Myths And Truths About Cholesterol

What’s the truth about cholesterol? Are we more prone to heart attacks if we have high cholesterol? Does cholesterol and saturated fat clog arteries? Are cholesterol-lowering drugs helpful or doing more harm than good? Sally Fallon Morell, President of the Weston A. Price Foundation, today dispels myths and misconceptions related to cholesterol.

She explains the vital role cholesterol plays in the body for the brain and nervous system. She goes over its antioxidant functions and its role in fighting infections and toxins. She even covers what may be leading to heart disease, since cholesterol is not to blame.

Visit Sally’s blog at nourishingtraditions.com

Visit realmilk.com for information on raw milk

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Sally Fallon Morell.

Cholesterol-lowering drugs may lower cholesterol but do they improve health outcomes? The answer is no. This is episode 480, and our guest is Sally Fallon Morell. She is the President and Founder of The Weston A. Price Foundation, and the author of Nourishing Traditions and numerous other books. She is also a relentless advocate for slow food, regenerative agriculture, and raw milk. In this episode, Sally tackles another topic, cholesterol.

Nearly half of the population under the age of 65 is on cholesterol-lowering drugs and 65% of the population over the age of 65 is also on cholesterol-lowering pharmaceutical drugs. These drugs are doing more harm than good. Sally explains why cholesterol is not the villain it’s been made out to be. She talks about how it benefits us and its role in the body. She dispels common myths and misconceptions related to it, and she goes over in detail how cholesterol production is beneficial for physical, emotional, and mental health. This is part one of a three-part series focused on cholesterol.

Before we get into the conversation, are you curious about the safety of raw milk? Are you wondering about its availability? Go to Real Milk. It is a source of reliable information on real raw milk. It’s a project of The Weston A. Price Foundation. On this website, there are articles, blog posts, videos, and podcasts that explain why raw milk is healthy, its amazing benefits, and where you can obtain it in the United States. You’ll also find insights into the politics and economics of raw milk and industrial dairy.

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Visit Sally’s blog

Visit Real Milk for information on raw milk

Check out our sponsors: Earth Runners and Sleep Science Academy

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Our Body Produces And Needs Cholesterol

You told me a startling statistic that over half of the population or nearly half under the age of 65 are on cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Also, 65% over the age of 65. A lot of people are taking these drugs.

I thought cholesterol was something our body produced and needed.

Your body wouldn’t make something that it didn’t need in such large amounts. What is cholesterol? People call it fat but it’s like wax. It’s a sterile molecule with rings in it. It’s built into the cell membranes, the membrane around each cell in our bodies and its chief role is to keep those membranes waterproof. You can have a different chemistry on the inside and the outside of the cell. As we know, that’s very important. You have different minerals on the inside of the outside of the cell and different charges, and that allows things to go back and forth in the right way. If you’re lacking in cholesterol, your cells are not going to work as well.

If you’re lacking in cholesterol, your cells are not going to work very well.

When Doctors Started Saying Cholesterol Is Bad

When do you think the doctors came up with this idea that cholesterol is bad, and if our numbers get too high, we need to get these cholesterol-lowering drugs?

We have to go back more than 100 years when the vegetable oils were coming out and the industry was trying to make people think that they were better for you than all the fats that we’d been eating for thousands of years like butter, lard, tallow, and olive oil too but mostly, the animal fats. That was the competition. What they did was they said, “What’s animal fat that’s not in our vegetable oils?” The two things that are in animal fats are saturated fat and cholesterol.

They picked those two things and started to make you think they were bad. It’s very clever but it’s diabolical at the same time. The other thing about cholesterol is it’s easy to measure. It was one of the first things that they figured out how to measure in the blood so they said, “Let’s get everybody’s cholesterol measured.” That’s what they were pushing in the early days. With every doctor visit, you measure the cholesterol and then you start making people afraid of the cholesterol. That’s how they did it.

