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Plasmalogens Predict Heart Disease Better Than Cholesterol You have to understand statistics. When you take large populations of people and follow them for mortality against cholesterol, you find that folks who live the longest have total cholesterol between 210 and 240. Let that soak in. Folks below 200 live shorter lives. Got that? Now, measure how long those folks with higher cholesterol live, despite being put on a statin. Yup, yup, yup. Despite the statin, they still live longer than their ...

Plant Nitrates from Vegetables, As Essential As Vitamins Life probably couldn't have started without lightning. You see, lightning creates the energy to break the nitrogen bonds of atmospheric nitrogen and make nitric oxide. That step introduces nitrogen into the food chain and starts the production of amino acids and DNA. Now, we have the ingredients for life. That nitrogen is precious. One of the key ingredients from lightning was NO, nitric oxide that is very reactive and can go in multiple d...

Ultra-processed Food is a Real Problem This has been a slippery question. What are ultra-processed foods and do they really make a problem? This column first reported the Brazilian studies that kicked off the discussion and identified ultra-processed food as an item of concern. There have been some studies refuting its risks. This week's report is on the first meta-analysis (statistical distillation of all studies) of studies looking at the topic. Of over 4,500 articles, only 25 were found to ha...

Very High Levels of HDL Lipids are a High Risk for Dementia You have always been told that HDL is your "good" cholesterol, the more the better. Well, the shine has come off the apple. HDL over 80 isn't so good. There appears to be a U-shaped curve with increasing benefit up to 80, and then a sharp increase over HDL of 80. Published in the LANCET this January is a great study using 16,703 participants over age 70 (from Australia) and 2411 participants over age 65 from Kaiser Health in California....

Have We Had Diabetes Backwards all These Years? This is huge. This is why you are fat and can't get "unfat". Let's explore. Our current standard teaching of diabetes is that you are diabetic because you are insulin-resistant. You are insulin-resistant because you are too fat. Avoid carbs like the plague and eat nothing but fat and protein and don't touch sugar, fruit, pasta, rice, or bread or you will spike your sugar. That's the standard line everyone is familiar with. The problem is, no one ge...

Galectin 3 Perpetuates and Amplifies Inflammation Ever heard of Galectin? It's a protein that turns on inflammation and is being found to play an outsized role in diabetes. It may be the key link to the level of inflammation that you feel in your joints. It was first discovered with respect to its ability to accentuate prostate cancer, if not all cancers some 20 years ago. It is an approved test for congestive heart failure. With more research the means by which it accentuates and perpetuates in...

Does Linoleic Acid, (Soybean Oil) Make You Sick? The number one seed oil in the world today that is added to our food is soybean oil. That's because it is so easy to grow millions of acres of soybeans, and we like fat. It is a necessary fat that we don't make ourselves. You could call it a vitamin. Our mitochondria need it to make the cardiolipin on which all the enzymes sit for the electron transport chain. Soybean oil is 20-54% linoleic acid, so that is one very rich source. Sunflower, corn, a...

Hormonal Effects of Omega 3 Fats Compared to Saturated FatOne of the "Great Dietary Transitions" of humans with the advent of civilization occurred in the 1950s, and no one noticed. All of our animals were moved from pastureland to feedlots. That fundamentally changed the fat content in their meat. Examination of feedlot-fed beef versus grass-raised deer shows a roughly 5-fold increase of omega-3 fats in the grass-raised animals. That suggests that we humans living in "advanced societies" where ...

Oxidized Phospholipids And Autoimmune Diseases The Holy Grail of medicine is "just what starts it all". We have yet to find that unified hypothesis of disease that would explain how the human body gets in trouble. Inflammation is a pretty broad excuse and doesn't quite get down to the details that matter. I have witnessed two remarkable events in the last month that might give insight. They both got my curiosity going. One was in a client with modestly abnormal oxidation of cholesterol and a hig...

Visceral Fat Shrinks Your Brain The gut-brain-immune triad is more complex and more important that any of us imagined. For starters, if you take 10,001 older Americans (average age 52) and do a whole body MRI scan with volumetric calculations of brain regions and body fat, notably visceral fat, you can show that quantity of visceral fat directly predicts loss of brain volume. Testing multiple areas of the brain the same findings were revealed with odds ratios of 5.1 and p values of < 0.001. T...