Transcription
Hello Health Champions.
Cholesterol and heart attacks are perhaps the most misunderstood topic in all of healthcare and as a result a lot of people get hurt and are suffering needlessly. And here are just some of the problems we hear forever that HDL is good, LDL is bad. High cholesterol is bad and that's just way way too simplistic.
There's so much more to it than that. We hear that a statin drug could be necessary after we try diet and exercise without success, but the question is what diet and what exercise are they trying? And very often people ask me or I see suggestions of natural remedies to lower cholesterol, but the question is, are we sure we want to lower it?
Now please keep in mind that I am not saying that a stat drug is never a good idea. I'm not saying that cholesterol can never be too high or out of balance, that's not what I'm saying. But there may be like one percent of people with a genetic defect with familial hypercholesterolemia whereas that drug is the right thing for them. But for the vast majority of people who get blanket recommendations of statin drugs because their cholesterol is too high, we need to understand a lot more.
And even though I will defend higher cholesterol numbers, I'm not saying that higher is always better and I'm not saying that you should not get concerned about what your blood work says, that you should just disregard everything on there. What I am saying is I think it's a bad idea to make a diagnosis on a single marker such as high cholesterol or high LDL. And if we then based on that diagnosis get a prescription for a chemical or medication that will interfere with the function of the liver, which we'll talk about, and interfere with health, then I believe we are doing some of the greatest disservices to mankind. And we need to understand some of the things that I'm going to talk about.
First, we need to understand something about this molecule cholesterol. First of all, it's synthesized in every cell of your body that has a nucleus. That's basically every cell except red blood cells can make cholesterol. A lot of it is made in the liver and that's traditionally where we hear that cholesterol is made. And because the body makes cholesterol itself, then if you eat less, then the body will make more. If you eat more, the body will make less. The body needs to have a certain amount of cholesterol.
And the brain is one of the places that's most dependent on cholesterol. 23% of all the cholesterol in your body is in the brain. And interestingly, the cholesterol molecule is too large to cross the blood-brain barrier. So all of the cholesterol in the brain is manufactured in the brain because it's that important.
Cholesterol is necessary for many things and one of the most important is as a building material, as a structural component. The cell membrane, which is the surface bilayer of every cell in your body. 30 mole percent, meaning 30% of the number of molecules in that cell membrane is cholesterol. And if you look at these little arrows, this yellow structure is cholesterol. So 30% is a lot more than what they're showing in this picture. 30% of your cell membrane is cholesterol.
And why is that cell membrane so important? Because the cell membrane is the actual decision maker of everything in your body. Your body processes billions of bits of information every second and it's all about the cell membrane because the cell membrane is a barrier that determines what stays outside and what gets into the cell. And inside the cell is where you have your metabolism and your metabolic function and the manufacture of every hormone and protein and substance in your body. And cholesterol is a huge part of determining the properties of this cell membrane because there's a fine balance between rigidity and flexibility when you determine how the cell membrane works. So cholesterol is critical for the function of that cell membrane.
And where do you have the most important cell membranes that handle the most signals? Well in the brain, of course, which has tons of cholesterol. And then when the brain needs to send the messages out to the periphery, when the central nervous system talks to the peripheral nervous system, which has millions of these electrical wires that go to every little part of your body, then it sends it along a nerve pathway called an axon. And this axon, it's just like electrical wires in your house basically that it needs a surface insulation. Just like your wires have that plastic coating, so does your axons and your nerves need an insulation. And that insulation is called myelin. That myelin is 27% cholesterol. And there is a severe disease called multiple sclerosis which happens when this myelin is defective or gets attacked.
Cholesterol is also a precursor to bile. So when your gallbladder releases bile to dissolve fats to help you digest fats, bile consists mostly of cholesterol. It's also a precursor to steroid hormones. So a lot of your endocrine system, a very fine-tuned communication system, depends on cholesterol. So testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone are made from cholesterol. And also cortisol. And very often I talk about cortisol in this channel because cortisol is a stress hormone and too much of it on a chronic basis contributes to a lot of health problems. But it doesn't mean that we don't need it. It's still critical because if you can't have a stress response, then you're basically a sitting duck. That means you can't respond to the events of life and you might just be standing there when the bus comes to run you over.
So with all these functions of cholesterol, do we really want to just shut it down? Do we really just unilaterally say that cholesterol is a bad thing? You have too much, let's shut it down. There's no wonder that there's such dramatic side effects when we try to interfere with cholesterol.
