07/22/2025
Think you understand high cholesterol and heart issues? I bet you’re wrong.
LONG but so informative. Please take the 4-5 minutes to read how your body really works, vs what your doctor told you.
The Cholesterol thing
There are many articles available concerning the inaccuracy of the modern view of cholesterol. These articles cite various studies going all the way back to when the Theory of Cholesterol concerning heart disease was first promoted by medical/pharmaceutical authorities. These articles tend to emphasize various and numerous research findings, all quite valid, all very scientific and all a bit complicated and technical.
I want to examine the Cholesterol Myth from a different angle, using plain language and minimizing the technical.
Everyone in our society understands how high cholesterol causes heart disease. We have all been taught practically from infancy about the dangers of consuming too much cholesterol.
So let’s look at it again.
OK, here’s how it goes: If you eat too much cholesterol, the excess cholesterol that your body doesn’t use will float around in your blood stream and, because it is a sticky fat, will begin to adhere to the insides of your blood vessel walls. As this layer of sticky cholesterol continues to accumulate on your blood vessel walls, the corridor through which your blood is flowing will become narrower and narrower. Your blood will become more and more restricted in its flow, until some part of your body that needs a lot of blood (usually your heart, sometimes your brain) will be impaired in its function because of insufficient blood supply. In the case of your heart, you will either experience angina pectoris (heart pain from insufficient blood supply) or a heart attack (part of your heart dies from insufficient blood and the oxygen it supplies).
In addition to these two events, there are accompanying problems such as high blood pressure, arrhythmia, etc. We understand high BP to be caused by the layers of cholesterol on the blood vessel walls making them rigid and inflexible and interfering with healthy blood pressure regulation.
That about sums it up, doesn’t it? Isn’t that how you’ve been given to understand it?
Let’s look closer at this theory.
Let’s say that you are concerned about your blood cholesterol level. You go to your doctor and say, “Doc, I want to know how high my cholesterol is.” He sticks a needle in your arm, takes out some blood and sends it to a laboratory to have it tested.
First question: What does the doc take the blood out of, an artery or a vein? He takes it out of a vein.
Have you ever heard of hardening of the veins? Veinerosclerosis? If the sticky cholesterol sticks to the sides of the artery walls, why doesn’t it stick to the walls of the veins?
The reason is that the body doesn’t want it to. The body WANTS the cholesterol to stick to the walls of the arteries. The cholesterol that is accumulating on the sides of the artery walls is NOT from the cholesterol you eat, it is primarily cholesterol produced by the liver in response to an imbalanced metabolic condition the body is trying to cope with.
Why would the body do that?
The explanation you will next read comes from the teachings of the late Dr. Carey Reams, biophysicist/biochemist (and my mentor).
To understand the big picture of health and nutrition, the bottom line is this: We are made of minerals. We are not made of vitamins or enzymes or hormones or herbs, we are made of minerals. I think that nearly everyone knows that our bodies are made up of about 80% water. I weigh 175 lbs., so if all the water in my body was removed, there would be about 35 lbs. of powder left. What would this powder consist of? Minerals. I think nearly everyone also knows that the foods we buy in the store don't have much nutrition in them (minerals), because of what has been done to the soil by commercial farming.
Every day our bodies use up a certain amount of minerals just to function, yet we are not fully replacing those minerals with the commercially-grown foods we eat. It's a bit like a checking account I once had, where if I wrote a check for more than the money that was in the checking account, it would automatically dip into the money in my savings account. They called it Overdraft Protection. But we have all been doing this same thing all our lives with our Metabolic Bank Accounts. Every day that you deposit less into your body's account than the “checks” your body writes that day, you dip into your savings account. When I do not give my body the minerals it needs that day, my body steals the minerals it needs from other places throughout my body. So, if my chemistry has become unbalanced in one particular way, my body will steal minerals from my bones, joints and cartilage and I will end up with arthritis, bursitis, fibromyalgia, osteoporosis, etc.
Or, if my body has a chemistry imbalance of another kind, it will leach minerals from the linings of my arteries, and I will develop heart disease.
Why from the linings of my arteries? Because the arteries are surrounded by a layer of muscle tissue that is there to enable the body to enlarge or constrict the arteries in order to regulate blood pressure. It’s these layers of muscle tissue that are a rich source of minerals for the body to scavenge from in order to combat diet-caused mineral deficiency.
But of course, after awhile, as the body continues to steal minerals from the artery walls, those walls begin to get thin and weak. So the body says to itself, “Uh, oh, this is becoming serious, even life-threatening. One of those artery walls might balloon out (embolism) or burst open (aneurism) and I might die!” So the body mixes up a batch of cement, which it plasters on the artery walls to strengthen them. What is this cement made of? Well, calcium and some other minerals, fibrin (what makes you stop bleeding from a cut) and yes, cholesterol.
None of this dynamic I have just described has anything to do with the amount of cholesterol you eat. Restricting your cholesterol intake will not prevent your liver from producing it in response to weakness of the artery walls. Neither does any amount of cholesterol in your diet accumulate on your artery walls if your body is not already in the process of placing it there.
