Transcription
Is cholesterol a poison in your body that your doctor needs to lower as far as possible in order to help you be healthier and live longer? Or is cholesterol a naturally occurring molecule your body actually makes that your body uses for hundreds of different purposes?
In this video, I'm going to show you a chart that will forever end the fear that you have, and evidently your doctor has as well, about cholesterol being deadly. High cholesterol, specifically. And I'm going to give you some resources you can use. And you can actually print them out, take them to your doctor, and say, "Hey, dude, calm down. Cholesterol is not poison." I'm Dr. Ken Berry, a family physician. Let's destroy the cholesterol hypothesis.
Okay, so here's the graph in question. Now, this is plotting U.S. heart deaths against the cholesterol levels, or the percentage of Americans who have high cholesterol. The blue line is deaths from heart disease, and the golden line is the percentage of people who have high cholesterol in the United States. And you can see that as heart deaths since 2010 have been going up rather quickly and uncomfortably, doctors have been steadily lowering your cholesterol with pills and injections.
So, for example, if the golden line was poison in our food supply, someone was secretly poisoning our food supply, and then doctors discovered it back in the year 2000, it said, "Ha! Someone's poisoning the food supply. Let's take this poison. Let's lower it dramatically." So the golden line, you can see the doctors are doing a good job of lowering the poison. In this case, cholesterol. But in our hypothetical example, strychnine. Well, what you would expect to see if this poison truly were poison and were killing people prematurely, you would expect the blue line to go right hand in hand to decrease along with the golden line. But we don't see that, do we? We see in 2010 that the number of deaths because of this poison start to skyrocket as the doctors continue to remove the poison from our environment, from our body. So these two lines don't track at all, do they?
So quickly, you can go, "Well, wait a minute. If high cholesterol caused heart death, then the golden line and the blue line, they should be just side by side, and they should, they should track each other." But they definitely do not. And this is the one graph, the one chart. Once you see this, once your doctor sees this, I predict your doctor will shut up about your high cholesterol and start to focus on things that really do increase your risk of heart death. Things that I talk about in other videos on this channel, like high blood sugar, high insulin levels, and high levels of inflammation.
So why is your doctor so single-minded about lowering your cholesterol? It seems that you could go in with a compound femur fracture, and they'd want to put you on a statin to lower your cholesterol, as if that were going to help your broken leg. The reason that they're so single-minded in talking about cholesterol as a risk factor for heart disease is because that's what the American Heart Association has taught them. Evidently, the American Heart Association is much more interested with partnering with huge, multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical corporations. And when I say partner, I mean they like to get big checks from them. Uh, companies like Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Merck donate millions of dollars a year to the American Heart Association. And it seems like that the American Heart Association is not interested in the graph I showed you previously. They're just interested in cashing the checks.
So let's talk about science for a second. Uh, not too much, just a little. I promise I won't bore you. So here's the graph of how a bright idea becomes a hypothesis, then a theory, then a law. So a few decades back, a few scientists had the idea that having high levels of cholesterol would increase your risk of dying from heart disease. And since they were gray-haired old white men in long white coats, this idea quickly earned the status of a hypothesis. Now, a hypothesis is basically just an educated guess. That's all it is. It doesn't prove anything. What has to happen before a hypothesis ever becomes a theory, much less a law, is that multiple research studies, good quality control research studies, need to support that hypothesis in order for it to move up the ranks and become a theory. But that hasn't happened with, uh, the lipid hypothesis of heart disease, as I'm going to tell you in just a second.
So there are literally scores of randomized controlled trials in human beings about medications that lower your cholesterol level, and they never show a decrease in mortality. That's your risk of dying. So you don't really care if your total cholesterol is high or if your LDL cholesterol is high. What you truly care about at the end of the day is, "Hey, I don't want to die prematurely. I want to live a long damn time." Well, all of these controlled trials, which were supposed, supposed to support the lipid hypothesis of heart disease, didn't support it. The vast majority don't support it at all. If subsequent good quality research doesn't support a hypothesis, then what's supposed to happen in science is that that hypothesis is disproven, and it's thrown in the garbage because it's trash. There have been hundreds and hundreds of hypotheses that have been put out there by scientists all through the centuries. That's the way science is supposed to work.
What's not supposed to happen is that scientists and doctors, healthcare providers, are not supposed to start making medical recommendations based on a hypothesis that's not been supported by randomized controlled research. And in this case, for some reason, it seems like the American Heart Association is so blinded by the millions of dollars in donations that they get every year that they're making formal, black and white recommendations based on a disproven hypothesis. Now, that recommendation that the AHA makes, that makes Pfizer and Merck and AstraZeneca billions of dollars a year, but it doesn't help you live one day longer. So I think it becomes clear who the AHA is actually working for.
The problem is, your doctor's supposed to be working for you, right? But if your doctor's taking their marching orders from the American Heart Association, then they wind up giving you bad, unhelpful, perhaps even harmful advice about how to lengthen your lifespan and your health span. Out of 29 major randomized controlled trials to see if this particular medication, by lowering your cholesterol, would increase your risk of not dying, only two studies out of the 29 showed a mortality benefit. The other 27 showed no decrease in your risk of dying whatsoever. Yep, you heard that right. Only one-third of these 29 major randomized controlled trials even showed any cardiovascular benefit. The other two-thirds of these very well-done trials didn't even show a cardiovascular benefit, much less a reduction in your risk of dying.
Now, the question becomes, instead of having to have an argument with your doctor every time you go to their office, is there some way that you can teach your doctor? Because obviously, the American Heart Association ain't going to teach them that high cholesterol is not a risk factor for premature death. Maybe it's, maybe it's not your job, but maybe it is going to have to be your duty to say, "Hey, doc, stop talking to me about my high cholesterol." Down in the show notes below, I've linked to two review studies that look at all the information I just gave you. You can print these studies out in their entirety, the complete study, and take a copy of each one to your doctor the next time you have an appointment. And when your doctor says, "Oh, look, you've got a skull fracture here, you need to take this statin to lower your cholesterol," you can politely, respectfully, with a smile, hand these two studies to your doctor and say, "Doctor, when you have a minute, I need you to read these studies." And then, "If you ever talk to me again about my cholesterol being high and at the same time ignoring the real risk factors that are going to kill me prematurely, I'm going to find a new doctor." And I think if you put it like that, your doctor may go, "Hmm, this must be important. Maybe I'll read these tonight instead of watching the financial news to see how my stocks are doing."
You know what you could do? You could just share this video with your doctor on social media and say, "Hey, doc, what gives? You told me that if I have high cholesterol, it's going to kill me prematurely, but the vast majority of randomized controlled trials don't show that. So what's going on, doc? Who, where are you getting your information from? Because Dr. Barry said that randomized controlled trials in humans, they're the, that's the most rigorous, vigorous research out there. And so the lipid hypothesis, that having high cholesterol will increase your risk of dying, not only has not been proven, it's been disproven thoroughly."
So all healthcare providers out there, if you're listening, please stop saying stupid things like, "Hey, you've got to take this injection or this pill to lower your cholesterol, or you'll die prematurely," because the research does not back up what you're saying. If this video helped you understand this very cloudy, muddy issue, then thanks for the thumbs up. And maybe you could even share this with a friend or family member who's still worried to death about their high cholesterol. This is Dr. Berry. I'll see you next time.