Speaker 1: 0:31

Welcome to the Wellness Connection podcast with Fiona Cain. I'm your host, fiona Cain, and today I'm going to be talking to you about cholesterol. I was just having a chat earlier. I recorded another podcast it's the previous episode with the personal trainer by the name of Kathie Lloyd-Prowse, and she was talking about cholesterol in that, because we were talking about the different kind of tests that we have as we get older and the health challenges we have, and I realised I had earlier mentioned it in another episode and said I would talk about it in a future episode. So I decided that I'll just jump straight in and do that. I nicked out to the gym first, though, because after talking to a personal trainer about all the issues that happened for ladies over 50, I'm one of those I thought, okay, I thought I was too busy to go to the gym, but no, I shall go. So I've been to the gym, and now I'm back, and you may have noticed the last couple of episodes. I'm on the same desk, but I've just turned myself around, so I don't know if you can see in the background there, but I've got a couple of friends there.

Speaker 1: 1:36

There's a great artist. He calls himself the awkward yeti and he writes I think you'd call them cartoons, comics, that sort of thing and they're little characters, that's heart and brain from the awkward yeti. So you can buy those plushies on his website and if you go to, if you just go to his socials, you'll see lots of, lots of fun and very accurate depictions of all of our different body parts. But heart and brain are wonderful, so I decided to pop them behind me, my little mascots for the show. Anyway, well, probably after, since I'm talking about cholesterol today.

Speaker 1: 2:11

So the first thing I will say about cholesterol is that we it has been demonised and we have been frightened by it and told that it's something scary and bad and you know it's going to kill us all, and I think that, well, that is way, way, way over the top and it's all about context. So cholesterol in and of itself is not a bad thing. That's why your body makes most of it. Your liver will make about 80% of the cholesterol in your body. So your body is not pumping it out and making it to kill you. It's pumping it out and making it because you need it and we need it for loads of things. So we need it to make sex hormones. So estrogen, progesterone, testosterone you acquire cholesterol for that. You acquire cholesterol for synthesis of vitamin D and absorbing vitamin D into the skin. So essentially, you know, if you're low in vitamin D, cholesterol will help with that. We also need cholesterol. Cholesterol takes the things like vitamin D and calcium. That kind of thing takes nutrients and puts them into our bone. So if you don't have that sort of saturated fats in cholesterol, you can't do that as efficiently, or maybe even not at all. I'm not quite sure about that. So cholesterol is also involved. I'm just checking. I've got notes on my website. I'll put some links in, actually, because I've written about this quite extensively on my website. So it helps you with your fat digestion. It helps okay.

Speaker 1: 3:40

So low levels of cholesterol have been associated with things like depression and, yeah, some cancers depression. Cholesterol is required to well, your brain's mostly made from cholesterol, so it's really important for brain function. So I think it's also seen in things like dementia, that sort of thing, that people have lower levels of cholesterol. I'm not saying it's causative, not at all but there's just these connections where you see patterns of certain things. So it's what I'm trying to say is you need cholesterol to function. You need cholesterol for good health. So cholesterol is not evil and bad and your dietary cholesterol is not evil and bad. Your dietary cholesterol has little to no effect on your blood cholesterol. Your dietary cholesterol is used for all of these other things that I was just talking about and, like I said, your liver's making a whole bunch of cholesterol anyway, so keeping it out of your diet is pointless. Excuse me while I sip some tea. So we need cholesterol for healthy functioning, so don't be afraid of cholesterol. So when you're eating your eggs, make sure you're eating the yolks as well. Don't be afraid of things like your chicken skins or the fats with you know, if you're eating a real food, as in ingredients not things that have ingredients, but things that are ingredients like eggs and meat and veggies and fruit and vegetables and nuts and seeds and olive oil and things like that, avocados If you're eating those things in a nice balance, don't be afraid of eating the fatty bits of those, right? Anyway, cholesterol is vital. Now, when does cholesterol become a problem?

