137: Cholesterol Confusion: What Your Doctor Isn't Telling You

When faced with high LDL cholesterol, most doctors prescribe statins without investigating the root cause. Using integrative health approaches, we can identify what's truly driving cholesterol elevation and address the body's underlying imbalances.

• High cholesterol affects 94 million US adults, with 29 million having levels over 240 mg/dL
• Statins deplete essential nutrients like CoQ10 and vitamin K2, causing side effects without addressing root causes
• Cholesterol serves as the body's "patch kit" to repair damage, rising in response to inflammation
• Key drivers of high cholesterol include inflammation, liver dysfunction, insulin resistance, nutrient deficiencies, and oxidative stress
• Functional lab testing reveals underlying issues through hair mineral analysis, omega-3 index, and comprehensive hormone panels
• Natural rebalancing strategies include anti-inflammatory nutrition, targeted supplementation, and appropriate movement
• Extreme approaches like severe calorie restriction and excessive exercise can actually elevate cholesterol by stressing the body

If you'd like to explore the root causes of your cholesterol concerns, schedule a complimentary consultation at loveenergywellness.com and read our blog post "When Cholesterol Isn't the Problem" in our Learning Center.

Chapters

• 0:00 Personal Cholesterol Story
• 2:51 Truth About High LDL
• 4:44 Root Causes of Elevated Cholesterol
• 10:54 Functional Testing Beyond Basic Bloodwork
• 15:30 Natural Rebalancing Strategies
• 18:05 Final Thoughts and Next Steps

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello wellness seekers and boundary breakers, welcome back to Breaking Boundaries for Entrepreneurs. Today I am going to do something a little bit different. I'm going to get a little personal. Recently, a person close to me reached out a woman in her early 60s. She had just left her doctor's office perhaps it was her annual physical feeling overwhelmed and a little bit frightened, a little shaken, and her doctor told her she had high LDL cholesterol and that she may need to go on a statin. But something didn't sit right with her. She didn't feel heard. She wasn't in pain, she lives a relatively healthy, active lifestyle. She didn't want to go on medication. So she called me. And here's where it gets even more real. I was recently told the exact same thing by my doctor. At my own recent physical, my doctor informed me that my LDL is elevated and, I'll admit it, at first it rattled me. I said to myself I'm a health coach. How can this be? How can this happen? Because, even as a health professional, there's something about that moment when you're sitting in that exam room being handed a number that sounds scary and perhaps a prescription that feels like a life sentence.

Speaker 1: 1:21

So today's episode is dedicated to every person who's ever left the doctor's office feeling more confused than clear and wondering is this really my only option? Let's break it down. Hello, I'm Jeffrey Mort. If you're like most entrepreneurs, you're busy taking care of business, yet who's taking care of you? If you're ready to take your energy and performance to the next level in your life and your business, then this podcast is for you, because today you're going to start breaking boundaries of your mind, body and business with integrative health, and when you do that, your possibilities are limitless. I'm grateful you're here are limitless. I'm grateful you're here. Yes, as always, I am grateful for you joining me here on a Breaking Boundaries for Entrepreneurs podcast. And yeah, that little intro story. You know it rattled me for about five minutes when my doctor told me that I had high LDL cholesterol, and after that I said to myself all right, yay, something to work on, and I know exactly the steps I need to take to be able to get this level down. But you know, more importantly and we're going to talk about this a little bit in today's episode is what is causing that and the way that I found out and the way that you can find out too. We're going to talk about that. So stick around.

Speaker 1: 2:46

But first the truth about high LDL cholesterol. First a few facts. Over 94 million US adults age 20 or older have total cholesterol levels higher than 200. That's 200 milligrams per deciliter than 200. That's 200 milligrams per dec deciliter. Nearly 29 million have levels over 240 milligrams per deciliter.

Speaker 1: 3:14

And the most common recommendations? Yeah, you probably already know statins, but I will tell you. Well, statin drugs are often the go-to when LDL cholesterol is elevated, as opposed to HEL cholesterol. And LDL is not bad. We're going to talk about that in a minute. It's deemed as bad cholesterol, but it's not. If you didn't have it, you'd be dead.

