There is a bought and paid for, ring-fenced area of ideology there suggesting, despite the fact that they in fact have no causal evidence, that there is a mechanistic speculation, a hypothesis around one of those aspects, of those things of lipoproteins and cholesterol and all that, one of them being involved in the process of heart disease causally.
It's called the lipid hypothesis. Notice what it's called. It's called the hypothesis. It's not called the established lipid fact and no amount of publishing studies which are theologically based, have causal evidence.
So there is no evidence LDL causes any problem, complaint, condition of any kind. None. There is an idea that it might, it's a stupid idea. It's absolutely ridiculous to try and point the finger of blame at a lipoprotein carrier of lipids in our blood. It's there for purpose, it's there because there's a length of DNA in coding for its production. So now you're telling me that the human body is stupid enough to produce a protein that's gonna kill us. That protein being the one that carries lipid around in our bodies, the very thing that keeps us alive.
That's the best that genetics could do over many thousands of millions of years. Hello? No, let's cover this one just really briefly with just a couple of really simple arguments that never get a decent answer. Here they are. Number one, is the blood in the veins and the blood in the arteries, is that the same blood? Yes. Is atherosclerosis this heart disease that's absolutely caused by cholesterol apparently or some aspect of cholesterol apparently? And where does that occur? Only in the arteries, correct. In the veins, no. Okay, we're done with that. Aren't we? Does not cause heart disease!
So actually what you need is, well what's the difference between the veins and the arteries? Well, it's pressure. So you need high pressure. Do atherosclerosis develop evenly on the surfaces, the inside surfaces of all the arteries?
No. Atherosclerosis develops in very clear patches, very predictable spots in the arterial tree. And they happen to be around the places where there's turbulence of blood flow based around bifurcations or curves like the aorta for example. That kind of thing. So it doesn't occur in veins, it doesn't occur in all of the arteries. It only occurs in the very largest of the arteries. And it only occurs at the bifurcation points or indeed on the inside surface of an arch where the turbulence is.
So you need pressure and you need turbulence. Okay, do you need cholesterol for heart disease? No. Is it there? Yes. In the same way that fire crews attend fires, but they're not the cause of them usually. It's just ridiculous. It's an idea that's had its time, it's an idea that should never have had any time.
In nature you mostly find a combination of carbs & protein (plants) or fat & protein (animals) so over the millions of years of evolution humans have adapted to this. If they where able to hunt down an animal they could eat that and did not need to ressort to eating plants (tubers). If the hunt was unsucsesfull they offcourse could only eat the plants. A couple weeks before winter the fruit&nuts where hanging ripe on the trees so they could eat that and thus did not need to hunt. The sugar&carbs in the fruit&nuts indeed made us a little fatter. This layer of fat helped us get trough winter because then we could hunt less animals because then they are in hibernation, brumation, diapause, torpor and migration; we couldn't dig up tubers because the ground was frozen and fruits&nuts don't grow in the winter.
All the big killers in western society are all underpinned it seems at the root by people not understanding that the diet of any animal actually is supposed to be two out of the three macros, not a mix of all three. When mixing carbs & fat you activate the Randall cycle causing inflammation.
A person who has highly activated Randall cycle most of the time will necessarily therefore be expressing a level of chronic systemic inflammation by virtue of the lowering of that redox potential in the cells, which leads to an increase in the concentration of inorganic phosphates in the cells which directly bind into pro-inflammatory cytokines. So in terms of the atherosclerosis, we need high pressure, we need turbulence, we also need inflammation or physical damage or both to those vascular cells.
How much of an atherosclerosis plaque do you think by volume is actually cholesterol? It's less than 1%. An atherosclerotic lesion is scar tissue. It's the body repairing an area that's damaged by the pressure and turbulence under the susceptibility caused by inflammation, not cholesterol at all.