Important Functions of Cholesterol

It is observed that Cholesterol elevates for a reason and can be a protective response to various adverse systemic conditions such as inflammation, inability to detoxify and free radical damage. The following teleconference notes shed light in a practical way of reasoning what may be out of balance so that the body responds with elevated cholesterol. Cholesterol has very critical functions in the body.

I thought you’d find my notes/quotes from this interview of interest.

Jackie

Teleconference with Jeremy Webster DC(1)


What about Good and Bad Cholesterol?

Function of LDL and HDL
LDL and HDL are lipoproteins and technically not even cholesterol at all.
Their ****is to help transport cholesterol and other lipids like triglycerides through water mediums --- the blood. Without LDL or HDL attaching to cholesterol, it would not be able to move where it wants to go.

In the case of LDL, the ****is to mobilize cholesterol from the source – primarily the liver – out to a site where it is needed. For example- there is tissue damage somewhere in the body. Released LDL binds to cholesterol and transports it out there where cholesterol is needed in the repair process..like in muscle tissue or an artery. That’s really the only function of LDL.

HDL is the reverse. It helps mobilize cholesterol also but it’s in charge of taking cholesterol from the site of damage after the repair is done and it is returned to the liver so the cholesterol can be recycled or used for other functions…such as converted into bile.

So when we say that one is ‘good’ and one is ‘bad’ that doesn’t make much sense because they are both very appropriate …when needed.
We need to get out of the mindset that cholesterol is a bad thing and realize that cholesterol is one of the most important molecules in the body. It’s right up there with vitamin C or glutathione…. It is truly that important.

It’s said that people with higher cholesterol or higher LDLs have more incidence of heart diseases which is true in some cases but it is really a matter of what’s the cause and what’s the effect.

If you imagine that you have a process going on in your cardiovascular (CV) system that is doing a lot of damage…like free radicals…which do a whole lot of damage to the CV system, then what happens naturally as a result is the body’s response to repair that damage and it’s going to respond with LDL. So if you have a whole lot of free radicals that are doing damage to your CV system, you are probably at higher risk than you should be for CV disease because you have that damaging process going on.

The LDL is just responding to the damaging process that happens to be around a lot of times when someone is destroying themselves so it’s easy to make a correlation between the existence of LDL and the existence of heart disease but it doesn’t it doesn’t necessarily mean the LDL is causing the heart disease.

Cholesterol & Gallbladder Function
Bile cannot exist without cholesterol. Cholesterol is the building blocks of bile. Bile is what your liver produces to mobilize toxins. You dump the bile into the gallbladder (G and it’s stored there until you eat a fatty meal and then it dumps out into the intestines. So not only important in allowing toxins to flow through liver but when the GB squeezes and releases bile after a meal, that helps you break down fat so you can absorb the essential fats and also absorb fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K – all crucial to our health and a lot are very much tied to cardiovascular risk.

So if you don’t have cholesterol, you can’t make bile and you can’t absorb the essential nutrients – essential fats and vitamins that help us fight off CV disease…rather than cause it.

Cholesterol & Absorption of essential nutrients… Vitamin D

Fat Soluble Vitamin D… large amount of research in the last two years on this vitamin. Cholesterol is also the building block of vitamin D. When sunlight hits the skin, it stimulates the production of vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol). Without cholesterol, that action can’t happen. It’s impossible. From there the D3 is converted to 25 Hydroxy D3 in the liver and then in the kidneys where it’s converted down to the active form of vitamin D. The whole point being, without cholesterol or when cholesterol levels are too low you can’t even get that process started because it all starts with cholesterol.

We know that vitamin D is important for reducing the risk of a lot of things…osteoporosis, cancer rates reduced, auto immunity is reduced and CV disease is reduced as well. Some things directly impacting your risk for CV such as insulin resistance is affected by vitamin D levels. If your D levels are too low, you are at greater risk for insulin resistance. You are also at greater risk for inflammation.

If you want to mention a factor correlated to any disease, inflammation would be one of them. You can pick your favorite disease of aging and they all seem to have an inflammation process and vitamin D is crucial in modulating that process. Calcium absorption might be another way vitamin D could reduce CV risk. Calcium is an electrolyte and a lot of people have CV problems simply because they can’t control the rate and rhythm and it could be something like a calcium issue because of poor vitamin D levels.

There are a lot of ways that vitamin D affects cardiovascular health and without cholesterol, there is no vitamin D.

Moderator --the body can actually synthesize… cholesterol, vitamin D and glutathione indicating they must be very important if you aren’t getting them somewhere else, the body can make them. If you are a vegetarian, the body says, I can make my own cholesterol in the liver.

That’s a good point – when we eat less cholesterol, we tend to make more; when we eat more cholesterol, we tend to make less so dietary intake doesn’t really affect blood levels of cholesterol that much.
There seems to be other factors that impact cholesterol levels much more than dietary intake – like how many eggs or meat you eat in a day… unless it is impacting your health for other reasons in other areas.

Cholesterol and brain function, depression.
Specifically, Serotonin

First, structure.
Every single cell in our body has a membrane. Without cholesterol, a membrane wouldn’t be sustainable in a human being. In cells with membranes with no cholesterol whatsoever, they require a cell wall…like a bacteria or plant, because the cholesterol imbeds itself in between the phospholipids bi-layer which actually gives the stability and rigidity to the whole phospholipids bi-layer; otherwise, it would be just like mush. So cholesterol is extremely important to the structure of the brain as well as all the other cells in the body. It’s crucial..otherwise we would just be pretty much a blob.

As far as function in the brain, serotonin is very rich in the myelin sheath which is the insulating cells that wrap around the nerve axon and without those we can’t transmit neuronal action at all. The nerve impulses would be extremely slow instead of being lightening fast as in the brain. This is one area where low cholesterol levels could affect your ability to make myelin, as in Multiple Sclerosis (MS), when there is stripping of the myelin sheath. So you don’t want to take away the building block that allows building of that molecule of myelin around the nerve .. something so important because we know how bad life is for MS patients.

Serotonin – a neurotransmitter -has a lot of functions in the brain. It helps stabilize mood, reduce sugar and carbohydrate cravings, it helps you have a normal threshold to pain… ie, people with low serotonin experience a lot more pain – as their threshold is much lower than with normal levels. So if you don’t have regular normal levels of cholesterol, you can’t absorb serotonin into the brain. That’s an extremely important aspect of cholesterol in brain function because serotonin can’t cross the blood brain barrier without cholesterol and the brain becomes serotonin deficient which results in symptoms like depression, pain, sugar cravings and other aspects of low serotonin.

Science Daily October 4, 2009(2) With adequate cholesterol levels, brain cells are capable of forming more of the dopamine producing nerve cells in the brain as opposed to people with lower cholesterol who are unable to produce as many of the dopamine producing nerve cells. These are the cells that line the substantia nigra of the brain and these cells are implicated in Parkinson’s Disease. So low cholesterol could be highly related to Parkinson’s.

It also said that those with the best cholesterol levels in their brain also
have a reduced tendency of the stem cells to show uncontrolled growth. Now this is pretty significant…because in my mind, until proven otherwise, I think all cancer comes strictly from stem cells. Every type of cancer I’ve studied comes from stem cells rather than fully-matured cells. So this is basically that cholesterol levels could in fact have an impact on reducing cancer rates.

That made me think about what happens if you do take statin drugs for a long time and what they are now finding is that cancer rates go up.

[As an aside to this low cholesterol/cancer risk observation, I’d like to comment on one of my patients long ago that I saw every 3 months. He was mid-fifties and seemingly healthy. Because measuring cholesterol was a hot, new topic back then, we often discussed that when doing the routine health history updates. He always chuckled that he didn’t have to worry because his cholesterol was always under 150; often around 145. At one point, I noted he had a gray pallor that remained for a couple of years. He then came in looking haggard and thin. He had been diagnosed with intestinal cancer which was so severe he ended up with a permanent colostomy. I’ve always thought about this patient whenever very low cholesterol levels and the cancer connection comes up. Jackie]

Symptoms of people using statins for long period?
Yes… muscle pain most common, but people also feel like they are in a fog…can’t think straight… and this could be the dopamine factor – if you can’t produce it because of low cholesterol.

Low dopamine doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have the classic Parkinson’s tremor. What it does mean is that you won’t be able to initiate things in your brain. Not able to initiate movement and also not able to initiate cognition… so thought patterns are going to be extremely slow if you can’t produce dopamine properly. The loops in the brain pretty much shut down and you can’t ‘get started.’ Lost your ‘get up and go’ both physically and mentally.

Cholesterol & Sex Hormones
Again cholesterol is the building blocks for bile, vitamin D, and also for sex hormones… all of them…including pregnenolone all the way down through the entire pathway to include testosterone, all of the estrogens, DHEA, all made out of cholesterol. So taking statin drugs means you’ll have problems making all of these sex hormones and also have trouble making all of the corticosteroids hormones for cortisol production. All will be inhibited and they all have crucial functions in the body. These things are the chemicals on which our bodies run so to think we can just delete or depress the basic building blocks and not have any serious impact on our health is “kinda crazy, in my opinion.”…

This would even impact fertility issues and breast feeding. Breast milk is loaded with cholesterol because the baby needs that cholesterol to build its brain, cell membranes and all the great functions we’ve discussed.
If you aren’t breastfeeding, you must be sure babies get something that has a rich source of cholesterol. Babies will develop mentally much slower unless they have plenty of cholesterol when young. Cow’s milk is almost as bad as soy…but goat milk is pretty good. There are a lot of recipes out there for high quality combinations of infant formula - those that you mix yourself.

