CHOLESTEROL, THE TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES!
PART II
We left off discussing Cholesterol, metabolic syndrome and inflammation, and posing the question "Just where does all of this inflammation come from?"
Well in virtually every case we can tract that back to your "LIFESTYLE". You see it is simple, your genes expect certain things of you.
First you need to "EAT RIGHT". That means lowering an "inflammation producing" grain-based carbohydrate/sugar diet. That's right you must decrease your intake of "grain-based carbs" and sugar!!!Unfortunately most Americans fail miserably here! And you need to "THINK RIGHT". This means that you must reduce your stress level. Those of you who haven't attended my "Stress is Killing You" seminar or watched the video of this program, need to take advantage of that opportunity. I will be presenting that program again in the spring next year, so watch for it. The brief answer to this problem is this, we are designed to respond to acute stress in one of two ways. We will either fight the offending stressor, or we run away form it. However, when the physiologic changes that occur when the "acute stress response" is present for a prolonged period, many of the good things that occur during the acute (short term) stress response become bad for us. You see the stressor, and our response to it was not designed to occur over a period of days, weeks, months, or even years. The response was meant to occur for a short period of time. Simply put it was intended to allow us the stamina, strength, and overall ability to run or fight.
One of the things that is good for us (for reasons that I will explain in the seminar) during the acute stress response period is that our overall cholesterol level will rise. Not only will the total level rise, but the ALC (LDL) cholesterol will go up, and the AHC (HDL) cholesterol level will go down. This is a fact that I need to share with one of my patient's other doctors who emphatically stated to this patient that; "Stress does not affect your cholesterol level." Unfortunately, perhaps this doctor believes that cholesterol levels magically rise, and that the only thing that you can do for this dilemma is to take a statin (cholesterol lowering) drug to mitigate the rise in cholesterol levels.
The other thing that will affect cholesterol levels is the "MOVE RIGHT" component of your "Health and Wellness Paradigm". That's right exercise is critical in reducing inflammation in your body and burning calories. This in turn will assist in lowering blood sugar levels and managing appropriate cholesterol levels.
There is one other component of the Health and Wellness Paradigm that you must consider in relationship to maintaining good cholesterol levels. That is the "SLEEP RIGHT" component. Yes, lack of sleep will cause weight gain, increased systemic inflammation, increased insulin resistance, and as a result of all this, increased cholesterol levels.
You see, this all seems very complicated, but in fact it is all really very simple. You need to EAT RIGHT, THINK RIGHT, MOVE RIGH, AND SLEEP RIGHT in order to maintain your Health, and more specific to our topic today, your cholesterol levels.
In my next installment I will discuss what the standard medical answer to this is, and why it doesn't work.