Speaker 1: 5:36

So it's not just simply about the cholesterol number, and I'm not going to actually even talk about the numbers because this show. I've noticed that people are watching and listening to the show all over the world and everywhere in the world has different numbering systems so it gets quite confusing. But essentially what happens a lot is if someone's cholesterol goes up even just a little bit. In many countries I know, certainly in Australia and I think it's the same in the US and maybe in the UK there's kind of guidelines for GPs bang to just prescribe statin medication or other cholesterol lowering medications and what they're doing is they're not treating risk, they're treating cholesterol. And Dr Ross Walker, who's a cardiologist based in Australia, he says he doesn't treat risk, he treats cholesterol, which is the other way around. He doesn't treat cholesterol, he treats risk, which is exactly what should be happening. So it's not as simple. As someone's cholesterol is a bit high, therefore we need to or even quite often it's not that high, to tell you the truth, when I see the numbers that my clients have but cholesterol is up a bit, you need a medication. No, it's not as simple as that and the medication is not the answer in many cases, if not most cases.

Speaker 1: 6:57

I'm not saying it's never, ever helpful, just saying that I think it's way over prescribed and I think for a whole bunch of reasons. But I think we've got a system of medicine in the Western world that kind of says that people aren't capable of change, people aren't going to do lifestyle changes, so we have to just use medications for everything. And there's a percentage of that that's true. But there's also a percentage of that that people don't know, because if someone's cholesterol is up and say here's cholesterol medication, bang. And the advice that they get often is really silly dietary advice, like don't eat eggs, you're not really empowering the person. But when you really understand this and you're really empowered, you can make the lifestyle changes. And not everyone will, I understand that, but I think that in most cases you could get people to make lifestyle changes that will make all of the difference and you wouldn't need the medication. But then drug companies wouldn't make a lot of money. Call me cynical, but anyway.

Speaker 1: 8:01

So I do understand that doctors are doing it out of precaution and out of well intention, but I think that it's way overprescribed and often the side effects of the medication are kind of a bigger problem for people. An example of that was recently a client of mine, and this is not the first time I've seen this with clients, but I've had a few clients come in over the years actually, who've been in a really bad way with pain, with a lot of muscle pain, and I've noticed that they're on a statin medication and something like Lipitor and I send them back to their GP to reassess that and they go off the Lipitor and their pain goes away right, or it reduces majorly, because it can cause that muscle pain and wastage. It doesn't do that in everybody, but there's a certain percentage of people that does do that in. And the other thing that cholesterol medications do is, well, they reduce your cholesterol. So although this things are told you that cholesterol does, they can affect those things like hormones and also things like your, the way your body is. This is getting into biochemistry and I don't want to get too technical here. But the way our body makes cholesterol biochemically, there's a whole series of processes your body goes through, your liver goes through. Well, that process is also how your body makes Coenzyme Q10, which is a really, really important nutrient. It's an important antioxidant, it's really good for your heart and really important for cellular energy. So when people go on cholesterol medications, it can really deprive the cells of this cellular energy, this antioxidant, and so I find that people can often get very fatigued on these cholesterol medications and very, very forgetful and brain fog that kind of stuff, because, again, we need cholesterol for our brain to function. So I think just reducing the cholesterol can have quite a few effects on people. Excuse me, I'll have a sip of my tea, thank you.

Speaker 1: 10:02

So, yeah, anyway, medications have their place, but they're not always the right thing. Always talk to your doctor about what's right for you. But I will talk to you about when you even consider medication as opposed to when it's really not an issue. So when, as Dr Walker says I told you before, he talks about he treats risk, not cholesterol. So you look at someone's overall risk. So you look at things like is that person in what's considered to be a healthy weight? Is that person, have they been diagnosed with metabolic syndrome or if any of the other risk factors and they would be insulin resistance, diabetes, they've previously had a stroke or a heart attack. They've got high blood pressure they might have. When you look at someone's blood test results, you'll see high insulin. You will see high glucose levels. You will see CRP, which is a C-reactive protein, which is a sign of inflammation. You'll see that has gone up. You will also see high triglycerides. So all of those numbers go up in someone and their cholesterol number is high, well then you know that that cholesterol number is a problem because all of those other numbers affect the quality of that cholesterol. So again, I don't want to get too technical here, because get too technical people start to kind of disappear.

