Realfoodology - 58: The Cholesterol Myth with Dr. Jonny Bowden

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

What if I told you everything you knew about cholesterol and statin drugs was wrong? I speak with Dr Jonny Bowden about why we need cholesterol, how it shouldn’t be vilified, what we got wrong about it, how we are over prescribing statins, why LDL & HDL are not actually the whole picture, what lab work we should be getting to determine heart disease risk and what we can do to better our health! Show Links: https://jonnybowden.com/ https://meta-fasting.com/meta-fasting3 https://jonnybowden.com/product/the-great-cholesterol-myth/

On today's episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. So we went from what I call the Johnny Bowdoin four food groups, the basic four food groups, food you could hunt, fish, gather, or pluck. We went from that to the 7-Eleven in record time. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Real Foodology Podcast. I am your host, Courtney Swan. I am so happy that you're here. As you can tell in my voice, I am having a great day. Even though it's raining outside in Boulder, it's still like very nice and cozy here.

Today's conversation with Dr. Johnny Bowden is a long time coming. I've been wanting to have this conversation for a while now on my podcast. I'm so excited the time is here. I think this is one of the most important conversations that we can be having around our health right now because as we learn a lot in these conversations, it's all connected. And what Dr. Johnny Bowden has discovered in his work and the book that he wrote, which is called The Cholesterol Myth, is that everything that we know about cholesterol and statin drugs and what we're being told is wrong. So we talk about why we actually need cholesterol for our brains and how it should not be vilified. We talk exactly about what we got wrong about it, how we're over-prescribing statins, why LDL and HDL are not actually the whole picture and we need to be looking at more than just LDL and HDL, what lab work we should be getting in order to determine heart disease risk and what we can do

to better our health. Also, there is a connection between insulin resistance and heart disease and cholesterol, which, you know, we learned in earlier podcast episodes, but it's just, oh, I love these conversations so much, guys. I love biology. I love learning about the way that the body works and just learning how all of this stuff is connected. If you've been listening to this podcast for a little while, you'll probably remember I had Dr. Richard Jacoby on a few months ago. He is a neuropathy surgeon, which means that he works with diabetic patients on a day-to-day basis. And he was the first person to really open my eyes to this. And I was pretty mind blown. And Johnny only confirms this in our conversation,

but what he said was that heart disease, cancer, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, they're all the same thing. We just keep slapping on new names, new diagnoses, and coming up with new medicines for it. But really what's happening at the root of it, it's all insulin resistance and overconsumption of carbohydrates and sugar. I was mind blown when Dr. Jacoby first put this on my radar. And it was really interesting to hear Dr. Johnny Bowden also make a similar comparison. Anyways, I don't want to give away anything else. If you guys are listening and you have family members or friends that are on statins, I would urge you to send this to them. I think this is really life-saving information and we deserve to know the truth. Also, if you're enjoying this podcast, would you leave me a five-star rating and a review?

I have recorded this about 20 times now because I have a really hard time asking for help, but your reviews and your ratings really help this show get into more ears. And I'm really enjoying this podcast. This is my favorite thing about health and nutrition is educating and getting really life-saving important information into the ears of as many people as will listen. And your ratings and reviews help me accomplish that goal. So I really appreciate all your help. And with that, let's get to the episode. Do you want to hear the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging?

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sponsoring this episode. Hey, Johnny, how are you doing? I'm great. How are you? off. Thank you so much to Lumen for sponsoring this episode. heard. I feel like it's kind of falling on a lot of deaf ears. I think more people are waking up to it, but it's a conversation that's really near and dear to my heart is my dad has been on statins for, you know, probably 10 plus years now. And I've constantly been trying to send him information to get him to really understand the implications of what these statins mean. And I want him to understand that maybe we're approaching cholesterol from the wrong direction. So it a hard it's a it's a hard battle to fight isn't it it's very much uphill and it probably won't be one in our lifetime yeah that's the bad news but the good news is that when i was talking about this 10 years ago when the first edition of the great cholesterol myth came out in 2012 we sinatra and i were really thought, like these guys, they wrote letters to Dr. Oz saying, how could you have these cracks on? They petitioned the Australian Broadcasting

Company for doing a documentary, not just on me and Sinatra, but on faculty members at Harvard and tenured professors elsewhere and authors who had written about this, taking the same position as we did. And the medical, they did a public relations campaign. I saw headlines that I couldn't actually believe that I saw these and that they were generated by the film that I was in. But the headlines said, 31,000 people will die if they listen to boden and sinatra's advice that was placed by pr agency in australia that got that story to be carried by the australian newspapers and they

tried to get the documentary that we were in taken down from youtube i'm not sure if they succeeded or not the point of all of this is that that was in 2012. we just released the new edition in 2020 and although we are very very far from being in the mainstream nobody's laughing anymore yeah there's a very vocal and growing and respected contingent among the cardiovascular experts in the world cardio cardio surgeons and thoracic surgeons and heart disease specialists and hypertension experts like Dr. Mark Heason, millions of these, millions. Many of these very credentialed people are now saying, yeah, we got cholesterol wrong.

And there's new information showing how we can get it right. And people aren't listening to it. And now that we're not the only one saying that, we can have this conversation. We're still not in the minority, in the majority. I don't think we're going to, the forces we would have to overcome, big pharma, big food, mainstream medicine. It's not going to happen in our lifetime. It's going to happen incrementally. There'll be changes, but I've seen changes just in the last decade. And I can tell you now, I mean, when we first gave our presentations at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, we had a few doctors come up to us quietly and say, God, thank

you for saying this. We've known this. I'm so glad you're here. Not anymore. Now there's entire divisions of these professional organizations that are aligned with our belief. And it is beginning to get into the mainstream, or at least people are beginning to hear about it. It didn't hurt that the keto diet and the paleo diet became so popular

because they went against all of the BS premises we had been taught. I mean, here we eat that, right? And people are doing really well on keto. So there's a beginning awareness that some of what we were taught is not the whole truth. And hopefully our conversation will add to that illumination. And the more people that hear this, you know, I don't have great illusions or delusions about my audience is zillions of people. And I'm going to transform what I hope is five people listening to you today have a

