Change Your Brain Every Day - The One Big Myth About Cholesterol, with Dr. Jonny Bowden

Episode Date: October 26, 2020

Most of us have been told that your cholesterol levels predict your risk of heart disease. Often it’s our own doctors than take a look at lab tests and scare us into reducing our cholesterol as much as possible. However, as “The Nutrition Myth Buster” Dr. Jonny Bowden tells us, this is all a big myth. In the first episode in a series with Jonny, he and the Amens dish the details on all things cholesterol, such as the importance of HDL and LDL, and why too little cholesterol can also be a bad thing. 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, everyone. We have a very special cholesterol week for you. We have one of our friends and favorite guests, Johnny Bowden with us, who wrote really a seminal book on cholesterol called The Great Cholesterol Myth. I use it

clinically. I talk to my patients about it. I've probably sold thousands for Donnie. Thank you. So Dr. Bowden, also known as the Nutrition buster, nationally known board certified nutritionist and expert on diet and weight loss. He's appeared on Dr. Oz, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, all the letters, New York Times, Forbes, Daily Beast. But what he's really great at is taking complex concepts in health and make them easy to understand. So heart disease is the number one killer. However, traditional heart disease protocols with their emphasis on lowering cholesterol have it all wrong, according to the great cholesterol myth. Emerging science is showing that cholesterol levels are a poor predictor of heart disease and that standard prescriptions for lowering it,

such as ineffective low-fat, high-carb diets and serious side effects causing statin drugs obscure the real causes. So we are going to talk about that today. His new book, The Great Cholesterol Myth Now, includes 100 recipes for preventing and reversing heart disease. And what you and I often say is whatever's good for your heart is good for your brain because your brain uses 20% of the blood flow in your body, which is also good for your genitals. So if you want to keep... I quote you on that all the time. Everybody, my friend Daniel said that, and it's got to be true,

but it is so true. It is so true. People don't make that connection enough, do they? So welcome, Johnny. Oh, we're so happy to have you. Yeah, and I just want to tell you, Johnny, it's an honor because that book really did change so much for me. So I had several people that I consider huge mentors in my nutritional journey. I didn't set out to write my books to help other people. Initially, I set out doing the research to save myself. And so you were one of those people. When

I read that book, it was so eyeopening and so life-changing and it made sense. So I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. I really, that is such an honor to hear that from you. I appreciate it very much. So what's new? There's a lot. I'm glad you asked. What's new? The premise of the old book, which is still true today, is that the way that we test for cholesterol, HDL, LDL is obsolete and does not give us valuable information. That's even more true today because we now have tests that actually do predict. And I want to clear up the notion that, you know, sometimes when people take a contrarian position like we did in the great cholesterol myth that statins are overused and all that, the soundbite comes out, oh, they don't believe cholesterol has anything to tell us, and they think statin drugs are evil. And neither of those is really what we said. The test that we're using, I mean, if I had one mission with this book, is that never,

ever, ever again would a prescription drug be given on the basis of this test. This test is as useless as a horoscope from Cosmopolitan magazine. Sometimes they get it right. I mean, it's not always wrong. You know, you go, oh, I'm a Sagittarius. Yeah, that is me. Most of the time when you say that, you mean total cholesterol with HDL, LDL. Yeah, you think he's going to get to this fractionated thing. That's exactly what I am saying. And I think it's important to understand that I don't say that cholesterol tells us nothing. I think we're measuring it incorrectly and we're emphasizing it where it shouldn't be emphasized. So if I could clear a couple of those things up, I think people would actually have some usable information about this.

So what's important to understand, and this I guess is sort of new, is that cholesterol does not travel in the blood. It can't. It would be like trying to, if I wanted to get some cooking oil across a lake, if I poured the oil into the lake, it's not going to arrive on the other side so that you can now cook with it. It has to be in a container. a lipoprotein. So if you look at HDL-LDL, what do they stand for? A high density lipoprotein and a low density lipoprotein, but the lipoprotein is the ship, the boat. Cholesterol is the cargo. Oh, I like that analogy. And in the last 10 years, the evidence has just stacked up that what's important here is the number of boats in the water, not the cargo, not the cholesterol. Cholesterol doesn't even do any damage to anybody until the boat breaks. And then it gets out into the water and then all kinds of different things happen. But if we're looking at the cargo, instead of saying, why is this boat being damaged?

