High Cholesterol is Healthy! [with David Diamond, PhD]

Hello my friends, Dr. Ken Berry here, family physician. Today, I have the great honor of chatting with Dr. David Diamond, a PhD researcher who's been looking at the lipid hypothesis, total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, familial hypercholesterolemia, and the research behind these topics.

There's nothing more frustrating for someone to adopt a proper human diet, low carb, keto, ketovor, carnivore, and all of their metabolic markers be improving. They're losing weight, they feel better, they look better, they sleep better, but their damn cholesterol went up, their LDL went up, and their doctor stripped the gear and flipped out and told them to stop that immediately, start a Statin, or worse. And now you're confused. I thought a proper human diet sounds healthy, should be healthy. Why did it do this to my cholesterol? That's what we're going to be discussing today.

And this is being filmed inside of our life, our community, our private group, and our community members will be able to ask Dr. David questions today. And if you'd like to have that privilege in the future, when I have future preeminent guests like Dr. David Diamond on, consider becoming a member of our community. There's a link in the show notes. Let me bring this guy on. His brain is so full of information, I don't want to waste a second. Dr. Diamond, welcome.

Uh, thank you so much, Ken. I have such great admiration for you. It's a pleasure to be with you today.

Ah, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to chat with you, either in person or remote. I always learn something new. We've got, um, a good topic today because there are literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world, maybe millions at this point, who have adopted a very low carbohydrate diet to correct metabolic disease. They're trying to reverse type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, hypertension, obesity, and a host of other maladies that they've heard from me and other people that, "Hey, you can fix that just by eating a proper human diet." And they did that. They did it. And then they went to their doctor for the routine checkup, and all of a sudden, they have high total cholesterol and high LDL cholesterol. And the doctor is seemingly blind to the improvements in their triglycerides and HDL and A1C and fasting insulin. They don't see that. All they see is the elevated cholesterol. "Oh my God, you're going to kill yourself with a heart attack. Here's a, here's a prescription."

So let's, let's break this apart. I've got your slides uploaded, so we can reference those at any time. And, uh, first, tell us just a little about your background. I've got your bio in the show notes, but what brought you to worrying about this, thinking about this, studying, researching, publishing about this topic?

Okay, uh, great introduction. Um, and let's just go back. I got my PhD in Neuroscience. I started studying Neuroscience 45 years ago. Um, developed a career, been doing Neuroscience ever since. I'm still a neuroscientist. Another question is, why is a neuroscience scientist studying heart disease? 25 years ago, I looked to get some health insurance and life insurance. Got a blood test, and I was put in one of the highest levels of, of, uh, of concern for having a heart attack. And in fact, here, I showed you a little bit about a blood test of mine. And in fact, here it was, 1999. I was put in such a high-risk category. You look at my triglycerides at 771, my HDL, which is circled by my doctor there, and my HDL 34. Um, anybody familiar with these lipids knows that that's extremely dangerous. Um, you don't want your triglyceride HDL ratio to be more than two. So mine was over two, was 23. Um, and I added in this slide some of the notes by my doctor in which he's repeatedly urging me to come in to talk about it, to get on some medication. You see, "Recommended meds, is the patient agreeable?" And for the first decade in which I had these extremely high cholesterol-related lipids, I thought I could beat it. I went to the American Heart Association website, basically said low-fat diet, exercise. And for almost a decade, that's what I tried. I knew a lot about the brain, but for a little about heart disease. And, you know, all that happened was my triglycerides went higher, and I got fatter.

Ultimately, I decided, "Listen, I know biology. I got to study this for myself." I read the papers, I read books, I read textbooks. I realized the reason why my triglycerides were so high was I was eating too many, too many carbs. I was patting myself on the back, reading the bread without the butter. But turns out it was the bread, bread, potatoes, and ice cream. Cut back on the carbs, my triglycerides plummeted, HDL rose. That was great. Well, then once my triglycerides dropped, then you could actually see my cholesterol level, which is kind of hidden when you have such high triglycerides. And my LDL was extremely high. My doctor at that point, this is around 2007, demanded I go on medication, which included statins. And of course, being a neuroscientist, I didn't know much about statins. So again, I went to the textbooks, read the papers, and realized that, um, high LDL is really not something to be concerned about. That in fact, very healthy people, um, have very high LDL. I refused to take the statins. I've never taken the medication for the triglycerides or the, the cholesterol. And so here it is now, 25 years later, when I'm first diagnosed being at high risk for heart disease. At this point, now I publish research. Cardiovascular disease is now my second career, and I have the pleasure to share what I've learned both with you online and in my lectures at the conferences. Sort of a very quick summary of how we got here today.

Yep. You know, I think that that's the case for many healthcare practitioners and researchers. In a quest to fix your own health, all of a sudden, you're very interested in this. You learn some things, and then you want to share it with the world, right? So I, I applaud you for that, and that's that's very similar to my story as well. So I'll pull up your slides, and we can jump to any slide if you want to skip through, that's fine. If you want to hit everyone, that's fine. You just let me know.

Well, I, oh, well, I think the first slide, I think is really useful. I don't know if you have that one there, which is about familial hypercholesterolemia.

Yep, I've got it right here.

This is so incredibly important because this is in which people have a genetic anomaly, and they have astronomically high cholesterol, specifically LDL cholesterol, because of impaired binding of the cholesterol to the LDL receptor. And so you have extremely high cholesterol. And a subset, these people do have heart attacks when they're young. And this is a very important paper, which is about, there are about a half a dozen papers like this that say, "Wait a second. I mean, people with extremely high cholesterol still have a very healthy life. They live a very long, normal life." So there's clearly something wrong. And I read this paper, I said, "There's something wrong with the way people are talking about high cholesterol."

Um, and so, in fact, the next ones is an ancient study. It's really interesting. If you go to the next slide, you know, people say, "Well, that's an old study." You know, as if science has some kind of expiration date. That's a real valid study. This is a modern study. And what's really important is when you look at what is actually significant. And so that slight increase early in life is not statistically significant. And it is important to recognize that a small subset of people with this disorder do have heart attacks when they're young. And we can get into why that happens. But this is the most important finding. When you look at people who are in their 70s, and these are people with astronomically high cholesterol, they have a lower rate of death compared to the general population. So what this graph is showing is that 1.0 is the rate of death for people in each age group in the general population. So when you look at people in their 70s, 1.0 is the rate of death of people in their 70s. Well, the people with extremely high cholesterol have a significantly lower rate of death. And why is that? Because cholesterol is so important to our health. People with high cholesterol have a lower rate of cancer and non-cardiovascular disease, lower rate of death from infection, and a normal rate of cardiovascular disease. This is information you are not going to get in medical school. You are not going to get from the American Heart Association, and you don't see at conferences in which people learn about the physicians learn about cholesterol.