different view of heart disease, food, cholesterol, nutrition than they did before they started. And that those five take it to a few other friends. And that way we can literally green America and change the consciousness about what it means to be healthy. But we're not going to do it massively. We're probably going to do it one podcaster and one listener at a time. Yeah. Yeah. And that's true. It's perfectly fine. I agree. And you know, I, like you said, it is a heartening to see that more and more people are waking up to this, which is really cool. So let's backtrack a little bit. Um, so I've heard you say cholesterol is the

wrong target for the prevention of heart disease. And cholesterol has been so vilified. So can we first explain what cholesterol is and what its role is in the body and why? Oh, sure. And can I start by saying, because one of the biggest problems about all of this is that we use the word cholesterol to mean very, very, very, very different things. So I wanna be clear when I'm talking about whether cholesterol should be the target of our efforts,

if cholesterol should be considered the cause. We used to think that cholesterol was a single thing. When I was a little boy, way before you were born, I'm sure, they had these health fairs, where they would try to educate the public about important things to be aware of in health. This is like such a different time. It's the 50s and the 60s. Nobody knew anything. And one of the demonstrations at the health fair would be to educate people about cholesterol. It was this new thing that they had discovered that lived in the blood. And they would do a little fingerprint. The doctor would be in a lab coat and, you know,

put the finger and put a little blood clot on a thing and come out with a little reading and say, Mrs. Jones, your cholesterol is 210. That's why. That's very good. You keep up the good work. Nobody knew what it meant. But it was like we were educating people to be aware that there was a blood test that could indicate something about your risk for heart disease. That was what was understood. And it was one number. And at the time, the number was very high

for what people considered to be normal. They have said significantly, they have lobbied to reduce that number steadily since 1960s. It used to be 240. Now it's I think 200 because every time they lower it to normal, they get an entire 10 million new people to get on statin drugs. But that's the I digress. That's a great business plan. Yeah. They would have it lower and lower if they could be fight for every year. But here's, here's the important thing. So that's how we measured cholesterol in 1960. And then

measurement got more sophisticated, and we got a little more sophisticated about what cholesterol was. Scientists realized, well, this doesn't even travel in the bloodstream because it's hydrophobic. It doesn't mix with water. It travels in a container. The container is called a lipoprotein, and that's where HDL, LDL comes from. The L stands for lipoprotein. And that's where HDL, LDL comes from. The L stands for lipoprotein.

And the scientists noticed, Courtney, that the lipoproteins were kind of shaped different and had different cargoes. One of them kind of floated to the surface. It was very low density. And the other one, if you put it under, it would kind of sink. So they named one of them, the one that had this kind of arrangement, they'd call the high density one. And this one's the low density one. And they did different things in the body. And it seemed like low density one was more involved. And so they made the low density one, they called the bad cholesterol and this is 1963 and it's great medicine for 1963.

so we now know this is 2021 but there are 13 subtypes of cholesterol not two the notion that one of them is good and one of them is bad is ridiculous. And that the size of the particles matters. The number of the particles matters. All of those which are on the modern cholesterol tests are important. So when I say cholesterol doesn't matter, what I'm talking about is a 1963 concept of a complex issue that we are pretending we only know what we knew in 1963. Let me give you an example that everybody will get cell phones. Now I lived in New York when the first satellite phones came out. They were the size of a brick. They were called satellite phones. And you have pictures if

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expensive, the most on-demand phone, a little flip phone. You remember you had to text someone, you would have to hit it three times to get a letter, right? If you wanted A, you had to go bump, bump, bump. You wanted one, you had to go bump bump bump you wanted one you had remember that oh yeah major innovation over the over the over the satellite phone the flip phone is the hgl ldl test and they are using it like an Atari 64 computer. And people are going on drugs because of this outdated test that is invalid, that tells us nothing. And they're still using it because they're too lazy to change to the one we've had for almost 20 years,

called the nuclear magnetic resonance. It's a different way to measure than good and bad, and it tells you all 13 types. And it tells you your pattern. And it tells you your number. And it tells you your size. And that, my friend, can tell you something about your risk for heart disease. HD on LDL, you might as well read your horoscope and cosmopolitan.

I love that comparison. So what do we do? So what is all that? Why do I get so exercised about this, by the way? I love it. Why do I get so passionate about this? First of all, I'll tell you why. Not that you asked, but I thought it does deserve an explanation. It's people like your father. So I'm an avid tennis player and I play with people literally. I played this morning with a 12-year-old wunderkind and I play with guys 87. So I play with the range. Every one of the men I play with who are over 70 are on statin drugs.

That's frightening. More than half of them have obvious statin drug symptoms that they don't know are because of the statin drugs. The others don't. I'm not saying it's 100%. I'm saying it's a higher percent than people realize. Every one of them, I have talked to the same group for 15 years. I know their medical history. I've talked to them. They don't necessarily have risk factors other than high cholesterol. They certainly not overweight. They exercise every day. And many of them are over 75, where the literature is crystal clear

that statin drugs are of absolutely no benefit. And yet they're taking them. And I, from the time I was five, if I had one passion, I hate bullies. The medical industry, and I call it an industry because very often that's how it operates. Big pharma, big medicine often bullies us. They bully us into following certain pathways that they say are right. And then they go on shows like Good Morning America and they double down and they tell you if you're not on a statin drug, you're going to die. And I have had clients and

people in my audiences and people who listen and write and read my columns and write to me, tell me that their doctors threatened to fire them if they would not go on a statin drug. They will not be their doctor. I would fire my doctor. Yeah, I would fire my doctor if he tried to force me to do anything I didn't want to do. And I actually tell people often on this podcast, I'm like, if your doctor is not listening to you and willing to work with you and not just speak at you, then fire them because you need a doctor that will listen to you. Because at the end of the day, they may be the expert on the human body, but you're the only expert on your own body.

