Great summary Dr. Davis.  You're the best!

Thank you for the useful information you provide, Dr. Davis. But I have a question: Does it really take 3-4 years to replenish vitamin D stores in the body?

Dr. Davis..
My husband decided to give going gluten free a try after I read your book, and shared many things with him.  He has a number of issues.  HBP and taking meds.  Asthma, knee injuries with multiple surgeries over the years, and based on his lipid panel numbers, his dr. like you said, wanted to put him on a chol. reducer.  He went gf for a month, this past month, and just this week had his blood work done.  His LDL # went up from 146 to 164, and his HDL went from 45 to 47.   His Trig at least, dropped from 190 to 122,  So he now has in hand a scrip for atorvastatin (sp.?)..  Even though my husband would be considered a slender 48 year old, he has lost 6 pounds during this month of being wheat free.  I personally began a trek of losing weight a year ago by cutting wheat and sugar, and lost over 30 pounds, going from a size 12 to a 2.  I never had any blood work done, since I didn't have any health issues.  I was really hoping for better results for my husbands numbers so that we could provide a valid testimony to those unbelievers within our family.  I don't have your book memorized, but I've scanned through the blog posts and comments and found bits and pieces about numbers and how some people experience an increase like my husband Bill did.  Could you give me a bullet point laymen's version of the reason for the increase, if it's a concern, and if not, should he get the prescription filled like the dr. ordered so that he can then do the 3 month follow up to see if the med. worked for lowering the #'s?
OR should I just go back and do some more reading like of the above post and reread the book?
Thanks!
Amy

Hey there,

thanks for the article. I would also like to know does Vitamin C plays any role in lowering cholesterol? I am thinking about writing a blog post about it so thank you in advance dr. Davis.

List makes great sense to me but one question arises: In light of recent research showing increased risks outside range of 20–36 ng/ml, do you anticipate any change in your recommendations as to Vitamin D blood level?
J Clin Endocrinol Metab. Published online March 26, 2013. Abstract

Thank you.

[...] between triglycerides and HDL, those improve with LCHF diet. You can start reading more here;  What tests are MORE important than cholesterol? | Track Your Plaque Blog  Lipid researcher, 98, reports on the causes of heart disease | News Bureau | University of [...]

Tests are important, and I think that there are more people today who are interested in keeping track of their cholesterol levels. This is why I think we live in such a special time. We have access to more information than ever before, and now people can learn about high cholesterol risks without having to go to the doctor. In fact, I have found a number of sites that allow people to track their cholesterol levels online. Obviously, there are some people who may go overboard with access to this information, but I do think that there are plenty of benefits to be had.

[...] What tests are MORE important than cholesterol? [...]

Dear Dr. Davis,
I have read your blog for some time now, and I consider it to be the no 1 in the nutrition-health-cardiology field. A couple of years ago I became interested in the “cholesterol theory” and I have studied the development of the statins in detail. Having a background in the “hard sciences” I am appalled at the lack of sound science in this field in particular, as well as in some other areas of medical research.

To my knowledge there is zero evidence that the lowering of any of the cholesterol levels has anything to do with preventing heart disease or reversing plack. On the contrary, an anti-inflammatory mechanism is probably the reason for the little protective effect there is, while the lowering of the cholesterol levels probably causes more harm then good (as can be suspected from the extensive list of side effects).

Reading this post and the statement, “LDL cholesterol reduction achieved with statin agents does correspond to increasing degrees of plaque reversal”, I couldn’t help feeling that some readers would get it all wrong, especially since “cholesterol lowering” is the healing mantra that is being communicated to the market (and even most doctors seem to advocate).

"Having a background in the hard sciences"? In the "hard siences" they call plaque "plak" ? That was a dead give away that you have no idea what your talking about even before you made the ridiculus statement"to my knowledge there is zero eveidence that the lowering of any of the cholesterol has anything to do with preveting heart disease or lowering plak(sic)" You should read some of the studies, they're easily found on the internet or in journals. By the way did you look at the pictures Dr. davis put up in the article? As Dr. davis always says I don't work for the drug companies and statins certainly aren't miracle drugs but they do have a place. Ever hear of the Framingham Study, just a small study thats been going on for over 60 years now and has studied over 10,000 people( now in its third generation) and they have NEVER had a recorded heart attack in ANYBODY with a cholesterol level under 150. So much for "your knowledge"

Dear Dr. Davis,

In reading this and about vitamin D, if you have a plaque problem, but your HDL is high and your Vitamin D level in normal, would it still be helpful to take the suppliment?