I have heard doctors say, “If your cholesterol is elevated, you have bought a train ticket to a heart attack or stroke.”

They put the fear of cholesterol in.

That sounds scary.

Why do they do that? This is a good thing to start with. The way doctors in a practice are paid is by a salary. They get a bonus at the end of the year and that bonus could be half their salary. They get the bonus if they issue a certain number of prescriptions for statins but it’s not just you. You might say, “I don’t care about my bonus. I don’t want to give these statins,” but everybody else in the practice is docked too if you don’t write enough prescriptions. It’s a tremendous peer pressure on all the doctors in the practice to write as many prescriptions for statins as they can.

They have that financial incentive but also they seem to equate high cholesterol with heart attacks and strokes.

That’s not true. The Honolulu heart study found that the higher your cholesterol, the longer you live. There’s no correlation between cholesterol levels and whether you’re going to have a heart attack or a stroke. There is a correlation between low cholesterol levels and cancer that’s very well-established that under 180, especially under 150 total cholesterol, you’re much more prone to cancer but they never tell you that. Frankly, I would much rather be carried off by a quick heart attack than a long bout with cancer but I don’t have to die of either.

There’s no correlation between cholesterol levels and whether you’re going to have a heart attack or a stroke. There is, however, a correlation between low cholesterol levels and cancer.

The Vital Roles Of Cholesterol

I don’t wish that for any of us. Let’s go back to the fact that our bodies need cholesterol. Talk to us about the many vital roles of cholesterol.

First of all, the cell membranes make sure that they’re waterproof. Cholesterol is the body’s repair substance. For example, if you cut yourself and develop a scar and you analyze that scar tissue, it’d be very high in cholesterol. That’s why you find if you have weak or a tear in your arteries, what comes along to repair the arteries is cholesterol. They say, “This is bad. You’ve got cholesterol in your arteries,” but if you didn’t have cholesterol coming along to patch up things, you’d have an embolism, a stroke, or something like that.

They’re always blaming the firemen for the fire so to speak. We make a lot of hormones out of cholesterol starting with the sex hormones. Estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, DHEA, and all of these important hormones we make out of cholesterol. If any young man was told, “We’re going to give you this statin pill and you won’t be making enough testosterone anymore,” they wouldn’t do it.

If they had an idea, “This is related to my sex hormones,” it’s the drive also.

Yes, and whether you can have children. The other hormones that are made out of cholesterol are the adrenal cortex hormones. These hormones regulate blood sugar and mineral metabolism. They help you absorb minerals. They regulate blood pressure and also stress. They help you deal with stress and this is what we find in people who are on these cholesterol drugs. It’s much harder for them to deal with stress. You get a lot more anger and not being able to deal with stressful situations.

Wise Traditions | Sally Fallon Morell | Cholesterol — Cholesterol: What we find in people who are on these cholesterol drugs is that it’s much harder for them to deal with stress.

They’re on edge.

They’re not as fun to be with. Depression also is a side effect of the cholesterol drug. Cholesterol protects us against depression. We can’t utilize serotonin and digest fats without cholesterol because the bile salts are made out of cholesterol. I remember once I was giving a talk. I was talking about digesting fats and a girl came up to me afterward and said, “That’s my problem. I can’t digest fats. I get nauseous when I eat fats.” I said, “What’s your cholesterol?” She said, “My cholesterol’s great. It’s low.” This is my theory about morning sickness. When you become pregnant, you need a lot of estrogen to make this baby grow and probably a lot of testosterone so your body’s using up cholesterol for that. If it doesn’t have enough cholesterol left over to make bile salts, you feel nauseous all the time.

What would be the antidote or the cure for that? I remember snacking on saltine crackers to try to eliminate the nausea. This is before I learned about all of this but what would be a better alternative?

To eat a lot of high-cholesterol foods and certainly not be trying to lower your cholesterol in any way. We make vitamin D out of cholesterol in the skin. It’s an antioxidant that protects us against cancer and LDL cholesterol, which is supposed to be the bad cholesterol is very helpful in fighting infections and endotoxins that come from bacteria. As you grow older, you do want your LDL to go up because you need more protection from cancer, and you need this antioxidant production.

