For as long as I can remember, cholesterol was the supervillain when it came to heart disease. Consumption of saturated fat increases cholesterol levels which increases your risk for heart disease. Right? Maybe not.
Reducing cholesterol levels turns out to have very little to do with heart disease risk. Over 70% of people hospitalized for heart disease have normal cholesterol levels and half of people with elevated cholesterol have normal, healthy hearts. Heart disease, it turns out, has very little to do with your total cholesterol. It does, however, have a great deal to do with insulin and insulin resistance, a condition affecting nearly 90% of American to some degree.
Many people (like me for instance) are surprised to learn that insulin resistance turns out to be the single most important predictor of heart disease. And you don't need to be obese, or even overweight, to be insulin resistant. The low fat diets many people adopt to reduce cholesterol can drive up insulin levels if they include a lot of processed foods.
Insulin resistance also increases your risk for high blood pressure, elevated triglycerides and low HDL (good) cholesterol. Each of these is a risk for heart disease in its own right. Chronically high stress levels can also aggravate the problem by stimulating the release of the stress hormone cortisol.
The good news is that as many as 40% of heart attacks could be prevented by reversing insulin resistance. Not to mention the potential for reducing the incidence of Type-2 diabetes. How? I'll talk about that in my next blog post.
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