How many statins are being prescribed these days?
Prescribed like candy it seems; every time the drug companies want to make more money, they seem to be able to convince the medical community that the threshold needs to be lower and lower to the point where almost everyone seems to need statin drugs. He says: all of my patients come in and are on statins and wondering why or they’ve been told they need to be on it and they ignore them because they hear me talking.

Estimates are it’s a hundred billion dollar industry… diagnosing, treating and monitoring cholesterol. It is going to be hard to put a wedge in that and knock down a $100 billion industry, but we can do our best.

Statin Side Effects beyond muscle pain
Side effects beyond muscle pain are way more serious. Increased cancer rates are very real with statin drugs, depression is extremely real, increased congestive heart failure because of depression of Coenzyme Q10.

Here’s how I look at it… what would happen if you took a drug to reduce your glutathione levels…or reduce vitamin C levels? Bad things would happen. This drug that reduces cholesterol is just as scary and dangerous as one of those would be.

Statins and the suppression of CoQ10 production?
Statins are an HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor … the HMG-CoA leads to the creation of coenzyme Q10 and a few steps later, cholesterol is produced from this same exact pathway. The statin drugs start all the way at the top and knock out that HMG enzyme which prevents the production of cholesterol but also the production of CoQ10. CoQ10, along with B vitamins and minerals is probably the most important nutrient to allow our cells to make energy and gives us pep. Literally it is cash for the cells. If you don’t make energy in the cells, the cells can’t function, can’t repair itself, can’t detoxify itself and the cell becomes dysfunctional. So a muscle cell can’t contract, brain cells can’t fire, so you can’t think, heart cells can’t contract, liver cells can’t detoxify. All these things are bad. Nothing can do its ****when you can’t make energy. The body just basically shuts down.

Probably the worse side effect of statins is the suppression of Coenzyme Q10 which is the most important molecule along with cholesterol, vitamin C glutathione and all the others we discussed. CoQ10 is huge.

Moderator – So we all know that CoQ10 is one of the best supplements for helping treat congestive heart failure but you’re saying, push CoQ10 levels low enough you contribute to ailments we are trying to prevent.

Yes, it is ironic that taking something supposedly to reduce your risk of heart disease actually promotes a different type of heart disease and probably at a greater rate than lowering cholesterol prevents heart disease. That’s probably why a lot of studies – if you look at books like The Cholesterol Myths by Uffe Ravnskov, MD, PhD – he looks at some of the actual results. Yes – the drugs lower cholesterol but what really should be the goal of these drugs – is to reduce cardiovascular disease and to reduce death. Statins don’t seem to do those things very well. In a lot of cases – depending on the population – death rates and cardiovascular rates actually increase in those that take statin drugs so you die with lower cholesterol.

Heavy metals and elevated cholesterol
This is very important because it could be one of the underlying factors as to why someone might have elevated cholesterol which would indicate something is going on; they are probably at higher risk of CV disease; something is damaging their body…causing oxidative stress so they are releasing cholesterol in order to repair tissues, reduce inflammation because cholesterol has anti-inflammatory properties and cortisol has anti-inflammatory properties along with the antioxidant properties of cholesterol. We have discovered there are antioxidant properties in cholesterol.

So what do toxic metals do? and mercury in my opinion is probably by far the worst, but they are all bad… they increase inflammation, they increase free radicals and they destroy cells. All of these things will be a trigger for the release of cholesterol to try to undo that damage. So the connection is easy to make between heavy metal toxicity and elevated cholesterol.

Another easy link is with people who have a lot of mercury metal fillings tend to have a lot more anxiety than the average person. Anxiety leads to excess cortisol production – the fight-or-flight sympathetic response and if your body is demanding excess cortisol, how are you going to get it? You have to release cholesterol in order to make cortisol because cholesterol is the building block of cortisol.

The problems with heavy metal toxicity are probably the underlying cause of the increased risk of heart disease and the resultant excess cholesterol levels.

Toxic metals are probably related to every neurological disease. Chiropractic neurologists do brain balancing to reduce stress but in patients with a true neurological disease, in my mind, it is toxicity until proven otherwise. If you can do only one thing with a patient, it’s important to get the toxic metals out so you can proceed with other treatment.

I have my doubts if lowering cholesterol …even if you could do it without lowering CoQ10… would be the best thing to do. I like to figure out why the cholesterol is high in the first place- then the cholesterol normalizes by itself without forcing it lower.

I look at inflammation, free radicals and stress in cases of high cholesterol. If you get those under control, then most likely, cholesterol levels will lower significantly.

Reducing inflammation, reducing free radical damage – taking plenty of antioxidants – broad spectrum antioxidants…vitamins C, E, glutathione precursors like lipoic acid, CoQ10, and all the bioflavonoids on top of that – broad spectrum – all the colors of the rainbow in there…and from foods dark berries and vegetables. That will go a long way toward reducing free radicals and the body’s demand for cholesterol.

And maybe even more important – stress reducing techniques. Adrenal fatigue – everyone is chronically stressed and that’s truly one of the reasons for people having high cholesterol simply because they are chronically stressed, chronically in a sympathetic dominant state and chronically demanding more cortisol in their body which requires constant high levels of cholesterol.

A case example… male 52 yo – drives race cars as a hobby so he’ll haul a race car and do dune buggy racing where he is in a race car for hours and hours within a day and he’ll do that for multiple days in a row. You can do a pre and post-cholesterol level test and see his cholesterol levels skyrocket after a race. So in his case, we need to get his stress under control because you can imagine the stress – racing through the woods at extremely high speeds – producing a constant, extreme amount of stress.

With him, we did brain balancing – he was very much right brain dominant so we did left brain stimulation, along with stress reducing activities to try to get him to sleep more – using some of the adaptogenic herbs. We also did EFT and for exercise, the high intensity, burst training. And for activity –just calming activities like walking. Don’t do anything that causes adrenaline surges.

Another case/patient --worked in a printing company where you could smell the ink and a lot of inks have toxicity. Her mouth was clear of mercury amalgam fillings. She said she had just had all her mercury fillings removed in Mexico. Uh oh! I asked when did your health problems start? 2 years ago which coincided with the filling removal. So she basically poisoned herself with the dental procedure. So she had a double problem; the ink at the ****and then the release of the mercury into her system. The mercury overload makes it impossible for her to detoxify anything else she gets exposed to so she was just a toxic mess. Her levels of cholesterol were high – and all I did for her was detox. Toxic Metal, full body detox, NAC, Paleo cleanse, chlorella, DMSA which we can’t get anymore, it works so well,. She was to the point where she couldn’t think. After the detox, she could think, began to lose weight, and her cholesterol went from 242 to 195 over a six month period. Mercury detoxing is still an ongoing process… we didn’t get rid of it all. But just by getting the mercury out of her soft tissues, she was functioning so much better, we just had to keep working at it.

It’s very common for cholesterol levels to drop 30 – 40 points after detoxing.


Testing
He does a CV panel for his patients which shows their risk for CV disease.

Fibrinogen - blood viscosity or thickness –
High Sensitive CRP which measures inflammation specific to CV system.
Ferritin – measures iron levels – excess iron causes free radical damage to the heart.. shows up in ferritin faster so better test – critical for anyone with CV disease
Homocysteine – lots of evidence correlating to CV disease
Triglyciderides – measurement of how burning fat
Fasting Insulin, glucose and Hemoglobin A1C - test for all three to measure responses to sugar and how much is this doing damage to the body.

Fibrinogen – responds to the special garlic extracts and fish oils(also nattokinase – very well)
Homocysteine… B vitamins for the methylation process
Triglyciderides… high intensity exercise, carnitine, lower intake starchy carbs and sugar.

Reading suggestions

Cholesterol Myths
By Uffe Ravnskoff, MD PhD
Looks at all the things people have tried to do to reduce cholesterol, including excessive niacin, fibrates, statins, high dose estrogen, and reports on the results including the adverse results especially that reducing CV disease wasn’t a prevalent outcome. He digs deep into the actually numbers and runs the statistics himself and says that you might want to think again – they fudged the numbers a lot.
[www.ravnskov.nu]
[www.thincs.org]

Stop Worrying About Cholesterol
Richard C Tapert, D.O.
[www.avoidheartattack.com]


References:

(1) Featuring: Jeremy Webster, DC
Topic: Debunking the Myths of Cholesterol: Setting the record straight on how & why the body produces and uses cholesterol (Courtesy: Designs for Health – Windsor, CT) June 2010
Dr. Jeremy S. Webster received his Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Oklahoma State University and then attended Parker College in Dallas, TX where he received his Doctorate of Chiropractic. Dr. Webster has post-doctoral training in Neurology from the prestigious Carrick Institute for Graduate Studies. He has specialized training in vestibular rehabilitation which deals with those with vertigo and dizziness. He is currently seeking a diplomate degree in Chiropractic Neurology. Dr. Webster has lectured on the interactions of nutrition and the nervous system to health professionals as well as the public.
Dr. Webster has geared his studies towards the treatment of physiologically and nutritionally-based problems that adversely affect health and ultimately prevent weight loss. Nutritional deficiencies, toxicities, and poor neurological function are all assessed in his office.

(2) [www.sciencedaily.com]

Thanks Jackie -

Very nicely done, and very important. It can't be said too often, or often enough.

Erling