Cholesterol Cure: Heal Naturally, Without Medication

By George John Georgiou

This book debunks the myths around cholesterol in a very simple and easy-to-read way. Discover how many theories about cholesterol are wrong and the reasons why, along with how the natural, Da Vinci Cholesterol Treatment Protocol can help you to become medication-free forever. Find out how chronic inflammation, food intolerances, toxicity,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Da Vinci Health Publishing
• Release date: Feb 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9789925569175

George John Georgiou

Dr. Georgiou, Ph.D.,D.Sc (AM).,N.D., is a chartered biologist, iridologist, naturopath, herbalist, homeopath, nutritionist, bioresonance specialist, acupuncturist, clinical psychologist and clinical sexologist. He has been a clinician most of his life and is the Director Founder of the Da Vinci Holistic Health Center in Larnaca, Cyprus (www.naturaltherapycenter.com) which specializes in the natural treatment of chronic diseases, heavy metal toxicity and Candidiasis, along with many other health problems. He is also the Founder Director of the Da Vinci Institute of Holistic Medicine (www.collegenaturalmedicine.com) as well as the Da Vinci BioSciences Research Center. He is the author of 23 books, a clinician and researcher.

Book preview

Cholesterol Cure:

Heal Naturally,

Without Medication!

Dr George J Georgiou, Ph.D.,N.D.,D.Sc (AM)

Dedication

First, I would like to bow deeply to the thousands of patients who have helped me understand the complexities of this disease process and who need to take credit for the time spent with them in refining this protocol over many years. 

All these patients over the years have been my laboratory for developing many treatment protocols through trial and error, backed by research.

I would also like to thank all the researcher scientists, lecturers and teachers who dedicate their life to helping others, and all the courageous health professionals who go against the grain of the establishment, while thinking outside the box.

A loving hug of gratitude to my wife and 4 children for their support and understanding during my professional endeavours throughout these years – they are all blessed.

Finally, I deeply embrace the Divine faith that I have been blessed with, that has helped me believe in the innate healing abilities of the body, through the power of Natural healing, without chemical intervention.

A profound blessing to you all and may your healing journey be fruitful and fulfilling!

Copyright © 2018 Dr. George J. Georgiou. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher.

For information contact Da Vinci Health Publishing – [e-mail].

Published by:

Da Vinci Health Publishing 

Panayia Aimatousa 300

Aradippou 7101

Larnaca

Cyprus

MEDICAL DISCLAIMER: The following information is intended for general information purposes only. Individuals should always see their health care provider before administering any suggestions made in this book. Any application of the material set forth in the following pages is at the reader’s discretion and is his or her sole responsibility.

ISBN: 978-9925-569-17-5

Contents

Chapter 1: The Da Vinci Cholesterol Protocol: Drop Your Cholesterol and LDL in 90 days!

Chapter 2: The Holistic Model of Health

Chapter 3: Toxicity: Underlying Cause of All Diseases

Chapter 4: Detoxification: The Health Secret of all Time

Chapter 5: Food Intolerances, Inflammation and Disease

Chapter 6: Candida: A Universal Cause of Many Diseases

Chapter 7: Curing with Energetic Medicine and Bioresonance

Chapter 8: Emotional, Psychological & Spiritual Roots of Disease

Disclaimer

Summary and Concluding Remarks

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

More Books written by Dr Georgiou:

Chapter 1: The Da Vinci Cholesterol Protocol: Drop Your Cholesterol and LDL in 90 days!

As a clinician working in my clinical practice for the last 35 years, I have seen many cases of patients with high cholesterol levels, and more importantly, high LDL lipoproteins.

It appears that the number of patients seems to be increasing yearly and most of them have already started taking Statin drugs in order to control their cholesterol levels.

When I tell them that it is possible to come off these drugs and stabilize their cholesterol and LDL levels naturally, while also optimizing their overall health and wellbeing, they look at me like I’m from another planet!

I understand why this is the case! I really do! If these patients, who have usually seen a few medical doctors before sitting in front of me, have been told that the only answer to their cholesterol problem is to take pills, then who am I to disagree with the mainstream?

This is one of the reasons why I wrote this book – in order to give people, the information that they need to empower them to take responsibility for their health and become drug-free and healthier in the meantime.

If you KNOW what to do, then it’s not difficult. I have witnessed hundreds of patients stabilizing their blood fats and getting better by making the changes that I am recommending in this book. The beauty is that it does not take very long to achieve the desired results – if everything I recommend in this book is implemented, then you should see permanent results in 90-days!

