How do cholesterol and Saturated fats affect your health?

Written by Dr harold Gunatillake –Health writer

Cholesterol is a fat and waxy to the touch. It participates in the cell structures of the body, and in many other functions like making hormones: cortisol, testosterone and oestradiol, vitamin D, bile acids: also prevalent in the liver, brain and other organs in high concentrations may be as stores. In the blood stream the larger cholesterol particles combined with a protein is called Very low Density Lipoproteins (VLDL): intermediate size particles are called Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL) and these are the culprits you need to watch in your blood stream. The smallest particles are beneficial-is called High Density Lipoproteins that protects your heart by carrying the bad cholesterol back into the liver and destroyed thus reducing the numbers in your blood stream.

It is also believed that LDL cholesterol becomes bad after it gets oxidised in the blood stream which then adheres to plaques in the arteries, referred to as atherosclerosis. Now it is believed that cholesterol is not the culprit, but an inflammatory process responsible for plaque formations and obstruction to the blood flow.

The normal total cholesterol in a healthy subject is about 4 mm/L. If the numbers are higher there is a risk of heart disease. If your level is between 5.5 and 6.5 your risk of heart disease is only increased by a small amount. If it is higher than 6.5 you may need medication.
Presently, there are schools of thought that consider this hypothesis obsolete and disputed, and that the risk of heart disease is not related to the cholesterol numbers in your blood.

This is also misunderstood because the current thought is that cholesterol in your food has no influence and reflection on your blood cholesterol. This is true as for example you may eat 2 eggs per day and your blood cholesterol does not seem to increase. Likewise foods containing high cholesterol such as seafood too, you could eat as much as you wish without affecting cholesterol numbers in your blood. It was believed that it was the saturated fats in the foods that caused heart disease by increasing the cholesterol numbers in your blood.

It was believed that saturated fat in your food taken by the liver as raw material to produce cholesterol through Acetyl CoA utilization, and cholesterol absorbed from the food per se is excreted by the liver in bile salts for re-cycling.

Saturated fats in your foods like meat, dairy, and cooking oils were referred to as bad fats. Like cholesterol they were thought to be linked with an increased risk of heart disease. They were demonised a few decades ago and claimed to cause heart disease.

Saturated Fats do not cause Heart disease

Many studies have revealed that there is absolutely no relationship between saturated fat and the risk of heart disease. It is now believed that saturated fat causing heart disease was a myth all along, based on flawed studies.

These studies must not be taken seriously either. Eating foods with high saturated fats may not run the risk of heart disease, but they put on additional weight round your waistline and that is considered as a risk factor in heart disease.

To prevent the risk of heart disease one has to stay within the normal range of weight. So one has to minimise eating rich foods containing saturated fats and not go over-board because it has been found that saturated fats do not cause heart disease.

DR. Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist practising in UK has set the record straight on the truth about saturated fats and heart disease. He published his findings in the peer-reviewed editorial in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 2013. He seriously challenges the conventional view made out on saturated fats, and recent studies have failed to find any significant association between saturated fats and cardiovascular disease.

It is now revealed that poor diets that contribute to more diseases and death than physical activities- smoking and alcohol combined.
It was Dr Ansel Keys whose seven Countries study laid the groundwork for the myth that saturated fat caused heart disease. Soy and Corn oil big cats then pointed out that coconut oil being a saturated fat caused heart disease. Dr Ansell Key is supposed to have fudged his figures by selecting the countries and omitting others to prove his statistics on heart disease.

Coconut sales went down to 0.2% in US and only used in cosmetic industry.

Even Sri Lankan doctors believed in this flawed theory and condemned coconut products in the very soil they were grown. That was the time when we believed that “Whiteman’s research work was taken as Gospel truth, or may be that we were made to believe so.

The belief that cholesterol numbers in your blood stream are important to assess the risk of heart disease is also flawed.

If cholesterol affects the lining of the arteries to form plaques (atherosclerosis), then why do we take blood from a vein to assess the cholesterol levels in the arteries?

The arteries convey the nutrients including cholesterol and triglycerides to the tissues and organs for their respective metabolic needs. Veins that collect the returning blood from the tissues to be re-oxygenated in the lungs will be depleted of its contents like cholesterol and nutrients.

So taking venous blood to assess the cholesterol and triglyceride levels in the arteries would be fraudulent, too.

So it implies that doctors have been prescribing statins when cholesterol is above the normal range in the veins that do not form plaques.
Thank about it.