Speaker 1: 11:33

But most of us have heard of, when they talk about cholesterol they talk about good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. So good cholesterol being HGL and bad cholesterol being LDL. Well, it's not as simple as that. Ldl is made up of. Oh no, there's like five different kinds or something. And there is, specifically, there are small dense LDLs, which are the bad ones, that are problematic towards heart disease, and there's ones called large, fluffy LDLs, which are not an issue. So sometimes when people's cholesterol goes up and even their LDLs go up and they think that's bad and it's not always bad for LDLs to go up, it depends which ones have gone up and if all of those other numbers Because if someone has high blood glucose and high inflammation, all of those things, I know that it's small dense LDLs that they have, because all of those things go together Whereas if someone's got all of those other numbers perfectly normal and they're perfectly healthy, then you know that their cholesterol number is usually quite irrelevant.

Speaker 1: 12:36

There are cases where sometimes it might be super high and there might be a family history, something like that genetic issue, and sometimes in those cases it might need to be treated anyway. But largely I think most people are over treated and they don't need to take cholesterol medications. So if you have been tested high for cholesterol high cholesterol I'd be looking at all of those other numbers and if all those other numbers are higher, they are the things that you need to treat first, because if you treat those, that will ultimately treat the cholesterol issue anyway. So it's about treating the whole metabolic syndrome issue as opposed to just treating cholesterol, because, like I said, cholesterol on its own, just in and of itself, is something that we need and is something that is required for the body to function. To explain a few more things about cholesterol Every cell in our body has a double layer of fat around it and that controls the cell function.

Speaker 1: 13:46

So there's fat involved there. Fat's cholesterol is a type of fat, but also there's something called myelin sheath. Myelin sheath is a covering that we have over our nerves in our body so that it can conduct messages. So essentially, when I decide I want to move my arm, the ability for me to do that is because my brain and my hand are connected and they're connected by nerves and those nerve fibers are covered in myelin sheath and the myelin sheath is what allows that signal to go through. So if the myelin sheath is damaged or not there, then that signal doesn't go through, then I can't use my arm properly. That's what happens in things like multiple sclerosis and some other brain diseases. So myelin sheath is made from cholesterol. So it is really really important to have the cholesterol to make that myelin sheath.

Speaker 1: 14:39

Look, the other thing that happens is the reason why kind of blood sugar issues, diabetes, pre-diabetes, insulin resistance. So things are so connected to these heart issues is when you have insulin resistance or various diabetic blood glucose issues, what happens is you often means that you've got high blood glucose levels a lot of the time. So, and usually that would relate to a high carbohydrate diet. So you're eating a high carbohydrate, high sugar type diet and that essentially turns into glucose into a bloodstream straightaway. So that bowl of cereal, that toast, that pasta, whatever it is that becomes glucose in your system straightaway. So your blood sugar level goes quite high quite quickly and people with insulin resistance or issues around diabetes.

Speaker 1: 15:32

What happens is your body is not able to easily or properly get that glucose out of your bloodstream and put it into different cells in the body. So if it's not able to do that, it stays in the bloodstream. And if it stays in the bloodstream it can cause damage to our arteries, particularly the small arteries. So it really really affects things like the eyes and the extremities. So it's like sexual function as well. That is why one of the signs when you see something like a rectal dysfunction, that is actually a sign of possibly an early sign of things like diabetes and heart disease, because it means that there's high blood. It can mean, depending on why it's happening, it can mean that there's like a lot of high glucose happening in the bloodstream and there's damage happening to the small arteries Also, I think, the arteries to the kidneys as well.

Speaker 1: 16:23

So having that high blood glucose, like I said, it damages the arteries and what happens is your body sends cholesterol along to as like a band aid to try and heal that area, or sort of as a band aid to try and just keep things covered while it heals and it's actually. It builds up actually on the inside of the wall. So if you think of an artery as being like a tube, it's not kind of in the tube, it's on the like, it's in the wall of the tube. Anyway, it goes in there to try and sort of heal things and if that assault to the body, if that damage only happens occasionally, it's really a non-issue and it just allows time for things to heal and everything to sort itself out and everything to go back to normal. But because when it goes there too, there's all this inflammation that happens in the area and there's all this immune response and all these things going on. So if that all happens occasionally, non-issue.

