Longevity Lab Series: Easily Lower Cholesterol

Longevity Lab: Cholesterol

Welcome to the first episode of Longevity Lab, our monthly series exploring the biomarkers, habits, and nutrition strategies that influence how well—and how long—we live.

In this episode, Julia breaks down the science of cholesterol in a practical, easy-to-understand way. Learn why cholesterol isn't the villain it's often made out to be, what your blood lipid panel is really telling you, and how nutrition can help improve your numbers naturally.

You'll discover:

• The difference between LDL, HDL, triglycerides, and ApoB
• Why dietary cholesterol isn't the whole story
• The surprising connection between carbohydrates, insulin resistance, and cholesterol levels
• How fiber helps your body remove excess cholesterol
• The foods that support healthier cholesterol levels and cardiovascular health
• The one additional test Julia recommends beyond a standard lipid panel

Whether you're trying to improve your cholesterol, protect your heart, or support long-term brain health and longevity, this episode offers actionable strategies you can start using today.

Longevity starts with understanding your numbers—and knowing how to influence them.

Transcript

Hi everyone. Today we are going to talk about improving your cholesterol levels and doing this through dietary changes, we're going to talk about how diet affects cholesterol, how it doesn't affect cholesterol and what you can do to bring down your triclycerides, your total cholesterol and your LDLs. The important thing about this is that your blood lipid panel is very, very easy to get tested and it does give you an insight into how your cardiovascular system is performing and how healthy or unhealthy it is and actionable steps that you can take. We're also going to talk about one test that's super important to really hone in to the significance of your numbers. I'm Julia. I am the founder of Joli Life. We are here to help you optimize your health mainly through nutrition, but we always talk about your lifestyle, your mindset and other habits that support your overall wellness.
(01:20)
However, for us, nutrition is the key. So if you're thinking about cholesterol, you're probably thinking about it because your doctor has told you after a recent blood test that you need to lower yours. Cholesterol is the most well-known biomarker because of its decades long association with cardiovascular disease. And cardiovascular disease is one of the leading causes of death in the US, but it's a bit misunderstood because we went through the whole fat is bad and now fat no longer is bad. So it's hard for us to get a handle sometimes on what to do because cholesterol is a lipid and it's actually a fat or lipid that your body makes. It's produced by the liver and it's carried through the bloodstream as a component of lipoproteins. And it's used by cells for their cell lining, for the production of hormones and for bile. So you need cholesterol.
(02:27)
You need it so badly that your body makes cholesterol for you. And it's not inherently bad because we need it. We need it for our wellbeing. We need it for our hormone balance, but it is well established that high LDL, so LDL stands for low density lipoprotein cholesterol, contributes to plaque buildup on our artery walls. And this is where cholesterol becomes a problem when it starts to build up on the walls of our arteries because over time this continued buildup can cause our arteries to narrow. It can cause them to stiffen and it impairs the blood flow and it drives cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks and strokes. And this doesn't just affect whether or not you're going to have a heart attack or stroke. Since it restricts circulation in all parts of your body, it also impacts your brain health. So we want to be aware of that, that cholesterol, high cholesterol goes beyond its importance goes beyond our heart.
(03:40)
It goes to our long-term longevity and our long-term protection against Alzheimer's and dementia. High HDL, which is the high density lipoprotein cholesterol is somewhat protective as it relates to cardiovascular health and that's why we call the LDLs the bad cholesterol and the HDLs the good cholesterol, but your overall cholesterol level is determined by adding together your LDL and your HDL. So let's say you have your panel back and you need to lower your cholesterol levels. Well, we have some ways that we can do it and we have ways that you can do it with diet. Of course, you're going to be talking to your doctor about what you should be doing with him or her, but there are things that you can do that will move the needle and will also positively impact anything that you are doing with your doctor to improve your cholesterol profile and to reduce cardiovascular risk.
(04:49)
