This year has been a rough year for my family. My grandmother, my grandfather, and my mother have all been hospitalized with heart-related issues.

My father has a history of heart disease in his family – his mother had multiple by-pass surgeries and he’s had to have his carotid artery stented too.

Why is this happening more and more in our country today? I’m a firm believer that outside of heredity, it’s our DIET that is causing most of these issues. And we are being fed incorrect information from standard medical practitioners.

If you remember, I’ve spoken before about the pre-WWII era and how we used to cook with all traditional saturated fats like butter, lard, coconut oil, etc. Think about the health of our society then versus now. Obesity rates, heart disease, etc. After WWII – some joe decided to start promoting Vegetable oils and margarine spreads and said they were “healthier” and “lower in fat” for us. Little did they realize they were loaded with free radicals that murder our insides.

Functional medicine tries to stay as close to primitive eating habits and earliest practices because it worked! Then we started trying to get fancy with GMOs, replacement fats, etc and started hurting ourselves.

So let’s talk Cholesterol.  Cholesterol is GOOD. We need it desperately in our bodies. When you have the right kind, it can PREVENT heart disease!

My family all has “atherosclerosis” going on right now. What does that mean? It means that they have plaque buildup that happens over time in the arterial walls.

When not taken care of, atherosclerosis can lead to:

• Heart Disease
• Stroke
• Peripheral Vascular Disease
• Kidney Failure
• High Blood Pressure
• Digestive Abnormalities

So my favorite part about going to Dr. Beyer is the education I receive there and how much I LEARN about my body. So let’s get a brief biology lesson right now on Cholesterol.

Cholesterol has 2 main functions:

1. To act as a healing agent – when your artery lining gets damaged for one reason or another (eating bad foods, smoking, pathogens, toxins, etc), cholesterol from the liver sends LDL to fix the damage. After the wound is healed, cholesterol returns from the healed lining back to the liver as HDL.                  
2. To act as an antioxidant – we want all cholesterol strands to be Oxidized – meaning they have all their electrons and no air gaps for free radicals to get in. But sometimes when we smoke or eat dumb things, our body has unoxidized cholesterol in there (missing an electron).  When this happens, a good cholesterol strand will give the unoxidized strand one of their healthy electrons and neutralize the free radical. Oopsies! This makes that one then unoxidized, so it heads back to the liver to get another electron and become oxidized again. This is incredibly important because the body cannot use unoxidized cholesterol for anything but harm, so too many unoxidized cholesterol strands is when cholesterol becomes an issue. 

ATHEROSCLEROSIS AND CHOLESTEROL:  

When atherosclerosis occurs, 3 main this happen:

1. Phase one: Inflammation:  Toxins, pathogens, and inflammatory foods damage the artery lining. White blood cells step in and know what to do, they send free radicals to destroy whatever’s causing the damage, but this process causes inflammation.
2. Phase two: Repair: Like we just talked about, the antioxidant behavior of the cholesterol neutralizes any free radicals out there, then goes back to the liver to get oxidized again. However, in many instances of a lifetime of bad diets, smoking, toxins, etc – since so much damage is happening, this can’t happen fast enough, so the LDL healing agent piece of cholesterol acts as a plug to any nicks in the artery lining.

Buildup happens when inflammation overpowers the repair phase

1. Phase three: Rupture: over time, these plugs form an absess, and block the airway through the artery. If that was an artery to the brain, it can result in stroke. If that was an artery to the heart, that can result in heart attack.  

The TRUE cause of atherosclerosis  = chronic inflammation

1. Lack of fiber (unrefined grains) – if you have a lifetime of eating refined grains, it strips the fiber out, leads to slow transit time, and reabsorption of toxins and hormones from your stool.
2. Refined salt and refined sugar – lead to mineral deficiencies. It’s all about unrefined everything. Get used to that word.
3. Oxidized fats – lead to plaque buildup (i.e. heating up olive oil, vegetable oil, etc)
4. Lack of phytochemicals and unoxidized cholesterol – lead to antioxidant deficiencies – eat your greens and coconut oils people

SO WHAT CAN I DO, YOU ASK?

Eat MORE: avocados, coconut oil, salmon, and eggs.

Eat NO Mcdonalds, heated olive oil, vegetable oils, or refined things.

Ok, great 🙂