Everyone knows that high cholesterol and eating saturated fat cause heart disease, right?
Just ask almost anyone. Ask your friends, co-workers, parents, siblings, neighbors, and medical ‘professionals’.
They’ll likely all tell you that, yes, saturated fat is the prime cause of heart disease, and eating a bacon cheeseburger is a heart attack waiting to happen! It’ll raise your cholesterol, and then you’re just moments away from a fatal myocardial infarction.
The conventional wisdom is that the 3 B’s of ‘Butter, Bacon, and Bovine’ will be the death of you! It’s enshrined dogma now.
It doesn’t matter one lick whether or not any of it is true or not. Or if in fact, it’s just absolutely and totally 100% pure bullchips.
It’s engrained in the public consciousness now. It’s now ‘fact’, even though it’s absolutely and patently false.
But why are saturated fat and cholesterol so demonized by the medical media? (Saturated fat found in coconut oil notwithstanding.)
To answer this, we must take a look at cholesterol.
Cholesterol is a very misunderstood thing, even by many very educated people. Most doctors I know do not even understand it. You try to have a simple conversation with them and most of them look at you like you’re crazy. The fault does not lie with them, per se. They are just perpetuating the myth and regurgitating what they were taught from rote memorization. I do not think that this is by accident. Just like there is no profit in ‘cures’ for anything, but rather in the treatment of ‘disease’, there is no profit in an educated public. The individual doctors are not to blame. But they do have some responsibility to bear for continuing to be the banner men and women for something that was long ago proven to be flat out incorrect.
The confusion in all of this comes with LDL, or Low Density Lipoproteins.
When your LDL level goes up, everyone freaks out. This is the ‘high cholesterol’ that your doctor typically talks about. High cholesterol isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom. You don’t fix something by absolutely ignoring the cause and trying to ‘fix’ the symptoms instead. But that’s exactly what the medical industry does at large. (Because it’s not really trying to ‘fix’ anything!) In order to address the cause, we must first ask why the cholesterol is elevated in the first place. In other words, what function does it serve that is causing your body to have this response? The answers may prove instructive.
It is also important to note that most of the time when someone goes in for a cholesterol test, that the office doing the test largely do not inform you of the difference between LDL and HDL (High Density Lipoproteins) They just say you have high cholesterol and that you have to bring it down. If you don’t ask, they typically won’t even tell you which of your cholesterols are high.
As everyone knows, LDL is labelled as ‘bad’ cholesterol. It’s not ‘bad’, it has a function in your body, and is there for a reason. Bringing your LDL way down is just as dangerous as having it be too high. Your body needs it’s cholesterol. Without cholesterol, you’d be dead as a doornail, as your cells would not heal themselves or replicate. They also do not typically test for LDL particle size. It’s the smaller ones that tend to get ‘stuck’ in places where you don’t want them to be and eventually cause a build up if there are too many of them. And they get stuck there in the first place because they’re doing what they’re designed to do, and that’s repair damage.
And focusing solely on high LDL counts are why we have such things as statins on the market. They are prescribed with frightening regularity. They are also present in municipal and city water supplies as they tend to not break down during the ‘purification’ process and get cycled back into your drinking water. Yum! Everyone wants their infant girl on statins, right? Statins do have limited use, in theory, for a male if he has a prior history of heart attacks. But under no circumstances should females be on these drugs. They are far more harmful than helpful to women. (For further study, just do a net search on the terms ‘Statins harmful to women’. You’ll have plenty to read.)
As Dr. Joseph Mercola says:
Statins are the world’s most-prescribed class of medications. A staggering one in four Americans over the age of 45 now take cholesterol-lowering drugs such as Pravachol, Mevacor, Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor, and others. A majority of them are taking these drugs for primary prevention of heart attacks and strokes.
However, mounting research suggests this could be a critical mistake.
Most recently, two separate studies have concluded that progression of coronary artery calcification, which is the hallmark of potentially lethal heart disease, is INCREASED with statin drug use.
