High Blood Cholesterol and Its Contents

Cholesterol is a fatty substance that is important in human tissues; it is a sort of sealing compound that is essential to control the diffusion between the internal and external zones of the cells and vascular systems of the body, the cell walls and blood vessel walls, by which these barriers are so regulated as to permit the diffusion and degree of fluid interchange that is normal. If there is too great a transfer of fluid, toxins may leak into sensitive areas, such as proteins leaking from the blood capillaries into the cerebro-spinal fluid, causing headaches. Or the capillaries fail to hold back the fluid contents as normally they should, and the patient develops low blood pressure. Or if the cholesterol levels rise unduly, the blood pressure may become high, since the blood pressure is automatically controlled to produce the right amount of diffusion of fluid from the capillaries and there is a compensative rise when the vascular walls become less permeable to serum. Then there is the danger of capillary rupture from this higher blood pressure, with blood clots forming in the injured areas, and which can float into branch of the coronary artery that supplies the heart, and a consequent blocking of part of the heart muscle, the common “coronary embolism” or “coronary thrombosis.”

That is why everybody fears cholesterol. Why do we hear more about this subject today than a few years ago?

In Science News Letter during the last few months, articles very enlightening have appeared. First in February the news was released that animals or human subjects fed unrefined vegetable oils experienced a gradual fall in blood cholesterol, but if fed synthetic fats such as the hydrogenated oils in which the natural vitamins had been destroyed in the conversion of the oil to the synthetic fat, the blood cholesterol progressively increased.

Then in May the fact was reported that if human subjects were fed eggs fried in refined vegetable oil there was no effect on the blood cholesterol, but if the eggs were fried in hydrogenated (synthetic) fat, the blood cholesterol of the eater progressively increased. No doubt if the eggs were fried in unrefined vegetable oil carrying its normal quota of vitamins, there would have been a progressive reduction in cholesterol, as reported in the previous news item.

What are the protective factors in the unrefined oils? Well, we know that we can list a lot of factors essential to our health in the natural oil, that are totally absent in the synthetic imitation of fat.

Besides the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K, there is present in varying amounts in all natural oils the important sex hormone precursor that is a part of the E complex (discovered by Levin and Associates), the vitamin F complex so necessary to our health, without which we develop kidney disease (often associated with high blood pressure), skin disease (eczematous lesions, rough skin, scaly spots, brittle nails, dandruff and other psoriasis-like effects), and the various phospholipids to be described under the class of lecithins and cephalins which carry the essential B complex factors of choline and inositol (as lipositol).

Liver degeneration is the result most commonly attributed to the deficiency of these factors, plus loss of hair, and inhibition of lactation in the nursing mother.

How do we get inflicted with all these very unpleasant and often fatal consequences? Simply by letting someone sell us a counterfeit food, “made worse so it can be sold for less,” we gullible buyers not thinking that we are destroying the very integrity of our own precious body mechanisms by so doing. Oleo in place of butter, patent “shortenings” in place of lard and natural oils, hydrogenated oil in peanut butter, softening chemicals in bread instead of honest fats, synthetic and refined fats in “frozen custards” imitating ice cream, etc. If there is any certain way to get fat and lazy, it is by eating these “foods” that supply no nutrition, but only the calories alone that we are all trying to avoid.

LET’S WAKE UP AND LIVE. At least a lot longer and more enjoyably. It is no fun to nurse a necrotic heart, a busted brain from an unnecessary cerebral hemorrhage, a burned out liver that cannot detoxify the blood, or a kidney disease that lets us bloat up like a poisoned pup. Common sense here pays big dividends.

Natural Oils

Forty per cent of the American diet is said to consist of fats. No other nation boasts a higher consumption of high cholesterol foods. In this country heart disease is also the leading killer. Is this merely coincidence, or is faulty diet the real threat to our health?

The Situation Today

One out of 3 of all male deaths between the ages 45 and 75 is due to coronary thrombosis or an occlusion.¹

A thrombosis or blood clot is precipitated by a thickening of the blood vessels due to a cholesterol buildup on the inner lining.

Cholesterol is a fatty, waxlike substance found in many foods. Natural foods contain cholesterol-metabolizing agents (phospholipids), but refining and processing (hydrogenation) destroys these valuable health protectors and leaves us susceptible to the dire results of impaired cholesterol metabolism.²

Examination of 300 American boys killed in Korea at an average age of 22.1 years revealed 77.3% had “gross evidence of coronary arteriosclerosis.”³

Arteriosclerosis and atherosclerosis have been artificially produced in test animals by placing them on a diet high in cholesterol but low in the vital cholesterol-metabolizing factors.^4,5 An excess of cholesterol in test animals causes them to be predisposed to cancer.

Virtually all of the fats composing the American diet are of the hydrogenated variety which is lacking in metabolizing agents necessary for normal body usage.

Progress Toward Solution

A number of nations, including Japan, Hawaii, South Africa and Finland, have a lower refined dietary fat intake and correspondingly lower heart disease and coronary difficulties.1

Dr. B. Bronte-Stewart noted the effects of eggs, (a high cholesterol food) fried in unrefined peanut oil, on a number of patients. Consumption of such food did not increase blood cholesterol in these subjects, but a marked increase was noted when the same food (eggs) fried in hydrogenated oils was consumed.⁶

President Eisenhower’s consulting physician, Dr. Paul Dudley White, accompanied Dr. Bronte-Stewart of The University of Cape Town, and Dr. Ancel Keys of the University of Minnesota to Japan for further studies relating high fat diet to heart disease.¹

Drs. Pottenger, Jr., and Krohn fed patients suffering from high blood cholesterol foods rich in cholesterol plus natural oil components rich in phospholipids (fat-metabolizing agents). Seventy-nine per cent of the patients showed a marked decrease in blood cholesterol.⁷

Thus it can be seen that unrefined natural fats or oils are not harmful and, more important, unrefined vegetable oils, rich in natural associated factors, can actually reduce the threat of arteriosclerosis and coronary disease by keeping cholesterol levels within normal limits.

References Cited:

1. “Are You Eating Your Way to a Heart Attack?” by S. M. Spencer, Saturday Evening Post, Dec. 1, 1956.
2. Reader’s Digest, George Dock, Jr., Nov. 1946.
3. “Coronary Diseases Among U. S. Soldiers Killed in Action in Korea,” Major Wm. F. Enos, J.A.M.A. Vol. 153, No. 12, July 18, 1953, p. 1090.
4. Revue Internationale du Soja, March, 1946.
5. Chemical and Engineering News, Nov. 30. 1953.
6. “Serum-Cholesterol Diet in Coronary Heart Disease,” Lancet, Vol. 2, No. 22, Nov. 26, 1955, pp. 1103-1108.
7. Am. Journal of Digestive Diseases, April, 1952.