Foods That Lower Cholesterol Naturally | Dr. Neal Barnard Live Q&A

welcome to the exam room live brought to you by the physicians committee bringing you the stone cold facts about your health on this 3 16 day hi i'm the weight loss champion chuck carroll thank you so very much for helping to make the world a healthier place as we help to raise your health iqs today we're going to be talking about cholesterol did you know that nearly 100 million adults in the us are estimated to have cholesterol levels that are too high and that is not a number that you want to throw around because having elevated cholesterol means that you're at an elevated risk for a heart attack and a stroke which are two of the leading causes of death in this country and the numbers worldwide outside the us borders not that much better either the world health organization estimating that 4 out of 10 individuals have cholesterol that is too high and now the standard course of treatment for high cholesterol of course is medication but what if there was perhaps an even more effective way than having to make a trip to the pharmacy maybe a natural way one that could start with the foods that you eat and my guest today says yeah there is a natural way and yeah it is effective dr neil barnard is here for another episode of the exam room live my friend good to see you good to see you chuck all right now if you have a question about cholesterol go ahead and post that in the comment or in the chat we're going to get to as many as we possibly can here on the show today and because it is the doctor's mail bag that we're going to be opening up there's questions about a little bit of everything in there as well so dr barnard we're going to be talking about coconut milk and high protein low carb diets i know we have a question about that already as well as diet soda and of course plenty about cholesterol and then some so go ahead get your questions in there or send them to me on twitter or instagram chuck carol wlc before we open up the doctor's mailbag dr broner let's do a little cholesterol 101 and i think that we should first talk about what cholesterol actually is and why we even need it yeah well cholesterol is something that's made in your body especially your liver but all your cells can make it and they're making it for a reason um they're they're using they're using it to go into your cell membranes where it keeps your cell membranes flexible it's used as a raw material for making hormones vitamin d is made from it testosterone is made from it estrogen is made from it it's sort of this all-purpose tool used for lots of things the problem is that if there's too much of it your body reacts to that too if there's too much of it it ends up getting into the artery walls and it ends up leading to plaque development and a plaque bursts and that closes off your blood circulation leads to a heart attack and the the problem is not small the problem is huge as you were saying in the introduction uh this is a worldwide epidemic really where we have heart disease as a number one killer or number two killer in just about every country on the globe and so when we're talking about so many people who have high cholesterol what exactly is the threshold for high cholesterol now what number is that okay if you go to a typical doctor's office they'll say 200. 200 milligrams per deciliter is the limit you want to be lower than that however i would suggest you aim for a lot lower than that and the reason i say that late 1940s framingham massachusetts researchers started tracking people's diets cholesterol levels blood pressure lots of factors in their lives and they looked at who had heart attacks and who didn't and the number 200 was pretty much irrelevant uh the number that really mattered was the number 150 when people were below 150 heart disease was really rare but then if you went from 150 to about 170 you could see the numbers really going up 170 to 190 they're going up again 190 to 200 they were going up again and 200 was just a spot on the on this increasing curve so why do people use the word to the number 200 it's a round number it's the number of people yeah i'm not kidding and it's a number that people can get to so if the average cholesterol in america is between 200 to 10 you can get to 200 feel good about yourself but are you still going to have a heart attack very likely yeah so we want to get it down and and we and we can why do people say 200 because it's a nice round number okay asked and answered i was not expecting that one whatsoever uh let's go ahead and open up the doctor's mailbag the first question comes to us from olivia it is the topic of the day what is the best way to lower cholesterol naturally okay uh the first thing to do is instead of focusing just on medicines or on some magical thing that's going to bring it down look at what's bringing it up and get away from that what brings it up number one cholesterol itself if your day starts with two eggs you're eating cholesterol in fact if you're eating any animal product you're eating cholesterol stop doing that it does yes it does add to your own uh the egg industry has tried to dispute that unsuccessfully in the same way as if you eat sugar will it add to your blood sugar yes if you eat cholesterol will it add to your blood cholesterol yes it does about half of it adds to your own but even worse