So why does cholesterol matter? In some people, LDLs become elevated due to dietary habits and for some it's for genetic disorders that interfere with LDL clearance from the blood and from other processes in your body. So your eating habits are about 20 to 30% of the influence on cholesterol in your bloodstream. But as we'll get to, it's not as simple as eating cholesterol equals high cholesterol, not as simple as that. But when we can change our nutrition, we can increase and decrease the number of LDL receptors on our cells and this increase or decrease causes LDL levels to rise or fall in our blood. So that's one way. The other is familial hypercholesterolemia and this is a genetic situation that interferes with the body's ability to process LDLs and there's a mutation in the gene that causes this. And so if you have this, your doctor is going to look into it because your LDL cholesterol levels might be two to four times higher than normal.
(06:15)
So it's quite dramatic and you will definitely need medication to help you get this into range. Diet will help you, but with this genetic component in your body, we're not talking about family history here, we're talking about in your body Your body doesn't have the receptors and so you will need the help of medication to get you to where you need to be. So the most common way to assess cardiovascular disease risk and to learn your cholesterol numbers is your lipid panel, which we're going to talk about what that is. It's going to have your total cholesterol, your LDLs, your HDLs, and your triglycerides. Total cholesterol is high if it's considered high if it's over 190.
(07:08)
And this isn't a number that we take in isolation because it is total cholesterol. Instead, we usually look at the trend in terms of your total cholesterol. Is it trending upward or is it trending downward? We also place our emphasis or our attention on the LDL levels because if LDL is low and HDL is high, then you have a different health outlook than if LDL is high and HDL is low because the LDLs are the bad guys, the HDLs are the good guys. So if the HDLs are high, LDLs are low, your doctor's going to be much less concerned. If LDLs are high but HDLs are low, your doctor will be more concerned. But that's not the primary marker and that's why I always ask clients to have their doctors take an APO B test, which measures the particles in your blood that actually cause arterial sclerosis.
(08:16)
So the ones that are actually causing plaque deposits causing your arteries to become more narrow and that's why we want the APO B test. And that test, if it is elevated, gives us a lot more information about how proactive you need to be in bringing down your cholesterol levels. If they're above 30 to 50, then they're considered high and then we need to work on modifying your diet and you work with your doctor to bring down cholesterol levels. So we talked a little bit about, it used to be that we thought if we have high cholesterol, we need to cut out all the things that we eat that contain cholesterol, like red meat, for instance, eggs, things like that, dairy. And we thought that for nearly half a century, but our most recent research tells us that our cholesterol from our food has little to no impact on blood cholesterol levels.
(09:22)
It's a bit more complicated than we just thought. We thought we ate something with cholesterol. Oh, there goes our cholesterol levels, not so. So eating foods that contain cholesterol is unlikely to cause a health risk provided that the amount of food that you eat isn't saturated fat. So while we say, okay, it's not dietary fat that raises cholesterol, we still have to be mindful of diets that are more akin to the Atkins diet that are super duper high in saturated fat, those diets haven't been cleared yet, so I don't really suggest them. What I do suggest is going to help your body to clear cholesterol, including dietary cholesterol. So one of the things that really, really impacts how much cholesterol gets into our bloodstream is how much fiber is in our diet. And so one of the nutritional strategies that we're going to talk about for lowering cholesterol is increasing the fiber in your diet.
(10:34)
It will help your body to clear dietary cholesterol and to clear cholesterol from bile. The other aspect of what's affecting your cholesterol levels that very, very few people talk about is carbohydrates because we don't think about that as it relates to cholesterol levels, but regularly eating more calories than we burn, particularly in the form of low quality carbohydrates, increases the liver's production of triglycerides, which is another lipid that can contribute to cardiovascular disease. Research suggests that excessive carbs also ramp up our cholesterol, but not directly. When we eat excessive carbs, especially highly process or refined carbs and sugars that your body rapidly breaks down and absorbs, this contributes to blood sugar spikes and when we have a blood sugar spike, we get a surge in insulin that can lead to insulin resistance. Insulin resistance induced dyslipidemia is considered one of the pathways through which excessive carbs impacts cholesterol levels because it causes an increase in small dense LDL particles and the small dense ones are the most dangerous ones.
(12:07)