I sincerely hope that you become one of the lucky ones who follows through on the recommendations I give and optimizes your health – when you get there, please write to me and let me know what you achieved.

Let’s begin our health journey by answering some of the basic questions like, what is cholesterol? Is there bad and good cholesterol? What is the normal range? Why do we need cholesterol? and more…

What is Cholesterol?

Cholesterol is a 27-carbon molecule shown in the figure 1 below. Each line in this figure represents a bond between two carbon atoms. 

Fig 1. The free or unesterified cholesterol molecule

It’s crucial to make one distinction that will be very important later; cholesterol, a steroid alcohol, can be present in two forms:

Free cholesterol (unesterified cholesterol), which is the active form (Fig 1).

Esterified cholesterol (this is the way it is stored in the body).  

Where Do We Get Cholesterol From?

There are two ways that we can get cholesterol:

We can ingest it from the foods that we eat (exogenous cholesterol). About 25% of our daily intake comes from food; about 300 – 500mg.

Our body synthesizes it (endogenous cholesterol). About 75% of daily production is synthesized; about 800 – 1,200mg. The liver synthesizes about 20% of this, and the body cells the other 80%.

The total body stores of cholesterol are about 30 – 40 gm (i.e., 30,000 to 40,000 mg) and most of this resides within our cell membranes. Every cell in the body can produce cholesterol and thus very few cells require a delivery of cholesterol. 

Cholesterol is required by all cell membranes, as well as to produce steroid hormones and bile acids.

When there is excess cholesterol in the body, the liver converts the cholesterol into a bile acid, and it gets excreted as bile in the stool.

Is Cholesterol Bad?

This is one of the biggest misconceptions that is often propagated by the pharmaceutical companies in order to get people to take cholesterol-lowering drugs for their own profit.

The truth is: Cholesterol is a life-saver for the body and it is absolutely good!

This is why the body produces more than 80% of our total cholesterol needs.

What is the Function of Cholesterol?

Cholesterol is one of the main building blocks of all cell membranes – it is the bricks and mortar of the cell’s structure – it helps to form the lipid bilayer of each and every cell in our body (Fig 2).

Fig 2. Cholesterol part of every cell wall

Cholesterol is vital for hormone production and therefore the entire human reproductive system is totally dependent on cholesterol. Hence, not only would you die without cholesterol, humans would die out too.

Cholesterol has four primary functions, without which we could not survive, these are:

contributing to the structure of cell walls

making up digestive bile acids in the intestine

allowing the body to produce vitamin D

enabling the body to make certain hormones.

Cholesterol is vital for digestion. The human body uses cholesterol to synthesise bile acids. Without cholesterol-rich bile salts, the human body could not absorb essential fatty acids or the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K), so serious - even life threatening - deficiencies could develop (it is interesting that nature puts cholesterol in virtually every food that contains fat – providing a digestion mechanism in tandem).

Cholesterol is vital for the brain, central nervous system and memory functions (hence how the side effects of statins include memory loss, mental confusion and people generally just not feeling themselves). Even though the brain is only 2% of the body’s weight, it contains approximately 25% of the body’s cholesterol. The vital connections between nerve endings in the brain, which help to conduct the electrical impulses that make movement, sensation, thinking, learning, and remembering possible, are largely made up of cholesterol.

Cholesterol is critical for bones and for all the roles performed by vitamin D. Vitamin D is best known for its role in calcium and phosphorus metabolism, and thus bone health, but we are continually learning more about potential additional health benefits of vitamin D from mental health to immune health.

Vitamin D can be ingested (and is, interestingly again, found in foods high in cholesterol) and it can be made from skin cholesterol. Modern ‘health’ advice to avoid the sun, take cholesterol-lowering drugs, eat a low cholesterol diet – along with the fact that there is not even a recommended daily allowance for vitamin D that scientists can agree on – is undoubtedly contributing to many modern illnesses that can be avoided.

One of the key reasons that we need to spend approximately one third of our lives sleeping is to give the body time to produce cholesterol, repair cells and perform other essential maintenance.So, all cholesterol is good - the only bad outcome is when cholesterol ends up coating the walls of our arteries, such as the coronary or carotid arteries, which leads to a cascade of inflammation. So, when we measure cholesterol in the blood – we really do not know the final destination of this cholesterol – certainly not all will stick to the walls of the blood vessels.

