THE BLOG

nutrition Jun 10, 2020

People often ask me - Tanya, what about heart disease, should I really be eating all of that fat?  

Part of starting a keto lifestyle (or any real food lifestyle) requires unlearning a lot of the things that we have been told our whole lives about what healthy eating is.  

We have been living in “low-fat nation” for the last several decades.  A common misconception is that the reason we haven’t seen the purported health benefits from following this advice is that we were not following the guidelines in the first place. 

Studies show the opposite.  People have been avoiding the consumption of too many eggs, too much red meat and excess dietary fat. As a result, we have focused our attention on eating foods with labels that boast “low-fat,” “fat-free,” and even “heart healthy.” 

This can create big problems for our overall health, including the health of our cardiovascular system.  When foods are labeled with claims of “low-fat,” this usually means that the natural fat from the food product has been removed. 

The problem here is that food does not taste good without fat, so people would not buy or eat it.  In order to get people interested in the food, something has to be added in the absence of the fat, this substance is usually some form of sugar.  

On top of the sugar, highly processed cereals and other pseudo-foods are on offer that are labeled – “heart healthy.”  These foods are also largely highly processed carbohydrates, that people eat blindly, assuming that they are doing good things for their health. 

So, what is the problem with all of these processed foods?  In short, our body cannot handle them.  Let’s look at how things should work, first.  When everything is working as it should, our body keeps our blood sugar (glucose) tightly regulated.  Our hypothalamus watches the blood sugar and when it sees a dip or increase it tells the pituitary gland to get to work. 

The pituitary gland signals the pancreas that it is time to release one of two hormones.  Those hormones are insulin and/or glucagon.   Insulin shuttles excess glucose off for storage in the cells, when our blood glucose is too high.  Glucagon signals the liver to start converting stored glycogen (the stored version of glucose) into glucose to bring the blood sugar back up. 

Too many processed foods disrupt this balance because they cause our blood sugar to rise too quickly.  This causes the body to have an emergency response and pumps out tons of insulin to quickly bring the glucose back down. 

Unfortunately, because our body was responding to an emergency, it might release too much insulin.  This makes our blood sugar drop too low, too quickly.  This starts a blood sugar “rollercoaster.”  If the glucose dips too low, our body senses another blood sugar emergency.

Glucagon may not respond to the emergency quickly enough, so the adrenal glands get involved secreting our stress hormones (epinephrine, norepinephrine and cortisol) to bring the blood sugar back up, quickly. 

This taxes the HPA-axis and eventually leads to adrenal exhaustion (which is actually HPA-exhaustion, and simply speaking, a breakdown in communication between the hypothalamus, pituitary gland and adrenal glands.)

This rollercoaster keeps occurring when people are continuously putting processed carbohydrates in their body and stressing their body in other ways – like too much caffeine and environmental toxic exposures.  

This chronic need for more and more insulin eventually leads to insulin resistance.  Insulin resistance means that our cells stop wanting to listen to insulin’s cue to take in the excess glucose. 

Our pancreas responds by pumping out more and more insulin to try and force the cells to take the excess glucose in.  The cells do not like this force and become even more resistant. 

This results in high levels of insulin in the blood (hyperinsulinemia.)  This condition is a precursor to metabolic syndrome, obesity and diabetes.

 You may be wondering: how does this all relate to heart disease?  Atherosclerosis is what we are usually talking about when we are talking about heart disease and it is characterized by the formation of never healing lesions to our endothelium (inside walls of our blood vessels). 

Hyperinsulinemia creates a pro-inflammatory environment within the body.   And, when we have chronic inflammation, our body is not able to heal things in the way that it is built to.   

When things are working as they should, in our bodies, inflammation is a signal that lets our white blood cells know to come and take care of a problem.  In this case, the problem is an injury to the endothelium. 

After the white blood cells stamp out the fire, collagen and cholesterol come in and start to form a scar over the injured area.  New blood vessels start growing over the scar to strengthen it, and things are generally good to go. 

Chronic inflammation causes the white blood cells to keep fighting the fire, without the ability to stamp it out.  Cholesterol, fat and collagen still show up at the scene to repair the wall – even though the white blood cells haven’t stamped out the fire yet. 

Collagen begins by building its “scar” over the injured area.  But this scar may be much more raised than when things are not inflamed, which starts the potential problems with blood flow.  Then fat and cholesterol get called in because the white blood cells need more firefighters, and fat and cholesterol are essential for building new cells. 

This is where fat and cholesterol often get mixed up as the culprits of the heart disease problem.  Fat and cholesterol can become chemically damaged due to the chronic inflammation – once they are damage they were there to do. 

The new cells and vessels and collagen that are being produced also get destroyed by the inflammatory issues and become necrotic debris at the site of the inflammation.  These dead cells, vessels and chemically damaged fats and cholesterol build up an create an unstable core of plaque that becomes even more dangerous. 

To recap: fat and cholesterol are often implicated in the case of heart disease because they are found at ground zero.  But they are actually there to help the body heal itself.  The problems occur when there is a chronic need for insulin which then translates into a chronic state of inflammation.  The more processed food we eat, the more we encourage this inflammation to keep burning through our endothelium.    The good news is that by eliminating most of the processed foods from your diet, eating real and nutrient dense food and practicing other self-care (stress reduction, proper sleep, eliminating toxins, exercise, etc.) you can support the health of your cardiovascular system.

 

 

 

References: 
Nutritional Therapy Association. (2019.)  Cardiovascular Student Guide.  Olympia, WA: Author.
 Kresser, C. (2019.) The Diet-Heart Myth: How to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease Naturally. Retrieved from: https://chriskresser.com/the-diet-heart-myth-how-to-prevent-and-reverse-heart-disease-naturally/

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