One of our heart experts here at the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute recently gave us an official update on what does and doesn’t work in the battle for our hearts: eliminating dietary cholesterol does little, heart disease is pretty much all in our genes, and (this is perhaps my favourite part) vitamins don’t help the heart—leaving statins as our only reliable solution.
 

Restricting dietary cholesterol does little, that much is true (and a message so long overdue it’s ridiculous), and genetics do play a role, but to suggest that dietary changes of all kinds are pretty much futile and to see cholesterol-reducing meds as our only recourse makes me—forgive my arrogance—want to weep.
 

It is true that some of us have normal cholesterol levels despite our ingestion of eggs and steak and butter like we’ve never read a health advisory in our lives, while others who avoid dietary cholesterol like the plague have arteries as clogged as thousand-year-old pipes—but the problem isn’t strictly genetic, nor is it unresponsive to dietary changes, not if they’re the right kind of dietary changes. Some of our livers manufacture a lot of cholesterol for reasons that have nothing to do with dietary cholesterol and everything to do with other dietary practices. 

Though I’m not a cardiologist and wouldn’t presume to tell anyone what to do on this front, I do feel obliged to share some of the seriously relevant science. 

 

One overlooked but key bit of information is that dietary carb intake stimulates insulin production, high levels of which alter blood profiles like nothing else does. This isn’t new or anything, so why it’s not included in standard heart advice is beyond me. A study published almost a decade ago in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported that high-carb, low-fat diets were likely to increase the risk of heart disease because of the adverse effects of high insulin levels. Others since then have supported that conclusion.
 

High insulin levels required to deal with high-carb eating increase LDL cholesterol production and decrease protective HDL. Chest pain and heart attacks are more likely after a high-carb meal than after a high-fat meal—because raised insulin levels cause arterial constriction and arterial plaque formation. Remember Super Size Me? It was the high insulin required to deal with both the quantity and the quality of the food he was eating that so completely altered his cholesterol and all other key health markers. 
 

High insulin levels also increase homocysteine levels (a heart disease risk), and there’s a pile of research showing that low-carb eaters score significantly better on all markers of heart disease than low-fat eaters. And though a meta-analysis of the literature back in 2000 concluded that dietary saturated fat has no significant effect on heart disease mortality, low-saturated-fat diets are still routinely recommended—along with, of course, cholesterol-lowering statins. 
 

All those seductive muffins and rolls and bagels and cereals and cookies and crackers and fruit juices and anything with a high glycemic index—they’re all actually in fact quite evil for those of us needing to keep insulin levels down a bit. I know this isn’t terribly good news, but it is infinitely more exciting than the statin alternative. 
 

Because statins, in addition to damaging our livers and muscles and depleting us of Coenzyme Q10, a key healthy-heart nutrient, increase our risk of cancer, Parkinson’s, depression, stroke and—if this isn’t the biggest irony of all—heart disease. Because even though they effectively reduce cholesterol, they also do much harm—and because there is more to the picture than cholesterol.
 

This really does make me want to weep because the real villains here—our high-carb and omega-3 deficient diets, our high stress lifestyles and exhaustion-induced inactivity, and the statin solution—are being let off the hook. And those mostly responsible, the food and drug industries, are padding their nests. V



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