Yep. And let me interject just a few things here, doctor. First of all, my experience in medical school, we were taught about familial hypercholesterolemia, and we were basically taught that if somebody has that diagnosis, they are screwed. They're going to have an early heart attack, they're going to die early. As a doctor, my only hope was to get them on an aggressive dose of a Statin like Zocor or Lipitor and have them eat as, as essentially a fat-free diet, saturated fat-free, cholesterol-free diet, and then just cross your fingers and pray to God because they're still probably going to die very, very early. But this chart is showing very clearly. So on the left-hand side, at 1.0, that's just the rate of death for anybody at that age. That's just the average age of death. And so congratulations to everyone watching this who's 50 years of age or older and you have high cholesterol, because you can see as we move across, you're actually your rate of death is lower than somebody with normal cholesterol. And so, and then the lifetime risk on the far right, you actually have a lower risk of dying if you have high cholesterol. So congratulations.

Yeah. And what's a travesty is that that is not only still taught, that has now been put on children. They're now doing blood tests on children and putting them on lipid-lowering medications such as statins. And so this to me is so terribly wrong. Also, in many cases, when somebody adopts a very low carbohydrate diet, which by definition is going to be higher in fat than they used to eat, harm saturated fat, it's about one-third people develop very high total cholesterol and very high LDL cholesterol. In in many cases, it's the highest number that their doctor has ever seen someone's cholesterol be. And so, hypercholesterolemia, exactly. That's the first thing they think, "Oh, you've got familial hypercholesterolemia." Much like Dr. Diamond's doctor back when he had triglycerides of 700, it would have been understandable if his doctor had said, "David, I think you've got familial hypertriglyceridemia." Right? But he didn't. He was just eating too many carbs for his personal physiology. And so I think that's very important to understand why your doctor reacts the way they do. They're not evil or stupid. That's just how they were taught. And when they see a cholesterol number higher than they've ever seen, that has to be familial hypercholesterolemia in their mind. Although their special testing that you have to have done to actually diagnose FH, you can't just see a really high cholesterol and go, "Oh, that's it. You've got FH." That's not how it's supposed to be done. But that is how it often is done. And I would like to say at this point, most doctors are not like you. Most doctors, when they are told high cholesterol is bad for you and it's genetically determined or high triglycerides bad is genetically determined, they stop right there and accept what they've been told. Yes. Um, unlike most doctors, you've actually gone to the literature with a critical eye and say, "Wait a second. It's not so simple. Diet and lifestyle interact." And then the question is, is high cholesterol really so bad for you? And you, unlike most doctors, have realized, "No, it's not intrinsically bad for you." Absolutely.

Now, this actually goes beyond familial hypercholesterolemia. So I wanted to include this slide because this is work that I just had the great pleasure to work with you. I'm the only PhD in this group. All the others are MDs. And we evaluated the literature. Uh, and here you've got MDs that are again evaluating literature, not just taking what they've been told. And we reviewed every paper about on people with extremely high LDL. And what's remarkable is there's not a single paper that showed premature death in people with the highest LDL. And this isn't familial hypercholesterolemia. This is the general population. So this is saying, in general, if you're over 60 years of age and you've got very high LDL, you are as healthy and even healthier than people in the general population with low LDL. Absolutely. And we know that having that LDL is also a, a molecule that helps the immune system function. And many doctors either were never taught that because I don't remember being taught that, or they just have never thought about it. But LDL is, is vital for proper function of the immune system. And indeed, we see people with the highest cholesterol, they die less often of infection, and they die less often of cancer, and they die less often of autoimmune disease. So that fits perfectly into the model once you understand that LDL cholesterol, your immune system uses that. It's a good thing to have that. It's, it's just an important point to make that LDL actually works with our white blood cells to eliminate viruses. Yes, and bacteria, as well as pre-cancerous cells. And so the cardiologists aren't aware of this. The, the immunologists should be very much aware of it, but you don't hear that from them when you look at people with high LDL. So yeah, we need to think of LDL as a beneficial molecule, not as something that evolution seems to have designed to be able to cause harm. Absolutely.

And here, I, I just included. I think it's worth seeing. There is a vast amount of literature on this topic. We just mentioned, um, you can manipulate LDL levels in animals and then expose them to bacteria. And what you find is that if you artificially lower the LDL in animals, they're much more likely than to die disease, such as from sepsis, and you reduce the functioning of their immune system. And so here it is. It's so clear when you look at people who study the immune system, and I have it underlined, LDL is a component of the immune system. And specifically, the LDL protects us against the kind of infection which can be fatal from from bacteria. Absolutely.

And now, this, this I think is an incredibly important finding because we have a way of assessing future risk of heart attacks. And that future risk has been known for decades, and it's the coronary artery calcium. At first, this was ignored to a great extent for the first decade or so, it was ignored. Why? Because there's no drug that will lower coronary calcium. That's the first thing. So people with, I, coronary calcium, doctor can't help you because you can't give a drug. The second thing is the coronary calcium, higher it is, the more likely it is you're going to have a heart attack. And it's independent of your LDL levels. So it says there is another measure that tells you whether or not your diet and lifestyle and potentially genetics is increasing your risk for developing a heart attack. That's your coronary calcium. Ideally, you want it to be zero. And as it goes higher and higher, it increases your risk of developing a heart attack. Now, what's so important here is again, you've got people with the familial hypercholesterolemia. And as you said, Ken, a doctor sees that, taught this in medical school, and this isn't a doctor's practice. You got, which holds it called FH, you've got to lower your cholesterol. Well, look at these people who have have zero coronary calcium. And that's the group here in red. And they have zero, which is in that middle graph. And they have no events, no heart attacks. That's the red line that goes straight across over 10 years. And the people who do have the heart attacks, and the ones that have the high coronary calcium, that's that middle graph in which the CAC is over 200. So these people are at risk. And yet the LDL between these two groups, that's the red and the blue bars, is no different. So the LDL does not tell you who is going to have a heart attack. What really matters, your glucose, your blood sugar. Those people with higher blood sugar, and that's the graph on the right, they're the ones that had more heart attacks. Again, it's independent of the cholesterol. And that's the message I want to get across. And saying it's independent of the cholesterol means that the cholesterol is not the causative agent here.

And are you aware, Dr. Diamond, that some doctors are now telling their patients, primary care doctors and cardiologists are telling their patients that with a high CAC score, "Oh, you need to be on a Statin. That'll help lower your CAC score." Although I'm unaware of any research showing that a Statin or a repathara will actually lower, has been shown to lower CAC scores. Are you aware of any?

