look, why don't you just do this? And then they turned thirty and go, but it doesn't work anymore that's because their hormones have changed, so as we get older, we just need to adapt to that so the older you get it's gonna get a bit more challenging, but keep that in mind, the more you've yo yoed, the harder it's going to be so ifyou've wait cycled a lot. We see this a lot and married couples where the wife is the one who really wants to change her life and her body. So she starts going saying, because she starts going saying, and she's responsible for food in the house hold everyone else goes saying by proxy, and I've heard numerous stories of accidental weight loss in husbands we're husbands who not even trying are just like just losing inches like their pants don't fit that there, and the and the wife is like oh, why are you losing weight? Well, I'm not andi it's not I mean, just generally speaking, men have amore anabolic environment in their body than women do it's easier for men to build muscle and burn fat. Generally we have a lower body fat percentage. Adi, adi, adi hormone differences I mean, folks get that intuitively. But when it comes to yo yoing, it is much more common to females to have yo yo dieted throughout their lives than it is for men, this is why understanding this science and teaching it to our young ones is so important because truly the more you yo yo the harder and harder dr keene was talking about this, the harder and harder it is to make metabolic change in the future, so the more you've yo yoed, the longer it's gonna take, but that doesn't mean it can't happen. It's just gonna take a little bit longer, just like if you break your ankle three times the fourth time it breaks it's going to take a little bit longer for teal than it did the first three times right? Sleep? If you are not sleeping enough, you will not ever achieve the health outcomes you want. Bottom line, if you do not put any fuel in your car's gas tank, it can't run. If you do not give your body a chance to recuperate, it cannot function. If you are waking up early to jog, stop because waking up early increases the hormone levels that make you store fat and then jogging also increases the stress hormone levels. We don't want to stress ourselves out and deprive our body of time to recuperate. We need less stress and mohr time to recover when we're healing our body, because that's, what we're trying to do, we're trying to heal less stress, more sleep and then medical conditions in health. One of the saddest things about these calorie myths is because they're so ineffective people start to think that they're broken and then they get depressed and because they get depressed they get very depressed and the only way they can sometimes pull ourselves out of it is to seek pharma logical intervention and anti depressant medication is one of the few things out there that have been shown to consistently act on your set point and raise it and make it harder to lose weight it's consistently shown in clinical trials that you take spa person same quantity and quality of food same quantity and quality of exercise put him on certain ss arise they gained body fat so in addition to we talked about immediately feeling better that's great because feeling better about yourself as a person I can also help you to achieve all of these other things and of course if you have diabetes if you have other medical conditions is going to take a little bit longer and of course your level of sanity if you say you know what, I am just going to eat ten servings of delicious naan starchy vegetables I'm going to eat the sameness sources of protein in the world fatty fish I'm going to enjoy the highest quality sources of fats and I'm going to do that every single day and I'm gonna exercise eccentrically there's no way you're not going to see dramatic body composition changes in a few weeks and then perpetuated over time and then, more importantly, maintained easily. You'll start to notice that your body will changes doctor my king talked about you won't have cravings, you won't be hungry, it won't be a struggle, and you'll say you'll achieve what I call a nutritional serenity where you just don't think you even think about it anymore. It just happens like just like it happens that you struggle now it'll happen that it will be simple in the future, but of course, if you take a more casual approach and you just like up, you know, I'm gonna continue to drink soda and eat pop tarts for breakfast, but at lunch I'm gonna have a second serving the vegetables that that will improve your health, but it's proportional, right? So what I would really encourage people to do with it at all possible is two things one I don't feel like you need to be perfect at all, but there's two approaches to take one is a very gradual approach, and if you're taking a gradual approach to changing your diet to changing your exercise, I would urge you to expect gradual results, whereas if you decide to jump in and become completely saying, well, you know, the more you put in, the more you'll get out