And you need to have someone that will listen to you about your experience and what's actually going on in your body. Absolutely true. You can hire them as the leader of your health team, but you better be the CEO. You better be right there getting the input, something very big wrong with handing over your faith to them without even questioning any of the premises on which what they are, on which the advice they are giving you is based. And look, any one of us would take, statins aren't the most risky drug in the world. Nobody's saying that they're not like poison. They're not thalidomide. They're not going to cut your arms off at birth and stuff like that.

We're not saying that we're saying anybody, you, me, anyone, we had a life threatening illness. And there was a drug that was a little risky. But it had a real good chance of keeping us alive. Who's not taking that drug? I am. Yeah, me too. But there are millions of people who are taking a drug that it's not going to kill you. But it's going to list the side effects this long let me start with loss of libido loss of memory muscle pain depletion of coq10 depletion of coq10 which has a whole other set of subcon of consequences who who are taking taking a drug with a big list of side effects and absolutely no benefit. That is what drives me crazy. There are people who, I'm not as anti-statin under all circumstances as some of my colleagues.

I think they have a place. I think the problem was when the companies got greedy and decided, let's expand the marketplace, they seemed to have some benefit for middle-aged men with previous heart disease it's a small population it ain't what we're doing what we're we're now dosing 13 year olds with statin drugs and 75 old women with statin drugs who were never even in the trials yeah this is this is the problem isn't necessarily the statin drugs are the worst drugs in the world.

The problem is these greedy companies have made them into a money printer and therefore they continue to try to expand the market. They don't want to go to the 13th to the modern cholesterol test because they might lose some patients that they keep up with this stupid good and bad cholesterol. They can keep millions of patients on statin drugs forever. And do sounds actually help reduce heart disease? That's a wonderful and much debated question. If you ask the drug companies who fund all of the studies, they have data showing that there are less deaths in the statin-in treated group from heart disease but when you look at the people

who the statisticians and skeptics and mds who then looked at the data after that reanalyzed and put them up on graphs and said wait a minute guys yeah you did have one or two less deaths from heart disease in your experimental group with the statin drugs, but it was offset by three deaths from diabetes and cancer in the other group, in the group that took the statins. They had a couple of less heart diseases, a couple of less heart attacks, a couple more deaths from cancer. It doesn't save lives. It may, if you listen to the drug companies, reduce slightly the risk for heart disease, maybe.

And it's a pretty small amount. Yeah. But you know what also reduces heart disease and they don't want to talk about this is lifestyle and diet changes. 100%. And the purpose, the only reason I'm still doing a book tour at this point in my life and still proselytizing for the message in the great cholesterol myth is because we believe with all our heart, and we're not alone in this, that when you look at the risk factors for heart disease, the biggest one is showing up 10 years before your doctor says your cholesterol is high, 10 years before your diabetes doctor tells you your A1C is off the charts, 10 years before any of these much later risk factors show up, this one rears its ugly head. It's called insulin resistance, and it is almost 100% treatable, reversible, or preventable to diet and lifestyle. And people don't even know it. Doctors barely can tell you what it is. That's really frightening, especially because I was looking at the numbers on this recently, and I think it's only 12% of our population now is metabolically well, meaning

that the rest of our population, like 88%, are at least pre-diabetic on their way or already are diabetic. 100%, that is one of the most frightening statistics. I bring it up, and every time I get in front of an audience of any kind, whether on podcast or live, I bring up that figure. 88% of America has some degree of insulin resistance, maybe a little bit, maybe a lot, but it's on the spectrum. And let me tell you where insulin resistance leads. It's a long trip, but this is where it's gone. Hypertension, pre-diabetes, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, lung disease, kidney disease, and I forgot the third one. All of the preconditions for COVID, all of them. Metabolic health underlines every single one. Insulin resistance equals metabolic disease. Insulin

sensitivity, which is what we want and which we can create by the food we eat and the lifestyle that we live. We don't need medicines for that. We can create an insulin sensitive metabolism that knows how to burn fat, that doesn't run on sugar, and that doesn't result in heart disease. Yes, exactly. My gosh. Okay. So there's so much to unpack here. First of all, I was really interested. So I started getting really into this pretty recently within last year. And I did one of those glucose monitors. Oh, me too. What an education, right? Yes. I mean, it was life altering. It really showed me the foods that I was eating that was causing spikes in my glucose and my insulin. And I was able to make adjustments in

my diet, really see what foods were affecting me. And I was able to make adjustments in my diet, really see what foods were affecting me. And I will say that I was really proud of myself, because this is something that I've been working really hard on in the last couple years. And I think, you know, had I done this five years ago, I probably would have shown that my insulin was like all over the place and my blood sugar was spiking left and right. But this is what eating a healthy diet and prioritizing good, healthy fats and training your body to be more metabolically flexible does. And it's truly like the, I think the key to our overall health. Can I, for you listeners who might not know, can I make, can I just draw a couple of connections between what you just said and

the CGI and insulin and all of that. So what Courtney's talking about is a little device that we use to measure our blood sugar and you wear it. It's very easy to put on. And the point is, that's what it is. It's a blood sugar monitor that you wear. And why do we care about that? And what does that have to do with heart disease and insulin? Very simple. So insulin's job is to bring your blood sugar down to normal. So your blood sugar goes up when you eat. And that's a good thing because you need more sugar for energy and all that stuff and the cells want it. And you know, and insulin's job is to go up there and be a Sherpa for the blood sugar and to get it into the muscle cells. The problem is that as you age in our society,

and you eat more and more sugar, and your sugar continues to go up and up and up and the insulin continues to try to round it up and get it into the muscle cells, unfortunately, you are no longer moving very much and your muscle cells no longer want that sugar and they become resistant to the effect of it. Now you have insulin resistance. You may be able to keep up with the blood sugar load for a while and be out of the diabetic range. You are on the path and you are in some way metabolically disordered. Now, why do we wear those things? Because they are, they are a surprising window into what's happening with our blood sugar. I don't know if