Speaker 1: 17:26

But if you're eating that way over and over and over again, or your blood glucose, a combination of that, and your blood glucose levels are not being controlled, well what's happening is that assault and that injury is happening over and over and over again. And if that is the case, then every time that you eat, every time that you eat, essentially, actually, there's a cardiologist. I always forget his name, but he says that heart disease is a post-prandial disease and essentially what that means is it happens after a meal and what he's talking about is what I'm talking about now. After you have a meal, your glucose is up high, and if you're just eating way too much carbohydrate, which is glucose, or if you're not metabolizing it properly, then you have these assaults, you have these damage. That happens, and so, essentially, what happens is your body keeps sending the cholesterol there as the band-aid, but, of course, eventually, you end up in that area, you end up with all these white blood cells, all of this cholesterol and all bits and pieces that your body has there trying to heal and trying to fix the thing, and then you end up with an occluded artery. So, basically, it pouches out that wall so far that it narrows the artery, and then, potentially, it can harden and break it off and then become a clot, and so what happens then is we blame excuse me, I'll just have a drink.

Speaker 1: 19:03

What happens then, though, is we blame the cholesterol, and it's not the cholesterol's fault. So it's kind of like every time I see a fire, I see firemen there, so I'm going to blame the fireman, and the fireman didn't cause it. The fireman's trying to fix it right. So this is the same thing that we blame the cholesterol, when the cholesterol didn't cause the problem, but the cholesterol. So cholesterol can become a problem, but it becomes a problem for other reasons. So cholesterol can be oxidized and damaged and it's usually damaged by these processes that I was just talking about. Or just generally a lifestyle where you're smoking a lot or drinking a lot, doing drugs or whatever, but just junk food, just generally not looking after yourself. If you're not looking after yourself and if you're doing things that cause oxidative stress, then you're more likely to have damaged cholesterol. So cholesterol in general, cholesterol in itself isn't a problem and we actually need it for healthy functioning. It becomes a problem if all these other things are an issue.

Speaker 1: 20:08

In most cases there is also a test you can do. I'm not quite sure what it's called in the United States. It might have a similar name, but anyway it's called a coronary calcium score and that is certainly available in Australia. It's not covered in Medicare here, but I think it's around $200 Australian dollars and GP would have to send you for that and it's not an invasive test, it's just a CT scan. It's a CT scan while they've got the ECG little monitors on you as well. I did it last year, so it just requires you to have your arms over your head because they're taking a picture of your heart and you're just going to breathe at certain times and they've got this ECG monitors on there and they're just taking a picture to see if there's any buildup of calcium, because essentially you can't really see fat in the scan, but you can see calcium and how I said that you have those areas where cholesterol and white blood cells and other things build up. What will happen is calcium will build up in those areas as well. So that will allow you to see that there are blockages and there's a risk of heart attacks and that kind of thing. So essentially, coronary calcium score will help you see what your risk is of having a heart attack. It's not 100% there's no 100% test that can tell you that but it is very good and it gives you a very good indication of how at risk you are in regards to having a heart attack. So that's a useful test that you can do.

Speaker 1: 21:46

So if your doctor is asking you and telling you that you need to take cholesterol medications, there's a few things that you can do. One, it's ask a doctor to tell you about all the other numbers, because the other numbers will let you know if there's an issue and, like I said before, it is numbers like insulin, glucose, hba1c, which is your glucose over a three-month period, crp, c-reactive protein, which is an indicator of inflammation, and I think triglycerides, and triglycerides go up when your blood glucose goes up. So generally those things go up together. So you look at all of those things and you can do kind of subfractions tests to look at the makeup of the LDLs as well, not just like LDL, because not all LDL is bad. So there's all of those you look at. You look at things like whether or not you're, like I said before, whether or not you're a healthy weight, but then you also and you look at if you've got high blood pressure and some of those other issues and you do something like a coronary calcium score test. And when you do all of those things then you can make a really good assessment about whether or not medication will be helpful for you or not.

