VLDL: The REAL Cause of Heart Disease

For over 50 years, people in conventional healthcare have urged Americans to reduce their intake of saturated fat, eat more “healthy whole “grains,” and take statin cholesterol drugs to further reduce cholesterol. Has it worked? No, it absolutely has not worked. As I’ve discussed previously, both in my Defiant Health podcast as well as my DrDavisInfiniteHealth.com blog, and of course my books, conventional strategies have little, if any, impact on the incidence of heart disease. And, in some instances, conventional strategies increase risk, especially their dietary advice. 

Witness, for example, that more than 80 million Americans now take a statin cholesterol drug, yet the incidence of heart disease has not gone down and hospitals do a very brisk business in heart procedures while the pharmaceutical industry continues to profit by dispensing drugs that hardly achieve anything. 

The recent Fourier trial has brought the cholesterol paradigm to its knees by taking it to its extreme. In this very large clinical trial involving over 20,000 participants, every participant was on a statin drug but half were also given the injectable drug Repatha to further reduce LDL cholesterol. So half of participants were on both a statin drug and Repatha injections. Participants receiving statin + Repatha had LDL cholesterol drop from 92 mg/dl to 30 mg/dl, an extremely low value. If the “LDL cholesterol is bad” argument is valid, then reducing it to this extremely low value should yield a significant reduction in heart disease—and it did not. There was a barely measurable 1.5% reduction in cardiovascular events over 2 years and, while the numbers have been a topic of debate, there was a likely increase in overall death in people receiving Repatha—not to mention that the drug costs around $600 per month per person. And, of the 13,000 people on Repatha plus statin with LDL cholesterols of 30, 1300 of them died, had heart attack, stroke, or required a heart procedure over the 2 years—in short, reducing cholesterol, even to extremely low values, does not work. 

As I have often said, the real tragedy of focusing on cholesterol is that it takes everyone’s attentions away from the REAL causes of heart disease. Among them: VLDL, or very low-density lipoproteins. 

So, in this episode of Defiant Health, let’s talk about VLDL particles and why, if your interest is in minimizing or eradicating risk for heart disease that remains the number 1 killer of men and women in the U.S., you need to understand VLDL. 

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Books:

Super Gut: The 4-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight and Find Your Path Back to Health; revised & expanded ed