This is blowing my mind because this is the opposite of what conventional allopathic doctors have to say.

LDLs, HDLs, And Lipoproteins

They say that the LDL cholesterol goes into your arteries and plugs up your arteries. A study I wrote about is that people on statins have more clogging of the arteries. LDL is associated with less clogging of the arteries.

The higher the LDL, the less clogged they are. I have heard also that they have ways with their technology to analyze the heart and see how clogged up everything is.

It’s called electron-beam tomography. It measures the calcium buildup in your artery because that’s what plugs up the arteries. It’s calcium. What they should be doing is making sure people have a good source of vitamin K in their diet because vitamin K ensures that you don’t get calcium in the soft tissues. However, the problem with that is that vitamin K is in all the foods they’re telling you not to eat. It’s in egg yolks, cheese, butter, goose fat, lard, and things like that. They’re up between a rock and a hard place.

The bottom line is LDL, which I’ve heard someone call the lousy number is not as lousy after all, especially as we age. We need a higher number there.

The reason they’ve chosen LDL as the bad guy, the first thing they did was say total cholesterol, and they picked the number 200. They said anyone over 200 is at risk for heart disease. That number was picked out of thin air. There was no reason for that but they wanted a low number. Later, they said, “We want to get your cholesterol as low as possible.” It’s 180 and that’s very dangerous for most people but then they found out that HDL cholesterol was good for you.

That’s the healthy one. That’s how someone told me to think of it. HDL is healthy and LDL is lousy.

They had to say, “The HDL is okay but the LDL is the bad guy,” with no real proof. HDL carries the cholesterol away from your cells and the LDL takes it to your cells. They collaborate. First of all, the cholesterol is the same in the HDL and the LDL is more in one than the other. It’s the same because you’re talking about lipoproteins. These are these little submarines that carry the cholesterol around in your bloodstream because cholesterol is like fat.

The cholesterol they’re transporting is the same.

Yes, but the lipoproteins carry the cholesterol. The cholesterol is the same inside those lipoproteins. One’s got more than the other. Proteins also carry fat-soluble vitamins and special fatty acids that your cells need.

If we try to stop these little submarines, as you described them, from transporting things, we’re also missing other nutrients.

We are. Also, these statins interfere with the absorption of very important nutrients like vitamin A and deplete an enzyme called CoQ10, which is very important for your muscles to work. One of the side effects of statins is your muscles get weak and they stop working. Very often, you’re in intense pain because you need muscles to hold up the spine and so forth. The doctors say, “What do you expect? You’re getting older.” That’s not right. You shouldn’t have muscle weakness and muscle deterioration as you grow old.

It doesn’t have to be. People think it’s destiny when it could be drugs.

Also, bad nutrition. The other thing about the statins is it’s not just the statins. Usually, when you go in, they give you statin and a blood pressure drug. They’ve lowered the standards on blood pressure drugs to the point where they’re unreasonable for older people. In the old days, 150/80 for somebody who was 50 years old or 70 years old was considered fine. It was normal. Now, if it’s 120/70, you’re pre-hypertension, and pretty much everybody is put on blood pressure drugs to lower blood pressure.

You go back a year later and your pancreas isn’t working because the statins interfere with all kinds of things there then you’re put on metformin. It’s a trio. It’s the statins, usually an ACE inhibitor, and the metformin. All three of these are toxic to the body. We had someone who worked here who also had a job at a morgue. She said that everyone who came in who was on statins was on the other two so it’s not just the statins.

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Coming up, Sally dispels myths related to cholesterol, including the myth that if you have high cholesterol, you are more prone to heart attacks.

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Myths Related To Cholesterol

Since you’ve already told us some of the good things that cholesterol does for us, let’s talk about some of the myths related to cholesterol. Some people say that cholesterol and saturated fat clog the arteries but you’ve already said that’s not the case.

