Stop what you are doing for a sec and count to forty.
That’s about how long it will take for the next heart attack to happen in this country. This approximate rate will continue non-stop, every hour around the clock, 24 /7, for 365 days, and about every fifth one will result in death. That’s a lot of people.
What is particularly unfortunate, however, is the fact that most of them can be prevented. In other words, almost 800,000 heart attacks occur in a year, and, aside from fairly rare instances, most should never even happen.
Now pause again and think about this number: $20,000,000,000. That is the approximate worth of the cholesterol-lowering drug industry this year, and that many zeros equals a lot of pills. You might wonder why, if high cholesterol causes plaque in arteries and that causes heart attacks, there be that many heart attacks every year if so many people are taking those drugs?
The short answer is this: cholesterol-lowering drugs do not sufficiently treat the primary cause of heart attacks. While I am not saying they are worthless, it’s still true that, unless we use an approach that fully addresses the cause or causes of a disease, we should expect the disease to continue showing up regardless of how fancy and technologically advanced our band-aids get.
Now think about this issue from a different perspective.
If high cholesterol, in and of itself, was the primary cause of cardiovascular disease, there should be no variable circumstances. If this were truly the case though, then I wouldn’t be able to ask the following two legitimate questions:
1) Why do people get plaque build up in their arteries, but not in their veins?
2) Why don’t other animals in the wild, with similar or higher cholesterol levels than we have, get cardiovascular disease?
If you look at the answers to these questions in more detail, you will see they help call into question the very foundation of the conventional, medication-based treatment approach currently in use, and begin to point towards the need for an additional explanation as to what is going on. More importantly, exploring these questions helps point towards a more thorough, and effective solution to this most pressing of medical problems.
Exploring Question 1: Blood samples for cholesterol levels are always taken out of veins and yet these very blood vessels don’t get plaque in them like the arteries do whose blockages lead to heart attacks. Simple logic would suggest then that high cholesterol, in and of itself, cannot be the direct cause of plaque forming in a blood vessel, or it would form in veins just like it forms in arteries.
Exploring Question 2: Animals in the wild, with similar or higher cholesterol levels to humans don’t get cardiovascular disease. For example, the cholesterol levels of brown bears in the wild vary during the year between about 250mg/dL and 425mg/dL, and because of that, most card-carrying cardiologists would typically say it’s necessary to prescribe them a fairly hefty dose of a statin at the low end, and at the high end, at least a few would walk them hand in paw, straight to the treadmill for a stress test. However, it is a fact that no brown bear in the wild has ever been found to have died of a heart attack like human does, or even have plaque in their arteries.
Simple logic applied here would suggest then that high cholesterol, in and of itself, cannot be the singular cause of either plaque forming in arteries or heart attacks occurring from that.
Now let’s be perfectly clear- I am not suggesting that cholesterol has no role in plaque formation or heart attacks at all. Cholesterol is, of course, a primary ingredient of plaque. Denying that fact would be like denying logs have anything to do with log cabins. Because of this, it would also be silly then to argue that cholesterol has nothing to do with plaque formation. However, just like logs don’t build themselves into log cabins, cholesterol (and the molecules that carry it like LDL) don’t just cause plaque to form, simply by floating around in the blood stream.
The bottom line is this: If cholesterol and the molecules that shuttle it around your body are a primary component of plaque, but their mere presence is not sufficient to cause the plaque to form, then the conditions in and around those arteries must also have something to do with it.
When looked at this way, we can begin to try and answer both of the above questions.
Conditions in veins must be different in some way than they are in arteries, which allows for the cholesterol carrying molecules floating around in both vessels to lead to trouble in one, but not the other.
Conditions in the arterial systems of bears must be different as well, leading to them being apparently resistant to the impacts of high cholesterol, regardless of how high it is.
The cause of heart attacks must then be considered multi-factorial, with perhaps an equally important aspect influencing resistance to them being the conditions in and around the arteries, and not just the level of cholesterol carrying particles in the system.
If we are to be as thorough as possible in our efforts to prevent heart attacks, we should not stop at trying to lower cholesterol carrying molecules like LDL, using drugs or even supplements. In fact, a good argument can be made that the primary focus should instead be the conditions which allow for them to become a problem.
Stay tuned for more in Part Two of this discussion.
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**If you or someone you know is interested in going above and beyond the efforts typically recommended to prevent heart attacks, please check out my offerings at vital-human.com
Great thought process on this and I like the correlation to bears since they have so much physiology that is similar to ours, including their digestive system.
Looking forward to part II.