than that is certain foods that increase cholesterol production in your body the technical word is saturated fat the informal word is cheese or cheese meat eggs to a degree as well and certain there are certain plant fats not very many but a few of them that have a substantial amount of saturated fat that's going to raise your cholesterol too so if you want to get your cholesterol down avoid animal products completely keep oils really low and if you don't do anything else for most people you're going to start to see your cholesterol come down and for 90 of people your doctor is not going to even mention the idea about medication because your cholesterol level will be in in a healthy range perfect segue to raymond's question we live in a what have you done for me lately world and so how quickly he's wondering can cholesterol improve if somebody adopts a vegan diet uh in research studies we usually wait about two or three months before we want to see the effect because that's where the effect has really blossomed but the truth is your cholesterol starts coming down within the first week so let's say uh on a given day a person decides i'm going to try a completely plant-based diet today not a shred of anything animal in it so you're not eating eggs so all that big load of cholesterol that's in an egg gone you're not eating the animal fat that's driving your cholesterol it's all gone your cholesterol starts dropping on day one and if you're in a hurry and you went back to the doctor two weeks three weeks from now just in that short interval your cholesterol would be substantially lower but there's no reason to hurry it's a chronic issue so don't i would not bother getting tested for about two to three months out you've mentioned eggs now a couple of times so let's take a question from lee who is wondering whether or not they raise cholesterol she's confused like a lot of people she says that she knows that there's cholesterol in them but she's also seen that data that you were talking about from the egg industry that says no they don't raise cholesterol this was a huge thing and it was the 2015 dietary guidelines for americans this is the government's guidelines for what you should eat in 2015 they were being reformulated and everybody knew it including the egg industry and they made a plan to try to make eggs not look so bad the reason they were concerned is eggs are really the biggest source of cholesterol in the diet it's a little cholesterol bomb that's because when a chicken lays an egg that egg is not calling out for room service that egg has to have everything inside the shell to make a chicken so that when the chick pops out with feathers and a beak and eggs and legs and eyes and a liver and a heart and all that stuff everything that goes into making that chick had to be in that egg so there is a boatload of cholesterol there's fat there's protein all this stuff um and so when you eat it yes your cholesterol level goes up but anyway back to the dietary guidelines what happened was the egg industry started doing studies to try to suggest that that cholesterol levels wouldn't really rise so much when people eat eggs and so they would do studies say comparing eating an egg to eating sausage and they would say well gee it's really not much different um so i mean you can see the problem with that they both raised cholesterol or they would do other things to try to make cholesterol look good bottom line even the egg industry couldn't hide the facts eggs do raise cholesterol if there's anything you want to say for them is that there are other things that are even worse and those are foods that have a huge amount of saturated fat that dries cholesterol but no i would avoid eggs entirely and avoid the other animal products too so now we know that getting meat out of your diet getting eggs out of your diet those animal foods out of your diet is effective for lowering cholesterol but how effective is it compared to medication that's what sam is wondering very effective now if you take the skin off your chicken and eat more chicken instead of beef and you have more fish and that kind of thing and you switch from two eggs a day to one egg a day the effect is minimal it doesn't work very well and so that's a big reason why doctors have gotten discouraged and they've started been they started writing lipitor prescriptions as if it's candy um because they thought diet wasn't very effective let's not do that let's instead eliminate all the dietary cholesterol let's eliminate all the animal fat and when that happens the numbers look like this back in 1990 dean ornish who has been a great friend to exam room he brought in people who already had severe heart disease did exactly the diet kind of changes that the diet changes i'm talking about and the ldl cholesterol bad ldl dropped not five percent or seven percent or 12 it dropped 37 so that's in statin territory uh bottom line it's it's very very effective it varies a lot from person to person and your cholesterol bounces around from week to week but it's um if you do it right it can be very much like medication well let's take a question now from spike that's a good name because you know spike is is a guy that probably has eaten a steak or two in their day and now spike's a little veg curious so spike's making progress but what spike is wondering dr barnard is whether there are any vegan foods that contain cholesterol there are tiny tiny traces of cholesterol you will see here and there in various plants you take a tobacco leaf for example and it's got nicotine whatever but you'll find some tiny traces of cholesterol but not to any substantial degree not to any significant degree not enough to drive that nutrition facts label up above zero so the amounts are trivial um so so the the practical answer is no plants don't have cholesterol but what they do have in some cases is they do have bad fat not many um beans and vegetables and fruits and grains really don't have much saturated fat at all but there are a couple of bad actors in there uh coconut oil is case in point um that's unfortunately getting into more and more foods but it has not cholesterol it's got a lot of saturated fat that will drive your cholesterol let's get back to the what have you done for me lately category take a question from mickey wondering are there any foods that lower cholesterol faster than others she's wondering specifically whether high fiber foods would do the trick yes uh exactly and bullseye you're right um david jenkins a great researcher at the university of toronto and a person who has consulted with us on our work because he's just been a leader in the world of nutrition for decades he devised a diet called the portfolio diet and the idea was let's say i start with a plant-based diet but i add a portfolio of additional foods to it and see if i can augment that cholesterol lowering and the answer is you sure can and number one high fiber foods what we're talking about beans of course fiber is roughage uh but also barley and and oats you know you pick up a box of oats and they'll put a um an authorized nutrition health claim on there that the government lets them use saying that it will lower cholesterol level uh cholesterol levels not huge but a few percentage points so let's add to it some other things soy protein for some reason lowers cholesterol beyond just the fact that soy doesn't have cholesterol and doesn't have animal fat there's something about soy that will reduce cholesterol a little bit too that's right next next yep next up almonds um explain it but we think it's probably the type of fat that's in almonds seems to have a cholesterol-lowering effect and fourth on the list after fiber soy almonds the next one is certain kind of magical margarines out there now most margarines are just replacing butter and they're not really adding anything helpful but there are some brands like benecol you'll see these brands they have certain sterols or stanols in them that have an active cholesterol lowering effect david jenkins put them all together brought in human volunteers and said try this and he could get about a 30 40 cholesterol lowering in four weeks it was very fast um so you can add those to your diet that said if you're just avoiding the animal products and the bad oils you're going to get a pretty good effect just from that alone i'm not going to be over with a feather you can lower your cholesterol by eating a certain type of margarine that i again file that under was not expecting to hear that on this show that that is just amazing always man that's what i love about the show dr barnard is every single time we learn something new it's so great that's why i love this this show so much yeah well let me let me let me add this onto it then chuck um yeah there are two brands that you'll see a lot one has been a call one is take control i'm not suggesting that you need either one but they both do have their margarine you put them on your baked potato but they do have a specific cholesterol lowering effect uh let's take a question here from brittany and i think that this probably comes from a house where britney lives and maybe her significant other really has their heels dug in brittany's going vegan she's feeling good eating plant-based but her partner heals duggan wants to continue to to eat that diet that they've been eating so maybe brittany is just looking to do the best that she can here and she's wondering which meat has the most cholesterol so maybe that's something that she'll stop serving i hate to break it to you the cholesterol is different from the fat the cholesterol as i mentioned is actually in the cell membranes of the muscle cells so if you have um chicken beef and you take the skin off the chicken in the lean portion of the chicken or the lean portion of the meat the beef that's where the cholesterol is hiding now getting away from the fat is helpful because the fat drives your cholesterol level up but they really all do have it so if your question is which kind of burger is going to lower my cholesterol the most is it a beef burger a chicken burger or a turkey burger the answer is the bean burger yeah that's the one that's that's the one that's going to bring down your cholesterol and the ketchup and pickle will not hurt you all right now this is an important question from wendy one that a lot of people i'm sure are wondering as well does eating a salad with the steak offset the cholesterol from the state only if you ate so much salad that you couldn't eat the steak then it would yes okay okay so there's not really much that you could do one does not wash no and having a salad with a cigar doesn't you know reduce your risk of you know the problems with this no i'm sorry to break your heart no it doesn't help important information thank you um let's take a question from brandy and there is a certain segment of the population who i think is in brandy's position she's wondering do you have advice for people who still have high cholesterol despite the fact that they're eating a plant-based diet oh great great great question um when a person gets away from animal products you're avoiding virtually all the cholesterol that's good you're also avoiding virtually all the saturated fat but let's say your cholesterol didn't budge could there be something left there in the diet that could be a problem and the big issues that that can remain are coconut oil and palm oil the reason i mentioned them is in the past what five years or so they have been added to more and more things you'll get a jar of peanut butter which you would think would have peanuts in it maybe some peanut oil but they're adding palm oil to lots of them to give it a smoother more buttery mouth feel and palm oil is high in saturated fat and it will raise your cholesterol coconut oil even more so and coconut oil you will see it in some things like the impossible burger or um a number of other products like that where they where it's added to make it taste like animal fat uh but it has kind of the affected animal that does so avoid the coconut oil avoid the palm oil that will bring it down avoid fatty foods in general for extra credit uh the saturated fat content of say beef fat fifty percent of it is saturated i switched to chicken it's 30 saturated go to olive oil it's only 14 saturated that's good but if i go to a non-stick pan and i don't use oil at all down to zero so what am i saying avoid animal products avoid coconut oil and palm oil and avoid oils in general and the vast majority of people are going to knock their cholesterols down if you did all this and it didn't work the problem is genetic and that's the time to talk to your doctor about whether or not you should start a statin and how how many people fall into that particular category where it's just genetics and i know that we can do a lot to improve our odds of being healthier but in certain situations it's just like eh it's still kind of bad luck so what percentage would you estimate of the population struggles with high cholesterol no matter what yeah maybe one in ten something like that and there we honestly don't know the answer the answer is still to follow a healthy vegan diet but the thing that we don't know is is it going to help you to add a statin and drive your cholesterol down even more most doctors would say absolutely go for the stat and get that low cholesterol but as statins risks have become more apparent they cause weight gain and increased risk of diabetes and in rare cases even dementia i am emphasized rare because they also have benefits but there was a really neat observation in dean ornish's study that i mentioned earlier everyone's going on a plant-based diet and they're exercising and having a healthy lifestyle there was one person in that study who could not get his cholesterol down it was really high no matter what he did and it was pretty clearly a genetic driver but even he had reversal of his heart disease in other words he had an angiogram his arteries were opening them up opening up just like everybody else and so that started people thinking well maybe the issue is sort of the cholesterol and animal products that you're eating to a degree independent of what they do to your blood test we don't really know the answer to that but most doctors would say if you've got a high cholesterol and you just can't get it down no matter what you're doing you might really want to consider medication ah that's that's fascinating i didn't realize that about his research that's that's a really really important nugget that you just put out there um brass tacks now from lucy uh she wants to know what is the bigger factor bar none not eating meat or the cholesterol lowering properties found in plants you mean when you switch from a meaty diet to a plant-based diet are you doing better because you're not eating the meat or is because there's something magical on the plant it's really the not eating the animal products and by the way i didn't mean to just say meat because the biggest source of the bad fat the cholesterol driving fat saturated fat is the technical term the biggest source is not meat the biggest source is cheese and other dairy products meat is number two but avoiding those that's really the main thing it's not the magical properties of the plants and last question before we open up the floor to other forms of questions here touch on a few other things is every time that we talk about cholesterol on the show i think back to a story maybe you told or i heard it somewhere about somebody who had high cholesterol adopted a plant-based diet the numbers improved just so dramatically he goes to the doctor the patient does and he's like doc you know like this is a great improvement but the doc says well you need to keep eating meat so you can keep taking your medication so i mean what what do you say to something like that and how does a person really make sure that they're working with their doctor in the right way as they're switching over to this type of eating yeah it's a tragic thing that sometimes doctors give advice that isn't really so helpful um i'm happy to say that that's happening less and less and less and the reason i say that is we've been doing clinical trials now since the 1990s and when we got started at that time there were a lot of doctors who were really glad that their patients with weight problems cholesterol problems diabetes we're trying a vegan diet at that point already a lot of doctors knew it was a good idea um but now virtually every single doctor knows it's a good idea and and these horror stories that you hear of a doctor thinking you need meat in your diet luckily those are pretty rare but i do have to say there there is one myth that has not yet led left the medical community and that is you can have a bad cholesterol but if your good cholesterol your hdl is high that'll compensate they're going to be safe and unfortunately doctors haven't really gotten that out of their heads there was evidence years ago that people with high hdl levels had less risk of heart disease and so everyone thought well as long as i keep that high i don't care what my bad cholesterol my ldl cholesterol is mistake the research has come in and it has shown that let's say you you boost your hdl there are medications that boost hdl it turns out that it doesn't actually reduce your heart disease risk at all so doctors have had to go back to basics they get your cholesterol test they look at the total number but what they zero in on is your ldl cholesterol level i want that below 100 and i honestly do not care if your hdl level is super high if i can if that ldl number is not low i want to take action and you should too all right let's open up that doctor's mailbag now and then see if we can't pivot and get something else we'll start with gail who's going to take us from cholesterol to kidneys she's wondering what foods help with kidneys and is it possible to reverse poor kidney health oh what a great question um your kidneys are your filters you need them uh you can't live without them if the kidneys totally fail we're looking at transplants or dialysis um so if you have had some attacks to your kidneys either from diabetes high blood pressure or infections or other causes we want to preserve the remaining kidney function that we have and you can so if if the assault has come from diabetes or high blood pressure this is a big case for a healthy diet getting the animal products out again is just absolutely essential that's the real real basics for improving diabetes and for improving blood pressure there has been a lot of um debate among scientists about animal proteins role in uh kidney disease and most of the evidence suggests that we really want to get the animal protein out of our diet because it can be hard on the kidneys too stay tuned on that but it looks like it's helpful for preserving the kidney function as well so it's really important let's take a question from lindsay wondering about diet soda she wants to know is it really bad for you she says she still craves it after three years of going without it you gotta ask yourself what the heck is in that you are not you are not alone um people can get hooked on this they really can um in favor of artificially flavored sodas it's not sugar they really are calorie free or close to it depending on on how it's made um and so you're removing a big chunk of calories i mean you have one big 20 ounce soda it could be 250 calories you go to a diet soda that's gone that's good problem is that the health benefits haven't really materialized you don't see people losing weight you don't see it reducing diabetes risk when people switch to diet sodas and some people have suggested that that's because the diet soda maintains a desire for sugary tastes and so it drives you you have that diet soda at 10 o'clock in the morning you still want sugar at two o'clock in the afternoon and five o'clock and eight o'clock at nine o'clock and so that um in fact when we've looked at the risk of developing diabetes it's driven as much by diet soda as it is by regular soda if it's even driven at all by regular soda so my bottom line is i don't think they're poison i don't think it's the worst thing in the world um but there is some benefit to getting away from it because it maintains that taste for sweet stuff you mentioned earlier in the show about cooking without oil trying to move to that area in the kitchen and so if you're doing that you need the proper kind of cookware so anna is wondering what are the best and safest options for that uh you can go in a couple different ways plain old stainless steel is fine and there are some brands of it that are so well made you really don't need oil with them at all um just tremendous uh products if you're getting going to uh a non-stick pan you're probably worried that this is gonna be one of those pans from the 1970s where you're frying up something in little bits of the teflon are chipping off into your food and you're wondering are you inhaling fumes as they're being made um technology has really advanced and the non-stick pans that are produced nowadays from what i have seen are completely safe a couple of caveats don't cook with them at burning hot temperatures keep it low to medium and if you treat them well they'll treat you well too take a question from tina about diabetes she says that she's been advised to eat a high protein low carb diet because of a family history with diabetes she's wondering whether that's sage advice or should she be looking at something else no that's an old-fashioned way a fad way and i wouldn't do that at all you can understand why people do that because diabetes means the cells of your body aren't able to take up the sugar the sugar that they would normally need to power themselves so your muscles aren't taking sugar out of the blood your liver is not taking sugar out of the blood so the sugar builds up in your bloodstream and your doctor measures it and says you've got a problem stop eating sugar stop eating carbohydrates that release sugar and that doesn't really solve the issue um the the question is why is it that your cells aren't using sugar normally why are your muscles not taking sugar out of your blood and the reason is the build-up of fat inside the cell once you get the fat out of your muscle cells they can act more normally they can reduce your blood sugar naturally that's the way to go the reason we encourage people not to do that idea of low carb high protein is because that sets you up over the long run for all the problems that we've been talking about diet related cancers diet related heart disease and other things so i wouldn't go in that direction at all speaking of sugar question now from carly it's the follow-up to the last episode you were with me she's wondering whether added sugar can help ward off depression probably not but you can see over the short term people do feel better and people crave these things and so in the morning it's just not morning if you're not having a doughnut and you know going to bed if you don't have a couple cookies before you go to bed people just don't feel well um but i have seen idiosyncratically by that i mean in an occasional person not in other people uh cases where sugar and especially sugar fat mixtures like pie and cake lead people into um not just depression but a particular kind of moodiness and irritability that that tends to go away when they avoid the sugar and those are also people who do tend to do well with plant protein in their diet um by that i mean they start their day with scrambled tofu or some grilled tempeh or other foods that are high in plant protein so they're not getting the cholesterol or the animal fat but they're getting protein they stay away from the sugar and then they do tend to do a lot better all right a couple more quick ones here uh angela you said coconut oil isn't healthy but what about coconut milk um same story if you get some coconut milk at the store look at the carton look at the saturated fat content if it's very much above zero i would have weighed it completely and last but not least on the milk train i'm on a plant-based diet and was wondering what the best plant-based milk is for my cereal in the morning that one from cecilia great question there are a million different brands out there aren't there you know there used to be soy milk and kind of not much else soy milk is still great it lowers cancer risk it really does helps fight hot flashes lowers cholesterol it's really hard to beat soy milk and it comes in a million different flavors almond milk is used much lower in protein but it's now the most popular one on the shelf there's rice milk hemp milk oat milk many others i gave a kind of a cautious warning about coconut milk because of the saturated fat that's often added oat milk sometimes has some added fat too the others tend not to so if i were going to recommend i would say something like soy milk rice milk almond milk those are going to be some great choices there you go so let's go ahead and close up the doctor's mailbag for today if we didn't get to your question as always i promise you we will save it and do our best to get you an answer on an upcoming episode and if you enjoyed today's show you feel like you raised your health iq by a point or two be sure to like this video and subscribe to this channel where there is plenty of other content that can really help take your health to the next level and we can't conclude today dr barnard without saying a huge thank you to the gregory j ryder memorial fund because their support of the exam room live and the physicians committee is helping to raise all of our health iqs today and make this episode possible the gregory j ryder memorial fund supports organizations just like the physicians committee that carry on greg's love for animals by promoting plant-based health and working to end animal abuse while emphasizing programs that promote systemic change and also benefit people and you can visit them online right now at gregoryriderfund.org that's gregoryrider spelled r-e-i-t-e-r-fund.org or just click the link right now that is in the episode notes dr barnard i appreciate you being here today my friend thank you chuck thanks everybody for watching today important topic all about getting your cholesterol under control so i want to say thank you to the crew behind the scenes that makes the magic happen and to you exam roomies thanks for hanging out and raising your health iqs right alongside of us for everyone here at the physicians committee i am the weight loss champion chuck carroll we'll talk to you again soon but until then keep it plant-based

Channel: Physicians Committee

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Id: yT-kKuXSu_I

Length: 32min 36sec (1956 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 16 2022