And what about LDL and HDL? We've heard that their LDL is bad, HDL is good. But they are just doing their job. LDL is a low-density lipoprotein. It's a carrier that contains a little bit more cholesterol than the HDL does. And therefore, its job is to deliver cholesterol when the body needs it, when appropriate. The HDL is high-density lipoprotein. So it has a lower percentage of cholesterol. So therefore, it tends to attract it, collects and returns cholesterol. So if the body has to have LDL or cholesterol delivered, then it would seem like a really good thing to have some LDL to deliver that, right? And if the body needs HDL to collect, then that would seem like a really good thing. The appropriate amount of LDL and the appropriate amount of HDL is a good thing. It's not that LDL or HDL is good or bad.
What we want to be concerned with is the properties, the state, the health of these particles. And what we want to watch is small LDL. When the LDL is large and fluffy, there's nothing wrong with it. There are no ill health effects. But when it gets small, it is because it's damaged by inflammation and by oxidative stress. And we'll talk a lot about this. So you get it totally clear. So the small LDL also, it is a bad thing in a sense that it indicates that something is wrong. But the small LDL itself is just a victim of inflammation and oxidative stress. And what is the cause of inflammation and oxidative stress? It is sugar, toxins, and excess free radicals. And that excess is key to understand that oxidative stress is necessary to produce energy. Free radicals is necessary as a result of producing energy and performing metabolism. But when things get out of balance and we have all these things in excess, that's when we have a problem.
And I've used this analogy before, but I really want to reinforce this, that we want to stop calling LDL bad because LDL shows up after the problem. When we have oxidative stress, LDL is delivered to repair the damage. It's like we see the fire department at the scene of an accident and we say, "Oh, that evil fire department is there causing accidents again." No, they showed up after and they're trying to help the victim because the victim indicates that something bad happened. But LDL and HDL are both good things, just like these first responders are.
And when the blood work comes back with a cholesterol over 200, then it's almost a knee-jerk response for a lot of practitioners to recommend a statin drug. So what do statins do? There are a couple of things. We'll talk about, but one of the things that's really important to understand is it can upregulate the number of LDL receptors on the liver. So the liver recycles these LDL particles. And on the surface of an LDL particle, there is something called an Apo B protein that can be recognized by these receptors. And then the liver recycles these LDLs. So the statin drug increases the number of receptors and now we can start recycling these LDLs. But here's the thing, it is only the large and the fluffy, the buoyant LDL that's healthy that get recycled, right? So we reduce the total number of cholesterol of LDL cholesterol by reducing the fluffy buoyant LDL. But it is the oxidized damaged LDL that we're trying to get rid of. And this has a damaged Apo-B protein, so the receptor can't recognize it. See, no matter how much we upregulate the receptors, there is no change to these oxidized LDLs. So we could make an argument that we're still doing a good job because if we reabsorb more of the fluffy LDL, then there will be less LDL overall in total to get oxidized in the future. But what really happens that's more important is that we change the ratio. And we'll talk more about that, that we, the ratio of the oxidized to the buoyant, the small to the large LDL, that ratio goes up and gets much much worse. And this is one of the more important indicators for heart disease. So even though the statin drug will reduce the total number, it will make the ratio worse.
The small LDL does damage in many ways. First of all, it's an indicator of damage because if we have a lot of small LDL, we know that there's a lot of oxidative stress and inflammation. But furthermore, this inflammation and oxidative stress, it can create damage or cracks in the inside surface and the intima of the blood vessel. And if you notice that this plaque here is not inside the opening, it's not inside the lumen of the blood vessel, it is between the surface layer and the muscular wall. So the surface layer, the inside has to crack, it has to get more loose so that these particles can get through and create these plaques. And the small particles will slip through the cracks much much easier. The large fluffy ones don't tend to do that.
And the other problem, like we talked about, is the small LDL cannot be recognized by the receptors. So when we have a buildup of these and they slip through, then we need for someone else to take care of them. And this is where the immune system comes in. You have white blood cells called macrophages. They're like little Pac-Mans and they follow these small particles in through the cracks or wherever these small LDLs are. But if they've gone through these cracks behind the intima, now that's where they hang out and that's where the immune cells go. And now they gobble up as many of these little LDLs as they can. And then when they're full, now they've contained the LDLs, but they've turned into foam cells. And that is basically what the plaque is.
But now let's look at some actual blood work to help us understand what we need to look for to understand the bigger picture. We don't want to make a diagnosis, we don't want to hyper-focus on one variable. We want to understand the bigger picture. What are all of the markers or some of the markers involved with insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, poor metabolic health, inflammation, stress, etc.?
Here is a patient that came in first to me around September and we did some blood work and then we repeated the blood work after about three months, almost exactly three months. First thing we look at, I've condensed this, we're just looking at a few variables here. But glucose, according to the reference, needs to be 65-99. And I think the 99 is too high. I think it needs to be under 88, 85 ish. 65 is fine if you're on a low carb diet, otherwise it probably indicates hypoglycemia. But this guy had really good glucose control. Even when he came in at 82, after a few months it was 74. So both of those values are good. No big deal.
Then we look at some liver enzymes. The AST is often called the liver enzyme, but it is part of several different organs. And these enzymes are not really supposed to be in the blood. They end up in the blood when the cells wear out and they spill their content. And some of that is normal because we have a turnover of cells. So if a few cells break and spill their enzymes, that's okay. And the range for this one is 0 to 40. And it's never going to be zero. But 40 is really too high. You want it kind of to be 25 or so. And he started out at 29, but after three months he was at 20. So we see some improvement. The ALT is also not a hundred percent specific for liver, but it's mostly specific to liver. And that one, they put at zero to 44. He started out at 40, again, a little bit too high. After three months, he's in a much better range, 27.
Then we look at total cholesterol. And they want to see that 100 to 199. In my mind, a completely crazy arbitrary number. If it is under 150, I will be much much more concerned than if it's 300 because cholesterol is necessary. And if it gets too low, then that means your liver is not healthy enough to make it. Could be something like heavy metal toxicity. So anyway, this person had 277. And this is, by the way, it's a 43-year-old male. And then after three months, it is 1 point worse. So basically no difference.
We look at triglycerides, which is the fat in the blood. So traditionally, we hear that if you eat a high fat diet, your fat in the blood will go up. And they want to see that 0 to 149. If it's zero, you'll be dead. If it's 149, I think that's too high. I want to see that probably between 50 to 80. And he started out at 112. After three months, it was 65.
VLDL is also a great indicator of insulin resistance, just like triglycerides are. Because the VLDL is a very large, very low-density lipoprotein. It has even more triglycerides in it than the LDL. So its job is to deliver the triglycerides into circulation. And if your cells are resistant and it doesn't accept and and let that triglyceride in for fuel because it already has too much fuel, that cell is resistant. And the triglycerides will build up. And if the cells don't want the triglycerides, the VLDL has nobody to deliver to. So therefore, the triglycerides and the VLDL both go up with insulin resistance. The lab range for VLDL is 5 to 40. And I never want to see 40 because that is strongly pre-diabetic. This guy came in at 20, which is pretty good, but still a little bit too high. I'd rather see it under 17, 18, or under 15. But after three months, he is at 10, which is a very healthy number. So he had some insulin resistance starting out. Even though he had good glucose control at 82, he was still a little bit insulin resistant based on the triglycerides and the VLDL. But after three months, it's looking much better.
Then we look at the LDL-C, which is calculated LDL or the milligrams or the mass of LDL. It doesn't count the particles, which we'll get to in a second. And this number, they want to see under 99. Again, the range is 0 to 99. And it's zero, you'll be dead. So I don't know why the range goes to zero. But 99 again is a totally arbitrary number because it's about the health of the LDL particles, not the total amount. And my patient started out at 209, so more than double what he was supposed to have. And after three months, he had 215. So basically no change or even a little bit worse. And the only thing that shows up on these blood reports is the high flag for total cholesterol and LDL. So in their minds, this guy is a perfect candidate for statin medications.
But if we're starting to understand the bigger picture and we look at all these markers that have to do with the true risk markers for heart disease, we see that glucose got better, AST, ALT enzymes got better, and triglycerides and VLDL got better. So he had five out of seven markers that got dramatically better, while two of these stayed the same. So to me, this is saying this person is getting healthier. And this is the level of cholesterol that his body likes to have now.
So far, all these numbers, you could get on a very standard blood work. But if we want to start understanding a little bit more, we add something called an NMR profile, where we can start looking at the size and the number of particles. So when we look at the LDL particle number, then the range is supposed to be under a thousand. And my patient started out at 2,700, so almost three times higher number of LDL particles. That looks like a disaster, right? But we don't want to jump to conclusions because we see a lot of the other markers are actually getting better. So we want to know what's happening here. And one of the things we want to analyze this is we want to understand what does this mean? What is the significance of these different numbers?
And when we look at the number of small LDLs, they want to see less than 527 out of a thousand. In the mainstream criteria, that means they think it's okay if you have up to 53% of all your LDL be small and damaged. And why do I construct that number and look at it? Because that represents the degree of inflammation and oxidative stress in the system. If you have a thousand LDL particles, on average, 53 of those are going to get damaged. And to me, that is way too high. I don't care about the total number as much as I do the percentage that get damaged.
So my patient here started out at 1400. Three months earlier, so he was at 52%. I'm not happy with that at all. But even though he has a lot of LDL particles, he is no worse than the mainstream criteria for acceptable. But again, I want to see that much lower. And what we see then is after three months, even though his total cholesterol basically stayed the same and his LDL went up, his particle number went down by over 300. And when we look at the nitty gritty and we look at the small LDL particles, this is nothing short of amazing. He went from 1400 to 200 small particles. He did away with 85% of his particles. And he went from 52% to 9%. Again, why is this so huge? Because the 52% represents how many percent get damaged by oxidation and inflammation. And if we can go from 52% to 9%, we have massively reduced his risk of heart disease.
So what do we do with this? We follow up again in three months. And now we see that we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven out of nine markers are vastly improved. So we check again in three months and we see make sure that we're still going in the right direction. But we don't jump to conclusions based on a single number.
Now let's understand a little bit more about the mechanisms of statin drugs. Because anytime you have high cholesterol, they want to prescribe a statin. So we want to understand what's actually happening in the body. So does a statin drug medication reduce the total amount of cholesterol? Yes, absolutely it does. And one way is that it upregulates the receptors, we get more of the recycling. But it does not reduce the small LDL. So even though it reduces the total and the LDL, it doesn't reduce the kind that we try to get rid of. So I just want to emphasize that over and over, it's so critical.
But the main way that the statin does its work is through something called the mevalonate pathway. And here's how that works. When the body makes cholesterol, it starts out with a substance called HMG-CoA reductase. And then through a number of different steps that I don't bother with the details, in the end, the body ends up with cholesterol. So the names here are not important. I just want you to show that there's a number of different steps and we end up with cholesterol. But once we take a statin, once we take a medication to lower cholesterol and to block the production, then we knock out a lot of this HMG-CoA reductase. And when we do that, of course, we also knock out the end result of that pathway, which is cholesterol. But there's one more detail. And that is there's another product from a component halfway down called CoQ10. And the CoQ10 also gets knocked out to a large degree. To probably whatever percentage we reduce cholesterol by, we're also going to reduce CoQ10 because they're part of the same pathway.
And what does CoQ10 do? It is one of the enzymes that the mitochondria use to produce energy. So 95% of our energy, of all the energy used by every cell in your body, depends on CoQ10. So any time that you block the production of CoQ10, you're also blocking some of the production of energy. So if you have to be on a cholesterol medication for whatever reason, or if you're working to get healthy, so you could have that discussion with your doctor, at the very least, you want to make sure that you supplement quite massively with CoQ10, probably at least 300 milligrams a day.
And cholesterol medications are very controversial because they have a much higher rate of side effects than just about anything else out there. And here are some of those. SAMS stands for statin associated symptoms. And in increasing severity, it starts with myalgia, which is muscle pain. Then we have muscle disease. We have myositis, which is muscle inflammation. Now the disease is so bad that we start breaking some cells and they spill an enzyme called creatinine kinase. So now it means the muscles are breaking down more than they should. And the worst version of this is called rhabdomyolysis. And "rhabdo" means striated or skeletal muscle, "myo" means muscle, and "lysis" means it's basically melting, that your muscles are just disintegrating. This is completely disabling and sometimes fatal. Part of this picture is also joint inflammation, tendon disorders, arthritis, and things like that. Because joints get 90% of their stability support from muscles. So if the muscles don't work and they're not firing right, then the joints are going to get unstable and suffer and get inflamed as well.
Statins have also been associated with type 2 diabetes, with neurological problems, with neurocognitive effects. And cognitive, you want to think focus, memory, intelligence, things like that. Also hemorrhagic stroke, bleeding stroke, bleeding in the brain, hepatotoxicity, that you're interfering so much with the liver that the liver gets toxic. And the kidneys can also get toxic. And there's many more conditions. So lots of side effects are observed. But they keep saying that they're unclear about the mechanism. But we do know that it interferes with the production of CoQ10. So we will have a loss of energy. So whatever body parts, whatever organs use the most energy are probably going to be the ones to suffer the most. And those would be the brain, the heart, the liver, and the muscles because they are higher metabolically active than most other tissues.
And other than that, cholesterol medications are so beneficial because after all, they lower cholesterol, right? But I hope you see by now that just looking at one number and saying we need to lower cholesterol in itself is not the goal.
Here's something that will hopefully get your attention. In a study, they found that lipophilic statins, which is a subclass, a type, most common class of statin drugs, more than doubles the risk of dementia. One of the most devastating conditions, one of the things that people are the most afraid of is to lose their whole personality and their cognition. These medications can more than double. And this was from the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging in 2021 annual meeting. So they did some PET scans, which is sophisticated brain imaging. And they found a substantial decline in metabolism, substantial decline in energy production and activity in the posterior cingulate cortex. That is the first place to lose function, to have decreased function when people have early Alzheimer's.
Here's another study from Neurology 2005. And they found that when we look at the risk of dementia, there was a longitudinal study. They followed people for many, many years as they were aging. And at 70 years old, they looked at the people with the overall lowest cholesterol, not because they were taking a medication or anything. They just looked at what are their cholesterol levels. And they compared the lowest group to the highest group. And they found that there was 69% less dementia in the people with the highest cholesterol. They followed this along. And when these people were 76 years old, they found that there was 80% less dementia in the people with the highest cholesterol. And in the 79-year-old group, it was still a 55% less dementia. So what this means is that cholesterol is neuroprotective. It protects you against dementia.
And now you may be thinking, well, maybe I have to sacrifice my brain a little bit as a trade-off for better heart health. And they often claim that it is beyond the shadow of a doubt, it's very, very clear that cholesterol medication reduces cholesterol and reduces plaquing and heart disease. And that may or may not be true, depending on what study you look at. But what if you're just lowering cholesterol and then dying from something else?
So when we look at all-cause mortality, dying from for any reason. And this was a study in Lancet in 1997. We see the people with the lowest cholesterol, we put them at a hundred as a as a reference. And then we see the people with medium cholesterol had 40% less mortality. And the people in the group with the highest cholesterol had a 60% reduction in all-cause mortality. So again, what they're saying, you're less likely to die for any reason if you have higher cholesterol.
But here's the one I hear the most still. Because people, they go low carb, they cut out the sugar, they start improving their health, they feel better. And then they're still scared because someone tells them that a low carb, high fat diet will raise your cholesterol. And they specifically say that you can't eat all that meat and all that butter because saturated fat will increase your LDL. Is that true? Well, maybe. I think there is maybe a correlation that saturated fat will increase. But what we see is that it increases the fluffy LDL, the buoyant, harmless LDL. And what happens with sugar, carbohydrates, and processed seed oils? These are the things that cause inflammation and oxidative stress. They will increase the small LDL. So even if you eat saturated fat and have a higher total level of LDL, what we're concerned with is what percentage of the LDL has been damaged.
And now you're probably wondering, then the example that I gave you, what did this guy do? Did he eat low fat like they recommend? No, he ate more meat and vegetables and butter and more saturated fat. But he ate less fast food because he had had some bad habits in the past that we got rid of. And he pretty much cut out all the sugar and he reduced his carbohydrate. Now, the thing to understand, I made this point before, I want to make it again, that you have to cut the carbohydrates low enough to dramatically reduce insulin. You can't go from 60 carbohydrate to 30% carbohydrate and call that low carb because you're still making too much insulin. And now with all that insulin, you still can't burn through that saturated fat. You have to lower sugar, eliminate sugar, and lower the carbohydrates enough that there's a significant change in your insulin. Now that saturated fat is good for you.
And because this person came to our office, we also put them on very specific supplements, a very specific program. And what was so specific? We identified the root causes that this person needed to handle. And for him, it was scars first of all. Because scars interfere with the meridian, with the acupuncture chi that flows in the skin. If you have scars, then that distorts that information. Electromagnetic fields was a big thing. So electromagnetic radiation from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and cell phones and laptops and iPads and things like that can distort the communication that your body is trying to send. He also had some chemical issues, we needed to gently detoxify. He had some digestive intel, food intolerances. He gave him some digestive enzymes. Then he was low in vitamin D. That was a simple one. And he also needed a little bit of immune support. And down the road, he needed a little bit of adrenal support.
So why am I mentioning this? Because so many people ask me, that does Ashwagandha work? Does turmeric work? Is vitamin D good? Vitamin D is good for you if you're low in vitamin D, you should add some. But if you have a headache or a digestive problem, a thousand different people with a headache could have a thousand different root causes. So we're not addressing the headache, we're addressing the root cause. And that is the only way that we can create long-term change.
And when they tell you you need to get on a cholesterol medication if you still have high cholesterol after trying diet and exercise, so which diet are they talking about? Because if you don't understand the things we talk about in these videos, chances are that what you have tried have been heart-healthy diets recommended by the mainstream, who are low-fat, lean meats, lots of fruits, grains, and seed oils. And while you're much better off if you eat this from whole food rather than eating sugar and fast food, for most people, it's still not enough to make a big difference because you're not reducing insulin enough to turn around that metabolic syndrome.
Also, we want to understand what exercise are they talking about? Because people usually have the mindset of no pain, no gain. So if you go and you join the so-called boot camp in the gym at five in the morning where they try to exhaust you as much as possible in 45 minutes, that may be the exact opposite of what you're trying to do to burn fat. Because these boot camps will put you into a glycolysis, into an anaerobic metabolism where you break down sugar. And when you break down the sugar, you're going to get cravings for more sugar and more carbohydrate. And you're going to drive up your cortisol, you're going to break down muscle, and you're going to create more stress and more inflammation if you do that wrong.
So again, there may be a very small percentage of genetic defects that could benefit from a cholesterol medication. But don't jump on one until you have done the correct diet and exercise for a while and you understand what you're trying to change.
But here's what still happens a lot. I get people coming in and they might report on a video on YouTube and they say, "I feel amazing. My weight, my glucose, my A1C, my insulin values, my triglycerides, my HDL, my small LDL, my VLDL, my sleep and pain, they're all better. I feel amazing. But I'm still worried because my cholesterol is high with all of this getting better. Now, all I want is to bring my cholesterol down. How do I do that?" And the answer is, you don't. If all of these other values are better, you are getting healthier. Now, I'm not saying that there is a number where you don't have to worry. But 200, 250, 300, 350 are probably totally fine if everything else looks good. If it's 500, 700, a thousand, then I don't know. Then you need to have a discussion with somebody.
Now, what if all the things that I've talked about are looking good or heading in the right direction, but you still have some doubts? This is where you go for a calcium score or a coronary artery calcium score. So what they do is they do an imaging of your heart and your coronary arteries. And you get a number back. So it's going to depend on the lab that performs it and where you are, what units they use and what the scale is. The one I get back usually goes from 0 to 400 or higher. And here's what that means. If you get back a zero, that's a negative test. That means you have no plaque. That there's a very low risk for a heart attack or a myocardial infarction. If you're between 1 and 10, now there may be some plaque. But if it's there, it's going to be minimal and you're still very low risk. If it's between 11 and 100, you have mild plaque, mild heart disease, but you're still at a mild risk for a heart attack. If your numbers come back between 101 and 400, now you have moderate heart disease. There is some plaquing present and you have a moderate risk of heart attack. And if your number comes back over 400, then there is a large amount of plaque. It's a high probability that one or more of your coronary arteries have a substantial amount of blockage. And there's a relatively high risk of a heart attack in the next five years. But very, very few people, I don't think I've ever had anyone come back in this number.
So what is this talking about? That if they're trying to tell you that your high cholesterol indicates that you are a candidate for heart disease, why don't we just find out? Why don't we take a picture and see if it's actually there? And there's not a 100% correlation between the calcium and the plaque because they're measuring the calcium and only indirectly guessing how much plaque there is. But there's a pretty good correlation there. And it's a very inexpensive test. Get this, insurance doesn't pay for this. They'd rather pay tens of thousands of dollars for cholesterol medication than to spend a hundred dollars on a test like this to actually find out.
So if you're in doubt, get with your doctor and have them order a calcium score. And then you can evaluate depending on what the results are. When you get it back, if you're on the top half of this, then you know you're in pretty good shape. And in a few years, you have another score and you make sure that it's not getting worse. Then you can consult and evaluate with your doctor.
And at my office, Wellness for Life, we have a department that can help you get some blood work and a consultation to help you understand your blood work. And if necessary or appropriate, could get you a calcium score. After that, I'll also put a link down below for 5% off on CoQ10 if you don't have a good source already. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you check out that one. And if you truly want to master health by understanding how the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications so you never miss a life-saving video.