Speaker 1: 3:37

But here's what we're very rarely told that statins can deplete things like coenzyme q10 it's a nutrient vital for energy and for brain health and that statin really rips that from the body. Statins may also reduce vitamin k2 levels, which affects calcium balance. So super, super important remember it's all about balance in the body, calcium balance in the arteries and in the bones. So that can lead to further things like calcification in the arteries or weak and brittle bones. Statins can also cause side effects like muscle pain and brain fog and fatigue.

Speaker 1: 4:26

And the most concerning of all is they don't address the root cause of why cholesterol is high in the first place. You're not. You don't have high cholesterol because you're deficient in a statin. So let me just leave that there for you. Now, what really drives high cholesterol? In functional medicine we always ask why is the body out of balance? Or I should say, in integrative health we always ask Functional medicine doesn't necessarily always ask that, but we do use functional medicine to discover the root causes. So here are some root causes of elevated LDL cholesterol. Number one inflammation from gut issues, from toxins from processed foods or hidden infections. I know, hands down, my mind immediately went to boy. It's been a while since I ran my inflammation lab post-inflammatory viral syndrome. So what is that? Post-inflammatory viral syndrome is the actual clinical term for the words, the terms that have been thrown around there, like long covid or myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome. That is nothing more than post-inflammatory viral syndrome and it's. What happens is the body becomes inflamed. And when the body's inflamed, then that can drive up LDL cholesterol. We're going to talk about why that is in just a minute. But some other root causes Liver dysfunction.

Speaker 1: 5:53

Since the liver regulates cholesterol, it's super important to optimize the liver and that's why we always I don't want to say start there. That's like step number three for liver optimization. The first step is functional lab testing. Second step is to make sure that we're having one to two regular bowel movements every single day, making sure that we're not holding on to toxicity, because you know, if we're not pooping, then things are getting backed up and stored and those things are toxic and we don't want those in the body. So liver dysfunction is, or liver optimization is the third step. That's don't want those in the body. So liver dysfunction is, or liver optimization is the third step. That's where we want to optimize the liver. So much happens in the liver, like it's a storage unit, it's a filter, it's uh, you know, it's a, it's a producer of certain enzymes and it's a regulator, and one of the things that it regulates is cholesterol.

Speaker 1: 6:45

Next is insulin resistance. Now, most people associate insulin resistance uh, that being driven by sugar. Yes, that's important to make sure that you know we're not overdoing it with processed sugars. However, stress leads to insulin resistance. Poor sleep leads to insulin, insulin. Poor sleep also leads to inflammation, like if you're getting inconsistent, or I should say consistently sleeping poorly, that's going to drive up inflammation. It's going to tank your liver function. It's going to drive up insulin resistance and so much Poor sleep is a stressor. Stress remember, stress is something, something troubling, resulting in essential system shutdown. So that something troubling could be external, as I always say, like kids, career and cash flow, or it could be internal, like liver dysfunction, inflammation, heavy metal toxicity, like what's. Let's go a level deeper. What's driving the inflammation? What's driving the poor sleep? We're going to keep going a layer deeper until we get to the bottom and the root cause. That's what we're looking for.

Speaker 1: 7:48

Next, for root causes nutrient deficiencies, things like fiber you know I'm not always talking about supplements Could be your macros. You could not be getting enough fiber, you could be not getting enough protein in your diet and that's considered a macronutrient. But then we can get into some of the micronutrients. Things like magnesium is super important and you know back to those statin drugs that can also deplete your magnesium. So you can start to see how this is a vicious cycle where doctor prescribes a statin, statin depletes magnesium, magnesium drives up cholesterol and the number never goes down. So and then they might be increasing the dosage of the statin, which would then further deplete the magnesium. So you can see how that keeps going around and around. I mentioned omega-3s. If we have a uh, an imbalance of omega-3 to omega-6s, what's that going to do? It's going to drive up inflammation and that's going to elevate the ldl cholesterol. And the body is not broken. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Speaker 1: 8:54

Next root cause could be oxidative stress. So we talked about stress before. Oxidative stress is more of the body. You know. You can equate it to rust. The body is actually rusting from the inside out. It's oxidizing. That's what happens with rust. What is rust? It's iron oxide. There's too much oxygen to the iron and it starts to oxidize or rust. So oxidative stress is akin to the body rusting from the inside out.

