Sadly, we’re still subscribing to most of them… is it because the doctors say so?
The humble chicken egg is one of the most ubiquitous symbols of “high cholesterol” there is out there. How many of us have heard this statement in one form or another?
Don’t eat too many eggs! They’ll cause high cholesterol!
The thing is, we do end up subscribing to various myths that have a tinge of truth in them, but don’t exactly contain the complete picture or understanding that is needed for managing our health better.
Let’s look at 3 common myths that we tend to believe in, then, as well as the bigger picture that surrounds that myth. I have covered them in greater technical detail here in Now Seriously, What's So Tricky About Cholesterol?
Eggs (or any other food) cause high cholesterol
I believe very few of us have actually not heard of this statement.
The issue with cholesterol in our body is that we do have an inlet (from our food) and an outlet (in our faecal excretion). It would function similar to a bank account balance.
Why?
If we do want to accumulate money in our bank account balance, then we do have to take care of 2 factors (assuming that the bank account is earning zero interest):
How much money is actually entering our bank over time.
How much money we’re spending over time.
Because even if we’re earning a million dollars a month, we’d be in debt if our spending habits tally two million dollars per month, isn’t it? Our bank account balance will only grow if the net difference between what’s going in and what’s going out is positive.
In the same vein, our cholesterol levels will increase if we’re eating more than we’re excreting.
Strangely though, why is it that the myth only focuses on what we’re eating but never on what we’re excreting?
Because when a major proportion of the population is not consuming sufficient dietary fibre, but survive off processed foods and refined carbohydrates, we’d be seeing suboptimal faecal movements from them. And that affects their cholesterol elimination mechanisms, no?
More on that can be found at The Problem With Accumulations In Our Body.
Statins can reduce blood cholesterol levels
Statin drugs are meant to reduce the liver’s activity in synthesising fresh cholesterol. It does not have much bearing on the elimination end.
Sure, the consumption of statins can reduce the blood cholesterol levels initially by almost entirely cutting out the synthesis process.
But if one is constipated and still isn’t excreting sufficient cholesterol in the stool, it gets reabsorbed back into the blood and we’re back to square one.
If statins were to be used, they’d still have to be used with an improved diet that facilitates cholesterol excretion from the body over the long term.
Then again, it’s easier and more profitable for the medical industry to sell the myth that statins can reduce blood cholesterol levels, ain’t it?
LDL is “bad” cholesterol, HDL is “good” cholesterol
Cholesterol is a fatty substance that is necessary for the synthesis of new cells. However, it cannot go directly from the liver to the cell via the blood, because fat and water don’t mix. Ever seen how oil always floats on water in 2 separate layers? We call them “immiscible” because they don’t mix. Oil always floats on water because of its lower density.
Therefore, a lipoprotein has to bag up these cholesterol particles, enter the blood and travel through the blood to be the cholesterol mailman. It delivers the cholesterol particles to where they should go.
Want to hazard a guess on the lipoprotein’s density when it is packed full of cholesterol particles, then?
It would be much lower than the density of the blood.
Whereas a lipoprotein that has delivered most of its cargo would be of a higher density.
Therefore we have low density lipoproteins (LDL) and high density lipoproteins (HDL).
Someone who is experiencing a suboptimal faecal movement would inadvertently reabsorb more cholesterol from their gut back into the blood, and that’s going to be packed into more of these lipoproteins, which do have a finite population. It would then be inevitable that the density of these lipoproteins get reduced over time, so there would be more LDL in the blood, wouldn’t there?
And when a doctor does the blood test for high cholesterol, they would then zoom in on the numbers related to LDL and HDL, wouldn’t they?
Having a well functioning digestive system is beneficial for supporting the elimination of cholesterol from the body.
Unfortunately, we don’t really pay attention to the digestive system that much — we’re more focused on what we’re eating and what the doctors do say.
That just gives us an incomplete “solution” in the medications that, when implemented incorrectly, won’t be able to bring about the desired outcome over the long term. It can only just weaken us further if we were to consume those drugs without making the proper changes to our lifestyle.
Do feel free to have a look at What Nutrients Support Digestion And Detox In Our Body? and 10 Nutrients That Support A Healthy Heart to see what can be further done to support our health without getting into the myths of high cholesterol!
This article was originally published in Medium.
Also do feel free to check out Dr J's Ebook Library: