CHOLESTEROL AND TOXINS

The concept that cholesterol can inactivate or neutralize a wide va­riety of toxins is not new. In 1981, Alouf identified cholesterol as an inactivator of multiple bacterial toxins.⁷ Chi et al. and Watson and Kerr showed that elevation of serum cholesterol actually served as a marker for a number of different toxic exposures.⁸'⁹ Studies by Kossman et al. and Bloomer et al. even demonstrated that exposure to the toxicity of pesticides would reliably elevate the cholesterol levels of those exposed individuals.¹⁰'¹¹ Davies et al. also showed that dogs exposed to low levels of methylmercury developed pro­gressively higher levels of cholesterol in the blood over time.¹² A very reasonable conclusion from all of these studies considered

Cholesterol: The Great Myth 91

together is that cholesterol serves as a defense mechanism to protect the body from a wide range of toxic exposures.

When patients who presented with high cholesterol levels (over 240 mg%) had their mercury amalgams and sources of dental infec­tion removed, these levels usually dropped dramatically within a few days. Generally, the only exceptions occurred in patients who initiated an unforeseen rapid rate of detoxification after the dental revision. A rapid rate of detoxification can keep blood toxin levels elevated. This in turn will usually stimulate the continued elevation of blood cholesterol levels. When such a brisk detoxification is pres­ent, cholesterol levels remained elevated for a longer period of time, apparently helping to protect the body from the toxins being re­leased from internal tissue storage sites. Even in the case of these patients, however, cholesterol levels would nearly always decline dramatically at a later date, as the patient continued to detoxify and the detoxification rate and total body toxin load gradually lessened. As long as the toxin levels in the blood declined, the cholesterol lev­els would also decline.

Remember that both detoxification and new exposure to external toxicity will increase toxin levels in the blood. Cholesterol levels will rise regardless of where the blood toxins originate. And choles­terol levels will drop when these blood toxin levels drop. The cho­lesterol level, when the diet is not depleted of cholesterol and cholesterol-forming building blocks, as in a vegetarian diet, appears to be an almost ideal laboratory test to track the presence and de­gree of blood-borne toxins.

A little-appreciated but also well-documented fact is that low serum cholesterol levels are associated with an increased incidence of cancer. This has been demonstrated in many different studies, in­cluding those by Schatzkin et al.,¹³ Cowan et al.,¹⁴ Davis et al.,¹⁵ Keys et al.,¹⁶ Gerhardsson et al.,¹⁷ Isles et al.,¹⁸ Kagan et al.,¹⁹ Knekt et al.,²⁰ Kark et al.,²¹ Stemmermann et al.,²² and Williams et al.²³ Yet there are few doctors or patients who are not happier the lower their cholesterol gets. When one considers the concept of the protective

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effect that cholesterol provides against toxicity, and when one also considers that many toxins are cancer-causing agents, this increased incidence of cancer seen with lower levels of cholesterol makes a lot of sense. The lower your cholesterol goes, the less protection you have against any of the cancer-causing toxins that are circulating in your bloodstream.

It is also of interest to note that Simon and Hudes found that gall­stones are only half as common in women with high blood levels of vitamin С as they are in women with moderate blood levels of vita­min C.²⁴ Since vitamin С is highly effective in neutralizing the toxi­city from many different sources, it is not surprising that the same unneutralized toxins that can cause cancer can also promote other chronic degenerative diseases, such as gallbladder disease.

The concept of cholesterol protection against toxins gets even fur­ther support from what is known about the chronic effects of low-grade mercury exposure—which is seen in most of the population because they are exposed to mercury from amalgam fillings. Al­though this low-grade chronic mercury exposure (micromercurial-ism) can have a wide variety of effects in different people, irritability, depression, and lessened muscular coordination are among the most common ones. We saw earlier that medically low­ering cholesterol levels increased the number of deaths from vio­lence, suicides, and accidents.

Recently Haley noted that Gulf War veterans had suffered excess postwar deaths both from suicide and from motor vehicle acci­dents.²⁵ Cumulative toxicity would explain this observation nicely. When enough toxicity finally overwhelms the toxin-neutralizing mechanisms of the body, the baseline toxicity that the Gulf War vet­erans share with most of the rest of the world faces much less op­position. If elevated cholesterol levels are trying to counteract the toxic effects that so many people are experiencing from the contin­ual exposure to the mercury in their amalgam fillings, perhaps low­ering those protective cholesterol levels is allowing irritability to

Cholesterol: The Great Myth 93

progress into fatal acts of violence, depression into suicide, and de­creased muscular coordination into fatal highway accidents. This could also account for the increased incidence of noncardiac deaths in the cholesterol-lowering clinical trials—a finding that has never been scientifically explained. Just because a finding cannot be easily explained does not mean that it can be ignored. A death is a death, whether it comes from a heart attack or a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Back in 1972, Eastwood and Trevelyan published research that showed that psychological symptoms were associated with an in­creased risk for physical disorders.²⁶ There is further support for this hypothesis in the current literature. The Johns Hopkins Precur­sors Study began in late 1948. Nearly 1,200 medical students were enrolled. Many of them were followed over several decades. Re­cently, men in the study who reported suffering clinical depression were found to be much more likely to develop coronary artery dis­ease as men who did not suffer depression. Ford et al. concluded that depression is an independent risk factor for coronary heart dis­ease.²⁷ Another study, by Barefoot and Schroll, conducted over a twenty-seven-year period, also concluded that increased depression was associated with increased risks for heart attack and death from all causes.²⁸ Depression is a very common symptom of unneutral-ized toxicity, such as is commonly seen with the chronic low-grade exposure from mercury amalgam fillings. When toxicity goes un-neutralized, more depression and a greater chance of death from multiple causes is exactly what can be anticipated. And low choles­terol levels allow more toxicity, such as from mercury, to remain un-neutralized. It would appear that this may very well be why depression is an independent risk factor for coronary heart disease. Depression is merely an especially common symptom seen in indi­viduals with unneutralized toxicity.

Another study supporting this concept was published by von Ammon Cavanaugh et al.²⁹ They found that a history of depression

94 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health

was an independent predictor of in-hospital death among the med­ical inpatients. This further increases the plausibility of the argu­ment that one or more toxins are resulting in both the depression and the fatal disease, since most toxins will nonspedfically cause or aggravate a wide variety of disease processes. Neeleman et al. also recently published research that showed that people at risk for suicide (who are often those individuals who are most depressed) were also at risk for dying prematurely from accidents as well as other illness.³⁰ We saw earlier that lowered cholesterol levels in­crease the death rates from suicide as well as accidents. Once again, these statistical correlations can easily be reconciled by focusing on the effects of unneutralized toxicity throughout the body. Suicide doesn't always result from a mind that has inexplicably gone hay­wire. Much more often, it results from a mind and a nervous system that cannot deal with being poisoned.