Eating cholesterol has very little impact on the cholesterol levels in your body as most of it is not absorbed but is excreted by the gut through the bile. So, the myth of cutting out all foods that are high in cholesterol is not one that should be adhered to, otherwise you will miss out on many of the fat-soluble vitamins that are critical for life.

How is Cholesterol Transported Around the Body?

Cholesterol is not water soluble so cannot dissolve in the blood plasma or blood. The only way that it can exist in the blood stream is by being carried by proteins called apoproteins.

Once they attach to the cholesterol molecule, they are called apolipoproteins (Fig 3), and the protein wrapped vehicle that transports the lipids are called lipoproteins.  As their name suggests, lipoproteins are part lipid or fat and part protein. 

We can think of lipoproteins as small cars travelling round the blood stream acting as transporters. So, lipoproteins are carriers of cholesterol, as well as triglycerides, phospholipids and protein. All lipoproteins carry these substances, just in different proportions.

lipoprotein

Fig 3. A lipoprotein

There are different types of lipoproteins – the ones that are most commonly known are the HDL and the LDL. There are also others such as the IDL and the VLDL. The difference between them, as can be seen in Table 1 below, is their diameter, density and the percentage of cholesterol that they carry.

Density table

Table 1 – types of Lipoproteins

All lipoproteins are part of the human lipid transportation system and work harmoniously together to efficiently transport lipids or fats. As you are probably starting to appreciate, the trafficking pattern is highly complex, and the lipoproteins constantly exchange their core and surface lipids. 

What Do Authorities Consider to be Normal Cholesterol Levels?

The lipid profile blood test reports the levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in the blood stream. This is what the medical community believes the ranges should be, but the most important thing to consider is the ratio of LDL to HDL cholesterol, which should be around 2:1.

What are Normal Blood Lipid Levels?

Your lipid levels are dependent on your age, sex, genetic makeup, lifestyle choices, and will vary over time. Although a line between safe and dangerous levels is not easy to draw, there are recommendations that your physician will make. 

European recommendations suggest the following targets – so anything above 5.0 mmol/l or 170 mg/dl would be considered as high:

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American recommendations suggest the following targets – these are slightly higher limits than European – anything above 5.1 mmol/l or 190 mg/dl would be high:

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The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends that a triglyceride level of 100 mg/dL or lower is considered optimal.

How Does Cholesterol Actually Cause Problems?

When the levels of LDL cholesterol are high, there is a greater probability of this depositing cholesterol and other fats on the walls of the blood vessels, leading to atherosclerosis, which is a furring of the arteries with inflammatory cells.

As plaque progresses it can encroach into the lumen (walls of the blood vessel) leading to ischemia (i.e. lack of oxygen delivery to tissues) as the narrowing approaches 70-75%, or the plaque can rupture leading to a thrombosis. A partial rupture will lead to ischemia and a total rupture will lead to an infarction (tissue death).

If you want to stop atherosclerosis, you must lower the LDL particle number.

What Went Wrong: A Little Bit of History

One can ask the question, how can something like cholesterol, which is so vital to life, become more vilified than a mass murderer?  In order to answer this question, we need to take a brief trip back in history to see what the first researchers came up with.

In 1913, a Russian called Nikolai Anitschkow decided to feed rabbits purified cholesterol and he managed to get their blood cholesterol levels in excess of 1,000 mg/dl (nearly 26 mmol/L - most people have levels of 5-7 mmol/L).

He noticed the formation of vascular lesions closely resembling those of human atherosclerosis forming in the arteries of the rabbits.

Only common sense, however, would tell us that rabbits are strict herbivores, so this is an obvious flaw in the experiment. Rabbits do not eat animal products, which is the only source of cholesterol.

Hence, rabbits are not designed to digest animal fat and cholesterol, so it is not surprising that the rabbits became sick. No other researcher questioned Anitschkow’s methodology – feeding herbivores large amounts of fat was methodologically wrong. Interestingly, there was another study at the time that fed rats and dogs (omnivores) cholesterol – these animals failed to produce lesions, but again no one questioned these results.

The Seven Countries Study

Several decades ago, Dr. Ancel Keys published a seminal paper that served as the basis for nearly all the initial scientific support for the Cholesterol Theory, which is still taught in medical schools today. What’s worse, the pharmaceutical companies are using it to push their cholesterol-lowering drugs. The study is known as the Seven Countries Study¹, and it linked the consumption of dietary fat to coronary heart disease.