you found this out, Courtney, I was amazed to find that some foods that I thought were very low glycemic that should have predicted a low blood sugar response actually raised my blood sugar a lot. Yeah, some that I thought, Oh, boy, I'm gonna this gonna take me off the charts will barely move the needle. Yeah, huge individuality and how we respond to foods. The point is why we want to know this is because we don't want our insulin going to the roof. We want our insulin to be like a nice calm pond, where there's no ripples, it's just goes up a little bit goes down a little and then you're we don't want

to do in this because that is diabetic land. And diabetes as we show in our book is no more than three heart disease. 80% diabetics die of heart disease. It's it is on the spectrum. Gotta stop insulin resistance. And the disease it's it is on the spectrum we've got to stop insulin resistance and the way we stop it is by not having our sugar go up every time we eat or keeping it in a moderate range that does not tax the system that causes insulin resistance and the interesting thing about the diet connection to this is that i mean the punch line the drop the mic line on this is what raises sugar the most? Everybody, carbohydrates. What raises it the second most? Protein, not as much as carbohydrates, but yeah,

your blood sugar will go up a little bit with protein. What doesn't even move the needle on blood sugar and insulin? Oh my God, that. What have we been told to eat to prevent diabetes, a high carb, low fat diet? Is this it drives me crazy. Is it Alice in Wonderland? Or is it just me? No, I mean, it's absolutely absurd. I don't even want I mean, we could go down the path of the low fat movement and how it was probably the most atrocious thing to ever happen in human history when it comes to our health. It could not have been further from the truth of what we needed to be doing. Yeah. And you know, when you, I don't know if you talk much on your show about paleo diets and keto and stuff like that, but I mean, the basic, I don't know if you ever talked about the Lindy

effect. It's sort of a relative of all that, but it's basically look for our wisdom to stuff that's born the test of time. That's what that is. And the paleo diet is, I don't care what was invented since 1957. What, what nourished our species for the last 100,000 years? I don't they invented Weiss Krispies in the 50s. You want to use the wisdom of the ages, which is what the Lindy effect is, or the wisdom of the ages, which is what the Lindy effect is, the wisdom of the ages for food, what sustained the human genus. The human genus, these are our progenitors before Homo sapiens, 2.4 million year history on the planet Earth.

Count humans, Homo sapiens out of Africa, depends on which anthropologist you listen to, but it's about 100,000, 110,000 years ago. Modern food was invented a minute ago on the 24-hour time clock. Which one do you think we're genetically adapted to? Which one is going to nourish our physiology? Our physiology and our genetics have not changed that much in the last couple hundred years. It takes generations and generations to adapt to a new food supply. So we went from what I call the Johnny Bowdoin four food groups, the basic four

food groups, food you could hunt, fish, gather, or pluck. We went from that to the 7-Eleven in record time. No wonder we're sick, fat, tired, and depressed. Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit depressing, but also at the same time, I'm seeing the needle move. There's so many people now that are talking about it and people waking up to this. But like we said, we're really waiting for the medical community to catch up on all of this. Why do you think it is like, how did we get cholesterol so wrong? Why, how did we get to this point where we're vilifying it and why haven't we corrected it? Well, now I'll tell you why I'm hesitating because there's really two roads we could go here. Okay. There is a very interesting story about the sociology and politics and economics of how this country got on this insane wrong path

about cholesterol and heart disease. It's a very interesting story. It starts in the Eisenhower administration. It involves this big study called the Seven Countries Study, and it's been told many times. It's been told. We told it in our book. Gary Taubes, one of the great writers, told it in his books. Good calorie, bad calories and how we get that.

Nina Teichler, one of the greatest authors, wrote The Big Fat Surprise. She told the story beautifully. wrote The Big Fat Surprise. She told the story beautifully. You can find it online. I feel even when we were doing the revised edition, we said, do we want to tell the story of how this country went wrong? I mean, it's very interesting if you're interested in the politics, but it doesn't tell people of today anything useful in terms of going forward about their diet. So we decided to down, we didn't even tell the story again because it's been told. And I'm not, if you don't know it and you're interested, you can find it. So we can look, I think we should use our time telling people we were wrong folks. And here's what we think we should be doing now. Okay. And if you

don't agree, I'm happy to tell that story. I love telling that story. But I think it's more relevant to talk about, just to say that we were wrong about it. Let's move on and figure out what we should be doing. I agree. Well, and so what I do think is important to note, because I find that a lot of people still don't understand this. Like if you go to the doctor, and let's say they're concerned about heart disease for you, they're going to tell you to go on a low fat diet, which drives me absolutely insane. So let's talk about that a about heart disease for you, they're going to tell you to go on a low-fat diet, which drives me absolutely insane. So let's talk about that a little bit and the difference maybe between good and bad fats and why we shouldn't fear fat

and why it really is sugar that's actually the concern for heart disease. It's what we were just saying with insulin resistance. And I also read that sugar – sorry, there's one more thing I want to say. I read that sugar is actually what is hardening the arteries. Is that true? Indirectly. I mean, not directly. It's not going, you know, I'm eating it from the dominoes and it's going in there and turning

into, you know, a high sugar, high glycemic diet. Absolutely. And it also increases your triglycerides, which are a bigger risk factor, in my opinion, than half of the stuff we're talking about. But anyway. Yeah. And what was the exact question again? I got, we got, your questions are so interesting and multifaceted that I forget which direction we're going.