Rare. It's even worse than that. Not only do the statins not lower the coronary calcium, it's actually accepted, this is a fact, statins increase coronary calcium. I mean, just let that sink in a bit. There are numerous studies that show that statins increase coronary calcium. Now, you've got to understand, this was a problem for the Statin advocates. And this is the solution they came up with to this problem. They decided that the increase in coronary calcium from statins is a good thing. Everybody in this high coronary calcium is a bad thing. But if the statins increase the coronary calcium, that's a good thing. And what they say is the statins draw in the car, the calcium into your artery where it doesn't belong, and it stabilizes your plaque. There is no evidence for that whatsoever. But this is the explanation they came up with to explain why statins is a good thing for statins to increase coronary calcium. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And I can't, when I first heard that from one patient who told me that, I'm like, "They can't be saying that." And then I've since heard it from multiple people in our private community who went for a follow-up with their cardiologist and they're like, "Yep, sure enough, they told me that it'll lower my CAC score." And I'm like, "That's just factually inaccurate." It is inaccurate. There's no study shot. And I have to say, there is no treatment at all. And even though we like the low carb diet, there's been no controlled study that I know of, no drug, no treatment that's confirmed to lower coronary calcium. Which kind of makes sense. I think once the calcium is in there, it's probably pretty much locked away in there. Um, I would love to see an interaction that lowers coronary calcium. Kind of the important thing to remember is it's not just the calcium score, it's the change over time. And so the people who have progressing, increasing in coronary calcium, those are the ones that are much more likely to develop heart disease than just having a one-time measure, high coronary calcium. So I, I don't think you have to look at it, "Well, I got a high score, therefore it's inevitable I'm going to have a heart attack." It's not like that at all. Yes.

Now, if you don't mind, doctor, I'm going to entertain questions from our community as we go by, as they come in, if they're, if they're relevant. Whitney says, "An otherwise healthy woman at 42, is there a threshold number I should worry about for LDL as a person with familial hypercholesterolemia, if my HDL triglycerides are within healthy range?" So she's saying, "I'm metabolically healthy, but my LDL is very high. Is there, is there a number I should worry about?"

So let me make this as clear as possible to Whitney. And of course, we gotta, I always have the disclaimer. First of all, I'm a PhD. Second, I'm not giving medical advice. We always have to be careful about that. But let's just go based on the science. There is no evidence that high LDL alone causes heart disease. There is no number you need to be concerned about. That's just simply a scientific statement. Now, what we will get to, and we have some slides on this, is that there are concerns people with FH should have. And this particular slide, I think, is very useful. The timing is great. This is a study on people with FH. So what's important is all the black bars. Those are people who have very high LDL. But understand, you're looking at CAD, stands for coronary artery disease, coronary heart disease. And what's so important is what you look at the insulin levels. It's fasting insulin. And you look basically at their waist size. So are they overweight? And it's really not until you see the people that have high fasting insulin, and especially high fasting insulin and they're overweight, that you see a dramatic increase in the rate of heart disease. That's you're like, with high insulin and overweight, you're over seven times more likely to have a heart attack than someone who does an FH. But what's really important, if you look at the low, low, with the black bar, those are people that have FH and very high LDL levels, and they don't have significantly more heart attacks than the people who don't have high LDL. This just is more evidence. And this is from a paper that I published with a bunch of PhDs and MDs. We reviewed the literature. LDL by itself does not cause heart disease. So an answer to her question, there is simply no evidence of a threshold level of LDL that will cause heart disease by itself.

Yes. I totally agree with that. My last LDL was 250. Just for reference, if anybody thinks I'm sitting over here with an LDL of 80 telling you guys it's okay to have a high LDL. My LDL is 250. Is, yeah, that's extremely high. Mine is, my LDL's 200, my cholesterol is 300. Um, you know, you just never know when it could happen. Um, but, um, I'm not concerned about it.

Yes. Nor am I. And this is where we get to her, her question. The answer to the question is, there is something so much more important than cholesterol when it comes to development of heart disease. And there's just so many papers on this that I've, I've got just a couple of slides to illustrate this. And we have published papers on this topic. These again, are people with extremely high cholesterol. I mean, look at how the total cholesterol is over 350. They're LDL is about 275, right up there with you, Ken. Um, and so we're at this point, they're not on medication lowering their cholesterol. And you've got one population that is diagnosed with CHD, coronary heart disease, another population does not have coronary heart disease. And look, there's no difference in either the TC, total cholesterol, other LDL levels. What matters here is a subset of people with FH have this additional genetic anomaly, which is called having a certain kind of gene, okay, for a clotting factor called prothrombin. So this is a protein that when it gets activated, causes our platelets to stick together and causes clots. And so you find, not only the people with FH, but in the general population, if these people happen to have this gene that activates prothrombin, which causes platelets to stick together spontaneously, well, then you're a heck of a lot more likely than to have a heart attack. And that's this on the right, in which you're more than twice as likely to have a heart attack compared to people who don't have this genetic anomaly. So this is what people with FH, and people in general, need to be concerned about, which is excessive clotting or hypercoagulation.

Yes. And the coagulation cascade. Let me throw this up. This is, this is the coagulation cascade. It is, it is exquisitely, this is dumbed down by the factor of probably a hundred. Okay? It, every single step in this cascade, this is all the things that have to happen for you to make a clot, either an appropriate clot or an inappropriate clot. And if anything at all is is wrong with this cascade, you're going to form clots more easily, or you'll be a free bleeder. And down at the bottom, you can see prothrombin, that Dr. Diamond was talking about. Each one of these steps has at least one, if not more, accelerator pedals that will speed up that step, and one or more brake pedals that will slow that step down. And so if you have a defect in prothrombin that causes it to be on the accelerator, you're going to be much more likely to form an inappropriate clot. And and that's what he's talking about. So when you have familial hypercholesterolemia, sure, you have high total cholesterol. That's not the problem, or at least we can say it's probably not the problem. The problem is probably right here on this side.

That's fantastic that you've included this slide, Ken. And if you go sort of factor eight to the left in blue, down to prothrombin, down to fibrinogen, those three components are very much associated with heart disease. And people are making too much of that. It's clearly associated with heart disease. Now, what is this? I understand one thing. Just having factor eight or prothrombin or fibrinogen does not cause a heart attack, correct? But causes clots is activation of this pathway. And what activates the pathway? Stress, hypertension, and high blood sugar. That activates this pathway because now the, the body interprets stress to meaning that you're under attack. So it's preparing for a hemorrhage. What does it want to do? Wants to make the blood clot so you'll survive a hemorrhage. So understand something. There are triggers that will make this clotting pathway become activated. And this is something people can control. Even if you have the genetic anomaly, you can control whether or not the clotting pathway gets activated by keeping your blood sugar low, controlling your blood pressure, okay, and also basically controlling stress. And it's really something to keep in mind. This is all under your control. It's not inevitable. Absolutely.

Absolutely. All right, back to the slides. Next slide. And this is just another one. Um, and I want to show you an ancient paper here because this is before there were statins. And so you had people with extremely high cholesterol, uncontrolled, weren't able to have statins at the time. This paper, going back, people in the 1970s and 80s. And so again, you've got people with extremely high cholesterol. Same thing. And they're specifically measuring those two factors that you showed in the previous life, fibrinogen and factor eight. And the ones that have the heart disease are the ones that have more fibrinogen, factor eight. And so under normal conditions, again, you've got more fibrinogen, more factor eight. You get the high blood sugar, high blood pressure, and overall more stress. And that's what activates these, these proteins. And that's the way to think about it. Both stress and anger. When we feel those two emotions, we literally have clots passing through our arteries. And this isn't the absence of being wounded. And that is why it contributes then both to heart disease as well as ischemic strokes, as we produce these clots that then block our arteries. And again, this is something we can control. And and I think it's important to to talk about the evolutionary reason why if you're in a stressful situation, it's your, your default is to be ready to make clots. That's because in our past, if you were in a situation that was spiking your cortisol and your adrenaline, then you were in a fight or flight situation, and you were very likely to be wounded. And so the, the, the, the coagulation cascade was ramping up, getting ready because you're probably going to get bitten or stabbed or pushed off the bluff, and you need to be able to form a clot quickly to to protect your life. And so there's an evolutionary reason for that. It's not pathology, it's physiology. But when we're living in an artificial environment like modern society, where your life is sometimes just a pressure cooker of constant stress, and then also constant carbohydrates, then you're, you're basically keeping this pathway overactivated at all times and just ready to make a clot at a moment's notice.

It's a great perspective when we look at the evolutionary relevance of this. Because realize, if we're under physical attack, we not only have the sense of stress and fear, our body is preparing us to be able to respond to it. So what happens? Blood sugar spikes, blood pressure spikes. This helps us to either attack or to run. And so that's what also triggers the clotting, which prepares us to be wounded. Our immune system also gets ramped up, which is why we have autoimmune diseases because of constant stress. So if you look at it from that perspective, I think it helps people to understand we need to keep our blood sugar, blood pressure low, but we also need to control that stress. I always like to think, is it worth really getting angry or stressed to potentially make those blood clots which contribute to an early demise?

Yeah, it's an excellent question that we should all ask ourselves. I totally agree. Now, this is another one related to again, the blood clotting. You know, there's so much science out there that you don't get in medical school. You don't get from the American Heart Association. This is some of the signs that I want to give you. These really old studies that have shown that if your blood is thicker, you are more likely to have a stroke, more likely to have a heart attack. And what thickens the blood? The activated clotting factors. So in this case, it's fibrinogen. We have fibrinogen R in our blood, and more activated fibrinogen makes our blood thicker. Now, what's beautiful about this study is that they were actually able to filter out fibrinogen versus the cholesterol. And when they filtered out the fibrinogen from these people, the blood is less viscous. That's the red bar going down. It's basically thinner. This is without taking a drug, okay? This is reducing the fibrinogen. The blood is thinner, okay, less likely to clot. Now, when you reduce the LDL, there's basically, there's no significant difference in the viscosity, the thickness of the blood. So this is another measure that tells us that it's the clotting factors that are either directly or indirectly related to our risk for heart disease.

Yes. I totally agree. And this isn't just something that I talk to people on podcasts about in Brazilian conferences. I've had the great pleasure to work with some outstanding MDs, so Uffe Ravnskov, Michel Deladroit, who's a cardiologist, Milton Kendrick, who's got some great books on topic, which by the way, I love your book too, as well, Ken.

Thank you. Great books on the topic.

You're welcome. Uh, we published this in a medical journal. So what I'm telling you about now is available in this medical paper. We also published one just about a year ago. We reviewed the literature on people with high cholesterol. And when you measure both the cholesterol and the clotting factors, what you find is the clotting factors are so much better at telling you who has heart disease and who doesn't. And the LDL turns out to be irrelevant. And this is in, uh, one of the papers we published on this. So if a doctor is truly interested in following the science and using what the science shows us to prevent heart attacks in their patients, they should be checking coagulation factors much more often than they check LDL cholesterol.

You know, what is a shame is that, first of all, they don't do that. I know they will put people on medication. Certainly people, if they've had a heart attack, they're not put on blood thinners or put on aspirin and other medication. But they're not actually assessing what caused the heart attack. And so if you have a person, I actually know someone who actually is relatively young and had a heart attack and already and actually had relatively low cholesterol. And despite that, I'm certain the physicians, the doctors are going to want to put them on a Statin. What they really should do, and I've urged him to do, is that he should do it genetic tests to see if he's got a genetic anomaly, have a test to assess whether he's got elevated fibrinogen and prothrombin. If so, then potentially you need to be on blood thinners, need to be very careful about keeping your blood pressure and, uh, and blood sugar low. But there's no reason to lower your cholesterol. And I think they're really scholarly doctors who truly care about their patients should be aware of these different factors that increase risk for heart disease, specifically the clotting factors.

I totally agree, doctor. And, and again, you know, I'm emphasizing familial hypercholesterolemia. And it is, I have to say, it is relatively rare, only about one in two to three hundred people have this anomaly. Um, but what I'm talking about is relevant to everyone. And so that's why I have this slide because I don't want people to think I'm only talking about FH. In this slide, you're looking at the general population. So you're not looking at any specific population. And what you're seeing is the relation between fibrinogen and both coronary heart disease, that's having a heart attack, as well as having a stroke. And in both cases, what you find is that people who have higher fibrinogen, independent of their age, are more likely than to have a heart attack or stroke. And cholesterol can't compare to this as far as predicting who will have either one of these. Um, so this is why I'm emphasizing we absolutely need clotting factors. You know, without it, we would die. Um, under normal conditions, but that's the problem. It's a double-edged sword. You've got to have functional clotting factors, but when they become too activated, they block our arteries.

Yes. Absolutely. Now, the question is, is LDL always innocent of causing heart disease? The answer is, well, it kind of depends. So this is a very important slide. You'll actually go into a little bit of detail about LDL. The thing to realize is that when we have cholesterol, which is packaged by our liver, the, the liver takes that cholesterol and packages it in a protein coat, which is called VLDL. And under normal conditions, for a healthy person with low triglycerides, high HDL, it will package that LDL in what can be called large buoyant LDL. And there is no association of large buoyant LDL to heart disease. So this tells us that fundamentally, LDL is healthy. Now, in a person that is unhealthy, let's say as metabolic syndrome, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high triglycerides, the LDL is packaged differently. It tends to have more triglycerides in it. Its shape is different, its composition is different. It is then what's called small dense LDL. I think that also, it's small, damaged LDL. And so the small dense LDL exists in an unhealthy metabolism. It is part of the problem. The problem is the high blood sugar and everything else that goes along with it. And then when you have damaged LDL, it's just part of this party that's creating havoc. And this is the problem. People still try to associate the LDL with heart disease, and they need to understand that it is only the small dense, the small damaged LDL that is associated with heart disease. But if you've got your blood sugar and your blood pressure low, and your weight good, then you don't have much in the way of small dense LDL.

Yes. And here I've just shown a study, really nice study, which you ask the question, people who have high small dense LDL, that's in red, what do they look like metabolically? And so the people with high small dense LDL have extremely high triglycerides, that's where they're over 200 in the red. And on the right, the people have high small dense LDL, 75% of them are diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, which means they've got the high triglycerides, the high weight, the blood sugar. But if you've got the low small dense LDL, that's in blue, triglyceride levels are great, and they're very much less likely to be diagnosed metabolic syndrome. And that's what's so important. And I really like what you emphasize, Ken, is the good diet, the good lifestyle. If you've got your weight down, and you're exercising, and you're cutting your carbs, you're cutting your blood pressure, your blood sugar, well, then you're going to have a healthy metabolism along with a healthy form of LDL.

Exactly right. And I, I don't think we can emphasize that enough. The vast majority of doctors out there currently, for some reason, the metabolic syndrome is just either not on the radar, or they think it's just, it's genetic, there's nothing you can do about that, you just have that as if it's part of your definition. Uh, they don't even stop to consider, is this something that this patient has acquired because of their diet and lifestyle? It's like they don't consider that. Or they suspect that the patient is a lazy glutton, is is just going to lay on the couch and eat donuts and is never going to change anything. And I think that's absolutely false. I think if people know that there's hope and know there is a way to have normal metabolic health again, they'll, they'll actively pursue that. If you give them an easy map, this is where you want to be, this is where you're at now, this is how to get there. And if the advice you give them about that is actually implementable and usable and actually gives results, I find that people are eager to follow that plan and to to adopt a proper human diet. And then they become eager to get their labs rechecked every three months or every six months so that they can see what they've done to their A1C, what they've done to their fasting insulin, what they've done to their triglycerides. Whereas in the past, when they were getting in improper nutrition advice, they dreaded having their labs checked because they just knew it was going to be worse.

Now, unlike you, most, almost all physicians, when you got a patient with metabolic syndrome, the response will be medication. And so we're looking at drugs that will raise HDL, drugs that will lower triglycerides, drugs that will be able to enable people to lose weight, drugs to basically treat every aspect of metabolic syndrome. And on top of that, doctors show up and will recommend a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. And they're just so out of touch with the science. Now, you go to the American Heart Association website, you're not going to see any of this information. You're not going to see recommendations for the low carb diet. You're not going to see the difference in small dense and large buoyant LDL. You're just going to see LDL-C, which is demonized. And that's just the total cholesterol you see in all the LDL. So you're not getting the best information. Not only that, you're getting very biased information. And the American Heart Association, you're not seeing that the low carb diet is ideal as the treatment for metabolic syndrome. Absolutely.

And there, you know, there are many theories as to why the American College of Cardiology and the AHA are so adamant it's sticking to the guns on on LDL. Uh, we won't get into conspiracies today, but suffice it to say that Dr. Diamond is absolutely correct. That is what they talk about. That is what they promote, regardless of the science that you're seeing right now in front of your eyes.

Well, we don't need to talk about as a conspiracy. It's, it's simple profit. It's very simple. Um, corn oil is heart healthy. Why? Because it lowers your cholesterol. Numerous herbs, garlic is sold. What do they do? They lower your cholesterol. Becoming a vegetarian is promoted. Why? The only good thing about being a vegetarian, it lowers your cholesterol. And of course, there's more and more medication that's generated over a trillion dollars in revenue. Why? To lower cholesterol. Uh, with almost negligible benefits of any of those. And in fact, corn oil definitely not only doesn't lower your risk of heart disease, it can increase your risk of heart disease. So I don't think of it as a conspiracy. I think of it as a very simple business model. You can target LDL, you can lower it many different ways, and you can make a lot of money by lowering LDL. You don't make any money by recommending people don't eat carbs.

Exactly. And to just expound on what Dr. Diamond just said, in nutrition science, you very seldom will see a randomized control trial in human beings in human nutrition. But the question of replacing animal fats, they're AKA saturated fat, with corn oil, this has actually been studied in three separate randomized controlled trials in human beings. That didn't go on for a few days or a few weeks or a few months. These were in-house studies that I think in one case it was a seven-year-long study, one was three years long, one was five years long. Most doctors have never heard of these studies where they took people who were in institutions and they just substituted all of the animal fat with corn oil. And in all three studies, randomized control study, one of them was blinded, one of them was double-blinded in human beings, long-term studies, all three studies found that human beings die sooner on the corn oil. They have a higher risk of cancer on the corn oil. One of the studies found they actually have a higher rate of heart events, heart attacks on the corn oil. Two of these studies were suppressed. One wasn't published for decades. One was hidden in the researcher's attic or basement and was found by his son, yes, decades after the study was was done, completed, because they they firmly believed that replacing animal saturated fat with corn oil was very protective and very healthy. And when they got their results back and crushed the numbers, they're like, "Oh my God, I can't publish this. I'll lose my tenure. I'll be laughed out of the business." And so they just suppressed the studies. This is not debatable. This is proven. I actually made a YouTube video about this a year or two ago about these three studies. And it, but the average doctor has never heard of these randomized control trials where animal fat was replaced with corn oil and the patients uniformly did worse.

That you're so aware of the literature, Ken. I mean, we're talking about studies that were done 50 years ago. And the reason why they haven't been repeated is frankly, obviously, the corn oil industry doesn't want to conduct any more of these studies since people are dying at a higher rate when they're having corn oil. By the way, in one of the studies, people were basically told not to change their diet, to be with high risk of having a heart attack, go home, don't change your diet. And they fully expected them to die of heart disease. Whereas the people that were told to have the corn oil, these are the ones that died or had a heart attack at a much higher rate than the people who said, "Don't bother to change your diet." Exactly. So yeah, these are studies done decades ago that clearly indicate that corn oil is not heart healthy. And yet it continues to have the heart healthy logo because it is true, you consume corn oil, you lower your cholesterol. But as, uh, it was a John Abramson said, dying with lower cholesterol is not a successful outcome.

I agree with that 100 percent. Yeah. So let's, let's continue. And this is probably, I think, the last slide in which I want to emphasize the importance of that small damaged LDL. There is almost no, no relation of cholesterol to stroke. Um, and in fact, in general, people with the highest cholesterol have a lower rate of having a stroke. That's why I always hear of coronary heart disease because basically there's almost no relation of cholesterol to stroke. But when we look specifically at the small dense LDL, we do find that people have more ischemic strokes. And again, this is the way to think about it. In this study, they didn't look at their blood sugar, but we know that what raises small dense LDL is everything we've talked about, is the high blood sugar, high blood pressure, having metabolic syndrome. And so it's not in the LDL-C, as you see here, there's no difference in those who have a stroke and those who didn't. Um, so again, we need to think about the metabolism with all the different components. And when they are off, the LDL is off as well, because it becomes damaged. So we need to stop thinking about LDL being inherently harmful and think about LDL as a part of a productive, beneficial metabolism, as long as we've got the low blood sugar, low blood pressure, and good weight.

Yes. Absolutely. Any other slides you really want to cover today, doctor? Do you think that covers it?

Um, I think we have, we have really covered so much. Let me just take a quick look and see if I want to, uh, yeah, let me know. Did you want to cover the deception in the Statin fields, how they have amplified the appearance of the benefit of statins? Absolutely. What slide? You go to slide 18. You'll see an advertisement for our Crestor. And so here is the ad. I've taken this. And Crestor is the true number, lowers the risk of heart attack by 54%. And in the next slide, you're going to see the way it is presented to doctors.

I actually took a medical course. I sometimes we'll just audit medical courses to see how the data are presented to physicians. And this is overall a 44% lower rate of coronary events. That's heart attack, death, and stroke. And a doctor is only going to see this graph and come away from it saying, "Gee, I got to put my patients on Crestor. Isn't that fantastic?"

And what I do is I show people the actual data in the studies. And that's in the next slide. So on the right, you are seeing the numbers as reported in the medical papers, New England Journal of Medicine. And in this case, you're looking at a summary of the Crestor findings. And you see that 54, 48, 46. So you're looking at overall 44% reduction in events. This looks fantastic. I mean, if you have a physician, you want your patient to be on Crestor. And if you've just had a heart attack, you want to be on Crestor.

So what I'm showing on the left is a graph of the raw data from the paper. And so what you're looking at is the, the red shows the percent of people on Crestor that did not have a heart attack. And the blue shows the percent of people on the placebo that did not have a heart attack. So it's almost 100% do not have a heart attack. And I drew that line at 99%. You people really need to let this sink in. Over 99% of the people did not have a heart attack. And yet, I have in that arrow, there's a 54% reduction in the risk of a heart attack. Yep. How can that be?

So we talked to her doctor. I remember when the Jupiter trial came was published. And and I remember the Statin reps bringing it around. And I remember seeing that 54% reduction number. And so it's important for people watching this who are not healthcare providers to understand, doctors don't have time to go and read every single study, all the details of the study. And so drug representatives, we call them drug reps, they'll come around and they'll have just a nice glossy printout. And they'll, they'll do exactly what Dr. Diamond did here. They'll blow it up. "Oh, look at this, it's 54% reduction."

Let's take it beyond the drug reps. Understand, I have taken this cut and pasted directly from the medical paper. Yep. So it's not just the drug reps. This is the person who ran the Jupiter study, Paul Ridker. But this is how it is presented to the medical world. This is in a medical journal. And you see those same numbers. And so if the drug reps are just repeating what Paul Ridker is saying, and this is universal in the Statin literature.

So now a person listening to this would say, "Wait a second, what's going on here? Almost nobody had a heart attack. We know it. 54% looks like, I mean, it should be half. It should have been cut down in half. And yet the two are virtually identical." So this is how I explain. And I give this talk to cardiologists, and they look at me like, "I don't get it. How can it be?" So in the next slide, I explain how you get a 54% reduction.

So here are the real numbers. I'm not making this stuff up. So for the placebo group, and realize they had almost 18,000 people in this study. And almost nobody had a heart attack. I, I look at it, nobody cooperated and had a heart attack and helped out these investigators. Very ridiculously healthy people. So we look at the blue, um, for the blue group, that's the placebo. 0.76% of the people had a heart attack. Their Crestor group in red, 0.35% of those people had a heart attack. So you're comparing 31 to 68 people. The difference in 0.35% to 0.76% is 0.41%. 0.41% is 54% of 0.76%. We're talking about less than half a percent of people had a benefit as a result of being given the Crestor, which is so incredibly small. And you are not getting that from the Statin advocates. You are told 54% and you are not told the difference is basically about 57 people out of 18,000 people. That's the difference Crestor made. Yeah. And that's really the best Crestor study there was. And that's how Crestor got FDA approval for treating cholesterol. Yep.

And you'll find that these types of studies, studies talk to doctors, they love to talk about relative risk. And that's what that 54% reduction is, in relative risk. But if you want what Dave is talking about is absolute risk. When you look at the absolute risk reduction, it's trivial. I don't even know if trivial is, is a trivial enough word for it. Now, let's look at it this way. I have given this talk to cardiologists, and they have said, "Okay, the benefit isn't as big as it appears, but it's still a benefit. A half percent, one percent is better than nothing. So still, there are benefits."

So let's go to slide 27. So the FDA has made it very explicit, there are risks of statins. And so if someone said, "No adverse effects," well, that'd be great. All right, you're saving, you're saving one percent of the people for having a heart attack. But they've made, made it very clear that there are risks.

So if we go to the next slide, which I actually have to say, I find amusing. This is from the American Heart Association making an official statement that statins produce non-serious, reversible forgetfulness and cognitive. How can it be that you can prescribe medication and the person has forgetfulness? And the American Heart Association considers that non-serious? I consider that pretty darn serious. As do I. By now, let's go. Here's a study that actually looked at that. It's in the next slide. This is a real study. I understand. I, I don't make this stuff up. This is not an internet cult. This isn't an original paper. What you've got here are 75-year-old people, men and women, all being diagnosed with dementia. They're all on a Statin. They go to their doctor and say, "I've got seriously impaired memory." The beauty of this study is that they've taken all these people that are formally diagnosed with dementia and now they take them all off of their statins. And that's defining in the next slide. Next slide. Next slide.

This is so important. When they took them off of their Statin, their cognition improved. They're no longer diagnosed with dementia. And ultimately, this is the critical manipulation. They put these people back on the Statin. All of them were then put back on their Statin. And once again, they're diagnosed with dementia. So that's the non-serious forgetfulness they were talking about. Is literally, and, and it's interesting, reversible forgetfulness, which means that forgetfulness is reversed by taking people off of the statins. The American Heart Association is saying that.

One thing I really have to emphasize to people, we have an epidemic of Alzheimer's disease. Yes. And we have a very high percentage of our elderly people on statins. We don't know what percentage of those people actually have fully functional brains. But the statins are having an adverse effect. This is so important. As a neuroscientist, I look at this. The brain actually produces its own cholesterol. It is so important for the brain to have cholesterol because it uses the cholesterol to produce new brain cells, new synapse system to make memory. If the brain can't make cholesterol, it can't make new memories. And so a subset of the statins can get into the brain and muck up that machinery, which then causes it to have dementia. We don't know because this study has not been repeated. Nobody's interested in funding this kind of study. And I would think that this is an important enough finding that there would be many researchers out there very eager to repeat the study and either falsify it or verify it. But as you said earlier, there's no patent waiting at the end of that study. So they're going to spend years of their life and and hundreds of thousands of dollars, and there's not going to be a patentable drug at the end of that.