Keys published his analysis that claimed to prove the link between dietary fats and coronary heart disease (CHD), from selectively analysed information from only seven countries to prove his correlation, rather than comparing all the data available at the time from 22 countries.

Therefore, the studies he excluded were those that did not fit with his hypothesis, namely those that showed a low percentage fat in their diet and a high incidence of death from CHD, as well as those with a high-fat diet and low incidence of CHD. If all 22 countries had been analysed, there would have been no correlation found whatsoever; it should have been called the 22 Countries Study!

Scientists at the time completely accepted the hypothesis, and encouraged the public to cut out butter, red meat, animal fats, eggs, dairy and other artery clogging fats from their diets -a radical change at that time that still persists today with the fad of low-fat foods that tend to be deficient in many of the fat soluble vitamins such as vitamins A, D, E and K. To make things worse, and lead people into more chronic diseases, these natural fats were replaced with the vegetable fats that we now know are the major cause of cardiovascular disease.

Challenging Ancel Keys

In the 1960s, British physician John Yudkin was among the first to challenge Ancel Keys' hypothesis, stating that SUGAR is the culprit in heart disease - not saturated fat.

However, Keys had a lot of political influence, so he publicly discredited and ridiculed Dr. Yudkin, whose sugar hypothesis ended up becoming obsolete and ostracised. By the 1970s, if you supported the sugar hypothesis, you were labelled a charlatan and a quack in the eyes of the medical establishment and ostracised too.

So rather than following the science, or at least having an open mind to investigate multiple hypotheses, public health recommendations simply followed the trail of the most powerful politically, something that unfortunately repeats itself today in 2018.

Three are several recent studies that have refuted Key’s biased findings, but we will just mention a couple here to make the point.

A meta-analysis (Siri-Tarino et al, 2010) that pooled data from 21 studies and included nearly 348,000 adults found no difference in the risks of heart disease and stroke between people with the lowest and highest intakes of saturated fat.

Another 2010 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (Siri-Tarino et al, 2010) found that a reduction in saturated fat intake must be evaluated in the context of replacement by other macronutrients, such as carbohydrates.

When you replace saturated fat with a higher carbohydrate intake, particularly refined carbohydrate, you exacerbate insulin resistance and obesity, increase triglycerides and small LDL particles, and reduce beneficial HDL cholesterol.

The Framingham Study

The next major support for the cholesterol theory came from a study called The Framingham Heart Study², which is often cited as proof of the lipid hypothesis. This study began in 1948 and involved some 6,000 people from the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, who filled out detailed questionnaires about their lifestyle habits and diets. The study is credited with identifying heart disease risk factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure, lack of exercise and high cholesterol.

The cholesterol link was weak in this study, but interestingly what the study found was that the more cholesterol and saturated fat people ate, the lower their cholesterol levels. Now that goes contrary to all that is being taught in medical schools today, and is not good for the pharmaceutical companies for selling their Statin drugs for lowering cholesterol.

In a 1992 editorial published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. William Castelli, a former director of the Framingham Heart study, stated:

In Framingham, Mass., the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person's serum cholesterol. The opposite of what… Keys et al would predict…We found that the people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, weighed the least and were the most physically active.

Some years later, Ancel Keys designed a brilliant piece of research that is now known as the Minnesota experiment.

What is not widely known is that Keys originally tried to establish a link between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in the blood (our cholesterol levels when we have a blood test) because he thought that cholesterol in the blood caused heart disease.

Keys did multiples of studies, changing the diets of his human ‘guinea pigs’, and he presented his conclusions in The Journal of Nutrition, November 1955:

It is concluded that in adult men the serum cholesterol level is essentially independent of the cholesterol intake over the whole range of natural human diets. It is probable that infants, children and women are similar.

In 1997, Keys put this even more assertively:

There’s no connection whatsoever between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in blood. And we’ve known that all along. Cholesterol in the diet doesn’t matter at all unless you happen to be a chicken or a rabbit.

After so many years, Ancel Key’s came to the truth, and it was good that he had the consciousness to admit that he was initially wrong. Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical companies and medical doctors did not pay heed to this research that rejects the Cholesterol Hypothesis, and the prescriptions for Statin drugs increase by the billions of dollars.

What is Cholesterol?

The chemical formula for cholesterol is C27H46O. There is no good version or bad version. HDL and LDL are not even cholesterol, let alone good cholesterol or bad cholesterol. They are lipoproteins – and they carry cholesterol, triglyceride, phospholipids and protein. Nothing to do with cholesterol, so reducing cholesterol is not going to have any effect on reducing mortality from cardiovascular disease – there have been no studies to measure this as yet.

