Change Your Brain Every Day - Do You Actually Need MORE Cholesterol in Your Diet? with Dr. Jonny Bowden

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

Although it tends to be demonized in western medicine, cholesterol is vitally important for your body. Without it, your body wouldn’t be able to create the hormones and nutrients needed for survival. So why does it seem that so many doctors tell us it needs to be as low as possible? In the second episode in a series with “The Great Cholesterol Myth” author Dr. Jonny Bowden, he and the Amens discuss why our current health system tends to steer away from the truth about cholesterol, and why this may be a mistake.   For more info on Dr. Jonny Bowden, visit https://jonnybowden.com/  

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are still here with our friend, Johnny Bowden. We are having a great time talking about cholesterol of all things in his new book, The Great Cholesterol Myth, revised and expanded. I read the original. It was awesome.

Changed the way that I treat myself, what I wrote about, how I thought about nutrition and health. And one question I had in the last episode, Johnny, was why are doctors so resistant to ordering this fractionated test? Why are they still stuck on this old test? We know that the old test is outdated. Why don't they want to order it? Just a couple of reasons.

And most of them don't have to do with medicine. They have to do with sociology, psychology, being in a rut, following patterns that you're familiar with following, insurance regulations. So there's a whole host of things. I mean, maybe in some places, in some practices, insurance doesn't cover it. That's one possibility. Another is people don't like to learn new stuff. I mean, they got to now learn how to interpret 13 different types of cholesterol and patterns of distribution. And it's, it's easier to just go LDL HDL and, and, and these things kind of set them. Yeah. And this, and the money in seven minute office visits than in 20 minute office visits. Always. And always. So I think that's why people

are resistant, but let's just step, take a step back. And why cholesterol, you know, cholesterol has been demonized when it's so important, uh, to survival. So talk about that. What, why should people care about their cholesterol? Well, the only reason, and that's kind of the whole purpose of the book, cholesterol, first of all, to answer your first question, or to support what you just said in your first question, cholesterol is a vitally important molecule. We used to have a TV commercial that used to run where they would show, this is your brain on drugs, and they would scramble it up. And then, well, your brain without cholesterol, you're dead. it's like you have a balloon and that's your life

and cholesterol this is your body on without cholesterol pick that prick that balloon and you've got a pricked balloon with no air in it i mean there's there are no cells there are no hormones it is one of the most important nutrients or compounds in the human body. It's in the membranes of the cell. It's involved in memory and thinking. It's vitally important in the brain. You need cholesterol. How did it get demonized?

That's a long story that goes back to the 1950s and 60s and a researcher named Ansel Keyes and epidemiological studies. We talk a little in the book about how nutrition studies are done. And we show you how the sausage is made. They're horrible. Nutrition studies are terrible. They're mostly observational. They're very rarely clinical.

They're almost never able to be replicated. They're just not good. And the study that is always used as the cornerstone of the cholesterol theory, was a terrible study. It was just an observational study filled with confirmation bias. He had a point of view. He was going to prove that point of view no matter what. He picked countries that were likely to support that. And it was a big association study.

And for those who don't know what an epidemiological or association study is, it's the opposite of a clinical study where you have two groups and you match them and you make only one variable different in one group and then you see if there's a difference at the end. This is just like we give a whole bunch of people food questionnaires and we ask them what they ate in the last six months and then we try to see if there's any correlation to how many people die. And those are just, they're studies that hint at a relationship that are supposed to give birth to hypotheses. They're not supposed to be public policy based on these associations.

And the book is filled with statistical associations that are between storks and babies in Denmark for decades. And when I tell people that, I say, well, obviously, storks bring babies, right? And they all know that's ridiculous. But when we tell them saturated fat causes heart disease, and it's the same logic, they go, well, yeah, that's true, right? Isn't it? No And it's the same logic. They go, well, yeah, that's true, right? Isn't it? No, it's not. It's an association that has more holes in it than, you know, you could drive a truck through. So association studies are not clinical. And that's why all the research that's come out since 2010, that has actually looked at saturated fat and endpoints, not just raising

cholesterol, but do people who eat more saturated fat actually have more heart attacks? And study after study, starting with 2010, there's another one in 2014, there was another one in British Medical Journal, there's a dozen of them by now. They do not. The people who eat more saturated fat don't have any more heart attacks or deaths than the people who don't. It just is a fall of the association. So I eat a more paleo version of keto. So I do eat a lot of plants, but I mean, I eat a really high fat diet.

I mean, like really high fat. And I try to eat pretty healthy fat, but a lot of it is saturated. I would consider more the healthy saturated stuff. But I feel better. I mean, I feel better. I have more energy. My weight is better. I just feel better. I don't eat sugar and simple carbs. And I would say that most people who we what you're basically doing, I don't care really

about following a keto versus a paleo versus any of the 50, you know, variations in between you're eating real food. Diet the way is not keto it's actually i make mine keto oh no no i know but what i was going to say is the people don't realize the paleo diet is about 65 plant food and 35 animal food it's not really a keto or a heavy animal product is mostly plants that's what they studied when they studied it in 1985 and 1989. But the point is that, you, well, let me see, there's a couple of things to unpack. You had mentioned, I try not to eat the bad fat, saturated fat. I would like people to understand that bad fat and good fat does not break down in terms of animal and vegetable. It does not break down

in terms of saturated versus unsaturated. What about grass-fed versus not grass-fed or like the quality? Kind of a different. Or hydrates or that kind of stuff. A little bit. Can we hold that for a second and just clear up the saturated? So a couple of years, four years ago, I wrote another book called Smart Fat that nobody read.

It just bombed. But the concept of smart fat, which I wrote with Stephen Masley, was that we should divide fat not into animal versus vegetable, not into saturated versus unsaturated, but into toxic versus non-toxic. So if you take canola oil, which is the kind of the poster child for good fat, and it isn't, by the way, it's a terrible pet. But if you took canola oil or any unsaturated pet, you put it in a restaurant, like a fast food restaurant, which they did. They got rid of lard. They started using canola. You fry up some food.

You let it cool. You put it back on the fryer, seven days of that, and then you throw it out. That was vegetable oil. It's as toxic a cauldron of carcinogens and trans fats as you can imagine, but it was a vegetable fat. On the other hand, if you took the fat from grass fed meat, which is 50% saturated, you can give me, I'll eat that all day long. So it isn't really whether it's saturated or not. Palm oil is a kind of nutrition, actually it gets a terrible reputation, but it's really not a bad oil.

Coconut oil certainly isn't. Those are plant-based saturated fats. So we got to stop thinking saturated fat causes heart disease. Toxic fat contributes to heart disease. But whether or not- Totally agree with you. How do people know what's toxic and what's not? So here we cook with coconut oil, avocado oil, macadamia nut oil.

That's not toxic. And the temperature you're cooking it at, I mean, those three you mentioned stand up to high heat very well. So it's unlikely that you're going to like hit the smoke point and all of a sudden these things are going to start appearing. Those are really good, healthy fats. Vegetable oil, which is not even vegetable oil. It's seed oil that's marketed to be

healthy by saying vegetable it comes with seeds like a rapeseed oil rapeseed oil so before we have to stop i want to go back to where we started which is cholesterol is critical and where i got interested in this was I started reading studies that said total cholesterol under 160 associated with depression and suicide. And accidents. Homicide. And also higher rates of accidents, fatal accidents. ADHD, autism. And I have so many young patients who have low cholesterol. And if you have low cholesterol, so one of mine who actually talked about this on Joe

Rogan is Miley Cyrus, whose cholesterol always ran low. And I actually give her cholesterol to try to get it normal because when she goes on tour or goes through a stressful period of time, she doesn't have the precursors to like make hormones like cortisol and estrogen and testosterone. Because when cholesterol is low, it helps to provide sort of the building blocks for many of your hormones. Just to add to that, when I first got pregnant, I was, um, I was in my early thirties and I was really into bodybuilding. So I was super lean. I was like, totally Nazi about my diet, really, really lean, the leanest I'd ever been very muscular. And I got pregnant. I didn't think I could get pregnant. So I get pregnant. I find out I'm pregnant. Um, and I, the first trimester I gained 11 pounds. I was so hungry and all I, I was craving like peanut butter, almond butter, avocados, like nuts.

I was like eating like so much fat. And I went to my doctor and I'm like, I'm so worried about this. Like you're not supposed to gain this much weight your first trimester. I didn't feel sick at all. I was just starving. And she goes, it's because you're so lean. You're you don't have the hormones. Yeah. Like your body is trying to tell you that it needs more. It needs more fat. It needs more cholesterol to support the pregnancy. I was like, oh, that's so wild. Yeah, that was pretty wild. And also you didn't mention this, but correct me if I'm wrong. Is it not also the precursor molecule for vitamin D? It's very important. So we have like a nationwide deficiency in vitamin D. Could it have anything to do with cholesterol-lowering medications

that half the population is on? Is that known for affecting vitamin D? It's one of the precursors to make it, isn't it, Daniel? But I mean, if you take the medication, does it affect vitamin D? So with everybody taking statins because cholesterol all we want you to do those people who are listening um you know and and often the disclaimer is talk to your doctor well talk to your doctor if he or she has read the great cholesterol otherwise um or if you're a functional medicine doctor doctors are human you know doctors

are human i had a i had an endocrinologist who i thought at one point was trying to kill me i was on nine medications i felt miserable and this guy was pretty well known um so i found a different doctor i found a doctor who's up he calls himself the idiot savant of thyroid up in San Francisco. He does research and I felt better within two weeks. So just because the doctor tells you something, if you're not feeling right, it's your responsibility to be your own advocate. Couldn't agree more. You need to be the leader of your own healthcare team. And I couldn't, I am a hundred percent. That's why we write. That's why Don Johnny writes, why Tana writes, why I write, so that we can bring you the latest information so you can be your best advocate. So stay with us. We're going

to come back with Dr. Johnny Bowden and talk about things to eat and things to not eat. And you have to actually tell them, this is the test we recommend. I'm going to. I can't wait. It is so important. So what did you learn? And, you know, I'll give you a secret. Cholesterol is not the devil.

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