Cholesterol Has Done A U Turn! by Dr. Harold Gunatillake – Health writer

The food that is considered bad and contributing to heart disease are those containing high saturated fats and not cholesterol Cholesterol never did a U turn; it was just misrepresented and misunderstood. 80 per cent of the cholesterol required by the body for its metabolic processes, including making of hormones and for cell membranes and others, are made in the liver. Some cholesterol is made in the lining of the intestines and individual cells in the body. Even if you do not eat cholesterol containing fatty foods, the liver can manufacture for its body needs.

If cell membranes in the body do not get adequate amounts of cholesterol, the cells themselves form sufficient amounts to maintain the metabolic activities. Less than ten percent of the cholesterol comes from saturated fat of animal sources, such as meat, poultry, and full-fat dairy products. This amount to about 300mg of cholesterol is absorbed in food in addition to the saturated and unsaturated fats in the foods. The liver picks up mainly the saturated fats from food for the manufacture of cholesterol through the HMG cycle. Cholesterol absorbed from food per se is not used but sent back to the gut through the bile salts for further re-cycling. Cholesterol is fat soluble and needs to be solubilized with water soluble bile salts to get absorbed into the portal blood stream which takes digested fats as chylomicrons to the liver for further processing. More recently, a specific transport protein (NPC1L1) has been identified that ferries cholesterol from the intestinal lumen.

From there, a bulk of the cholesterol is esterified, incorporated into chylomicrons and shuttled into blood to enter the liver. Bile salts play an important role in balancing the cholesterol in the blood through a process of homeostasis in the liver. When there is too much of cholesterol in the blood, more cholesterol combines with the bile salts from the liver into the gut and excreted in the faeces. Because of the high amounts of cholesterol present in bile, this provides the body with a method of eliminating excess cholesterol so that it does not accumulate in the blood. If you eat a diet high in saturated fats and trans-fats the liver tends to produce more cholesterol sending out into the blood stream as a water soluble form called low, high density lipo-proteins and VLDL (Very Low Density Choletserol). (LDL HDL & VLDL cholesterol) If less saturated fat containing foods are consumed the liver through its own homeostatic controlled process manufactures the required amount of lipids required by the body, and less will be excreted with bile salts into the gut.

So, doctors will always advice their patients to eat a low fat and low trans-fat diet, and pay less attention to the cholesterol in foods such as in eggs, butter, among others. Coconut Oil It was assumed that the saturated fat in coconut oil was also used by the liver for the manufacture of cholesterol, but it was found subsequently that the fatty acids in the oil being having medium chained triglycerides (MCT) is metabolised totally in the liver.The fear of increasing blood cholesterol was the accumulation of cholesterol as LDL the bad one in the plaques formed along the inner lining of the arteries at certain points. Such plaques contain cholesterol combined with fat, calcium and other substances in the blood. They build up and gets hardened and sometimes referred to as ‘atherosclerosis’ leading to heart disease, heart attacks and stroke. Now, it is believed that cholesterol is only a bystander and not the cause of plaque formation. They are considered like joining the crowd when two people are fighting on the streets, and the fight has no connection with the cholesterol. You were told that what you eat can greatly affect your cardiovascular health, and there were good and bad foods for the heart. Some healthy foods also can not only prevent plaque formation and reverse the narrowing of the arteries.

The food that is considered bad and contributing to heart disease are those containing high saturated fats and not cholesterol. Such foods are whole milk and cream, butter, high fat cheese, high fat cuts of meat, processed meats, including sausages, salami and bologna, icecream, among others.These foods contain cholesterol, but it is emphasised that it has no influence on the contribution to the blood stream through the liver causing the increased cholesterol numbers. But unfortunately the fact remains that most foods with high cholesterol supposed to have made a U turn contains high levels of saturated fat, except for a few exceptions like eggs, among others. So, the catch 22 applies. Transfat This is a form of fat made by man through the conversion of mainly vegetable oils to look like margarine. These are partially or totally hydrogenated when hydrogen is added to liquid oil turning into solid fat. Such artificially mad fat is found mainly in processed ad restaurant foods, because it improves taste and texture and prolongs the shelf life when stocked in the stores. Some of the biggest contributors of Tran’s fat in our food include fried foods and fast foods, microwave popcorn, and other savoury snacks, frozen pizza, magazine, cake, cookies and more.

A four decades age-old study-recently discovered in a dusty basement-has raised new questions about longstanding dietary advice and the perils of saturated fat in the American diet.The findings on research on over 9,000 people at state mental hospital and nursing home ran counter to the conventional dietary recommendations that advise a diet low in saturated fat to decrease heart risk. The current belief is that to prevent heart disease, it is necessary to reduce saturated fat consumption and replace with vegetable oils and other polyunsaturated fats to lower the cholesterol. This new analysis published in the journal BMI elicited a sharp response from top nutrition experts, who said the study was flawed. Walter Willett, the chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called the research ‘irrelevant to current dietary recommendations’ that emphasize replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat. Whatever any research findings defending saturated fat causing no heart disease risk has to be disbelieved presently. It is the saturated fat in the food that is the real risk for heart disease and not the cholesterol that goes with it.Study cites the Fats that could shorten your life.

A new study supports the notion that these ‘saturated’ fats are bad for you. The study, which followed more than 126,000 people for three decades, found that people who ate higher amounts of saturated fats and trans fats died earlier than those who stuck to healthier unsaturated fats. So stick to unsaturated fats including those plant based, unprocessed fats such as those found in olive, canola or soybean. Coconut oil can be included as a healthy oil as the fatty acids are considered as medium chained and completely metabolised in the liver. In conclusion, pay more attention to the saturated fats you eat and less attention to the amount of cholesterol you consume in your food.