How low-fat diets can cause cardiovascular disease and strokes
The avoidance of healthy fats and cholesterol in low-fat diets leads people to eat more processed carbohydrates, chronically raising blood sugar levels and creating an inflammatory environment that, over years, leads to an unhealthy build up of plaque in blood vessels causing heart attacks and strokes.
But fats are bad and grains are good, aren't they?
During the past few decades, reducing fat intake has been the main focus of national dietary recommendations. In the public’s mind, the word dietary fat is synonymous with obesity and heart disease, whereas the terms low‐fat and fat‐free have are synonymous with heart health.
But eating low fat means eating more grains as there are no other food options. In response to the low‐fat campaign, the food industry has produced commercial products labelled as low‐fat or fat‐free, but to add flavour they have added high amounts of refined carbohydrates and sugar instead, not to mention chemical additives.
Refined carbohydrates and insulin problems
Processed carbohydrates such as breakfast cereals, bread, chips, crackers, pastas and anything that contains any kind of sugar get absorbed almost fully and quickly by your body, putting excessive amounts of glucose into your bloodstream. Yet your body is not physiologically designed to handle this. In response, it puts out the hormone insulin to bring down blood sugar levels by getting glucose out of your blood and into your cells. The problem with constantly eating refined carbohydrates is that your insulin levels become permanently high, always trying to push glucose into your cells. This is called hyper-insulinemia.
But over time your cells become overloaded and eventually refuse to receive any more insulin. This is called insulin resistance. Yet all the body can do is produce more insulin to try and ram the glucose into those cells.
By now insulin levels in your body are dangerously high. In response, your body stores the excess glucose as fat. This leads to obesity, specifically the kind where people are unable to lose weight because high insulin—the master fat-storage hormone—ensures that most food gets stored as fat. People with permanently high insulin levels therefore find it impossible to lose weight. This is called metabolic syndrome.
Refined carbohydrates and insulin in heart health
Returning to cardiovascular health, hyper-insulinemia also creates a pro-inflammatory environment in your body, leading to atherosclerosis or plaquing of the veins and its deadly consequences of heart attacks and strokes. High insulin does this by blocking your PG1 pathway for prostaglandin anti‐inflammatory production, altering your body’s biochemistry in such a way that inflammation is encouraged and cannot be stopped.
Your blood vessels—that is arteries, veins and capillaries as well as the inside walls of our heart—are covered with a thin layer of cells called endothelium, an endocrine (or messaging) organ that separates the flowing blood from the rest of your body. Endothelium roles including controlling blood pressure, maintaining homeostasis (balance), regulating the immune response and communicating with local cells via the hormones it produces.
Endothelium can easily be injured, for example by personal care and cleaning products, prescription and over-the-counter drugs, smoking, synthetic chemicals, pollution, pesticides, chlorine, fluoride and nitrates, food chemicals, infectious microbes, nutritional deficiencies in vitamins, minerals, amino acids, essential fatty acids and other components, lack of sun exposure, electromagnetic pollution, unhealthy fats such as cooking oils and transfats, radiation, excessive stress and a sedentary lifestyle. In other words, an unhealthy modern life lived without consciousness damages your endothelium.
The normal way your body responds to injury is through inflammation leading to repair. This is a healthy partnership. But in the case of atherosclerosis, this process goes wrong. Due to chronic, festering inflammation caused by high insulin levels, the lesions in the endothelium wall never heal and unstable plaque (made of unsaturated fats from vegetable and cooking oils that are crumbly in nature) builds up on the inside walls of blood cells. This plaque can obstruct an artery or break off causing a blockage, leading to heart attacks and strokes.
During the inflammation and repair of any tissues, including in the arterial wall, millions of new cells are born, each of which requires plenty of cholesterol, phospholipids, saturated fats and other fats for its membranes, structure and function. Actually, all of your membranes, and most of your body, is made out of fat and cholesterol. The problem is that the inflammation and repair processes can compete for cholesterol and fat if insufficient amounts are available. If inflammation wins, atherosclerotic plaque develops.
But glucose does further damage. Excess molecules in the bloodstream can attach themselves to proteins, making them sticky. These are called AGES—Advanced Glycosylated End products. AGEs stick to the walls of the blood vessels, damaging them and starting the atherosclerotic process. They also block small arteries and capillaries accumulating as destructive amyloid.
Refined carbs and magnesium in heart health
As processed carbohydrates overload your body with glucose, they strip it of whatever magnesium your body has, causing chronic magnesium deficiency. Magnesium is involved in 300 different metabolic reactions in the body and we cannot live without it. Every cell, tissue and organ in the body needs magnesium every second of your life. To metabolise one molecule of glucose we need at least 28 grams of magnesium.
The flood of glucose into the body leaves it severely deficient of magnesium, causing muscle spasms, which leads to spasms in our heart and brain arteries causing arrhythmia, angina pectoris, cardiac death and strokes.
Conclusion
Low fat diets and the avoidance of healthy fats and cholesterol lead you to eat more processed carbohydrates, raising your blood sugar levels chronically. This excess of glucose causes blood sugar disease, creating an inflammatory environment that compromises the natural healing process of your blood vessels injured by an onslaught of toxins and stress. Over years, unhealthy atherosclerosis plaque builds, eventually rupturing and causing heart attacks and strokes. In addition, the magnesium stripped from the body by eating glucose contributes to spasming, which also causes heart problems, heart attacks and strokes.
Insulin resistance is probably the single most important dietary factor there is, yet controlling insulin levels is often ignored, even in many natural dietary approaches.
What should you eat?
Replace refined carbohydrates with complex ones. This means plenty of vegetables and some whole grains and legumes, preferably pre-soaked. Add well-sourced proteins and don’t be afraid of enjoying good fats. Our bodies are designed to live primarily off fats and then proteins.