If there’s cholesterol there, it’s because it was needed to create scar tissue but what mainly clogs the arteries is calcium. It’s like a lime deposit in the arteries and that’s from all kinds of things but it’s not from cholesterol. The assumption is that if you have high cholesterol, you’re more prone to heart attacks. It’s not true.

I remember reading Tom Cowan’s book, the one that was called Human Heart, Cosmic Heart. He said that even some young people sometimes when they die of a motorcycle accident, they’ll find that they have so many arteries clogged but he says the heart has a plan B, if you will. It’s not like that’s the be-all and end-all.

Yes, because the body builds alternative arteries.

Alternate routes to get the blood through and oxygenated.

This was published in the journal Circulation years ago and Circulation is a big journal for heart disease. For women of any age and men over the age of 60, the higher your cholesterol, the longer you live. That’s been shown in many studies. If you’re a man under the age of 60, if your cholesterol’s over 350, there is a slight risk for more heart disease but how many men under the age of 60 do you know whose cholesterol is 350 or higher?

For women of any age and men over the age of 60, the higher your cholesterol, the longer you live.

No, that would be very rare. I’m sure.

It’s very rare but they’re this one size fits all. They get everybody down to 200 or 180. It goes against the science and what the science says.

Some would say that these cholesterol drugs and statins have saved lives.

This is not true. There were some trials involving 10,000 subjects and the cholesterol-lowering did not result in any improvement in outcome. If there were slightly fewer deaths from heart disease, there would be many more deaths from cancer. When you get cholesterol down that low, you get a lot more cancer.

It’s like the doctors were celebrating victory. “We lowered all these people’s cholesterol,” but the long-term outcome wasn’t good. The mortality rate went up.

When they approved the cholesterol drugs, all they looked at was, do they lowered cholesterol, which they do but this is not what we should be looking at. Do they improve your life? Do they increase lifespan, which they don’t?

What about the thought that the more cholesterol we ingest, the more cholesterol-rich foods or saturated fat foods, the more likely we are to have heart disease?

Even Ancel Keys, who was the architect of this whole cholesterol thing and low-fat diets, said that the cholesterol in your diet has no bearing on the cholesterol in your blood.

The cholesterol in your diet has no bearing on the cholesterol in your blood.

I would say he recanted but I guess he didn’t pull everything back.

Someone who’s on our emeritus honorary board lived to age 100. He was such a huge critic of all this and went head-to-head with Ancel Keys many times. They were at some conference and Ancel Keys was eating a lamb chop at dinner. He said, “Have you changed your views on cholesterol, diets, and everything?” He said, “That’s for the other people. It’s not for me.” He said that.

That’s interesting. Plus, he probably liked the taste of the lamb chop.

This whole dietary thing about cholesterol and saturated fat results in a diet that’s inedible and is not satisfying. It doesn’t give you any pleasure. You can’t eat dry broccoli many times. It is horrible. What it does is it creates these cravings. You’re on this low-fat, low-cholesterol diet all day. By 9:00 at night, you can’t stand it anymore. You go to the freezer and take out a half gallon of ice cream. You eat the whole thing standing up in front of the freezer. That’s the kind of craving that this diet creates.

If you try to go low cholesterol and low saturated fat, you’re depriving your body of something that it needs and it’ll lead to a craving that’ll take you down the wrong road.

I wrote a blog about a study a few years ago. They got these rats addicted to sugar water, and then they gave them a diet that was 40% lard, and the rats didn’t want the sugar water anymore. The researchers were saying, “Isn’t this terrible? The rats don’t want this pleasant sugar water.” They know the high-fat diet reduces the sugar cravings. We’ve also had the revelation that the sugar industry was very much involved in this to make sure that nothing pointed to sugar as causing heart disease.

It’s because they wanted people to buy their products. Whereas farmers selling full-fat milk or meat with fat could have that fat targeted instead.

