When I was seven years old, my mother had her first heart attack. It was determined that she had genetically elevated cholesterol. She was put on a statin, and it brought her number into range.
In fifth grade they tested me, because they suspected the same genetic piece. My cholesterol came back at 562 — about 350 points too high. I started on a statin as a child. I was told I wouldn’t be able to have children, that I couldn’t eat grapefruit, and that I’d need my liver enzymes checked several times a year for the rest of my life.
When I was twenty-three, my mother died of her second heart attack. Her cholesterol was perfectly in range.
That was when I first understood that something was wrong with western medicine. The number had been corrected. She died anyway.
Over the following year I did my own research and worked with a naturopath to get off the statin I had been on for more than a decade — a drug that had left me in severe musculoskeletal pain, permanently sore, as though I needed a massage that never helped.
Even then, nobody reached the root of it. The naturopath I worked with at the time didn’t fully understand the link between metabolic dysfunction and elevated cholesterol either. I learned about natural ways to lower cholesterol, but the cause was still being written off as “genetics.” No one ever had the blood sugar conversation with me. It was always the same narrative: don’t eat a diet high in saturated fat.
Here is what I know now. Elevated cholesterol is the result of poor blood sugar handling that leads to metabolic dysfunction. And because the lab ranges for A1C, glucose and insulin only reflect a disease state — pre-diabetic, diabetic — insulin resistance, which is what is actually happening on the way there, never gets properly discussed. Clients are still shocked when I show them the full picture.
A drug that gets a number down on your labs does not mean you are healthy.
My mother did need to lower her cholesterol. She also needed a great deal that no one offered her: