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The most misunderstood, but vitally important, molecule in your diet is cholesterol. This video will set the record straight: what is it, why should you care, how can you optimize your cholesterol intake, etc.
First off, if you were one of the millions of people duped into believing that a low cholesterol diet was healthy - I’m sorry. By lowering, or even eliminating dietary cholesterol, you were robbing your body of optimal physical, psychological, and cognitive functioning.
Cholesterol plays a role in countless processes in your body, from acting as a precursor to steroid and stress hormones, to insulating neurons, building cell membranes, producing bile, and metabolizing fat soluble vitamins.
Given its crucial importance, cholesterol is highly regulated by the liver via a feedback mechanism that ensures our body gets the amount it needs. This amount is typically around 1000-1400 mg/day, which means if you consume the US’ dietary recommended amount of 300 mg/day, you leave your body to pull upon other resources to synthesize the remaining 700-1100 mg it needs every day.
Eat more eggs.
And if you consume an excess of dietary cholesterol one day, your liver continues to regulate the production process by slowing endogenous production to offset the dietary increase.
So what’s the deal with everybody blaming cholesterol for causing atherosclerosis?
The fol lowing passage by Mark Sisson on his blog MarksDailyApple.com summarizes the situation perfectly - so perfectly that I cannot try to put it better myself:
“Heart disease took off in the early part of the twentieth century, and doctors frantically searched for the cause throughout the next several decades. Tests in the fifties initially showed an association between early deat4 by heart disease and fat deposits and lesions along artery walls. Because cholesterol was found to be present in those deposits (of course it would!) and because researchers had previously associated familial hypercholesterolaemia (hereditary high blood cholesterol) with heart disease, they concluded that cholesterol must be the culprit.
In fact, what happens is that in response to an inflammatory situation, the body uses cholesterol as a “band-aid” to temporarily cover any lesions in the arterial wall. In the event the inflammation is resolved, the band-aid goes away and repair takes place.
No harm, no foul. Unfortunately, in most cases, the inflammation proceeds, the cholesterol plaque is eventually acted on by macrophages and is oxidized to a point at which it takes up more space in the artery, slows arterial flow and eventually can break loose to form a clot.
And all this time the cholesterol was just trying to be the good guy. Blaming cholesterol for all this is like blaming a cut finger on all the band-aids you have lying around your house.”
So what’s the real cause of heart disease?
Inflammation that exacerbates LDL infiltration of the endothelium.
LDL cholesterol has been shown to rise in direct correlation with an increase in sugar-induced inflammation. It is then oxidized by the free-radicals in the inflammatory milieu. Trans fats can also play a role in this oxidation.
How do we combat free-radicals? A diet high in antioxidants.
This is grossly oversimplified, but for our purposes it’s what you need to know.
Cholesterol is not bad at all - in fact, it is VITAL for life. Is dietary cholesterol the same as endogenous cholesterol? No. But the former does affect the latter, and a diet rich in dietary cholesterol from sources such as meat and eggs is going to nourish your body and brain in a way that a low cholesterol, grain rich diet will not.
Cholesterol is potentially the most complicated topic that we’ll be discussing in this video series. With that in mind, I want to keep it as simple and to-the-point as possible for maximum actionable takeaway.
Cholesterol, among the many other things mentioned above, acts as a precursor to testosterone. In short, it is converted to progesterone, then testosterone. What you need to know is this: a diet rich in cholesterol and low in inflammatory agents will promote testosterone production, especially when combined with resistance training. The best type of resistance training to undertake is discussed in the “training” section of this video series.
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