Hashimoto’s and high cholesterol. And the reason I am taking this question and doing it is because it’s something I see all the time. And it’s like people come in and they have high cholesterol and they have high LDLs, low density lipids. And they go, “Oh my God, my doctor told me I got to go on a statin drug, my cholesterol is too high.” That’s another whole thing as for what actually constitutes high cholesterol. You can look at some of our other videos on powerhealthtalk.com on that. But they’re like, “Man, I think I eat pretty good and I feel like I exercise,” and all that type of stuff.
So two things that can cause high cholesterol, which most doctors aren’t taking into consideration, one is actually insulin resistance. One is actually pre-diabetes. I won’t get into the physiology of it, but prediabetes causes insulin resistance and insulin resistance causes high cholesterol. It’s kind of like the basis of all the research for keto stuff. But thyroid, hypo-thyroid and 90… We’ll use Mayo Clinic’s numbers. In 85 to 95% of the people out there with hypo thyroid likely have Hashimoto’s. And Hashimoto’s is frequently called Hashimoto’s Hypothyroid Disease. So the hypo-thyroid aspect of it is what creates the condition. So basically the thyroid has receptor sites all over the body. And when you get hypo-thyroid, everything starts slowing down for two reasons. One, it affects the vagus nerve coming off of your brainstem. And your vagus nerve is what controls your stomach. It controls your gallbladder. It controls your pancreas. It helps to control… It controls the movement of your bowels. It’s the number one cause of constipation is when that guy’s not working. It controls your liver.
So everything slows down. Cholesterol is made and stored in the liver. And so what happens is when you get hypo-thyroidism, things start to slow down. The liver can’t clear as well as it should. And the next thing you know, you start making… High density lipids, they’re the good cholesterol. Low density are the bad cholesterol. And cholesterol is cholesterol. Okay, so high density lipids, the good guys, usually go down because those are guys that are going out to your arteries and bringing back the bad cholesterol. And the bad cholesterol is the bad cholesterol because it’s going into your arteries and staying there. And cholesterol is just cholesterol. When everything slows down, the low density lipids, the bad cholesterol starts not mobilizing as well as it should. When everything slows down, the overall cholesterol guys don’t get out of the out of liver the way that they should. And you start to get this picture of a high cholesterol and high low density lipids. And that’s the point in time when people start saying, “Oh, let’s give you a statin drug.” Or even in the alternative world, let’s give you something for that.
The actual way to handle that is usually to clear the liver. It’s usually to do a liver cleanse. And if those numbers go down, then you know that it was the liver that was causing it. But if you’re doing the functional medicine and you’re going to look for why is that liver having that problem, why is that cholesterol going up when nobody’s eating wrong, the person’s not eating wrong, they’re exercising, you look around, you see a thyroid or you see something that’s causing the vagus nerve problem, and you go, “Okay, it’s one of those two things. That’s what I’ve got to treat.” And one of those two things is hypo-thyroidism. So 80, 90% of the time when it’s hypo-thyroidism, it’s going to be Hashimoto. So yes, Hashimoto’s and high cholesterol, and although that wasn’t in the question, high/low density lipids. Frequently, in this practice, the vast majority of the time, I mean 90% of the time or more, it’s the thyroid that is causing the liver to slow down, that’s causing the high cholesterol numbers. Or it’s insulin resistance. Thyroid, insulin resistance. Think those two things the first time. The next time you see high cholesterol, and you’re thinking, “I’m doing pretty good, I’m eating pretty good. I’m exercising, I’m sleeping.” And if that’s you, think thyroid, think blood sugar.