You asked, what was the question again? Okay, so basically when someone goes to their doctor and they're concerned about heart disease, they put them on a low-fat diet. Let's talk about why that's so wrong. And this is the story I wanted to mention regarding that. So I'm constantly giving talks and webinars and, you know, in the olden days, live events, which I think we're going to do again someday soon. And I often talk about, you know, that information. And I look for pictures on Google images to proselytize to the low fat diet,

to show like what kinds of messages Americans are getting. I go, I put into Google images, things like low fat diet. Great. Low fat diet prevents heart disease. Try doing that sometime. It's very hard to find any of it. Most of it is how bad the low fat diet is and how the low fat diet is causing all of the things

it was supposed to be fixing. I found it very difficult to even find representative advertising or messaging that was pro low fat diet. Nonetheless, you tell me, and I I believe you that that's what mainstream America doctors are still telling people. It's almost mind boggling. You almost can't even find this crap on Google anymore. But okay, why do they tell us that they tell us that? Because this was the prevailing belief in the 1980s when what was called the Consensus Committee

appointed by, I think it was McGovern, I'm sorry, Nixon, got together to come up with dietary recommendations. And they were under the influence of some very strong personalities, one of whom absolutely believed in this low-fat stuff. He was wrong, but he believed it. And he had a very forceful personality. You can think a Donald Trump or a Harvey. I'm not, this is saying nothing good or bad about any, it just, that was a forceful personalities who managed to bend policy to their views. And that's what Ancel Key was. And despite a lot of opposition, people even then were saying John Yudkin, the professor of nutrition over at Queens England's College in the United Kingdom, one

of the most respected nutritionists in the world was saying, Ancel, you are wrong. It's sugar. Sugar is tracking with heart disease way better than cholesterol, way better than saturated fat. And he basically got into the 1960s version of a Twitter war, because Ancel Keys was very much like personalities we know here in American politics, and he did not like dissent. And he literally went after Yudkin in every way he could except calling his mother names. And he kind of got that point of view silenced. But that was the correct view. And yet he managed to pass these laws. I mean, guys, think about it. There are

people serving life sentences for marijuana. There are laws on the book that should have been rewritten a million times ago. There's so much more now. And these damn low-fat diet doctors are going by rule books that should have been rewritten 20 years ago. Yeah. Well, you know, I was originally on track to be a registered dietitian. I ended up getting out of that program because I couldn't take it anymore. Everything they were telling us is they were like, okay, you want to tell your clients to eat a low fat diet. You don't have to worry about organic. I started on the American dietetic Association I've been in a war with them since I began my career so yeah we don't even have to go down

that road but just so that people they renamed themselves to me that's like you know yeah I was gonna say it's like the class clan calling it the American Society for whatever they're the same damn organization I'm not calling them the cool, but they are a litigious, traditionalist, apologetic, and litigious organization that's basically there for job protection. And they have never had an original thought in their collective body. They go after everybody who questions anything that medical orthodoxy says. They are the handmaidens. They were set up in a hospital to be the handmaidens of doctors and to be yes men to everything that the most conservative forces in America say. I consider the American Dietetic Association

the single worst influence on American health that's ever happened. I mean, it's frightening. The things that, I mean, perfect example, if you go to any hospital and you see what these RDs are feeding their patients. Yes, very aware that my business partner is an RD. She just went back to school to get the RD. She was already a certified nutritionist and very, very competent. And she told me about that and she got very, very good training.

And what they teach them is horrifying. It's horrifying. Well, and I do want to say this for anyone that's listening that's an RDd that knows what we're talking about we're i'm not trying to vilify specific individuals no no some of my business partners and i do a great audience they're amazing yes this is just the yeah the overarching messaging that they get in school is what we're vilifying right now yes very different sometimes there are organizations i'm going to get killed for this but i'll say it there are organizations, I'm going to get killed for this, but I'll say it. There are gun owners and there's the NRA. They're not the same thing. Yeah. It's not the same thing. Organizations often have like a life of their own and you can be against what the organization does and still think that the people that they're, I mean, there are great dieticians out there,

but their organization sucks. Well, just going back a little bit to that low fat thing, the irony and for people listening that aren't aware of this, what happened when we took fat out of our food is that we replaced it with sugar. And it's why fast forward now to this day, we find so many products that are just full of sugar. And this is part of the problem that's driving this metabolic disorders that we're seeing right now, the metabolically unhealthy, unwell population that we have is that everything you pick up off the grocery store shelf now has sugar in it. Marinara sauce, your nut milks, your nut butters, everything, sauces, like salad dressing. It's insane. Yes. I agree. You're preaching to the choir. Yeah. That's why I always say when people

ask about nutrition advice, I said, you know, they, I usually have 10 seconds to tell an Uber driver, you know, the most important thing about nutrition or to tell an audience, you know, something that they're going to remember. And I always say the same thing, the best nutrition advice I ever got in my career. And the best I have ever given in my career is three words, eat real food. And if you're not sure if it's real food, it ain't. Yes. Yes. Oh, I love that. I mean, this is, that's why I named this podcast and, you know, my whole brand real foodology. It's the science of real food. We need to get back to eating real food. And I'll tell you something as somebody who has, you know, one of my earliest books was called Living Low Carb. And I reviewed in that first edition, 38 different low carb diets and rated them and spoke about the differences between them and which ones I thought were good

for which people. That book's now in its fourth edition. It's down to like just bulletproof and keto and carnivore, you know, just different classes of low-carb diets um and i have looked at all of these things and i've looked at them for years and i swear to you that it's all that the most important thing more important than any of those diets what percentage of protein what percentage of carbohydrates what percentage of fat what the macronutrient distribution is what this ratio is, all of them pale compared to the importance of simply eating real food. The rest is details. Once you're in the real food universe, you can argue about how much fat should be in the diet. You can argue about how much carbohydrates, you can argue about how much meat and how much meat should be absent. But once you're in that thing, all the rest, you're on home ground.

You are not going to harm your body. The rest of it is details. Yeah, I love that so much. It makes it a lot easier for people that are just starting out, too, to make it a little less confusing, I think. Absolutely. People are so confused by this. My whole career is about unconfusing people who have been made crazy by half of its BS

that's out there on the internet and in the books. Half of it's very good, but it's all contradictory. And it's hard to understand what are they saying in common? What are they saying different? Why do I make sense of this? What's the take home? That's all I do.

So I understand that. And I'm telling you just the way I will say the same thing about exercise. I mean, I started out as a personal trainer at Equinox. I had six certifications in personal training. I know every kind of personal training there is. When I tell you that having surveyed that for 30 years, the most return on investment for any exercise is walking every single day.

I'm telling you that from the point of view of somebody who's looked at all of it. And I think all these different forms of exercise are wonderful. But when people say, should I do Pilates? Should I do this? Should I play tennis? Should I do ice skating? If you just take a walk, how simple can that be? The biggest return on investment of anything. And the same thing with eating real

food. It trumps what diet or all the rest of it. It really does. So for everyone listening, what would be besides those your top tips for reducing your risk for heart disease? So obviously eating real food, walking. What else would you say? I have spent the last year and a half, the entire pandemic and a little before and since studying, immersing myself in and now teaching fasting, intermittent fasting. And I am pretty convinced that intermittent fasting is the it's it's the it's the golden calf. And I'll tell you why. As an educator, we've been teaching this diet stuff for how long? I mean, it's it's kind of exhausting, right? People get confused. There's

a million things you have to give up this food you have to. And then all of a sudden, there's this intervention, this intervention that's been around for thousands of years but just got popular enough to be on the cover of women's day and every other magazine that's in the supermarkets so everybody knows about it and really all you have to do to fast is you have to give up any food you just got to find this interval and if you get the interval right you, you're gonna get some benefits. And all of a sudden, there's a whole new audience for health. Yeah. And my thinking and I so I wrote a course on this. And if I can do a shameless plug, it's called meta fasting course. And it's me ta dash fasting.com. And you can see in here all about it, but I wrote this course

about it. And it's a two week course on fasting. And it talks about all of the issues in health besides fasting, like stress, like the food you eat when you're not fasting, like how much exercise do you get? My hope was that when people start doing these easy fasts and start feeling better and actually losing weight for the first time, they might go, I like this. I want more of this, what do I need to do Dr. Johnny, and now I got an audience to talk about real food. So I felt like the fasting thing not only does it does it get you out of ruts? Does it turbocharge your results on dozens of different

measures? Does it reverse insulin resistance? These are big deals, even bigger than weight loss. But not only that, it gets people interested in health again. And that to me is like a new opening. I don't have to talk about diets. I can just talk about how long every day you should not eat and the benefits. And then what happens? And my friend Dave Asprey made this quote quote and I love him for it. It's quite

well, I'll never steal it. I will just I will acquire it and I will acknowledge who said it, which is Dave. Dave said, what fasting does is it lets you take control of your life again. And when that I as a life coach go give me more. Now let's talk about some other areas you could take control of your life. Yeah other areas that you could let go of because fasting really is about letting go could you let go of hate could you do a hate fast for a couple weeks could you let go of complaining what else could you let go when i started doing fasting i went in my closet and gave away a third of my clothes it it sets you into a different mindset of like being able to do

with less than you thought you needed, which is very empowering. All of a sudden you have mastered the day's worth of cravings. Well, you know what? You might not need a Krispy Kreme. You feel pretty damn good. Just haven't done that. So there are a lot of things with fasting. I get very passionate about it because I really do think it's a portal into all of these areas of health that you and I are interested in interest in teaching people. You can sometimes hook them in with a good fast because the results are very quick. They're not hard to do. If you do it right, you understand what you're doing. You know, the hacks around it, which is what I teach in the course. It's easy to do a relatively easy to do. And you get a pretty good return. Now you mix that with real food and walking or exercise. That's how you get

to be my age, feeling the way I feel at almost 75. I agree. Wow. I mean, that's goals for real. I hope to be looking and feeling as good as you do at 75. Yeah. Well, and I think you're completely right. As I was hearing you talk about all of that, I was able to beat my sugar cravings, which were real bad. I was really, really addicted to sugar. And then when I discovered intermittent fasting. Yeah, exactly.

We all are. Let's be honest. We all are in America. Until you wake up and you realize just how much sugar you're eating on a daily basis. And then you're able to change that. That's super inspiring. So I want to jump back just a little bit because I don't think that we properly explain this. And I think it's really important for people to understand because whenever the conversation of cholesterol comes up, I find that it's just vilified. You know, like you just, you hear cholesterol and you immediately

think, oh, it's horrible. We need to lower it. Can we actually talk about what its role is in the body and why we don't need to be so quick to just get rid of cholesterol? Sure. It's actually in a class of molecule for those who are interested in this, the class of molecule is called a sterol, S-T-E-R-O-L, which is the ending letters of cholesterol, which is a waxy, fatty waxy kind of molecule. It is involved in thinking and memory. It is involved in the brain. It is involved in the immune system. It is the parent molecule for vitamin D. And here's the one that always gets everybody's attention. When I talk about all the other stuff and tell them why they're wrong about trying to

lower cholesterol so much, they say, yeah, but my doctor says, and then I tell them, yeah, it's also the parent molecule for your sex hormones. Interesting. Right, guys? That means your testosterone comes from cholesterol. And I don't happen to think it's an accident that half of American men are on Viagra and statins. Just saying.

So yes, you're in molecule for your sex hormones and you lay at the parent molecule for estrogen, testosterone, all of that. And when you take it out of the system, which is a clumsy, dumb way to try to, you know, get rid of something that is turning out to not even be the risk factor we thought it was. When you do that, there is collateral damage.

One of the pieces of collateral damage is they basically cut off the manufacture of cholesterol, but that's like cutting off a tree at the root. There are other branches to that tree besides cholesterol. One of them is called coenzyme Q10. It's real important for your heart. It's one of the most important nutrients. And the irony of giving a drug that stops your body from making this vitally important nutrient for your heart in order to protect your heart think about that you're taking a drug to prevent heart disease and then drug also cuts off the lifeline of the most important molecule your heart needs to function it does it does the word insane come up to anybody? Now, you should know this, lest you trust the drug companies too much.

Merck has a patent. Merck's a big manufacturer of drugs. They knew this. They knew that these statin drugs got rid of coenzyme Q10. So they wisely got a patent for a drug that combined a statin with CoQ10. Wouldn't that be nice, right? Do you know why we don't have that drug? Because Merck figured nobody knew about it and wouldn't have cared. I mean, that's infuriating. Enough of us know now.