Speaker 1: 9:24

And what that looks like is free radicals, which are, you know, now we're getting into the electricity of the body. Free radicals are electrons missing. It's too many positively charged electrons, so we want to dissipate those. We want negative electrons and ions, so free radicals. I don't want to go too far into biology here. What happens with free radicals is they damage the body's cells and vessels. We don't want that. We don't want that.

Speaker 1: 9:54

But when that happens, then an inflammatory response initiates and in response to that inflammatory response, our cholesterol, our LDL cholesterol rises, and here's what most people don't realize. Cholesterol itself, as I said, is not the enemy, it's the body's patch kit. This is why the cholesterol raises. It rises when there's damage to repair and when that damage is systemic, when it's all over the place, it's just going to keep going up and up. The body is doing exactly what it was meant to do and it's not doing that because it's deficient in a statin. The body is just unable to repair itself, so those levels become balanced again. So what we do in integrative health is we balance the body. Dis-ease cannot exist in a healthy body. We get the body so healthy that dis-ease cannot exist. So how? You might be wondering how do we find the real answers In our private wellness practice, love Energy Wellness we don't guess.

Speaker 1: 10:54

We use those at-home precision functional lab tests that go beyond basic blood work, for example, minerals and metals tests done with a simple hair sample and it tells us about the amount of stress the body is under, how the body is responding to that stress. It's basically a metabolic blueprint for what's happening in the body over the last three months and it also gives us some key indicators of detoxification and, yes, even inflammation. We also use an omega-3 index. Now, this is a simple blood spot, so it's a finger prick, a couple of drops of blood on a card that goes to the lab, they analyze it and that reveals fatty acid balance, and when I say fatty acids, specifically omega-3 to omega-6. And most people are way above, like up at 24%. We want to really be around 3% to 5% in that index.

Speaker 1: 11:50

Next, thyroid and adrenals and insulin panels all affect lipid metabolism. When I say lipid metabolism, that is your HDL, your LDL, your total cholesterol, lipid metabolism, you think fat metabolism. And so we use something called the stress, mood and metabolism test, a super unique lab test like Honestly. This lab was custom created for integrative health practitioners through Equal Life, our global partner in functional medicine, and this is a simple saliva test. So just four tubes and you spit some saliva into those tubes upon waking, before lunch, before dinner, before bed, and also a first morning finger prick to be able to get levels for insulin, hemoglobin a1c that's our cardiometabolic panel. And then, of course, thyroid thyroid hormones we're looking at not just tsh, which is not a thyroid hormone, by the way, that's a thyroid stimulating hormone created by the pituitary gland, initiated by the hypothalamus. However, we're looking at tpo antibodies. We're looking at free t4 and free t3, which is uh, which are two super important markers that your pcp is probably not looking at on blood work unless you specifically request and most often cases have to beg for them to run those super important markers, and they all affect lipid metabolism.

Speaker 1: 13:24

Next is the advanced lipid particle testing not just how much cholesterol you have, but how harmful it is. And then how do we rebalance? Naturally, right. So now we have the, we have the information we need on root causes. But what do we do to rebalance? Once we understand what's driving your numbers, we use a clinically proven holistic protocol to rebalance your body. When I say a holistic protocol, you know that may sound like it's one size fits all, but it's not.

Speaker 1: 13:55

These lab tests make it bio-individualized. For, you know, maybe you don't need more omega-3s in your day. Maybe you're eating, you know, salmon and sardines five to six times a week, which most people are not. You know, and maybe it's thyroid that's off. And it's not because the thyroid's broken, it's because the thyroid is responding to something either nutrient deficiency or toxicity. You know, maybe chlorine levels are elevated that can affect thyroid. Maybe there's too much fluoride. Well, any amount of fluoride is too much fluoride in the body. You can go back and listen to our episode on fluoride if you wish to learn more about that topic.