Cholesterol is found in every cell of your body, around the membranes of the 30 trillion cells of your body. Here it helps maintain the integrity of these membranes and plays a role in facilitating cell signalling - meaning the ability of your cells to communicate with each other so you function as a human, rather than a pile of cells. Cholesterol is also responsible for maintaining the stiffness, stability and maintenance of cell structure.

Causes of High Blood Cholesterol Levels

There are several factors that can affect blood cholesterol levels such as:

Heredity -The ABCB4 gene, which encodes a protein known to transport fats from the liver into bile to facilitate excretion of cholesterol from the body, has been found to affect LDL levels in blood.

Weight - excess weight tends to increase the levels.

Smoking - cigarette smoking lowers HDL cholesterol.

Alcohol intake (excessive).

Certain medications such as diuretics, steroid hormones, immune-suppressants, beta blockers and antidepressants.

Exercise - regular physical activity may not only lower LDL cholesterol, but it may increase the level of desirable HDL cholesterol.

Certain foods - eating too much saturated fat, found mostly in animal products, and too much cholesterol, found only in animal products.

Age and gender - cholesterol levels naturally rise as men and women age. Menopause is often associated with increased LDL cholesterol in women.

Type 2 diabetes

Underactive thyroid gland – hypothyroidism

Liver and Kidney problems

Heavy Metals such as lead, mercury and the like.

Other Factors That Affect Cholesterol Levels

Compounds in non-stick cookware (Perfluoroalkyl acids) may be associated with elevated cholesterol in children and teens. Children and teens with higher blood levels of chemicals used in the production of non-stick cookware and waterproof fabrics appear more likely to have elevated total cholesterol and LDL levels, according to a report published in the Archives of Paediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Heavy or Toxic Metals

Researchers from the Japanese National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences think they may have found a missing piece of the cholesterol puzzle. They discovered that small quantities of lead, a heavy or toxic metal, caused elevated serum cholesterol in animals. In their experiments they found that lead induces the genes responsible for creating the liver enzymes that produce cholesterol.

To compound the problem, lead also suppresses a gene responsible for the production of a liver enzyme that breaks down and destroys cholesterol. With cholesterol production turned on and cholesterol breakdown turned off by lead, the animals’ serum cholesterol increased significantly.

Studies summarized in the Journal of Toxicology (2011 by Alissa et al) point to the harmful effects of heavy metals exposure on the development of Cardiovascular Disease. Heavy metals are suspected of inducing pathophysiological changes relevant to atherogenic events including increased oxidative stress, inflammatory response, and coagulation activity.

In addition, there are several suggested biological mechanisms that support this hypothesis. The combination of a susceptible genetic background and dietary elements along with environmental co-exposure to heavy metals may also explain some aspects of their cardiovascular effects.

Heavy Metals, Fatty Liver and Cholesterol

Fatty liver describes a long-term inflammatory response causing fat deposition in the liver due to dysfunction and damage to liver cells. Chemicals, especially heavy metals, can cause this harm to our liver.

There has long been evidence that mercury and lead as well as PCBs (chemicals commonly found in plastics) can cause liver damage, but until recently there was no study proving their association with fatty liver disease in humans (Cave et al, 2010).

Imagine our body as an aquarium. The liver is the filter in the tank. The liver cleanses our blood and eliminates unwanted substances like chemical toxins or debris from our blood stream. When we overload ourselves with toxins such as alcohol or are exposed to increased levels of heavy metals, at a certain point the protective detoxifying capacity of the liver runs out. When healthy liver cells dysfunction or die, fat cells are deposited and replace them. A fatty liver is the result.

When the liver is injured or sick, it secretes an enzyme called alanine transaminase (ALT) into the blood stream. A blood test for the levels of ALT is used in clinical medicine, where the ALT level reflects the degree of injury the liver sustained.

So, what the researchers are saying is that toxic metals can put a burden on your liver that will not allow it to metabolize cholesterol, and this can lead to high levels of cholesterol in the blood. It may be wise to get your health practitioner to check out your liver functioning by running some simple blood tests.

Chemicals that can damage the liver include:

PCBs. Although PCBs were banned in the 1970s, all the study subjects had detectable PCB levels, especially older subjects. PCBs exist in chlorinated materials, and most industrial applications involve chlorination. The liver is the final organ destination for these compounds where they cause liver cell lesions, which results in inflammation and increased oxidative stress. High levels were associated with a 7x-increase in liver damage (high ALT levels).

