 If I had a dollar for everyone that told me I was going to have a heart attack on the carnivore diet because of all the saturated fat and cholesterol I consume, I might actually be able to afford to go to a steakhouse more than once a year. People blaming saturated fat and cholesterol for heart disease is like blaming firefighters for trying to put out a fire and not only are they blaming the firefighters for the fire, they're pouring gasoline on the firefighters and then turning off their water supply. It's a little bit hypocritical once you actually understand how cholesterol is used in the body. So there's LDL, low density lipoproteins, which take cholesterol to cells as every cell in the body needs cholesterol. So it's a normal human physiological process. HDL, high density lipoproteins, take cholesterol back to the liver and we view HDL as the good cholesterol because it's taking cholesterol away from cells. Now if these are normal physiological processes and various cells and tissues in the human body need cholesterol, why are we saying that cholesterol is bad for us? Everyone has some degree of marbling in their arteries. Whether or not that cholesterol becomes inflamed in the arterial wall and causes a blockage is what we're discussing in this video. There are many, many indigenous groups. The messiah had arterial marbling. Having marbling in your arteries has nothing to do with heart disease or calcification. Those things occur when there's inflammation in the diet or excess calcium in the blood stream and although we won't really touch too much on calcification in this video, arterial calcification is caused by excess calcium, which is a result of having not enough vitamin K2 in the body as well as not enough vitamin D3. If you want to know more about this, I believe I talk about it in my vitamin D3 video. I think I talk about it in my video on the RDAs, but this video is just going to focus on actual heart disease and anyone who does a reasonable amount of research begins to understand that heart disease is actually caused by inflammation. Inflammation, hyperinsulinia, high blood sugar, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, which is high body fat, high blood cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure, as well as hypertension, obesity and oxidative stress from things like trans fats, smoking, uncontrolled diabetes, toxins from pollution and preservatives, as well as stress are what actually cause heart disease in the form of inflammation. People that don't have heart disease are absent of all of these symptoms and they have better omega 3 to omega 6 ratios in their diet. And when people say, oh, inflammation is the real cause of heart disease, this is what they mean. And to sum it up very quickly, I'm going to link the resources for this in the description from Evor Cummings and Peter Actia. So if any of you guys want to spend about an hour or two researching this and truly understanding it, those are going to be your resources. I'm just going to sum it up as quickly as possible. So here we have the arterial wall. This is the bloodstream, red blood cell LDL platelets, the glyco-calyx, the first kind of line of defense against excess LDL entering the arterial wall. Glyco-calyx are these blue hairs that have like a civ-like function. Then we have the endothelium with the endothelial cells. These are actually very tightly bound together. Just ignore the spacing. I'm just differentiating the cells. And then we have the intima. This is the actual arterial wall. It's composed of proteoglycans that bind to cholesterol and they hold them until HDL cholesterol comes along and allows them to be used by other cells and tissues. So heart disease occurs when there's too much cholesterol entering the arterial wall and we're specifically talking about too much LDL cholesterol. Now this happens through various things like glyco-calyx dysfunction which is caused by high sugar, hypertension, oxidative stress, oxidized LDL, smoking and what glyco-calyx dysfunction is is by doing any of these things your glyco-calyx are pretty much knocked down to nothing. So you can imagine how much of that civ and filter effect you lose from the glyco-calyx. After glyco-calyx dysfunction we have leakage through the endothelial cell that can happen. And this is from TNF alpha which is tumor necrosis factor alpha which is emitted when there's inflammation in the body as well as angiotension too which is related to high blood pressure. So normally endocytosis only brings a certain amount of LDL through the endothelium but with dysfunction it can be increased greatly. Same with transcytosis and transcytosis is when the LDL cholesterol is taken into the intima and various things from TNF alpha can raise transcytosis up to 4.5 times, LDLs, leaky gut and then what happens is when all this excess cholesterol eventually leaks through the arterial wall from glyco-calyx dysfunction, from endothelial cell dysfunction, from unregulated transcytosis because of inflammation. Now we have way too much LDL cholesterol in the arterial wall so these proteoglycans bind to it and what pretty much happens is the HDL cholesterol cannot keep up. So what's really interesting is blood from heart attack patients and diabetics binds to LDL cholesterol more because of the lipoprotein structure. Two people can have the exact same levels of blood cholesterol but type 1 diabetic mice had 8 times higher retention of LDL cholesterol in the intima and this also has to do with the small and oxidized LDL as opposed to the large pillowy and protective LDL. So we can see how all these things can dysfunction and we can get too much LDL in the arterial wall. Now what actually happens when there's too much LDL in the arterial wall? These SAMs which are vascular cell adhesion molecules mark the injured area, make a 911 call. This releases interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor alpha which raises C-reactive protein. This is one thing that increases the transcytosis which makes things worse, monocytes which are the police officers, the white blood cells turn into macrophages. They ingest the excess LDL, form it into a foam cell and this is what causes fatty streaks in the arteries. Now this is fine as long as HDL comes along and esterifies the cholesterol, allows the cholesterol to be used by various cells and tissues but this occurs through multiple mechanisms so HDL levels are not necessarily indicators of how well the HDL cholesterol is functioning. And let's say everything gets overloaded, there's too much LDL in the wall, there's all this inflammation. These fatty streaks turn into full-fledged foam cells. Then they start producing proteins that damage the arterial wall. The body tries to repair this by forming a thick cap over it like a almost like a cyst. Then inflammatory enzymes released by this plaque destabilize the cap. Basically it bursts, it ruptures with all this lipid and tissue and platelets form. This is a heart attack essentially so inflammation causes arterial wall dysfunction which leads to excess LDL in the arterial wall. Excess LDL in the arterial wall leads to inflammation which leads to foam cells which burst and cause cardiac events. So it's safe to say the most important factor in preventing heart disease is removing inflammation from the diet and a carnivore diet does this inherently. But some carnivore diets don't have the best omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. Some carnivore diets can still have inflammation but since inflammation is the main driving factor of heart disease it's safe to say that a large majority of carnivores will never run into problems because hyperinsulinia, high blood sugar, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, hypertension, obesity, oxidative stress. We don't really see these things on a carnivore diet, these are all really prevented. But pretty much any whole food-based diet is going to prevent a lot of these issues. I mean whether or not you want to argue that maybe you could go on a vegan diet and then you have dementia when you're older because you didn't eat enough DHA but in regards to the context of heart disease it's one of the diseases that is easier to prevent as even most people on a standard American diet if they exercised and just kind of watched what they were eating to some degree they would probably have other problems before heart disease and not only that just the main issues in the standard American diet would be more along the lines of sugar, vegetable oils and refined foods. That's mainly what we're looking at. I don't want this to really be too much longer so thank you guys for watching. If you guys would like to support me please just share the video. As I said I will link those resources in the description below. If you guys would like to reach out to me for anything from diet, health, fitness, exercise, sun, water, consults to help optimize your lifestyle you can reach out to me through my email or the website below in the description. You guys want to check out my Amazon shop go ahead. But above all guys check out my Twitter, check out my Instagram. I've got a lot of interesting stuff on there that I don't really post in my videos. Maybe if you guys actually subscribe and do all of these things I'm asking you to I might be able to go to a steakhouse more than once a year and hey maybe I'll even film it for you guys.