High Cholesterol

Understanding Cholesterol:

For many years now conventional medicine has been too focused on treating cholesterol as a means of preventing heart attacks.  This has led to many other health issues while having little effect on heart attacks.  Unfortunately, the real underlying cause of the majority of heart disease continues to go undiagnosed. 

Current research shows that abnormal cholesterol levels are a downstream problem that is mostly the result of obesity, blood sugar and insulin imbalances that can range from pre-diabetes to full blown diabetes.

Taking statins or other cholesterol lowering medications do nothing to reverse the metabolic changes that are creating havoc and causing cardiovascular damage.  This is why people with normal cholesterol can have heart attacks.

This does not mean we want to ignore high cholesterol, but instead of focusing just on cholesterol numbers, we should look at cholesterol particle size and particle numbers.  The small dense particles are more atherogenic (meaning they are more likely to cause plaque in the arteries) than the large fluffy particles.  These small particles are associated with metabolic syndrome and diabetes and are caused by insulin resistance.  

Measuring cholesterol particle size and number requires a simple blood test, but relatively few doctors perform this test.  Unfortunately, you can have a LDL cholesterol that looks normal, but if you have over 1,000 small LDL particles it can be very dangerous.  On the other hand, you can have the same LDL cholesterol number and if it is made up of large particles, the risk is low.  Again, your real health risk has less to do with your cholesterol numbers than it does with the quantity and size of your cholesterol particles.

So, what does all this mean and what can you do about it?

To reduce your risk of heart disease you need to address metabolic syndrome, and that can only be done effectively with a comprehensive diet and lifestyle approach.  We encourage you to contact us today to learn more about healthy cholesterol and reducing the risk of heart disease.