And by the way, how many of them are there? So when I talked about the particle test in the old book, and I still do in this one, and there's even more modern stuff that people are using now, even beyond the particle test, we're talking about counting the number of boats in the water. And here's why. Anytime you have more people in a nightclub, there's more likelihood of a fight. Anytime you have overcrowded conditions, people are going to bump up against each other. And anytime there's tons and tons of boats in any water, there's more likelihood of a crash. It's the action in measuring cholesterol has nothing to do with LDL and HDL. It has to do with the particles, the lipoproteins, because that's what gets damaged. We use cholesterol as a kind of shorthand, but it's

the bolts. And those bolts don't just carry cholesterol they carry triglycerides they carry protein that's what some of them are high density some are low and and the part that makes my head explode about this is that they figured out about hdl and ldl in 1963 using this test when we have the equivalent of it is like using one of those old cell phones that used to have to right and then we had the flip phones. That was a slight improvement. That's like the HDL, LDL. Now we have the iPhone 12 Pro and we have the Samsung Galaxy.

Why are we using this crazy, old, outdated test? There are 13 different sub-fractions of cholesterol. They don't all behave the same. Some are more likely to become inflamed and ather same. Some are more likely to become inflamed and atherogenic. Some are less likely to become that. They have patterns of distribution that we can actually see. And those patterns tell us something. They predict insulin resistance. They predict heart disease a lot better than whether you have HDL and LDL. And yet we are still using this flip phone equivalent when we've got such more sophisticated tools available. And when we wrote the old book, people hadn't even heard of the

particle test. Now it's given everywhere. LabCorp has it, Quest Labs has it, and there are even surrogates for it that every doctor already knows. And's not like a big heavy lift apo b it's as good as a particle test and it's on the regulation it's cost four bucks why are they still using ldlh my question is why are doctors so resistant to giving you a fractionated test why are they so reluctant because i hear it all the time from our patients, from my own doctor. No, we're not going to do that. No, I'm not going to order it. No, you don't need it. Yeah. No, I'm pretty pushy. I get it. I get that you're an informed patient. You don't just take it. Oh, my doctor says you

want to order. Why? I want to know why. Right. And with ApoB, and the reason that I'm kind of moving towards recommending ApoB, which, by the way, everybody should know. So we want to know the number of bolts in the water. And the best way to do that is with a particle test, a fraction. In other words, what are the fractions of cholesterol? Because that does tell us something. Particle size actually does predict bad events. I mean, particle number, unlike LDL and HDL. And we talk about this in the books. There are studies that have looked at

hospital admissions for coronary artery disease and cardiovascular disease. They have mega analysis. They look at, they combine studies in 375,000 patients and they look at the admissions. And guess what? Depending on the study you read, between 50 and 70% of those people admitted to hospitals for cardiovascular disease have normal LDL. It's a terrible predictor. I don't know why we still think that LDL predicts. We talk about this wonderful study that was done quite a while ago called the lean diet heart study it's a very very famous study they took 605 people who were like the walking dead they had every risk factor you can imagine sure they had high cholesterol but they had they were smokers they ate a terrible

diet a lot of them were obese they had a heart attack they were just an insurance underwriters nightmare and they divide them into two groups And they give one what was called at the time the prudent diet, no more than 30% of your calories from fat, no more than 7% from saturated fat, high carbohydrates. And it was the standard quote, prudent diet, no eggs, because they have cholesterol, all that stuff. The other group got the Mediterranean diet, which is a 40% fat diet, right? The results were so dramatic that they stopped the study and they thought it was unethical. The results were, there was over 70% reduction in not only actual endpoints like deaths, but you know, all the risk factors. Now, here's the interesting thing. Everybody knows that study, but they don't know this. What do you think happened to the cholesterol levels, the LDL and HDL levels of the people who were now experiencing this enormous double-digit reduction in risk? Nothing. The cholesterol was identical. They just stopped dying cholesterol doesn't predict what we think it predicts we

are concentrating on this molecule this lab test and we've got so much more sophisticated ways to assess risk and we're still sticking with this whole thing you asked why well when we come back okay when we come back we'll talk about why they're stuck about why but i also want to talk about how important cholesterol is. Yes. Your overall health and hormones. So what did you learn during this podcast? Write it down, post it on any of your social media sites. Also, we dearly love if you go to the Brain Warriors way, podcast.com, leave us a comment, question, or review.

When we come back with Dr. Johnny Bowden, we're going to talk about why do you care about cholesterol? It is not the enemy. It is critical. Title of the new book is cholesterol the great cholesterol myth now right it is this it's the great cholesterol myth it's revised and expanded that's what we're looking for the revised and expanded that's the one that's on amazon what i like is your recipes are super easy so actually the recipes are in the old edition they are not in the new dish it was so much new information that we just didn't want to get the new stuff in there because it's way.

There's many recipe books. So we we drop recipes and stuck with a bunch of cookbooks on audio. Johnny, is it on audio? The old one was I suspect this one will be. It isn't yet. Just came out yesterday. Awesome. Congratulations.

All right. Stay with us. We'll be back. Dr. Johnny Bell. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast.

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