Dr. Reams declared that, if you resolve the mineral deficiencies in your diet, eventually your body will repair the artery walls and remove the cholesterol/plaque from them of its own accord, as soon as your body knows that plaque is no longer needed.
I have two more nails to drive into the coffin in which I want to bury the absurd, dangerous Cholesterol Myth.
First nail:
Let’s get in our plane and fly up to the Northern Territories and visit the primitive Inuit/Eskimo Indians. These are the ones who live out in the wild, who rarely if ever see a white man (or his food). What do they eat all winter? Whale/seal blubber. Pure cholesterol. “I’ll have a bowl of cholesterol soup for supper tonight, dear!” Yet these primitive natives have never heard of heart disease (or cancer, or arthritis, or diabetes, etc.).
Second nail:
Let’s get into our time machine and go back about 150 years ago right here in North America. 150 years ago, most folks in North America lived on farms. What was a farmer’s standard diet? Eggs, butter, cream, whole milk, red meat. Yet heart disease was virtually unknown 150 years ago. How did a diet that was healthy 150 years ago suddenly become dangerous? It didn’t. It never has been.
Indeed, Dr. Weston Price visited primitive peoples all over the world, examining their diets/lifestyles. These are the folks who live to be 130-140 years old and who, at the time they die, still have a full set of sound, straight, uncavitied teeth (I made up that word). People who have 20/20 vision all their lives and have never seen a bald man. Dr. Price found men 100+ years old who still worked all day out in their fields, still making babies with their 90-year old wives. None of these people had ever heard of our common western diseases. In fact, Dr. Price said he found one tooth cavity every 4000 mouths, and that cavity would eventually heal!
When Dr. Price rated these primitive peoples according to levels of health (though he hastened to explain that the least healthy of them was still far beyond anything seen in western society), he discovered that the healthiest societies on planet Earth were the ones who ate the most saturated fats! It was as a society began to grow their own foods, especially grains, that their level of health began to decline.
Does this mean we should run down to our nearest grocery store and buy a side-of-beef or a roasting pig?
Most definitely NOT. The toxic, poisoned, chemicalized, unhealthy animal flesh found in the normal grocery store is not vaguely similar to the wild, healthy, unspoiled animals eaten by primitive peoples.
That is why it is so essential to only eat grass-fed animals that were raised in a pasture; chickens that were allowed to run around and eat bugs and seeds and weeds and get sunlight and exercise and fresh water and air – animals that are as close as we can realistically come to what our primitive ancestors ate.
The diet that your doctor will put you on if he concludes that you have or are developing heart disease will, in fact, CAUSE heart disease. I am not saying that your doctor knows this. I do not believe that all doctors are consciously involved in a conspiracy to try to make as much money off your health problems as possible, to the point of deliberately recommending a diet designed to increase your health problems, while prescribing toxic drugs that will guarantee that it will happen.
Yet I cannot deny that many doctors fit this description.
The problem concerning what the medical establishment tells us nowadays about heart disease originally started with some fairly logical but erroneous early-century science.
During the early 1900’s, various manifestations of heart disease began to occur. The first few cases of it were misdiagnosed because the doctors had never seen it before. As the incidents of it began to increase, the medical scientists began to pay closer attention to it. They discovered that every case of heart disease was accompanied by high blood cholesterol, and they came to the conclusion that high blood cholesterol caused heart disease.
In reality, they got the cart before the horse. Heart disease causes high cholesterol, not the other way around.
By the time the doctors discovered their error (well over 50 years ago), two things had occurred.
First, they couldn’t very well come out with a public statement like, “Whoops! Hey, folks, we got it backwards, but it’s OK, we have it right now and you can trust us again.” The medical High Priesthood never apologizes nor admits to error.
Secondly, there was a fast growing, highly-profitable poly-unsaturated oil industry in existence, plus the doctors were making major dollars doing heart surgeries and other expensive heart disease treatments (not to mention lucrative statin and other drugs).
Eighty years ago there was a health issue that only occasionally occurred in seniors, but which has become the number two killer of seniors today. I’m talking about Alzheimers disease (AL). For about 80 years or so the doctors have been warning us away from “high-cholesterol” foods, and the public has dutifully complied. But if your body doesn’t get the cholesterol it needs from your diet, it will scavenge it from the best sources it can find within the body. Guess where the largest reservoir of cholesterol is in your body? Your brain is composed of 70% cholesterol!
Now let me see: 80 or so years ago AL was quite uncommon. For the last 80 or so years folks have been running away from eggs, butter, etc. Today AL is the number two killer of seniors. I can do the math.
When a client tells me they have high blood pressure or heart disease, I put them on 2 eggs per day, minimum. Of course, I impress on them the importance of buying eggs from healthy, back-yard chickens that don't know what a cage is and run around and eat like they were designed to do.
Also see the articles, "Heart disease & blood protocol" and "The Vit E story" in the "Heart disease" folder of our library:
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