Dear Anonymous, there is no need to be so sarcastic, and I apologize for spelling plaque plack. Do you mean to say that all of medical science is of high quality, and that it shouldn’t be questioned? Most of the serious critique against the cholesterol hypothesis comes from medical researchers by the way. I am waiting to be enlightened, please show me the evidence that the LOWERING of cholesterol by it self (per se) is the protective mechanism of statins.

From your writing it appears that you still believe in the old dogma of high cholesterol CAUSING atherosclerosis. Only a few of the fiercest statinators in the research community still maintain that, and probably so for financial reasons (most statin-advertising is doing its best to communicate just that). Most GPs seem to believe that cholesterol causes atherosclerosis too. It is trivial that in any academic context “correspond to”, “linear relationship” or “associated with” do not mean “direct effect of” or “directly caused by”. With this simple understanding we would have better doctors and better scientist in the medical field, and consequently less treatment of SYMPTOMS such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure and high blood sugar. By the way, is there any proof that atherosclerosis is not causing the higher cholesterol levels instead of the other way around?

The problem with many defenders of the cholesterol dogma is that they don’t read the scientific literature in a scientific way. I personally don’t know of anyone still believing in the cholesterol hypothesis after having studied it in depth from strictly scientific principles. There is simply no evidence to motivate all the “lowering” of “levels”. It is nothing more than a highly profitable market concept ($30 billion in 2007).

Great write up.

As  a diabetic, with all of my numbers under very good control, I have been on statins for 8 years and my last two heart scans (5 years apart) had a score of 0 plague.  My question is the following:

Are you saying that statins are good and should be part of a comprehensive approach?

Many websites that push your blog are against the use of statins in any approach.  How do you respond to that type of thinking?

Should you continue taking drugs to reduce your plague if your score is zero?


Thanks for your time

Playing devil's advocate, I'm not sure if science has proved cholesterol to be a cause of heart disease. What if it's a marker and not a cause?

Those in the Framingham study with low cholesterol values might not get heart attacks due to lifestyle/genetics, and their low cholesterol is a reflection of their overall good health?

Those who take high dose statins obtain benefit from less inflammation, but not because of cholesterol reduction?

I'm not saying the above two statements are true, but it could be possible. It could also explain why statins, as a single treatment, usually don't work for most people, and why the Vytorin/Zetia/Torcetrapib trials failed so miserably.

Or it could be that the reduction in LDL wasn't enough to matter, or that particle sizes for LDL/HDL wasn't taken into account, or some other factor? It appears that  right now, there isn't hard data that proves what causes heart disease exactly, but simply a lot of risk factors and disease markers instead.

I never suggested that Cholesterol by itself caused heart disease. Clearly many things do, inflamation, CRP, Lp(a)... On the other hand to suppose that cholesterol has NOTHING to do with heart disease is foolish. Show me a cardiologist that believes cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease and I'll show you a quack. It may not even be the main cause of heart disease in most people but the fact of the matter is reducing LDL lowers the the chance for heart attack in a good number of people. Have you ever heard of Dr. Agagston ? He of the South Beach Diet fame, a cardiologist in South Florida, who by the way the way of scoring calcium scans is named after. See what he thinks of statins and reducing cholesterol levels. and as Im sure you know it gets much more complicated than that when you get into particle size. Take a person who's scans keep going up because he has small LDL and nothing in Dr. Davis program has worked for him 9I am such a patient of the good Dr.s) The best you can do for such a person is lower his LDL as far as you can since its all going to be small particle anyway. I would also refer you to Dr. Greg Browns HATS Study for examples of lowering cholesterol and lowering heart disease or Dr. Davis' example that started this discussion. I apologise if I came off a bit sarcastic in my earlier comments I think this is an important issue to get all points of view on.

Great thead.

So what are you really saying about statins?  Is there value taking statins in combination with other treatments for men and women?

How do you address the comments that states statins don't work?

Thanks for your time.  Your comments are really appreciated.

There is NO DOUBT that statins reduce the chances of a person having a heart attack, NONE. There is question as to what about the statins does that, is it lowering LDL, is it stablising plaque, is it reducing inflamation . . .? Or is it all of these ? And there is no doubt statins have side effects, some serious, but the fact that they reduce heart attacks, that argument has been settled.