Speaker 1: 23:02

Certainly there are natural ways to help reduce your cholesterol. There are supplements that I use with my clients to reduce cholesterol if we need to. Generally, I don't go out of my way to treat cholesterol. I do what Dr Ross Walker says and I treat risk, so I will treat my clients with supplements and with dietary protocols and managing things like stress, because that can also have a big impact on things like heart disease and even things like cholesterol if we're not managing our stress well. And so I talk to. So, basically, I treat the insulin resistance, I treat the other things, the metabolic syndrome, I treat the things that are causing the cholesterol issue. However, if someone is in a situation where the doctor is in a hurry and they've got a lot of pressure and they've got to get their cholesterol down, then I treat the cholesterol just to get it down, just to get the doctor off their back, and but yes, there are things you can do to bring it down and there's some cases where it just won't come down. Like I said, some people have genetic issues and that's again where you have that a whole assessment where you look at all of it and you, along with your GP, can decide whether or not that it is useful for you to take those medications or not.

Speaker 1: 24:20

Dr Asim Malhotra, who is a cardiologist in London. He has talked about cholesterol quite a lot in statin medications, so you can Google him as well. So, dr Asim A S E E M Malhotra, m A L H O T R A. He has talked a lot about this and, and you know, when you look at the studies and there's been many, many studies done now those cholesterol medications are not useful for most people. They seem to have the best use in men who are quite young, who've already started to have heart issues, and a young man who's already had a heart attack or something like that, and it's just simply because it helps reduce inflammation. So we've got to remember that part of treating all of this is by reducing inflammation and but even then the studies say that the what they do is they help you survive for an extra three days, ultimately one to three days. So yeah, I don't know, it's questionable about how helpful they are, but they may be helpful in certain situations with people with certain risk profiles, but it is about looking at what that looks like for you. Anyway, I hope that just helped you understand a little bit more about cholesterol, what it does, why you need it, why not to be afraid of eating food that contains cholesterol, but why you need to be aware of that whole profile, of that metabolic syndrome. And if you have those metabolic syndrome issues again, you can book it and see me, or if you listen back to some other other episodes that I've done.

Speaker 1: 25:59

I've talked quite a bit well, I have talked about eating a healthy diet, but essentially what it looks like is eating the way your great-great-grandmother used to eat. It's kind of the meat and the three veg. It's like I said earlier it's just eating ingredients rather than things that contain ingredients. Generally speaking, if you have a balance of the meat, three veg, fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, eggs, what did I miss? A little bit of things like beans and lentils, that kind of thing, chickpeas, if that's your thing, and olive oil, avocados, that sort of thing. If you have a bit of a nice balance of those sorts of foods, generally speaking you're doing it right. And real food like whole food. That's the other thing that's worth mentioning.

Speaker 1: 26:43

Actually, I think I've said it in other episodes, but because fat helps you absorb your nutrients, because fat does that, it is really really important that you have the full fat milk, the full fat yogurt, the full fat varieties of natural, healthy foods, unless you just literally can't tolerate it because it goes straight through you. Some people have tummy issues. Then have the full fat varieties, because that's where the nutrition is If you don't have less because you think that having the low fat milk is going to help with your heart. It is not, and not only that. You need that cholesterol and that saturated fat that's in things like milk. You need that to get the calcium into your bones. You can't get the calcium into your bones if you have this low fat diet.

Speaker 1: 27:27

So forget the low fat diet and just have that nice balance of healthy foods and that can go a long way towards helping you treat things like metabolic syndrome and cholesterol issues.

Speaker 1: 27:39

So that syndrome is just essentially a name for the collection of things like insulin resistance, insulin resistance and diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high waist size.

Speaker 1: 27:53

So it's just a group of things that all indicate risk towards things like heart disease and it's referred to as metabolic syndrome, although more and more people are starting to call insulin resistant syndrome because it seems to be the driver of all of it. So I don't think we treat cholesterol necessarily. I think we treat insulin resistance and those other risk factors, and that goes a long way to helping you with your health and reducing your risk, and it's much more effective than literally just taking medication for most people, in my opinion. That's just my opinion. Obviously, you do you and talk to your GP, but just get yourself armed with information, address your risk profile and ensure that you, with your doctor, you're treating your risk, not just treating your cholesterol, because cholesterol is not necessarily a bad thing. Anyway, I hope you found that useful and I will talk to you all again next week. Please don't forget like, subscribe, share all that jazz, and I'll talk to you next time. Thank you, god bless.