That's why Sinatra recommends 200 milligrams of CoQ10 to every patient who's on a statin. We can't talk you out of being on your statins. For God's sake, go to the store and buy CoQ10 to every patient. We can't talk you out of being on your stance. For God's sake, go to the store and buy CoQ10 and take a double dose of it. Okay. So that's really good information. I mean, is it safe to say that everyone's cholesterol levels is kind of bio-individualized? Are we just harming ourselves by saying that there's an average cholesterol and we're trying to force everyone into this window when, when let's say like maybe mine is naturally higher because that's what my body needs. I've always believed that. Um, I, there are outliers all over the planet who are walking around the picture of health with three cholesterol levels of 300.

Yeah. Um, I, I mean, I don't, I don't practice clinically on individuals like that, where I would actually have to, and I would always consult with a cardiologist before dismissing anything like that. But in my personal, my practice, and just seeing people and talking to clients looking at blood tests, there's enormous variation in normal for different people. And it doesn't always mean the same thing and and besides let's just do a backup for a second take the kind of the the elevator i mean the helicopter view of risk in general all of these lab tests even the ones i think are important like a1c or um high sensitivity crp it's an inflammatory they're all risk factors

and we measure them let's put aside whether the cholesterol we're using the right test for cholesterol but they're all risk factors right i look at health like a bank account and you make deposits and you make withdrawals. So when you have a risk factor, it's a withdrawal. You spend an all-nighter, you deprive yourself of sleep, you made a withdrawal. Every time you take 5,000 IUs of vitamin D, you make a deposit. Now, all deposits aren't equal. 5,000 IUs of vitamin D is a great thing to take,

but it's not equivalent to a day of shooting cocaine and snorting meth. That's a big withdrawal. This is a small but modest deposit. Point is, your goal is to have money in the bank. Your goal is to have more deposits than withdrawals. So I like to encourage people not to get too bent out of shape over any given risk factor, which is simply one of a bunch of statistical numbers that are put into an equation to predict something that may or may not happen. Now, listen, I'm not saying experts don't know what you're talking about. They shouldn't, we should not listen to these predictors and these algorithms. They're very

important people, much smarter than us have worked on them for decades and crunch the numbers and they do mean something, but they are not your fate. Yeah. They are single numbers on a lab test that may or may not carry a lot of weight in this particular equation. So I would like to see people look at their lifestyle a little bit more holistically and not be focused on any one, you know, pixel in the photograph and go like a pixel when there's actually a step back and you see the picture. And the picture is you do a lot of good things for your health. You have relationships with other people. Those are very healing. Those of good things for your health. Your relationships with other people, those are very healing.

Those are way beyond lowering your cholesterol. Loving relationships, supportive relationships. You contribute to other people. You contribute to your neighborhood, to your next, to community boards, to shelters for animals, to delivering food to people when they're on COVID. You community to that is all, that all sets off neurotransmitters in your brain and sets off positive emotions and it sets off hormones that are healing and it sets off anti-inflammation pathways.

All of that counts for your health. All of those things, how much time you spend with your animals, how much time you spend outdoors, not only getting vitamin D, but being exposed to greenery, which is a whole field of psychotherapy because they have found that exposure to greenery is a major deposit into your bank account. So don't be too hard on yourself. If you've got a lab number that won't budge, look at it. If it needs to be moved, if it's a serious lab number, you want to do something about it. There's usually some lifestyle component that can affect it. There may be a drug necessary, but don't go nuts with this one measurement. Certainly not LDL. If you're going to pick one, for God's sake, don't pick LDL cholesterol.

Okay. Can we talk about that for a second? Because we hear a lot that HDL, oh, it's the healthy cholesterol and LDL is the bad one. In this way of thinking, is that true? No, it's not. It is. No, it's... There are aspects to that that have been true when we didn't know much about how cholesterol operated. We used to think LDL took... Those lipoproteins took cholesterol where it shouldn't be, but HDL, that was the hero that came and rescued it and took it back. It's not quite that simple. We now know there's HDL 2A and 2B. One is a little inflammatory. One's not. We know there's LDL A and LDL B and LDL A is harmless and B is not. So there's a, it's a lot more than good and bad and and um you know it's just you you ask that and and i know that that is what people's doctors are telling

them and all i'm saying is the people who are being told that please get on google and and look for reliable sources, not internet rumors and conspiracy. Look for stuff that's, it's not hard to bet good sources. If you want one, Healthline. Healthline is almost always very reliable. It's online, they give the studies. If you have, Examine is another good site.

Even Livestrong is 75% reliable. And look to see what people, look to see if this stuff your doctor is telling you about low-fat diets is holding up. If that is really what the pushing of the envelope in this field is saying. It's not what they're saying. What they're saying is we need more fat in our diet and less carbohydrates in our diet, not a low-fat diet. It hasn't worked. The research has not supported it. Some of the biggest studies of the last couple of decades,

the Mr. Fit, just Google it, MRFIT study. Thousands of people, millions of dollars spent to test whether or not the low-fat diet prevented heart disease, prevented deaths, got people healthier and had them lose weight. It doesn't. So it's very maddening because I understand that most people still think

that this is the way to go and that there are very respectable people who believe it's the way to go i don't and and you know i guess there's always going to be people who interpret the data one way and interpret the other and unfortunately it leaves some burden on the audience the poor audience who isn't even trained to figure out which of this makes sense and which is scientific bullshit. They have to kind of look to different messengers with different messages and see what makes sense to them. And if there's somebody, if I have, if you look at me and you listen to my argument, you go, well, that guy's, he's a nutcase, but he's saying something. Let me check, let me put in there cholesterol myth or LDL not really risk, but let me just put that in there

and see who is talking about it. Do I trust them? Do I trust their credentials? Are they making sense? And use that as a way of investigating for yourself. And you will quickly, I believe, find that, yes, the majority of people are stuck in an antiquated reality that no longer is supported by either science or experience. Yeah.