Additionally, high carb intake, particularly carbs from fructose, so from things like fruit juices, sugary beverages, contribute to accumulated fat storage. Stored fat is stored in the liver as triglycerides and this is one of the causes of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which is actually on the rise. And it's a vicious cycle because non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is associated with insulin resistance, which then can drive up your LDLs. And liver damage, one of the things that happens when the liver gets damaged is the LDL receptors are damaged. And when this happens, LDL stays in the bloodstream instead of being taken up by the liver and a damaged liver also interferes with the body's ability to downregulate cholesterol because the liver creates the enzymes that help to break down cholesterol. So over time, a diet that is especially high in saturated fat like an Atkins style diet or a diet that is high in simple carbohydrates and sugar can drive up your cholesterol levels.
(13:32)
So this is how our diet impacts our cholesterol level, but it's not in the traditional way of thinking, "Oh, if I eat red meat, my cholesterol is going to go up." Instead, it's very, very excessive saturated fat that is not characteristic of most of our diets, but high carbohydrates are characteristic of a lot of diets and that too can drive up cholesterol levels, which I think it's very, very important to highlight this because no one is talking about this. No one is talking about the impact that carbohydrates have on our triglyceride levels and therefore our overall cholesterol level. So how can foods help lower cholesterol? And this is the important part because this is the action point. Up until now we are explaining what's happening. I really think it's helpful to understand what's going on in your body and the terminology so you can follow your doctor when she goes through the information, but the crux of this is, okay, what do we do now that we know what we do?
(14:37)
First things first is eating foods high in soluble fiber. Fiber not only curbs your appetite, it stabilizes your blood sugar and it supports cardiovascular health. Soluble fiber in particular helps to lower LDL cholesterol and this is how. Soluble fiber forms a viscous gel in your intestines. Think like the paper mache liquid and this gel it traps and eliminates bile acid, which is mainly cholesterol and it farries it out of your body into your toilet, thus lowering your overall cholesterol because 95% of bile acid is usually reabsorbed and recycled by increasing the elimination of bile. This means that the liver must synthesize new bile and therefore it must take cholesterol out of your blood in order to make it. So this is a wonderful way of helping to lower your cholesterol. In addition, to accommodate the liver's need to make new cholesterol, it upregulates the number of LDL receptors that are available and therefore this decreases the LDL cholesterol that is circulating in your blood.
(16:07)
So by having a high fiber diet, particularly soluble fiber, bile is sequestered, you poop it into the toilet, your body needs to make more bile. So the liver says, "Hey, I need more of those LDLs," takes them out of your bloodstream and your cholesterol levels drop. This is fabulous. Soluble fiber also feeds the beneficial bacteria in your colon, which produces short chain fatty acids and research on short chain fatty acids suggests that they have many, many positive effects. So on short chain fatty acid is butyrate and it helps to decrease cholesterol synthesis by interfering with the enzyme activity that causes cholesterol to be formed. So this is another reason why a diet high in soluble fiber is really good. In the JOLI diet, you have tons of soluble fiber, which comes from beans and lentils and chickpeas and avocados and broccoli and Brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes and carrots and raspberries and chia and flax.
(17:23)
All that you're going to find in your Jolie program all of those foods, including quinoa and oats, oats unrefined, think Irish oats, oat groats, all of those foods you can use to have the amount of fiber necessary to reduce LDLs. One other thing that for clients who come to me with high LDL numbers, we will introduce a ficillium fiber supplement and that they will mix it with water and take it right before your meals. And this is super effective. It has been studied and in studies six to 15 grams per day of facilum fiber can lower your LDL cholesterol by six to 24%. So this is an easy fix combined with your diet to help lower your cholesterol. I will say if you are taking a facillium fiber supplement, be sure to up your water intake so that you don't become constipated and note that it will also decrease your appetite.
(18:30)
So I will sometimes use a fiber supplement for that effect, but I will also use it to keep my blood lipid panel good and healthy as well as my microbiome good and healthy. So fiber benefits you in so many ways and it's so easy to get. It requires that you add, not that you subtract and so highly, highly recommend it. The second way that you can use your diet to help lower cholesterol is to really emphasize the colorful antioxidant rich plants. There is so much research on arterial plaques and we're finding that arterial plaques and arteriosclerosis are more likely to occur when circulating LDL cholesterol is exposed to free radicals. Free radicals are produced from processed foods, from environmental toxins, and our own body's metabolic activity. We have antioxidant rich plant food to stabilize those free radicals so that they're no longer damaging and neutralizes them and therefore it reduces their harmful effect on your arteries and your LDLs.