Darlene has, and I, she's going to print some of these studies out and take to her doctor. I know exactly what Darlene's up to. She says, "Where can I get copies of these trials?" So what you do, Darlene, for just this slide, for example, if you'll go to your internet search engine and just type in the full title of this paper, it's, you, it's going to be the number one thing that pops up. And many of these papers print out the full text. Not the full text, you can print out the abstract. Uh, if you want to pay $39 bucks for many of these studies, you can get the full text. But in many cases, they're free online. And that's an abbreviation of the journal title. Uh, in, uh, let me also add, um, we're publishing papers reviewing this literature. It's beautiful. We only have time to go into one or two adverse effects. Understand something. This sentence of dozens of adverse effects, which I think are going to be in a following slide or two. Um, and we have reviewed this. We have provided in one of my papers, we got 40 or 50 publications that show the adverse effects of statins. And so those references are in my paper. And the latest one is open access. So it's free to get. And I'll share that, uh, that one with you, Ken, that you can share with your subscribers. Beautiful. I'll share that in our, in our community. And I just, one, one other adverse effect, which I think is so important, and I believe it's in the next slide. Um, oh, this actually is a paper that I published along with another group showing specifically the statins that can get into the brain. So the brain's got some protection called the blood-brain barrier. Not all drugs can get into the brain. It's only the statins that can get into the brain that have been associated with cognitive effects. So this is a paper that we published a long time ago that's been unfortunately largely ignored. But a drug like Lipitor gets into the brain much more easily than than Crestor. And Lipitor has a lot more cognitive effects than than Crestor. Uh, and let's go beyond that. Okay. And I, I think this is, oh, I don't see my, seem to have lost the. I have it on my side. You don't have the data. You'll have to take my word for it then. Okay. It's interesting. You, you seem to have lost the. We're going to go to the, the one that has a graph without data.

So this is from, this is the best study that has been conducted in looking at diabetes and statins. So in the, in the study, nobody has diabetes in the beginning. They do all kinds of tests on people. They look at their insulin, they look at pancreas functioning. No one has diabetes. Over the course of six years, 6% of the people on the placebo spontaneously develop diabetes. Almost 12%, about over 11% of the people on statins develop diabetes. So you're looking at almost doubling in the rate of diabetes. We're not talking about going from a half to one. We're talking about going from 6% to almost 12% of the people develop diabetes. So you're dramatically increasing your risk of developing diabetes when you're on a Statin. Yeah. And this has been minimized. First, by the American Heart Association. Most people in the, in the general community don't know that. But many doctors will actually argue that point that, no, statins don't raise blood sugar, they don't increase your risk of diabetes. And that's been shown to be absolutely one of the risk factors associated with taking a Statin.

Damage. I think doctors get both protective and defensive. Um, they don't want to think that they're harming their patients. They want to think they're doing the best for their patients. And so they basically shut off any, any discussion about adverse effects of statins because they want to promote the use of statins. So this creates what's called cognitive dissonance. In that you've got conflicting information. You got on one hand, they're told statins are great. On the other hand, maybe statins aren't so great, maybe they could cause harm. Well, that's really hard for a doctor that wants to do only the best for their patients. So they don't want to think about statins producing diabetes. But, but it does. A substantial percentage of the population. And, uh, you know, we don't want to get into it in any great depth. And again, I've got this reviewed in my papers. The next couple of slides, I just show you, you know, standard advocates. If you go forward a couple of slides, the diabetes occurs as well in women, maybe even at a higher rate than men. But let's go to the next slide.

This is why, you know, people like me who were called LDL deniers, they were called Statin critics, people have said, "Well, this is just an internet cult. These are not real scientists." This is why I show the original peer-reviewed medical papers showing the adverse effects of statins, such as lowering testosterone, damaging the kidneys, and the muscles. And the next slide, I'm going to set a few more of the original papers showing increased risk of colorectal cancer and bone quality of tendonitis. So this is not, I mean, I have not, no one's paying me to criticize that. No one's paying me to evaluate. They'll be on. I do this completely on my own without any bias whatsoever. I'm just reporting the medical literature, which says statins are really dangerous drugs. Yes. And that's all. In many cases, we're looking at the data with fresh eyes, with, with a fresh perspective, with a new paradigm. Not blindly believing that 54% reduction number. Actually looking at the data itself. And when you do that, very often as a doctor, you walk away thinking, "Man, I was an idiot. I totally fell for that. And I prescribed statins to thousands of patients who took it for decades. And it, it, it may be lengthened their life by two or three days, maybe if they took it every single day for 20 years." And, and doctors don't want to face that kind of knowledge. No humor does. You don't want to find out that what you, you thought you were changing the world, and what you were really doing was, you were making a, a billion-dollar corporation a little bit richer. That's all you were doing at that with your medical career. That's, that's disheartening and even depressing. But that's what many doctors are faced with when they, when they hear Dr. Diamond's presentation. And like he said, he's not making stuff up there. You, you can literally type in the title of any one of those studies on it, on a search engine. You can pull up the full study. It's there in the literature. This has been known for, in some cases, decades. But doctors are not aware of it because the drug rep doesn't bring that all glossified into the office with the bagels and the donuts and say, "Hey, look at this, doc." Right.

So in my latest paper, I put all this together. Everything we've talked about. And asked the question you asked originally, which was, I've gone on the low carb diet, okay, basically the optimal human diet. I've got very high LDL. Do I need to be concerned? And we actually put that in the title of the paper. It should be in the next slide. Okay. Okay. It's right there in the title. Statin therapy is not warranted for a person with high cholesterol on a low carb diet. And there was our summary. So how do we come to such an extreme title, an extreme perspective? We are stating that if you are basically healthy, you've got your weight under control, your blood pressure, and your blood sugar, you no longer have metabolic syndrome, but you have high LDL cholesterol, should you take a Statin? We directly answer that question. And so there are studies that actually give us a pretty good idea whether or not there's a benefit. First of all, is there harm of high LDL for someone that's healthy? Second, is there a benefit of taking a Statin for someone that's healthy?

And so the next slide, I think, is an incredibly important study. And frankly, I don't think the authors are all Statin advocates appreciated what they had here because it tells you that there's a subset of people with high cholesterol that will not benefit from lowering their cholesterol. So kind of the important thing is, back up there's a study done decades ago in which people were given a Statin. And this paper was published and evaluated two subsets of people that are so relevant to the low carb community. They both, all these people have high cholesterol, high LDL cholesterol, equivalently high, alarmingly high LDL. In one group, you got high triglycerides and low HDL, as you see here. I have it's unhealthy. Another group, you have low triglycerides and high HDL, which is called lean mass hyper-responder. Okay, which is also what you see with low carb diet. And either they got Statin treatment or they didn't. I mean, it's a beautiful study. And it really addresses the fundamental question, is how dangerous is LDL by itself? And then is there a benefit of the Statin? And the results are in the next slide. I can't wait to see that.