Wow. That's really great advice. So for people listening, what now? What do we do with this info? Is there an updated test that they can get to really get a snapshot okay the new cholesterol test you go to the they have lots of different names they are very popular now all the major labs in this country or if you've had a blood test it's either been a quest or lab core right yeah both of them have the new cholesterol test they call it different they call it the cardio iq they call it advanced lipid profile. They call it the particle test,

the NMR particle test. Everyone knows if you say the particle test, I want the one that tells me how many LDLs I have and what size and what shape they're in. They all have that test. And if your doctor doesn't order it or tells you they don't need it, he hasn't read any, he or she has not read a journal in the last 10 years. What that test look for exactly because you said something about this part of the over of ldl particles okay which is a very predictive number i want to know that number i don't give it i don't want to know ldl i want to know how many particles are in the water. Let me explain why. So cholesterol is the cargo. It travels in a boat. The boat is the lipoprotein.

The boat is what gets stuck in the arteries. The boat is what gets inflamed and oxidized. Cholesterol is the towel in the washroom of the yacht. Okay? If you are in charge of a marina, you want to prevent crashes. Do you give a shit what the cargo of the boat is? Or do you want to know how many boats are in the water? Because let me tell you something. The likelihood of an incident goes up when there are

more boats in the water. If you're a bouncer in a bar, you know that if there's five people in the whole bar, very little likelihood of a fight, but 5,000, somebody's going to step on somebody's foot and spill a drink and somebody's going to get in trouble. Crowds are harder to manage. The number of boats in the water is an important measurement. It is not given on your HDL LDL test. It is given on the new modern test.

Second piece of information. How big are those particles? If you look at them under a microscope, there are big fluffy particles that look like cotton balls. They don't really get caught in the arteries very much. They don't do very much damage. They're frigging cotton balls. Other LDL molecules are nasty little things that look like BB gun pellets that have been in fire. They're inflamed, they're atherogenic, they get into the arteries, they start a whole cascade of events that can lead to plaque. You want to know the size of your LDL particles. If they're all big, fluffy molecules, who cares how many there are, but if they're little BB guns, they're not so good. So the new test will tell you, and they'll even tell you the pattern of distribution. Is it pattern A,

which means predominantly cotton balls, or is it pattern B, predominantly nasty little BB gun pellets? Very important. Not only that, the pattern is a surrogate measure for insulin resistance. So now you don't even need an insulin resistant test because that one will tell you whether you're insulin resistant as well. That's an important cholesterol test to get. I am not disparaging that test. I'm disparaging people who are using the damn cell, the damn satellite phone when we have an iPhone in front of us. I mean, this is infuriating because this is the first time I've ever even heard of this test before.

And it makes me so upset. I think of you. Please Google. I always ask people, just write this down and Google it. Don't believe me. Write in particle tests. Why is the particle test superior? Why is the NMR particle test?

Why is the advanced lipopropane profile the way to go? Just Google it in any way you want to put the question to Google and you'll be reading for hours. Oh, I mean, I'm excited to dive into that. The HDL, LDL test in this day and age. It's just insane. Yeah, I mean, and this is important, life-saving information.

You know, as I hear you talking about this, I'm going to call my dad right when I get off this call with you, and I'm going to encourage him to get that test done. And you know what? The test is not expensive. I'd pay for it myself if I had a fight with the insurance about it.

You need to know this information. At least you need to know it before you go on a stand drug you may still have to go on one but at least you'll know it's not because of some hocus pocus cosmopolitan um you know not singling out councilman paulism would you get my idea what is astrology and what is science yep wow this has been this has been so. I'm so glad that I had you on this, on this podcast today. This is going to be, I just can't wait for people to hear this information. And can I mention my MetaFasting class again? I'm really grateful. Oh yeah, of course. I was going to ask you. Yeah. So it's MetaFasting.com M E T A above Meta dash fasting.com. And you can hear a five minute video of me talking about why it's great.

And I'd love to people to know about that. And of course my book, the great cholesterol myth. Great. Well, I was just going to ask, it is a myth. I was going to ask where people can find you. So those are the best ways to find you. Is there anywhere online, maybe Instagram? At Johnny Bowden, no H and Johnny, and I'm on Instagram and Twitter at Johnny Bowden. Amazing. Okay. I have one more question for you before we go. Cause I ask everyone this question for you personally, what are your health non-negotiables? No matter how busy you are throughout the day, what are things that you prioritize to take care of your own health to make sure that you are,

you know, on the right track every day? The first hour of the day. How are you doing? I believe in the stoic principle of own the morning. So I, the first hour of the day, this is aspirational. I don't always get to do it exactly like this. This is on an ideal day, which is most days, but I admit there are definitely days when this doesn't happen. So I get up very early, like six o'clock. I don't look at my phone for the first hour or so. I take my dog Cooper for a good half hour hike in the beautiful woods of Woodland where I live when it's deserted and the sun is just coming up. I come back, I meditate.

I listen to the Daily Stoic. I do a little bit of reading and sit in the gazebo and just sit in gratitude and peace and as i said i meditate a little read a little and that's how i spend the first hour of every day uh followed by usually an hour and a half on the tennis court and then i'm good to go for anything so i i find that an extremely important anchoring my routine my ritual uh, I take, you know, 52 vitamins a day, I drink athletic greens, I drink a high fat coffee, bulletproof version of coffee. And I get out in the sun every day, and I get out in greenery every day. And I try to structure my life

so that there's as much peace, balance, and gratitude in it as possible, because those things are not compatible with anxiety. They're not compatible with stress. And they're definitely not compatible with anger. And those things will eat us alive faster than any cholesterol test. Yeah. Wow. That's powerful.

Your morning sounds really nice. I might have to join you on some of that. I was going to say, come join me. That sounds great. Well, Johnny, thank you so much. This has been such an eye-opening. You are so welcome, Courtney. Thank you for having me. I didn't know about your podcast before, but it is going on my watch list. And I really appreciate your wonderful interviewer. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to get this message out. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much.

Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. If you liked this episode, please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know. This is a resident media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Chris McCone. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie, spelled with a J.

Love you guys so much. See you next week you I know I am.