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/10/15/statin-drugs-on-coronary-disease.aspx
The pharmaceutical powers that be of Big Pharma and Big Medica want you to be mostly ignorant of cholesterol. They want you to think of all of it as ‘bad’, so that you’ll buy more of their statin drugs and pad the bottom line. And why shouldn’t they? They’re a business. It’s called the medical industry after all. It’s a for-profit organization, not a philanthropic braintrust. They want to sell more statins. You are a consumer to them, and you need to be as ignorant as possible to consume as much of their product as they can possibly sell you.
But wait, you say. My Dr. says that I need to lower my cholesterol! How can I do that without statins?
Here’s a real question that folks need to pose to their doctor. “Why do I need to lower my cholesterol?” So many people I know are afraid to question their primary care providers and ask the simple and basic questions. They think that they’ll look like a fool, or a weirdo, or whatever, if they simply ask the doctor questions that challenge their recommendations.
If you were to say… “Ok, doc, you want me to lower my cholesterol. Why do I have to lower my cholesterol? What negative health effect is my cholesterol having? Is it my LDL or my HDL that is causing the problem?”
The doctor would likely answer: “Why? Well because everyone knows that high cholesterol causes heart disease and plaque build up in your arteries, which leads to heart attacks and strokes.”
Oh really?
Almost as dangerous as the totally ignorant, are those who are just educated enough on a certain topic to be intolerant of any other view. These doctors largely fall into that category.
I refer to these folks as having a ‘militant mindset’. Whether that be in regards to science, beliefs, religion, politics, or their diet. They get a certain mindset and become very rigid, often ignoring and failing to incorporate any further research into these topics. They also do not tend to research the topics very well at all. But they don’t need to be a doctor to have this mindset. Your average Joe or Jane has it as well. They’ll just order one book on something and all of a sudden they’re an ‘instant expert’, and look down their snout at anyone who doesn’t toe the line 100% in accordance with their current beliefs. Which may change with the next new and hot ‘trend’.
On the flip side most of our doctors tend to be mired in the quicksand of the dinosaur age dogma of rabid Keysism.
It’s only through a small number of medical practitioners who are fed up with nearly half a century of bad medical science, and with an informed and proactive cadre of individuals that are taking their health into their own capable hands, that any of this information is surfacing at all. If it were up to the mainstream medical mafia, none of it would ever see the light of day in a million years.
The purpose of this article isn’t to give you all the answers. It is to get you looking for answers of your own.
A good place to start when you are done with this article, is the movie ‘Fat Head’ which can be viewed free, here: http://www.hulu.com/watch/196879/fat-head
There are also things that all of us need to be aware of that will affect each and every one us, such as the new ruling by the AMA that declares obesity as a ‘disease’.
Be on the lookout for all the new and invasive ways that they try to control our lives in order to combat this newly classified ‘disease’. The effects will be as far reaching as they are detrimental.
And what will the medical mafia recommend as a solution to this new ‘disease’? More of the same that got us there in the first place!
Low fat, high carb, diets with plenty of grains. That’s what they’ll recommend. And that’s what’s been killing us for decades. Oh, and exercise. You can’t forget that one. Just burn more calories than you take in, and you’ll lose weight, right? What a joke. You’ll never exercise yourself from obese to thin. And nothing positive will happen if you don’t get your sugar and carb intake under control. It’s simply not physically possible.
Since obesity is now classified as a ‘disease’, I guess folks like me better watch ourselves and protect every simple truthful statement we utter with a disclaimer. You know, because only the FDA is allowed to say what can and cannot be used to prevent or treat a ‘disease’.
So saying something so simple as ‘Excess sugars and carbs can make you fat’ would be a borderline revolutionary statement now.
Well, you know what I think about that?
In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act. – George Orwell
Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, and none of what is stated in any of my writings or articles should ever be taken as medical advice. I simply write about things I do, and what has seemed to work for me personally. This article is for entertainment only, and nothing herein is intended to cure or prevent any disease. For example, should you cut out sugars and ratchet your carbs way down, I have no idea why you might suddenly be in better health in short order, or why your Type II Diabetes might suddenly vanish. Please get your medical advice from a competent and professional medical provider, should you be able to actually find one. The reader takes it upon him/herself to be 100% accountable for following any information, suggestion, or research in this article and agrees to indemnify the author of all responsibility in regards to any ill effects (or health benefits) that following anything written here may engender. That, and don’t bother suing me, it’s not worth your time, I’m poor. 😉
Wild Cookery! 