Also, the industry has figured out that they can make about five times more per pound of butterfat if you eat it in ice cream than if you eat it in butter. Our nutrition policy and dietary policy are being made by accountants.

Choosing A Doctor

That’s so shocking but unfortunately, it seems like it is the case. Sally, as we start to wrap up, let me ask you. If someone goes to the doctor and they’re told, “You have high cholesterol. Your diet needs to change. You need to get on these drugs,” what would you advise? I know you’re not a doctor and we don’t offer medical advice but I’m curious what you would say.

First of all, they don’t give you that choice. They say to do both but I know in my parents’ case because my parents always ate butter, the doctor said, “If you take the statins, you can eat butter.” That’s what they told my parents but my question is, why are you going to this doctor? You know if you go to a cardiologist, they’re going to put you on a statin. If you don’t take the statin, they’ll kick you out of their practice. They can’t have people refusing the statins because not only do they not get their bonus but their fellow practitioners in the practice don’t get their bonus.

They’ve got that responsibility.

It’s tremendous pressure on them. I feel sorry for them but if you’re concerned about your heart, you need to find someone who’s not in a practice but a single physician, an independent physician, and there are fewer of these and they don’t have hospital privileges unless they’re in these practices. It’s a tremendous push to plan to get rid of independent practitioners and physicians.

Eat Butter And Mitigate Stress

One thing that’s crossing my mind is when I talked to Stephanie Seneff and she said when they wanted to put her husband on statins, she said, “We fired our doctor.” It was because they were like, “We know that this isn’t good.” She did a deep dive into all of that as well. We plan on continuing this series about cholesterol with Tom Cowan and some other guests but it’s time for me to wrap up. Let me ask you the question I love to pose at the end. If the reader could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do, Sally?

Eat butter. Avoid industrial seed oils in all their forms and guises, whether it’s a healthy cholesterol-lowering spread, trans-fats in margarine, or cooking oils. The consumption of these industrial fats and oils has exactly paralleled the rise in heart disease in this country and gone in the opposite direction from the consumption of butter. In other words, as butter consumption has declined, heart disease rates have gone up.

That tells you right there to get off these horrible vegetable oils. I don’t say get rid of stress because stress is what makes us do things in life. Otherwise, we’d be couch potatoes but learn how to mitigate stress and that means having high cholesterol levels and eating cholesterol-rich foods and nutrient-dense foods so we can deal with the stress.

That is a beautiful word to end on. Thank you so much, Sally.

Thank You, Hilda.

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Our guest was Sally Fallon Morell. Visit her blog, Nourishing Traditions. You can find me at Holistic Hilda. For a review from Apple Podcasts from AnnEG. She said, “So great. I love listening to this podcast. It is my go-to in the kitchen, garden, on road trips, etc. It is a great resource for so many topics and has helped transform my family’s health and nutrition. 10 out of 10 recommend.”

AnnEG, thank you so much for your review. It means tons. If you too would like to rate and review the show, go to Apple Podcasts, click on ratings and reviews, give us a bunch of stars, and tell everyone why you listen to the show and why it’s worth checking out. Thank you so much for listening. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

About Sally Fallon Morell

Sally Fallon Morell, MA, President of the Weston A. Price Foundation, is perhaps best known as the author of the best-selling cookbook, Nourishing Traditions®: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.

She also founded A Campaign for Real Milk (www.realmilk.com). At its inception in 1998, the website listed only twenty-eight sources of raw milk in the U.S. Today, there are over two thousand, with many hundreds more not listed. Raw milk is the fastest growing agricultural product in the US; this growth has been largely stimulated by the information provided at realmilk.com.

Sally is a prolific author and outspoken advocate for healthy living according to wise traditions. She lives in Brandywine, Maryland, with her husband Geoffrey Morell. She is the mother of four and has four beautiful grandchildren, all brought up according to Nourishing Traditions® principles.