Speaker 1: 14:34

But all of these things can suppress thyroid production or thyroid conversion, as well as liver function can certainly have an impact. So I talked about free t3 and free t4. Free t3 is the usable form that's converted from free t4 and that conversion is done mostly in the liver, and if the liver is not optimized and it can't make that conversion, we're going to have some thyroid issues and our metabolism is going to be tanked. And now we're going to have some issues that the body is responding to by initiating elevated LDL cholesterol, if that makes sense. So you know, some of these protocols can be anti-inflammatory nutrition with high fiber and high phytonutrient rich foods. It can also be targeted supplementation like omega-3s and antioxidants, and liver supported supportive herbs, which helps with that detoxification process, which leads me to detoxification support can be another part of the protocol to clear toxins that disrupt hormones and liver function.

Speaker 1: 15:39

And then, of course, gentle movement. Um, you know, sometimes crushing it at the gym is not the answer and that's going to stress the body and cause ldl elevation. So, yeah, you know, boot camps and HIIT trainings every single day and, and you know, 60 minute, 90 minute workouts, um, fasted in the morning, or you know, when you're exhausted at that's a stressor on the body. So too much exercise can actually elevate LDL cholesterol, you know. So it's. You've got to go through that graduated exercise program Like where is your body measuring in all of these metrics and are we doing too much exercise? Are we not doing any exercise?

Speaker 1: 16:17

So, you know, starting with that gentle movement, improving sleep, regulating the nervous system super important uh factors in regulating cholesterol, naturally and above all, a plan that is personalized and the key is to make it sustainable. Right, eating less and exercising more is not a sustainable plan for weight loss because you can only dial back your diet. And what are you gonna eat? 500 or 1,000 calories a day, like that's not sustainable. Or are you gonna just keep turning up the exercise? That's not sustainable. So eating less is a stressor on the body, exercising more is a stressor on the body and it's balancing those hermetic stressors that's the key to health and longevity, because if you're doing those in extremes, if you're not eating enough calories, you're not getting your macros, you're, uh, micronutrient deficient, you're over exercising. That's going to actually that's counterintuitive to weight loss and that's actually going to stress the body, put it in fight or flight mode, make it retain body fat and you're you're actually going to put on more pounds rather than lose pounds. Uh, you know.

Speaker 1: 17:26

So, that being said, nature gives us what we need. We just need to listen. We need to test and then rebalance. You know, go through the five hours. We want to reveal what the underlying root causes are. We want to remove the toxicities. We want to rebalance. You know, go through the five hours. We want to reveal what the underlying root causes are. We want to remove the toxicities. We want to rebalance the deficiencies. Then we want to retain those results. And I think I'm missing a oh yeah, we want to rebalance. We want to retain those results for our five-hour process. And there's a podcast on. If you go to the search box in the podcast page, you can just type in five hours and it'll come up with that entire podcast for you.

Speaker 1: 18:03

So, final thoughts here you're not broken. If you've ever been told that you need to go on meds and that didn't feel right to you, you're not alone. Now, don't get me wrong. There's no shame in taking medication when it's truly needed. Sometimes there's a time and place for those medications. So I'm not against having a primary care physician. I'm not against conventional medicine. I am not against taking medications when they are truly needed.

Speaker 1: 18:29

But don't settle for just managing your numbers when you could heal the root cause and feel better for the long haul. Your body isn't broken. It's simply speaking to you and you deserve a team that listens. So if you want to learn more, if this resonated, if this really hit home for you, let's have that conversation. I offer root cause consults that are completely complimentary no cost to you to be able to explore what labs might be right for you and get a plan. We're going to listen to your challenges, we're going to listen to your concerns, we're going to listen to your goals and we're going to lead you in the right direction.

Speaker 1: 19:05

So you can find that link in the show notes. You can find it at our private wellness practice, loveenergywellnesscom. Click on that consultation. And while you're over there, go to the Learn page our Learning Center and click on that consultation. And while you're over there, go to the Learn page our Learning Center and click on the when Cholesterol Isn't the Problem. Blog post. You can read it there. I'll try to link it up in the show notes as well. Until next time, keep breaking those boundaries in your business and in your health. I appreciate you for listening. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.