Ten Cholesterol Myths
In This Chapter
� Quantifying cholesterol’s risks for women and kids
� Fooling around with fiber facts
� Getting it right on red meat
� Fighting cholesterol with Woody Allen and the Duchess of Windsor
In the words of the queen in Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Who hasn’t?
For example, everyone knows that (a) chocolate is bad for your heart, (b) margarine is better than butter, and (c) women don’t need to worry about cholesterol. Except (a) it isn’t, (b) it isn’t, and (c) I’m getting ahead of myself. In short, this chapter uncovers the truth hiding behind several common misperceptions about cholesterol.
Most of the Cholesterol in Your Body Comes from Food
Yes, you get some cholesterol from food, but the surprising fact is that most of the waxy material floating through your bloodstream is made right in your very own body. Your liver processes the proteins, fats, and carbs you eat to churn out about 1 gram (1,000 milligrams) of cholesterol every day.
Your body uses a lot of this homemade cholesterol to perform various functions such as enabling your brain cells to shoot messages back and forth. (Check out Chapter 2 for the other uses.) But when you bring in additional cholesterol from food, trouble may loom.
To keep your cholesterol level within healthy bounds, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, from our good friends at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recommend that you consume no more than 300 milligrams of cholesterol a day from food.
But here’s a surprise: Overall, the total amount of fat and saturated fat in your diet now seems to be more important than the amount of cholesterol in the foods you eat in determining your cholesterol level. Which leads me nicely into the very next myth.
All Fatty Foods Raise Your Cholesterol
Wrong. Why? Because — here comes some good info — all dietary fats are not alike. The difference lies in saturation, the number of hydrogen atoms attached to the carbon atoms on dietary-fat molecules. I won’t waste your time by reprinting the entire fat/saturation spiel I present in Chapter 5.
Suffice it to say that saturated fatty acids, commonly known as “sat fats,” increase the amount of fat in your blood, including the amount of low-density lipoproteins (LDLs), the “bad” particles that ferry cholesterol into your arteries.
On the other hand, monounsaturated fatty acids and polyunsaturated fatty acids, like those found in high-fat plant foods such as nuts and avocados (see Chapter 6), may actually reduce the amount of fats in your blood, including LDLs.
But before you go getting too excited, keep these facts in mind:
� All fats are relatively high in calories. (They contain twice as many calories per gram as proteins and carbs.)
� A higher-calorie diet promotes weight gain.
� Weight gain raises cholesterol.
The moral of this little tale? Not all dietary fats are “bad,” but a little goes a long way.
Women Never Have to Worry about Their Cholesterol
Ah, if only it were true. Women do tend to have lower cholesterol levels than men do from adolescence right through middle age. One protective weapon in a woman’s cholesterol-fighting arsenal seems to be the female body’s continuous, natural stream of estrogen.
Researchers have made this deduction from the fact that a woman’s cholesterol level rises with the onset of menopause and the slowdown in her natural production of estrogen.
Older women are actually more likely than older men to have high cholesterol, but women do have one other lifelong advantage in the heart game. Their blood vessels are more elastic — that is, they are more likely than a man’s blood vessels to stay wide open — which may help protect against high blood pressure and a heart-stopping blood clot.
Children Have No Cholesterol Problems
Ah, if only this were true, too. Infants require fatty acids, including saturated fatty acids, to promote and sustain proper growth and development, including the growth and development of nerve and brain cells (see Chapter 2, please).
In the 1980s, when overzealous parents sought to protect their babies by feeding them formulas made of skim milk, a disastrous epidemic of babies who failed to grow and develop as normally expected occurred.
Today, the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend a food plan with sufficient amounts of all fats for children up to the age of 2. After that, the kiddy cholesterol squad gets tough with the tykes.
According to the AHA, by age 12, as many as seven out of every ten American children have fatty deposits in their arteries. To counter this trend, the AHA recommends testing cholesterol levels in any child older than 2 who has a family history of coronary artery disease in parents or grandparents younger than 55.
Eating More Dietary Fiber Lowers Blood Cholesterol
The answer to this myth is another, “Not necessarily.” As you can see in Chapter 5, there are two kinds of dietary fiber, insoluble and soluble.
Insoluble dietary fiber is the rough stuff — cellulose, lignin, and hemicellulose — in leaves, grasses, twigs, seeds, and bran (the hard outer covering of grains).
Human beings literally don’t have the stomach for insoluble fiber. To pull nutrients out of insoluble fibers, animals need a very long gut and sometimes more than one stomach — a physical setup common to animals such as cows but not to us.
Soluble dietary fiber — gums and pectins — is found in the flesh of grains, fruits, and veggies. Examples include pectin in apples and beta glucan, the gum that makes oatmeal sticky. (Beans are also a good source of beta glucan.)
Soluble dietary fiber sops up cholesterol. Insoluble dietary fiber doesn’t. Increasing your consumption of insoluble dietary fiber, which moves food through your intestinal tract faster, will reduce your risk of constipation, but it won’t lower your cholesterol.
Increasing your consumption of soluble dietary fiber will turn those cholesterol numbers downward, but only by about 10 percent (or less). Listen, nothing’s perfect.
Cholesterol Is the Only Thing That Leads to Plaque in Your Arteries
Actually, no. An amino acid called homocysteine may be equally at fault. Your body makes homocysteine as a byproduct of digesting proteins.
Homocysteine circulates into your arteries, and it can rough up the interior surface of the vessels, producing miniscule chinks and ledges for cholesterol to cling to.
After cholesterol latches on the arterial wall, it attracts more cholesterol particles and other cellular debris, building teeny-weeny little piles of junk that become plaque. Alert: Heart attack looms.
As you can see in Chapter 2, a diet rich in the B vitamin folate appears to reduce homocysteine levels, thus reducing the risk of a heart attack. One group of foods truly packed with folic acid is green, leafy veggies. (Turn back to Chapter 2 — yes, again — for a list of foods high in folic acid.)
Red Meat Has More Cholesterol Than Chicken or Turkey
No. Although red meat, even lean beef, has more total fat per ounce and up to five times as much saturated fat as chicken or turkey, dark chicken or turkey (the succulent leg and thigh) may deliver more cholesterol per ounce.
A Heart Attack Is the Only Health Risk Associated with High Cholesterol
Alas, no. Plaque buildup is not specific to the coronary arteries. A person with high cholesterol may also develop plaque deposits in the arteries that feed blood to the brain.
Cerebral thrombosis, the most common form of stroke, occurs when a blood clot (thrombus) forms in a cerebral blood vessel, blocking the vessel and depriving brain cells of blood and oxygen. According to the American Heart Association, cerebral thrombosis is most common in arteries already damaged or narrowed by plaque.
This is not a trivial matter. According to the American Heart Association/ American Stroke Association Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics, 2007 Update, in 2004, stroke was to blame for 1 of every 16 deaths in the United States.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics ranks stroke as the third leading cause of death for Americans, right up there behind heart disease and cancer. Here are the facts concerning stroke in the United States:
� On average, every three to four minutes someone in America dies of a stroke.
� In 2004, 150,147 Americans suffered a fatal stroke.
� More women than men die after having a stroke; in 2004, the numbers were 91,487 women versus 58,660 men.
� Of the people who suffer a stroke, 4.5 percent are younger than 60.
Finally, here is a cholesterol fact to ruin your romantic evening. Most of us worry about cholesterol’s effects on coronary arteries, but the truth is cholesterol doesn’t differentiate between a coronary blood vessel and one in any other part of the body, like the penis.
Yes, you read that right. High cholesterol may cause plaque buildup that blocks the blood vessels carrying blood to the penis. A reduction in blood flow to the penis caused by a blocked vessel in the leg or penis itself would “certainly” affect a man’s ability to sustain erection, says one urologist at the male sexual dysfunction clinic at Johns Hopkins Medical Centers in Baltimore, Maryland.
Chew on that one the next time you plan dinner for your beloved — if your beloved is male, of course.
Changing Your Diet Is the Only Way to Control Your Cholesterol
No again. In fact, this book includes one whole chapter (Chapter 8) on how regular exercise lowers cholesterol, a second one (Chapter 7) on the virtues of weight control, a third (Chapter 9) on why you should stop smoking right now, and last but not least, a fourth (Chapter 10) describing the cholesterol- control benefits of consuming alcohol in moderation.
You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin, and Your Cholesterol Can Never Be Too Low
I’m a writer, a class of workers rarely overburdened with too much cash, so I’m not going to argue with the first part of that heading. But I am a nutrition writer, so I know that excessive thinness can be a sign of poor health or the result of an eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia.
As for cholesterol, believe it or not, too low can be as problematic as too high. For example, if your cholesterol suddenly takes a nosedive into the basement below 100 mg/dL, your doctor may not be smiling when he brings you the news. Hypocholesterolemia — very low cholesterol — can signal danger ahead. What kind of danger? Malnutrition, an overactive thyroid, cirrhosis of the liver, and certain forms of cancer (colon cancer and liver cancer are good guesses).
Having consistently low cholesterol is not always a guarantee of long life. In the late 1990s, in a survey of 3,500 Japanese American male residents of Hawaii, researchers found a higher death rate among the men with the lowest cholesterol levels (about 149 mg/dL) than among men whose cholesterol levels circled around the supposedly borderline 232 mg/dL mark.
Since then, both American and British medical journals have published reports that state a total cholesterol level below 160 mg/dL appears to be tied to a higher risk of death from the diseases and conditions I mention above, especially in men who drink, smoke, and have high blood pressure. That is, if they don’t take matters into their own hands first:
� A relatively early study (1966) reported in the prestigious British Medical Journal carried results of a French survey of data for 6,393 men showing that those with low cholesterol had an incidence of suicide three times higher than the incidence among men with middling or high cholesterol.
� Moving right ahead, in 1999, the British Journal of Psychiatry published a report from Finland’s Public Health Institute in which men with very low cholesterol were more likely than men with high cholesterol to be hospitalized for depression.
Thin quiz
Wait. Before you go, who’s thought to have first said that quote about never being too rich or too thin?
a. Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie
b. The Duchess of Windsor
c. Fergie, the Duchess of York
d. King Lear
Answer: (b) The Duchess of Windsor, also known as Wallis Warfield Simpson, the “original” Camilla Parker Bowles. To marry Wallis, a divorced woman, King Edward VIII gave up the British throne on December 11, 1936, to King George the VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth II, the mother of Prince Charles, and mother-in- law first to Princess Diana and then to Ms. Parker Bowles. Whether Wallis actually uttered the rich/thin words, the second part is still bad advice, health-wise.
Some researchers suggest these increased rates of depression and suicide may occur because low-fat or low-cholesterol diets reduce the levels of a brain chemical called serotonin that promotes a feeling of well-being.
In the end, one is left to ponder the strangeness of life and the weirdly prescient message in Woody Allen’s character who, in the 1973 movie, Sleeper, wakes up in the year 2173 to discover that hamburgers, French fries, and milkshakes are health food. In 2007? Not so much.
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