Why you do NOT need to worry about red meat and cholesterol!

Red meat i.e. steak is full of saturated fat.

NO IT'S NOT!

STEAK

70% Water | 23% Protein | 7% Fat (of which 2% saturated)

Cholesterol first.

Cholesterol is essential to every cell in our body. It is critical for the continual regeneration of cells, our steroid hormones, healthy skin, hair and nails. Our body also has an amazing ability to ensure we have the right amount of cholesterol in our body for what it needs. That is sometimes we need more and sometimes we need less depending on what is happening inside our body. And our body copes very well to provide for these needs!

For thousands of years we have been able to maintain the right amount of cholesterol in our bodies without the need for pharmaceutical intervention or too much consideration in terms of what we eat.

This is because our body is able to produce its own cholesterol and work with the cholesterol coming in via our food to maintain optimal levels. In fact, 85% of our total cholesterol is made in the liver and only 15% is typically from the food we consume.

When we consume more, our body produces less and when we consume less, our body produces more. The perfect system!

There have been times in the past when we, as a species, consumed a lot more meat and fish than we do today. Whether going back thousands of years, just a few hundred years or pre-1980s (I'll explain why pre-1980s in another post) but we have consumed plenty of full fat milk and fatty red meat.

Ah, well meat is full of saturated fat they say. And we'll get to that later but suffice to say it is not! A good old sirloin steak is approximately 70% water, 23% protein and 7% fat (2% saturated fat).

Red meat is mostly an unsaturated fat, now they don't tell you that do they?

Back to cholesterol. People talk about good and bad cholesterol, maybe your doctor too. Well, there is no such thing. Cholesterol is cholesterol is cholesterol. It has a chemical formula of C27H46O. There is no other variation!

What people are talking about when they refer to good and bad are lipoproteins, which carry cholesterol around the body.

LDL (Low Density Lipoprotein) is a larger carrier. And HDL (High Density Lipoprotein) is a smaller carrier. And they are carriers, like taxis. LDL cholesterol takes cholesterol to where it is needed (including your arterial walls to help fix damage) and HDL brings cholesterol back to the liver to be re-synthesised to be reused.

LDL also carries VLDLs or Very Low Density Lipoproteins aka Triglycerides. This is how we carry fat from our liver to our fat cells to be stored, or to our muscle cells to be used.

So, LDL could be high if we are needing to transport fat from our liver to our fat cells all around our body. This is case when we consume too much carbohydrate in our diet. Excess blood sugars (broken down carbohydrates) are transported to the liver converted into fat and then carried to the fat cell to be stored.

This an example when high LDL is bad. The solution, howe3ver, would be to reduce sugar in your blood needing to be converted into fat and then carried to your fat cells to be stored.

Another example of when our LDL could be high is when we are burning fats as fuel (the whole idea, of course, and what we are trying to achieve with our clients). LDL carries fat to your working muscles (via LDL) to fuel what you are doing. And this, of course, if good.

So, you might ask why are we told to consume a low fat diet and lower cholesterol? And the answer to this is the faulty science that occurred back in the 1970s and a huge mistake to our guidelines in 1983.

The early science studied already deceased people who had died of a heart attack. They found higher LDL-Cholesterol in their arteries. Of course, given the role of cholesterol is to fix damaged cells including our arteries and Low Density Lipoproteins carry cholesterol to the damaged site, this is exactly what you'd expect.

Just imagine

If there was a fire at a house in your street, you'd equally expect the first people to arrive at the site to be the fire brigade (to fix the problem i.e. put out the fire).

The big mistake was to conclude that cholesterol was the cause of the heart attack just because cholesterol was the first to the site. Just as it would be ridiculous to assume the fire brigade caused the fire just because they were also first to the site before the fire was put out.

Cholesterol is found in the arteries of patients of who suffer a heart attack because it is there to fix the damaged arteries. It is not the cause of the damaged arteries.

Cholesterol does not fur up arteries. We don't pour fat into our arteries. We eat it. That means it goes into our stomach and intestines, not arteries. Cholesterol in our arteries remember mostly comes from our liver (85%) not our food anyway. Cholesterol is not bad. LDL cholesterol is not bad. And worrying about eating a normal amount of real food in the form of some fish some days, some chicken some days, some red meat some days and some eggs is not going to cause you any problems whatsoever.

There are no randomised controlled trials that show even a correlation between high cholesterol and heart disease. But there does exist evidence to the contrary. Indeed let's conclude this section with some modern-day good science, like proper randomised controlled trials research.

Over the last few years it has become clear that higher cholesterol levels in your body i.e. higher LDL and HDL protects your body from both heart disease and stroke. An example of this research here -

A study in 2020 called the LDL Paradox – showed Higher LDL Cholesterol is associated with longer longevity. Ravnskov et al. a randomised control trial (RCT) – these are the Gold standard of trials.

Reference is here

Enough said. Your cholesterol level doesn't really matter (not at all when you have normal blood sugars) and whatever the normal distribution i.e. slightly higher than the average or slightly lower than the average (i.e. what a normal distribution means) you will not have a cholesterol that is outside the "normal" range sticking to this plan!

You body's really clever.

Trust it.

Red Meat

Red meat contains loads of iron, tonnes of other vitamins and minerals, complete proteins to fuel your metabolism and doesn't spike your sugar, like say wholegrains do for example, and so are really very healthy.

The only attack they get is that they are full of fat. They are not. And you now now know we need fat and cholesterol and that worrying about our cholesterol levels should not be a thing. There is no link between red meat and cancer either. Like no credible research evidence whatsoever.

Long story short, it serves people who sell cheap-to-produce carbohydrates particularly carbohydrates that come in a box, in a bag or with a barcode to drive up a low fat message since a low fat by definition means high carbohydrate diet.

The only studies that exist that show a relationship between a meat based diet for example and a plant based diet fail to distinguish between a steak and a peperoni pizza and a burger and chips. Genuinely, studies have taken subjects who eat meat and so pizza and burgers with chips and compared them with people who stopped eating that food and switched to a plant-based diet with no steak (that was hardly being consumed before anyway), but now no burger and chips, peperoni pizza etc. Of course that diet performed best. When you eliminate processed foods from a diet compared to the one with all the processed foods, it will out perform the other. There is no study that has compared people who eat red meat i.e. steak versus people who don't!

So, why are we told to eat less red meat? We're back to those 1983 guidelines again. But the answer in short is to drive up packed supermarket refined carbohydrates.

Darren

PS Our doctors don't mean to misinform us, they're just following "the guidelines" (not the research).