Easily verifiable facts: Heart disease is not caused by cholesterol or eating natural fats, but by inflammation, blood sugar issues, and excess blood clotting. Cholesterol is essential for health.
Prescribing cholesterol-lowering drugs for heart disease is irrational and causes great harm. Slicing through the mess that pharma-driven medicine has caused with straightforward, verifiable facts.
Contents
The Bottom Line: 7 Essential Facts
Plaque is Caused by Inflammation & Excess Blood Clotting
Root Causes of Heart Disease: Verifiable & Reversable
Cholesterol: Practical Knowledge
Cholesterol: Digging Deeper, Terminology, Medical Tests
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Context
For decades, Americans were told to avoid cholesterol-rich foods like eggs and butter, as doctors believed that dietary cholesterol was a direct cause of heart disease. The fear stemmed from the work of Dr. Ancel Keys, whose “Seven Countries Study” in the 1950s suggested a link between saturated fat consumption and heart disease. But, as Makary explains, Keys’ study was fundamentally flawed—he cherry-picked countries that supported his hypothesis and ignored others, such as France and Switzerland, where high-fat diets coincided with low rates of heart disease. Despite numerous follow-up studies, including the Minnesota Coronary Experiment and the Framingham Heart Study, failing to support Keys’ claims, the low-cholesterol message stuck. In 2015, the American Heart Association revised its guidelines, acknowledging that dietary cholesterol isn’t the culprit it was once believed to be. Despite this, many people avoid foods like eggs and full-fat dairy, while the real problems—sugar and processed carbohydrates—are often overlooked.
The Bottom Line: 7 Essential Facts
Atherosclerosis (also called clogged arteries or coronary heart disease) refers to the narrowing of blood vessels that transport blood and nutrients from the heart to the body. The narrowing of arteries reduces normal blood flow. [source]
Narrowing of arteries is due to plaque build-up. Plaque is the name given to a combination of substances found in the blood. Other names for plaque build-up include atheroma and atherosclerotic plaque. [source]
While cholesterol is one of the substances in plaque, it’s not the existence of cholesterol that causes plaque build-up, but rather inflammation and excess blood clotting. Sometimes the term oxidized LDL (or oxidized cholesterol) is used to describe the problematic plaque contents: “Oxidized cholesterol is created when LDL mixes with inflammatory compounds, harmful free radicals, and toxins in the circulation. These oxidative stress compounds actually turn the cholesterol ‘rancid,’ leading to increased inflammation, arterial plaque, and atherosclerosis.” [source and source and source]
Elevated cholesterol does not cause cardiovascular disease, and low cholesterol is a significant health risk. [source and source and source and source and source]
Thus, prescribing drugs to lower cholesterol for heart health is irrational and overlooks the actual cause. Nevertheless, establishment medicine (verifiably corrupted by industry) has doggedly promoted the reduction of cholesterol with statin drugs — supposedly to protect heart health, despite reams of evidence to the contrary. [source] Statin drugs damage health at foundational levels, which can lead to more than 300 health problems. [source and source and source and source] In a review of 26 randomized trials, statins did not lower all-cause death rates. [source]
The presence of elevated cholesterol is the body’s response to a problem — not the cause. [source and source and source]
The typical conditions underlying cardiovascular disease are: chronic inflammation, blood sugar issues (insulin-resistance), nervous system dysfunction, and excess blood clotting. The root causes of those conditions are, for example, eating highly processed foods and seed oils and exposure to high levels of toxins. Clear, verifiable details on the root causes of heart disease are here.
Corruption Has Been Required to Maintain Cholesterol Hypothesis & Use of Statins
To defend the cholesterol hypothesis, its supporters often misrepresented studies and ignored contradictory findings. For instance, the Framingham Heart Study found that each 1 mg/dL drop in total cholesterol (TC) per year was linked to an 11% increase in coronary and total mortality. Yet, a later report from the American Heart Association… falsely claimed that lowering TC by 1% reduces heart disease risk by 2%, misrepresenting the Framingham data. Similarly, studies favouring cholesterol-lowering treatments have selectively cited evidence, inflating weak findings while ignoring studies with negative results. In three major reviews supporting the hypothesis, only 2 out of 12 studies with contradictory findings were quoted accurately, favourable results were inflated, and unsupportive results were cited as if they were supportive. Additionally, statin trials often rely on misleading combined clinical endpoints—grouping minor issues like hospital admissions with major events like fatal heart attacks—while total mortality data shows no significant benefit (here and here). These distortions continue despite growing evidence that cholesterol may not be the key driver of heart disease. The worst part is that all the hype on statins offers false reassurance of risk reduction for CVD, when other risk factors, such as… metabolic syndrome… inflammation and lifestyle factors are not adequately addressed, or worse, ignored.
Plaque is Caused by Inflammation & Excess Blood Clotting
Key facts on plaque:
Plaque isn’t created because of excess cholesterol. — The theory that excess cholesterol is the cause of plaque formation has been overwhelmingly disproven. [source and source and source and source and source]
Plaque has these components. — Plaque is comprised of “oxidized cholesterol” (a result of inflammation, not cholesterol consumption), fibrin (a protein involved in blood clotting), cellular waste products, and calcium. [source and source and source]
Inflammation is the key factor in plaque build-up. — Plaque includes “oxidized LDL cholesterol” but this is not a result of excess dietary cholesterol; rather, it’s a result of inflammation mixing with cholesterol (due to the inflammatory immune response). [source and source and source]