(19:49)
So tons of foods and JOLI programs fit into this category. They are so wonderful to eat. You have all of your bright foods like your tomatoes, your carrots, your spinach, your arugula, your broccoli, your avocado, your sweet potatoes, your squash, your cantaloupe, your watermelon. Not hard to include in your diet. You have all the polyphenols, which are probably my favorite group actually, because it includes tea, dark chocolate, olives, extra virgin olive oil, nuts, particularly walnuts, seeds, turmeric ginger, onions. It includes berries and grapes and oranges and grapefruit and red cabbage. So I love the polyphenol group and it is really, really good for you. And lastly, your vitamin C, which so many of the vegetables and fruits that we mentioned already contain vitamin C, but if you really want to dial down on your vitamin C, you focus on your citrus fruits, your bell peppers, your broccoli, your kiwi, and your strawberries.
(20:58)
And in addition to that, your cantaloupes and cauliflower and cabbage are also high in vitamin C. One note on the fruit because we talked about excessive fructose contributing to LDL, when we talk about excessive fructose, we're talking about it in beverages. It in whole fruit form is not ... You're not going to eat enough fruit for it to be damaging. You're going to be full and very, very uncomfortable before you eat enough fruit for it to be damaging. When we eat fruit, we get that fructose sucrose with fiber, with water, with lots of vitamins and minerals. And so it ends up doing a body good as opposed to when we're drinking a sugary beverage. The third thing that we can do is we can add in fatty fish. We are a big fan of fatty fish. So think salmon, mackerel, sardines. These are not the lean fish.
(22:01)
These are the fatty ones and the beneficial impact of eating more fatty fish might be even greater when fish replaces low quality protein sources like bacon, sausage, hot dogs, ham, salami and other things. Recommendation is two, three ounce servings of fatty fish per week and that will help to lower LDL, lower triglycerides, increase HDL. There are so many benefits to fatty fish. Some of them are strictly omega-3 benefits, but the other is because they contain selenium, vitamin D and a lot of other antioxidants. So go, go, go fatty fish and then nuts and seeds.
(22:55)
If you are a non-fish person, let's say you hate fish, you can use nuts and seeds to give you the same omega-3 benefit. And my one caveat with nuts and seeds is just be careful not to overdo it. They are very nutrient rich and it's easy to overeat them and you actually don't need much. If you have a daily tablespoon of flaxseed, that's going to help and that's plenty. When we use nuts in our programs, we use them in very small portions. Flaxseed we use in almost every dressing that we do so that you always have it for management of your blood panel as well as management of hormone balance. The fifth thing you can do is to include healthy fats in your diet. So we're talking avocado oil, we're talking olive oil. Those things are really going to help you raise your HDLs, which are the good cholesterol and it will also add flavor to your food.
(24:00)
But when our HDLs, think of them as the cleaner lipids. When they're raised, we have greater cardiovascular health. So you have a lot of foods to add. I will tell you what not to eat, which is processed food, processed saturated fat food, trans fats, which thankfully are out of most foods these days and sugar and refined carbohydrates. If you are overweight, I encourage you to lose weight because that will help clear your liver and restore its function and it would also help to lower inflammation, which is going to have a positive impact on your cardiovascular health as well as your cholesterol. Exercise is another way of lowering LDLs and raising HDLs. And of course, don't smoke, don't drink too much. Those are not good for your liver in particular. And if you haven't gathered it yet, the liver has a lot ... The liver is the central organ when we talk about your blood lipid panels and it is also your central metabolic organ.
(25:16)
So your food, what you're eating very much impacts the liver and a compromised liver is going to compromise the health of your cardiovascular system. So that's it for today. I hope this was very helpful. There was a lot of information in it, but the key takeaways are to really focus on your diet to mitigate cholesterol reabsorption. If you do one thing, add more fiber into your diet. If you do two things, add more fiber, soluble fiber, and add a lot of colorful fruits and vegetables. We at Jolie Life, this is what we do, so we are here to serve you. Take a look at our programs at the www.thejolielife.com and you can ask me any questions at julia@thejolife and so nicely talk to you to your help.