Fats that keep us alive

Following on from my ‘history of the cholesterol myth’ last week, I would like to look at how fats keep us alive.

There is no doubt that the body needs cholesterol. It creates brain synapses, which connects our nerve cells together. It provides the synthesis of vitamin D from sunlight, which creates healthy bones and protects us from different types of cancer.

Cholesterol keeps our cells alive and supports our sex hormones. It also supports the creation of bile which helps us digest our food.

One of the functions of the liver is to produce cholesterol. However, it produces less if your diet is high in fatty foods; generally the liver produces between four to five times the amounts of cholesterol you eat.

Following on from last week’s history of how we have been taught to ‘hate and fear’ cholesterol, low-fat foods and a medication called statins, have been targeting what we know as ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol for about 50 years. But it is there for a reason, and that is to protect and heal us. It could even be our best defence against heart problems.

In today’s market we spend billions on low-fat foods, spreads and drinks to help reduce the levels of these bad artery-clogging LDLs. Included in the billions spent is the cost of statins.

As I mentioned last week, the theory that high-fat foods such as meat and dairy raise our cholesterol levels and, therefore, cause a build-up of fat in our arteries, has never satisfactorily been proven. I also referred to the confusion of what best to buy, which was echoed by one of my readers.

New studies have been published which have confirmed what a minority of heart specialists have always suspected – that high-fat foods do not raise levels of cholesterol. The first part of the hypothesis (that a high-fat diet causes heart disease) has been disproven in a new study involving 3,630 middle-aged men and women. They were split into 1,815 ‘cases’ who had suffered heart attacks and those who were in the control group.

The researchers, from Brown University in Providence, US, discovered that both groups consumed similar levels of dairy products. Some of the healthy group were high consumers of high-fat dairy products and the researchers found that over a 10-year-study none of them suffered a heart attack. They finally concluded that there was no evidence to support the high fats/heart disease theory.

An earlier study conducted in A&M University, Texas discovered that ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol is actually good for us. The study, involving 52 adults aged between 60 and 69 who were in good health but not physically active, found that only those with high levels of LDL cholesterol developed the most muscle mass after a vigorous workout.

The research team leader, Steve Riechman, summed up that “People often say ‘I want to get rid of all of my bad cholesterol’, but the fact is that if you did so, you would die”. He added “the truth is cholesterol is good. You simply can’t remove all the ‘bad’ cholesterol from your body without serious problems occurring.”

Despite findings such as these being published in medical journals since the 1960s, they have been invariably dismissed as wrong, simply because they don’t fit within the existing paradigm.

The cause of heart disease has to be looked at more closely. In research it was found that levels of something called C-reactive protein in the blood, which is a marker of inflammation, was more likely to lead to heart disease.

The response to stress and infection can lead to this process. Stress can be defined slightly differently in medical terms. The concept of stress refers to any ‘insult’ to the body such as poor diet such as fast foods, processed foods or even exposure to environmental pollutants.

In addition, the usual definition of stress such as depression, tension or even feelings of being alone, helpless and suicidal.

A new school of thought believes LDLs play a positive role in our health and wellbeing. They could be the marker of inflammation or they could be the fighter against infection in the efforts to repair inflamed arteries. If this is looked upon as the true role, then what we have always termed as ‘bad’ cholesterol could be looked upon as the ‘good guy’.

Following up on this theory, LDL cholesterol starts to form in our arteries to repair damage following infection or stress and not due to high consumption of fatty foods.

This theory of the importance of LDL cholesterol has its support in many studies where deaths had been caused as a result of infection and the patients having very low levels of cholesterol.

In the 1970s, George Mann of Vanderbilt University, US, studied the diets of the Masai tribe in East Africa. Their diet was almost entirely made up of meat, blood and milk from their cattle. However, their cholesterol levels were low and heart disease almost non-existent.

Dr Mann described the cholesterol-heart disease theory as “the greatest scam in the history of medicine”.

The feeling was that it was a scam because the food industry and later the drug industry made a fortune from the theory and continues to do so.

So while it is still important to check your diet, you should also check your lifestyle regarding stress, exercise and fast food.

kathryn@maltanet.net