William Davis, MD by Wheat Belly

Author:Wheat Belly
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Rodale Inc.
Published: 2011-11-16T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

MY PARTICLES ARE BIGGER THAN YOURS: WHEAT AND HEART DISEASE

IN BIOLOGY, SIZE is everything.

Filter-feeding shrimp, measuring just a couple of inches in length, feast on microscopic algae and plankton suspended in ocean water. Larger predatory fish and birds, in turn, consume the shrimp.

In the plant world, the tallest plants, such as 200-foot kapok trees of the tropical forest, obtain advantage with height, reaching high above the jungle canopy for sunlight required for photosynthesis, casting shadows on struggling trees and plants below.

And so it goes, all the way from carnivorous predator to herbivorous prey. This simple principle predates humans, precedes the first primate who walked the earth, and dates back over a billion years since multicellular organisms gained evolutionary advantage over single-celled organisms, clawing their way through the primordial seas. In countless situations in nature, bigger is better.

The Law of Big in the ocean and plant worlds also applies within the microcosm of the human body. In the human bloodstream, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles, what most of the world wrongly recognizes as “LDL cholesterol,” follow the same size rules as shrimp and plankton.

Large LDL particles are, as their name suggests, relatively large. Small LDL particles are—you guessed it—small. Within the human body, large LDL particles provide a survival advantage to the host human. We’re talking about size differences on a nanometer (nm) level, a level of a billionth of a meter. Large LDL particles are 25.5 nm in diameter or larger, while small LDL particles are less than 25.5 nm in diameter. (This means LDL particles, big and small, are thousands of times smaller than a red blood cell but larger than a cholesterol molecule. Around ten thousand LDL particles would fit within the period at the end of this sentence.)

For LDL particles, size of course does not make the difference between eating or being eaten. It determines whether LDL particles will accumulate in the walls of arteries, such as those of your heart (coronary arteries) or neck and brain (carotid and cerebral arteries)—or not. In short, LDL size determines to a large degree whether you will have a heart attack or stroke at age fifty-seven or whether you’ll continue to pull the handle on casino slot machines at age eighty-seven.

Small LDL particles are, in fact, an exceptionally common cause of heart disease, showing up as heart attacks, angioplasty, stents, bypass, and many other manifestations of atherosclerotic coronary disease.1 In my personal experience with thousands of patients with heart disease, nearly 90 percent express the small LDL pattern to at least a moderate, if not severe, degree.

The drug industry has found it convenient and profitable to classify this phenomenon in the much-easier-to-explain category of “high cholesterol.” But cholesterol has little to do with the disease of atherosclerosis; cholesterol is a convenience of measurement, a remnant of a time when it was not possible to characterize and measure the various lipoproteins (i.e., lipid-carrying proteins) in the bloodstream that cause injury, atherosclerotic plaque accumulation, and, eventually, heart attack and stroke.

Muffins Make You Small

“Drink me.

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