I will not go deeper into the science of atherosclerosis except to say that it has been known for several years now that cholesterol per se does not initiate atheroma, or plaque. You find cholesterol in the lesions but you also find calcium. We find cholesterol and calcium because it is available in the bloodstream. Cholesterol does not have a mind of its own, and it doesn’t one day decide to develop plaque by raising “the level”. Neither does calcium.

We need cholesterol for many important processes in the body, and it is a part of almost all of our cell membranes. Mother’s milk is packed with it because the baby needs it. Eggs are full of the stuff “because it takes a hell of a lot of cholesterol to make a chicken”. The body has the level it needs at all times, and a higher level could indicate that something is wrong, i e, it is a marker, like someone said. Lowering of levels makes no sense at all.

It is just dumb luck that the cholesterol lowering statins happen to be anti-inflammatory and therefore have some preventive effect, and may reverse plaque in some cases. The higher the dose the more anti-inflammatory effect, and reversal of atheroma. The higher the dose the bigger the lowering of the cholesterol level, because that is exactly how statins are designed to work. However, there is NO evidence in the scientific literature that the lowering of the cholesterol level has a protective effect, and I am very sorry if this upsets anyone’s religious beliefs. Dumb luck, as I said, the rest is coincidence and correspondence. Big Pharma will do its best to uphold the “religion” though, since it is so profitable. Levels will always be too high, and everybody should be statinated. Statins should be distributed in the drinking water, no less.

So, why bother, the statins seems to work in a few cases? Well, statins are really poisonous substances, and there are many indications that they cause harm to the human body, particularly by the lowering of cholesterol levels. Side effects are plentiful and it is probable that we will witness statin induced cancers in large numbers in the near future.

The point to be made here is that there are other and better methods to avoid atherosclerosis and to reverse plaque. Dr Davis is one of the leading proponents of such methods. I personally think it is interesting to se the results of the statin study presented here; I just wanted to stress the point of what statins really do. By all means, we should keep an eye our cholesterol levels. But many people having a hearth attack do not have high cholesterol. But did you know that 90% of them have diabetes or in some other way a pathological sugar metabolism? So what level is the more important?

About the quacks, who don’t buy the cholesterol dogma, there are thousands of them. Some of them can be found at www.thincs.org. If you are interested in how the cholesterol religion was developed and how science was corrupted to that end, I can recommend Gary Taubes latest book Good Calories – Bad Calories.

By the way, CRP is just another marker for hearth disease, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there will soon be talk about lowering the level

Well by your klogic there is no scientific proof the lowering inflamation is what cause stsatins to lower your risk of a herat attack, the only thing we do know is that ststins DO infact lower your risk, we just all keep guessing as to why. Well heres another piece to the puzzle: double blind study releasesed this week follow groups of people on statins or placebos and by a slight BUT significant margin the statin takers blood oressure was lowered ! So besides all the other things we think statins do we now KNOW they lower blood pressure. 2 ver5y interesting points for all of our paranoid readers 1. Not one of the study members recieving the statins in the 2 year period had to leave bececause of side effects and 2. this study was NOT paid for by the big bad scarry Drug companies, so there goes your default response.

I am no supporter of drug companies, nor a defender of their policies and practices. But I do believe that their data can serve to teach us a few lessons. For instance, here is an (cherry-picked, to be sure) example of intracoronary ultrasound cross-sectional images before and after two years of rosuvastatin, 40 mg daily:

Thanks for the knowledge sharing...it helps to be healthy.

Here is a link showing the atherogenicity in mice of different saturated fats in diets with 1% cholesterol. Look at page 1416 of the free full report that can be downloaded here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8409772

On the opposite you can see bread not being atherogenic in baboons here:

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/33/8/1869

By the way you can notice the effect of 0.1% cholesterol at the end of the article = 1 gm cholesterol per kg of food = 5 egg yolks.

Does it look a lot ? "There is evidence from animal experiments showing that if atherogenic dietary factors are reduced to levels comparable to man's intake, the same vessel changes occur as with higher levels, but more slowly."

Download the free full report here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1938976/

In this report you can also see butter to be highly atherogenic to swine without additional cholesterol to their diet.

What about rice?  Does it also increase small LDL particles?

