Cholesterol: One Day You're Here, the Next Day You're Gone

i get out here on the internet and ask
people every day to do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do and what people say back to me is it's hard as the saying goes one day you're here and the next day you're gone just a few days ago i came on camera and recorded a video with two takes unusually talking about the real life consequences of eating cholesterol the only reason that video wasn't uploaded was that we had a number of funny technical problems lighting and the camera and for completely banal reasons that video didn't get uploaded then just a few days later i find out that someone i know in real life face to face is going through exactly one of these calamitous life altering possibly life-ending health problems caused by cholesterol in the diet and yes this is someone i have talked to about the gospel of veganism on this channel most of the time i do not make pragmatic health-based arguments for why you or why anyone should be vegan because i think you got to do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do and cholesterol is an especially slippery case there is a legitimate problem with making it sound like plants are the absolute answer to everything could you possibly need statins and even if you're on a plant-based diet yes in fact i may need a statin my latest ldl is up uh my cardiac heart scan looks great but i've got a familial hypercholesterolemia and i'm very comfortable with the fact that the data shows that i would be better off on a statin even though i follow about a healthy diet as a human being can follow genetically some people are born to have cholesterol problems no matter how healthy their diet is even though it is incredibly rare a small number of vegans will have high levels of cholesterol not because of their diet but because their body is producing excessively high levels of cholesterol and they will end up taking statins and other drugs to treat their high cholesterol levels nevertheless for those people it's still helpful it's still beneficial that they have a vegan diet rather than eating bacon eggs but guess what at the opposite end of the genetic spectrum i've known one person like this in real life who got tested and knew was aware of this fact there are people who can eat a non-vegan diet who can eat huge quantities of cholesterol and their body will cope with it incredibly well like their dietary cholesterol can be high but their serum cholesterol the problem with blockages in the arteries won't emerge in any case so so you could say that life is not fair but to say that would mean that you think it's desirable or wonderful to eat a high cholesterol diet i don't if you think oh some people get to eat pork every day without any negative consequences well that's not my perspective right like my perspective is if you eat pork there are negative consequences for the pig there are negative consequences for the planet you know if you eat beef if you eat chicken if you eat fish no more what it is milk cheese all these things contain cholesterol i'm interested in doing the right thing because the right thing to do and i want you in the audience to be addressing that as well if you took the opposite pragmatic approach what if you had one friend who was in the position of having hypercholesterolemia where no matter what he or she eats he's going to have high cholesterol maybe he would say look he might as well eat cheese and animal products he's going to have the problem he's going to take the drugs anyway and at the opposite stream what if you knew someone who was actually diagnosed as having the opposite rare genetic condition where they can eat high amounts of cholesterol with impunity or immunity without suffering those negative concepts you say oh it's okay it's okay for them what if what if in dissecting a cow or dissecting some exotic fish we managed to find one particular cut of meat one day what if scientists discover there's one particular part of the cow one particular part of the arctic char that has no cholesterol what if there's some animal product you can eat without raising your cholesterol levels what if the scientifically developed cholesterol-free cheese or some processed part of this cholesterol-free beef jerky in the future it's about so what then what you don't think either you think veganism is for everyone everywhere all the time or you don't so i i primarily you know deal with things however you know a few days ago i saw that my fellow youtuber tko sam was boasting that he'd lost 45 pounds i think it was he could lose another 100 pounds he's got a lot of weight to lose and he's done this before he's lost weight and then he's gained it back he even briefly went on a vegan diet once lost all the way for that reason he went back to eating at mcdonald's every day you know we gained the dope back he's not a close personal friend of mine but he's just somebody i know someone has spoken to a little bit over the internet of the years i know that he was close friends with this guy laoshu 55 000 another youtuber laoshu who has now suddenly died of a heart attack of heart disease after many years earlier having an ischemic stroke when you have problems with the circulation of blood in your body right when you have coronary artery disease when you have atherosclerosis all right it's not just in any one part of your body subjectively you may experience erectile dysfunction as a man because of blockages in the circulation of blood to that part of your body you may experience a heart attack because the blockage of flow around that part of the body cardiovascular disease is a disease of the whole heart of all the vessels in the body in other words people with erectile dysfunction have a problem with their vessels and they can have a higher rate of heart disease because it is a systemic problem whether