Mercury. Mercury exposure mainly comes from contaminated seafood as mercury enters the aquatic food chain through the release of water-form mercury from the drains of coal-burning factories. Also amalgam fillings in the mouth contain 50% mercury. Mercury can cause a depletion of glutathione (an antioxidant), increased LDL cholesterol (bad cholesterol), narrowing of the liver's blood vessels, and chronic fatigue. High levels of mercury are associated with a 3x-increase in liver damage (high ALT levels).

Lead. Lead exposure usually comes from the respiratory or digestive system, originating from lead-paint dust, air pollution, or food chain contamination. Regardless of the route of exposure, it is bio-accumulated and is most concentrated in the liver. The present generation has some 20 times the levels stored in body tissues than their grandparents' generation. Lead overload causes liver cells to become enlarged into hyperplasia (initiating the formation of tumours in the liver), and, like mercury, causes inflammation, oxidation, and increased blood LDL cholesterol levels. Liver cells die more rapidly and are replaced by fatty deposits. High levels of lead are associated with a 3x-increase in liver damage (high ALT levels).

Exposure to these heavy metals helps explain why fatty liver is diagnosed in people who are not overweight, alcoholic, or do not have chronic liver disease. In test subjects, around 95% of people had mercury and lead exposure.

So, it is important if you want to succeed in eliminating your cholesterol to check the level of heavy metals and begin to eliminate them. The chapter on Toxicity in this book will give you precise instructions on the best way to do this.

Is HDL Always the Good Cholesterol?

We've all heard about the importance of raising HDL, or the so-called good cholesterol, and lowering LDL, or bad cholesterol, to improve heart health. While we've come to assume HDL cholesterol is an inherently good thing, a new study shows that for a certain group of patients, this is not always the case.

The study is the first to find that a high level of the supposedly good cholesterol places a subgroup of patients at high risk for recurrent coronary events, such as chest pain, heart attack, and death. The findings were published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, a journal of the American Heart Association.

What they found is that there is a group of patients in the high-risk subgroup were characterized as having high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a well-known marker of inflammation, in addition to high HDL cholesterol.

Study authors believe genetics and environmental factors, particularly inflammation, influence whether high levels of HDL cholesterol are protective or if they increase cardiovascular risk in individual patients.

Given an inflammatory environment, an individual's unique set of genes helps determine whether HDL cholesterol transforms from a good actor to a bad actor in the heart disease process.

So, we come back to the factor of inflammation again! I have said in this book and others that I have written that inflammation in the body is what will lead to chronic disease, including cardiovascular disease.

Saturated Fat Consumption is NOT Linked to Heart Disease 

New research (Chowdhury et al, 2014), involving 80 studies covering over half a million people, found that people who ate higher levels of saturated fat did not have more heart disease than those who ate less.

However, when looking at individual fatty acids, it was found that omega 3’s found in fatty fish are protective, while too much omega 6 could pose a risk. The researchers stated that the benefit of omega 3’s probably lie in preventing heart disease, rather than treating it. 

Yes, saturated fat increases LDL in the blood, without necessarily increasing total cholesterol – there are other factors that may be responsible for this such as hormones, antibiotics, exotoxins, endotoxins, the environment and any other factor that can increase inflammation in the body.

Fundamentally, if you have high serum cholesterol levels, there is so much more going on than just your saturated fat intake that needs to be addressed.

However, there is one very important factor that is linked to heart disease, and that is the oxidation of cholesterol.

What Is Oxidized Cholesterol?

The cholesterol that builds up on the inner walls of the arteries has been oxidized. Oxidation can damage and transform cholesterol cells and it is these damaged cells that are the culprits for atherosclerosis or plaque formation.

Oxidized cholesterol can be mistaken by your immune system for bacteria and begin attacking it. Therefore, this leads to inflammation inside of your arterial wall which can lead to atherosclerosis or heart disease.

Dr. Fred Kummerow, a professor of comparative biosciences, recently published a paper in the American Journal of Cardiovascular Disease reviewing his life’s work of 60 years on the dietary factors - especially oxidized cholesterol - that contribute to heart disease. In Dr. Kummerow’s view, and the view of an increasing number of experts, the primary cause of heart disease is oxidized cholesterol and fats. When fats degrade, free radicals steal electrons and a free radical chain reaction mechanism