@x.ds: Humans aren't C57BL/6J mice (susceptible to diet-induced fatty streak lesions), baboons or pigs.

@x.ds

The strain of mice in the first study are predisposed to diet-induced obesity, type 2 diabetes, and atherosclerosis.

Likewise, here's an interesting quote from the last paper based on a porcine model: "Whenever there are three
animals from the same litter, they are divided equally among the three groups (ie, "control", "butter", & "egg yolk" groups)  In the present experiment, this occurred once. These three pigs had the most aortic atherosclerosis in their respective groups. The control pig with the most atherosclerosis was the brother of the pigs with the most disease fed egg and butter."  

The group of pigs with the highest rate of atherosclerosis was the egg yolk group - yet at most we see a vanishingly positive relationship, if any, in a large number of human epidemiological studies of moderate egg consumption and heart disease (too many to list here - many are recent and easy to locate, though).  Do we even have grounds to formulate a hypothesis of egg induced atherogenesis based on human observational studies? I don't know, really - though a casual glance suggests, "no".

Looking forward to reading the other study you pointed us to when I get the time.

x.ds:

Often times these animal studies don't translate well when applied to humans.

Also, like Dr. Davis pointed out in his blog, most (LDL) cholesterol lowering research doesn't use advanced lipoprotein testing like NMR so the data is misleading to say the least.

x.ds:

It would be nice for a change to see experiments on other than herbivorous (mice) or mostly vegetarian animals (both pigs and baboons on the wild).

Bobber--

While all carbohydrates increase small LDL, the effect of wheat is the most extravagant.

I generally agree with those who deny the universal applicability of experimental results in mice and rats to men. However, I do so with this one caveat; there is one fact I cannot deny: Many women are convinced that most men are rats.

Doc, does this mean that I ca sorta log my particle size by getting my apoB checked in quarterly labs? I'll never be able to convince primary to do the outright particle size test...yet (working on that). Thnx.

I admit I do not understand VLDL-C. What I would really like to find is a simple range scale. Mine shows up VLDL-C..7  Non HDL ..70
I do not know if that is good or bad. Is there such a chart showing like,  1 good ... 100 bad ??
LP(a) shows up by itself and I understand that because there is a range showing bad ..over 30.
Any help understanding appreciated

LynP -

Bypass your doctor and order your own NMR test. PrivateMDlabs has it for $79.99, minus a 15% discount.

http://www.privatemdlabs.com/lab_tests.php?view=search_results&show=865&category=2&search=nmr#865

Dr. Davis,

I honestly think you are doing God's work and have learned to appreciate the value of heart scans through your site.  However, it still bugs me that so many people in Asia can live off of large quantities of white rice with minimal atherosclerosis.  For instance, this study shows that American Whites have much higher atherosclerosis than Japanese despite the Japanese having much higher LDL-cholesterol, blood pressure, fasting glucose, and smoking rates:

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/34/1/173


This other study (below) tries to explain this difference based on the Japanese consumption of fish. However, if you look at the data, those Americans who consume the most fish oil consume about as much fish oil as those Japanese that consume the least fish oil, and yet between these comparable groups in terms of fish consumption, the Japanese still have vastly lower atherosclerosis on heart scans.  And the Japanese American group consumes more fish than the White American group and has more coronary calcium.

http://content.onlinejacc.org/cgi/content/full/52/6/417


And here is another study showing much lower CAC in Japanese than in Japanese-Hawaiians even after controlling for a bunch of risk factors including fish intake:

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/166/11/1280


Although in this other study looking at only at Americans, the incidence of CAC appears to be similar to that in Japanese - so maybe there was something unusual about the US samples in the other studies?

http://content.onlinejacc.org/cgi/content/full/49/20/2013

Dr. Davis,
What is your opinion of the LP-Pla2 test for arterial plaque?  If you've used the test, do any elements of your program reduce levels of this enzyme?

However, the effect will not be fully evident if you just look at the crude conventional calculated (Friedewald) LDL cholesterol. This is because restricting carbohydrates not only reduces small LDL, it also increases LDL particle size. This make the calculated Friedewald go up, or it blunts its decrease. Conventional calculated LDL will therefore either underestimate or even conceal the real LDL-reducing effect.

I agree that the system is a mess. I am happy to see that you are not angry at the system, that serves no purpose and in my mind makes your position even more credible

Don Howard