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Cholesterol happens
Yes, I’m a loquacious health food fanatic, but you needn’t agree that quickly.
Like many, I’ve oft wondered where my 30-year investment into daily temple maintenance was headed: now I have a glimpse. No one was more freaked than I when a recent lipid profile indicated my total cholesterol was 224 with LDL higher than HDL. Heck, I’m a bleeping vegetarian who flees saturated animal fat like a politician does the truth. Plus I religiously exercise and practice yoga. My physician assured my bruised ego that my plant-based diet wasn’t the root; it’s my aging, rusting genes. I can’t imagine how much crappier I’d feel if I didn’t steward my health. My report card was a reassuring measure of success since I abandoned Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards as my benchmark long ago.
Overcoming viral heart disease in 1988 motivated me to keep an open mind. It saved my life. Like everyone else, I struggled greatly to overcome my primordial preference and hard-wired cravings for a chunk-o-meat at every meal, gravy and Betty Crocker. It helped the day I picked up a box of Betty Crocker white cake mix, read that beef tallow and animal fats were ingredients, suppressed a gag then walked away. Animals, what species? After undoing the effects of industrial indoctrination, I currently perceive commercial grocery store meat and boxed foods black-box-warning dangerous, but in the nicest way.
T. Colin Campbell, PhD, revered author of “The China Study,” says eating foods containing any cholesterol above 0 mg is bad for you. There are numerous motivations for dosing down fatty red meat. You recall recently a half-million pounds of E.coli-contaminated meat entered and then vanished into the food system? If a terrorist did that, we’d go bonkers. If a Fortune 500 company does it, however, Americans buy it and feed it to their kids. Buy local!
The holy temple normally produces what it requires. Cholesterol, a health-promoting nutrient, is made up of small lipids that stick together when they collide inside your arteries and blood stream. In healthy people, lipids are quickly broken down by other compounds in the body. However, when they aren’t broken down, the risk for heart disease and other complications rise. There are, however, measures one can take.
Lecithin, an emulsifier, helps the temple break up clumps of lipids then liquidates them back into the blood stream where they pose little risk. Soy-derived lecithin has significant effects on lowering cholesterol and triglyceride, while increasing HDL (“good cholesterol”) levels in the blood. Red yeast rice works and is approved by the AMA.
Despite my precedent transgressions, my liver tested healthy too. Remarkable, considering the Summer of Love (I think), copious cocktailing till I was 40 and Chiclets of liver-stressing drugs following several surgeries. The milk thistle and turmeric I’ve taken over the years proved, to me at least, to be effective liver tonic when used responsibly.
It’s not so much the saturated deceased animal fat that causes cholesterol to rise, but excessive polyunsaturated fats (Omega-6 EFAs) that inflame arteries. High cholesterol is often caused by consuming pseudo-industrial foods — fingers on a blackboard to the temple. Fake food sets off a biological response — inflammation that attracts cholesterol to the area as part of the healing process.
Excuse me please, but dinner guests are arriving for the Colts-Patriots game and we probably should put out a bowl of Lipitor after-dinner mints.
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