What is Normal Cholesterol (What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You)

What are normal cholesterol levels, and what do your numbers really mean for your heart health? Discover the truth about good and bad cholesterol, what your cholesterol levels reveal, and how to lower cholesterol naturally to support your overall health.

What is normal cholesterol? I want to discuss that as well as what your doctor is probably not telling you. So, here you are. You just got your cholesterol test back, [music] and maybe they even handed you a pamphlet that mentioned the word statin. And here you are trying to figure out what is normal cholesterol, anyway.

[music] The number that defines normal right now is not the same number that defined it normal 20 years [music] ago, or even 40 years ago, or even 60 years ago. That number has been changing repeatedly. And every single time it moves, millions more people are suddenly diagnosed with high cholesterol. Because when you treat cholesterol without investigating the cause, you are just turning off the fire alarm. You might be suppressing the beeping sound, but what about the fire?

What caused this LDL cholesterol to increase in the first place? That’s really not investigated too deeply. Let me just take you back to 1963. The New England Journal of Medicine published its official table on normal cholesterol levels. And the range back in ‘63 was between 150 and 280.

Okay? So, you didn’t want to go over that number right there. And then in 1988, the National Cholesterol Education Program released its official guidelines. Anything over 240 was not normal. And of course, at this point, millions of people were put on medication.

Something very interesting that happened in 1987. There’s a drug called Lovastatin. Okay? It’s the first statin drug. It was approved by the FDA a year before they changed the guidelines.

It’s an interesting coincidence. Then we have 1993. The threshold dropped again. Now, 200 was the target for everyone. Now, in 2001, something interesting happened.

They kind of dropped the cholesterol thing and went after LDL. And they wanted you under 130, but under 100 if you’re at risk. And then in 2004, they wanted your LDL under 70. And right now, they want your LDL under 55. And they also mentioned the guidelines having this conversation with your doctor at age 30 for statins for high-risk people.

My question is this, if lowering cholesterol is the answer, why is cardiovascular disease still the number one cause of death in America? For four decades. The drugs do work. They do bring down LDL to a certain level, but the deaths keep increasing. Between 2002 and 2013, statin use in the US nearly doubled.

Cholesterol levels fell, but cardiovascular deaths did not fall in the same proportion. But I need to back up and talk about what LDL really is. Is it cholesterol? And the answer is no. LDL is not cholesterol, but LDL stands for low-density lipo protein.

It’s a protein carrier, but it also carries vitamins. So, the body can take those from the liver deep into the cells. Every single cell in your body needs cholesterol. Your brain definitely needs it cuz your brain’s like 60% fat. Cholesterol is also needed to make vitamin D.

When you go to the doctor and they order this standard lipid panel, they’re going to tell you how much cholesterol is being carried by the LDL trucks. In that standard test, they don’t tell you how many trucks there are, and they don’t tell you the size of the trucks. There are two very different versions of LDL trucks. You have the one LDL, which is the large buoyant truck. These are the ones that are floating in your bloodstream, and they don’t tend to invade the arteries.

They don’t create a problem because they’re buoyant. They float around. They’re large. But then we have these small LDL trucks or particles, small dense. These are like little BB pellets.

They do tend to trigger inflammation. And when that inflammation happens, that’s where the placking starts. Two people can have the exact same LDL number uh let’s say 160 and have completely different risk factors, depending on whether you have more large buoyant LDL or more small dense particles. But the problem is to be able to differentiate these two, you need an advanced lipid profile test, not your standard cholesterol panel, because it’s not going to actually give you that data. The big question is, what drives the small dense LDL particles?

Well, the answer to that is insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is when you’ve eaten too much glucose that can come from sugar or starches for way too long, too frequently. And then what happens over time is the cells become resistant. They no longer allow the cell to pull in glucose. So the fuel door gets jammed shut.

And then of course there’s a compensating thing that happens where your body is going to produce a lot of insulin. Too much insulin is what’s causing too much of this right here. Now, I just want to temporarily go back to these guidelines again because there’s something you should know. July 2004, the National Cholesterol Education Program issued an update that lowered LDL targets. And they widened who qualified for statins.

It pushed millions of Americans into the need for treatment category, okay? Then it came out that eight out of the nine authors had failed to disclose financial associations with the makers of cholesterol lowering drugs. The Center for Science in the Public Interest organized a formal petition asking the NIH to create an independent review panel free of these conflicts of interest. So, they can actually reevaluate the data behind the update. In 2013, the ACC and the American Heart Association cholesterol guidelines drew the same criticism.

Eight out of 15 panelists, including the chair and both co-chairs, had past or current ties to pharmaceutical the Archives of Internal Medicine looked at 17 ACC and American Heart Association guidelines issued in 2008. Across nearly 500 committee members, 56% disclosed conflicts of interest. When you see headlines in the news that say statins will cut your heart attack risk by 36%. If we look behind the curtain, drug companies do clever math tricks to make those statistics sound way more impressive than they really are. I think the best way to explain it is imagine you and a group of friends buying a handful of lottery tickets, okay?

Your friend has two winning tickets and you have one winning ticket, okay? If your friend wanted to brag, they could technically say, “I have 100% more winning tickets than you. ” That’s true if you do the comparison, right? Two is 100% more than one, right? And this is exactly what the drug company commercials will tell you in their headlines.

New drug cuts risk of heart attack by 36%. It sounds like a miracle. What they’re actually looking at is they’re looking at a massive group of 100 people over several years, and without the drug, maybe three people out of those 100 would have a heart attack. And with the drug over that period of time, the number drops to two people. And because two is roughly 36% less than three, they get to print 36% risk reduction.

But if they were being completely direct with you, the headline would read, “If 100 people take this drug for years, it will protect one of them. ” I have a free download that I want to give to you. This free download is my daily routine in a checklist. This is the routine that I use every day to feel like I’m 18 years old, even though I’m 60 years old, and I want to give it to you for free. And so there’s a little link down below, click it and definitely download that.

Next thing I want to do is I want to just show you a comparison of the best-case scenario statin drug of what it can do for your LDL. And then what I want to do is I want to compare and contrast very well-studied natural things. And if we look at statins, we look at 45% reduction, okay? If we look at bergamot extract, this is a natural remedy, 15 to 40% r