you're aware of it or not whether you want to admit it to yourself or not if you have these high cholesterol levels you are going to be experiencing impaired brain function long before you get to the tipping point of having a diagnosis for something like alzheimer's disease because the distribution of blood in your brain the veins and arteries involved in that are incredibly fine they're incredibly easy for a high cholesterol diet to impair as opposed to the large sturdy veins and arteries that are right around your your beating heart and the most dangerous facet of all is that doctors tell you don't worry about it your cholesterol is within the normal range at a landlord years ago and he could have lost a hundred pounds and still not been thin you know what i mean he was more than 150 pounds overweight um [Music] and i remember several times we talked about the vegan diet we talked about what was going on in my life and so on and um he said to me that he had no worries and he had no concerns about cholesterol at all because his doctor told him he was within the normal range guess what having a heart attack at 55 is normal having cognitive decline at 75 is normal having dementia what's called mixed dementia now technically you know dementia caused by the reduced and improper distribution of blood in your own brain sometimes resulting in a sudden calamitous event where you have tissue damage in the brain cell death that shows up on an mri scan sometimes not right having sub-optimal mental performance in your 70s is normal what the medical profession treats as normal is not optimal and people are lulled into a false sense of security by going to the doctor and being told again again don't worry about it you're within the normal range now here's the other problem what's normal is not what you and your body can tolerate because on that genetic spectrum of how well people cope with cholesterol on their diet as mentioned some people it's going to be a problem no matter what their ability to cope is limited or their body is even over producing regardless of their diet all the way over the opposite extreme people are incredibly gifted at coping with cholesterol for diet most of us are somewhere on the spectrum in between okay you don't know where you are on that spectrum and what's considered normal or what's considered average in the united states of america or in england in any of these meat and dairy intensive western cultures for you that could be deadly for you normal might not just be sub-optimal okay it might be a death sentence and you might not get a warning okay you might not get called into the hospital with a minor heart attack needing minor surgery okay you might not get to the hospital at all you might just drop dead i have nowhere to go with this i mean i get out here on the internet and ask people every day to do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do and what people say back to me is it's hard what do you what do you want to do about myanmar right now what do you want to do about the country formerly known as burma this is april 8th 2021. you want to bring democracy to burma that's hard what do you want to do about the border between the united states and mexico well i don't i don't know any youtubers who are even driving down to the border to have a look and frankly i'd like to call you out for both cowardice and laziness jacqueline glenn what are you doing with your life they're all these imbeciles who like to front on politics shoe on head come on you can you can take an uber most of these people are in the los angeles area you could get to the mexican border in no time at all you could be reporting on this you could start a charity you could ask for a gofundme you could set up a vegan taco stand giving free food to refugees for all your you could get involved you could at least learn from looking at the problem you could at least alleviate your own ignorance instead of morally grandstanding here whether it's about syria or it's about myanmar or it's about latin america you could you could do things you can you can do things to change the world to help the world and become a little bit less ignorant a little bit more enlightened yourself okay that's hard that's hard okay people want to tell me all the time that the challenge of going to the grocery store and looking at the boxes of ice cream bars and saying oh no i'm not going to buy the ice cream bar made out of cow milk i'm gonna buy the one made out of soy milk you know like people are telling me that is hard and that it's hard for them to do because fundamentally they don't give a [ __ ] about morality they don't give a damn about questions of right and wrong when it's on them to make the decision when it's on them to make the choice as opposed to complaining about donald trump complaining about joe biden complaining about the federal budget when it's actually all up to you to make this difference to make this change and then when we shift from this world of ethics to this world of pragmatics and health then i'm going to ask the same question say okay you think it's hard you think it's hard well could you do it if your life depended on it because ironically or not sometimes it's people who are distant and far removed from the internet sometimes there's people i know face to face okay i'm now 42 years old so i know people in their 50s and their 60s all right if you're in your 20s watching this yeah the people you went through high school with maybe these health problems aren't that visible yet just you wait just you wait as the decades go by all right suddenly it starts to shift from are you willing to the right thing is the right thing to do or are you willing to make this a priority are you willing to lift a finger and try when for you here and now it starts to become a question of life and death [Music] maybe we can we can practice yes