Okay, let's start on the left side. And and understand something. Both groups have high LDL. And you're looking at the percent of people that had a heart attack. Okay. And so they're put on, half on simvastatin, half on placebo. Now, the people on the left side have the high triglycerides and low HDL. They are unhealthy. And so you see that they have a pretty high rate of coronary events. They've got a high rate of heart attacks. 35% of them on the placebo had a heart attack. Those people put on the Statin, simvastatin, and a huge reduction in the rate of heart attacks. And I understand, I have no problem saying that these people benefited by being on the Statin. These are, it's almost like saying, "Yes, sick people benefit from being on an antibiotic." Sick people benefited from being on the simvastatin. And understand, I also think the reason to this is because statins block clotting. You also block inflammation. And that's why these people who are probably hypercoagulating have reduced clotting because of the Statin. It has nothing to do with the LDL. Okay.

Now, let's look at the people on the right. The blue and the red. These are the people with a high LDL. They've got low triglycerides and high HDL. So these are healthier people. And you look at the dramatic drop in the blue, which means by having low triglycerides, high HDL, you have a lower rate of heart attacks compared to the unhealthy people. That's the blue finding with no drug. And now those people put on the Statin have a very small, non-significant difference in heart attacks. And this is great evidence. It says, if you've got a healthy metabolism, you are less likely to have a heart attack. And there is no benefit of taking the Statin. I think you would agree with this, Dr. Diamond. If, if somebody watching this, it might have a relative. You have a relative who has type 2 diabetes? Yes. If you just want to take a pill, there can be a benefit. But they're also going to be the adverse effects. Yes. And so you can increase your risk for the diabetes getting worse, and you're going to get tendonitis and potentially have brain fog. But you may be less likely to have a heart attack. Right. You want that trade-off without changing your diet and lifestyle? That's up to you. So you're going to be a diabetic nursing home, but you won't have a heart attack. But you won't have a heart attack. Okay. Is that a victory?

There's another study that sounds the same thing that's in the next slide. Okay. The important thing about the next study is, so this isn't elderly people. Say the same thing. The only report to HDLs. You have higher HDL, the unhealthier people. So those who have high HDLs, the best of these two retarders are a little bit different. The only time we talk about the statistics if it's not statistically significant, we don't consider it real. So there is no real benefit, excuse me, with high HDL. So the benefit is in getting that HDL higher. That's what happens lifestyle. Once you do that. This is, yep. I totally agree. We're, I don't know where our audio is not great, doc. I don't know what's causing that. Um, I guess let's, let's go ahead and sum up. And okay, that's the last slide. Is the sum? And I, I look at it in terms of diet. This is the very last, the very last slide of the sequence number 42. Okay. Let me say is that it. Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is sort of it's from my paper. We summarized all the benefits. I mean, you would call the proper human diet, we call it the low carbohydrate diet. Um, on the left side, look at all those benefits. I mean, this is where you say, you go to your doctor and you feel great. You lost the weight, blood pressure down, your blood sugar's down, you feel fantastic. But sometimes the LDL cholesterol is increased. And I've just got five components here that explain why you don't need to worry about it. First of all, LDL cholesterol is useless. Okay. LDL cholesterol tells you almost nothing. It doesn't tell you about those particles that I talked about, the small and the large. And that's the LDL particle. And LDL particle is useless because it doesn't tell you which of those LDLs are small and which are large. And even if it did, the small LDL is simply a part of damaged metabolism. The fourth point, we need to realize we have been deceived. The Statin advocates have used, and you said it, relative risk, which greatly amplifies the appearance of benefit. It can take a fraction of a difference between two groups and turn it into a 50% benefit. And they intentionally are deceiving us to give us the impression that the statins are wonder drugs when in fact, they really aren't. And so if you want to get that benefit, frankly, of, uh, that you don't need with the Statin, you get the benefit of the Statin if you're sick. But you get the adverse effects. Ultimately, to improve your health, to improve your metabolism, the best thing you can do is control your stress, control your blood pressure, reduce your blood sugar by reducing your carbohydrate consumption. Absolutely. And I think that's, that's perfectly well said. Uh, you can have all these benefits with no side effects whatsoever. Or you can have that one potential benefit with a long list of pretty much proven side effects. And so, well, there are side effects. I will add the side effects of the low carb diet is I had to have all my clothes taken in when I lost a good bit of weight. And I usually, you're going to be buying a new, new wardrobe. Right. Absolutely. Some people have to buy new shoes. Some people have to have the ring resized. That's right. Absolutely. So your life will change a bit, but all for the better. All for the better. Dr. Diamond, thank you so much for doing this today. This has been, uh, absolutely just like the sun has come behind the clouds and, and you've enlightened so much of this information for people because people are worried about this. When you go to your doctor with an elevated LDL, I've been going to that doctor for 10 years. You love that guy. Maybe he was your doctor when you were a kid. You look at this person as somewhat of a demigod, like this guy knows his stuff. You listen to Dr. So-and-so. And when that person, that person you've trusted, perhaps your entire adult life, says, "This is a big deal. This is important. This is dangerous. You need to take this drug." And the only argument you've got against that is this doctor I heard on YouTube. You're like, "Oh, okay. Well, I don't know what to do here because I feel like Dr. Berry and Dr. Diamond kind of got this figured out, but I love Dr. McGillicuddy. He was my doctor my whole life. I don't know what to do here." And so that's why I love that you put the actual titles of the studies up so people can look those up, print them out, and take a copy to Dr. McGillicuddy, who's probably 10 years behind on his reading. He probably plays more golf than he spends time reading his research studies, research from the American Heart Association. And that's right. Or the drug rep. And so maybe you can enlighten Dr. McGillicuddy, and he'll appreciate that that you've done that. And maybe we'll start doing some reading again and update how he or she practices medicine. Dr. Diamond, any parting thoughts that you want to leave us with? Listen, I, I have the greatest admiration for you, Ken. Um, I, I just think you are getting the best information out there. I greatly appreciate you giving me the opportunity to share this my information, what I have learned over the past 15 years, um, with your audience. So listen, I hope people will take this to heart, pun intended. Um, look at the papers that I've got here. Um, look at the papers that I've published. Bring them to your doctor. Especially that last paper that I published. Bring it to your doctor. Challenge tactfully your doctor to read that paper to understand what the doctor has not been educated on by organizations such as the American Heart Association. So listen, this has been, it's been a great experience for me. And I thank you so much, Ken, for giving me the opportunity to share what I've learned with your audience. Absolutely. Doctor, thank you so much. Have a good day. YouTube. Right. Oh.