Why might healthy lifestyle choices wipe out 90% of our risk for having a heart attack, while drugs may only reduce risk by 20% to 30%?
On the standard American diet, atherosclerosis—hardening of the arteries, the number one killer of men and women—has been found to start in our teens. Investigators collected about 3,000 sets of coronary arteries and aortas (the aorta is the main artery in the body) from victims of accidents, homicides, and suicides who were 15 to 34 years old and found that the fatty streaks in arteries can begin forming in our teens, which turn into atherosclerotic plaques in our 20s that get worse in our 30s and can then become deadly. In the heart, atherosclerosis can cause a heart attack. In the brain, it can cause a stroke. See the progression below and at 0:35 in my video Can Cholesterol Get Too Low?.
How common is this? All of the teens they looked at—100% of them—already had fatty streaks building up inside their arteries. By their early 30s, most already had those streaks blossoming into atherosclerotic plaques that bulged into their arteries. From ages 15 through 19, their aortas had fatty streaks building up throughout them, but no plaques yet, on average, as seen below and at 1:15 in my video.
The plaques started appearing in their abdominal aorta in their early 20s and worsened by their late 20s, by which time fatty streaks had infiltrated throughout. By their early 30s, their arteries were in bad shape, as seen below and at 1:25 in my video.
But that’s just the abdominal aorta, the main artery running through the torso that splits off into our legs. What about the coronary arteries that feed the heart?
Researchers found the same pattern: fatty streaks in teens, early signs of plaque in early 20s that progress with age, and by the early 30s, most people already had plaques in their coronary arteries, as seen below and at 1:47 in my video.
Atherosclerosis starts as early as adolescence.
That’s why we shouldn’t wait until heart disease becomes symptomatic to treat it. If it starts in our youth, we should start treating it when we’re youths. If you knew you had a cancerous tumor, you wouldn’t want to wait until it grew to a certain size to treat it. If you had diabetes, you wouldn’t want to wait until you started going blind before you did something about it. So, how do you treat atherosclerosis? You lower LDL cholesterol through a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol—a diet that’s low in eggs, meat, dairy, and junk.
If we want to stop this epidemic, we have to “alter our lifestyle accordingly, beginning in infancy or early childhood. Is such a radical proposal totally impractical?” (Eating more healthfully? Radical?!) It would take serious dedication to change our behavior, but atherosclerosis is our number one cause of death. In the case of cigarettes, we did pretty well, slashing smoking rates and dropping lung cancer rates. And, yes, healthy eating is safe. According to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the largest and oldest association of nutrition professionals in the world, even strictly plant-based diets are appropriate for all stages of life, starting from pregnancy. (NutritionFacts.org is among the websites recommended by the Academy for more information.)
The title of an important study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology declares: “Curing Atherosclerosis Should Be the Next Major Cardiovascular Prevention Goal.” What evidence do we have that a lifelong suppression of LDL will do it? There is a genetic mutation of a gene called PCSK9 that about 1 in 50 African Americans are lucky to be born with because it gives them about a 40% lower LDL cholesterol level their whole lives. Indeed, they were found to have dramatically lower rates of coronary heart disease—an 88% drop in risk compared to those without the genetic mutation, despite otherwise terrible cardiovascular risk factors on average. Most had high blood pressure and were overweight, almost a third smoked, and nearly 20% had diabetes, but that highlights how a lifelong history of low LDL cholesterol levels can substantially reduce the risk of coronary heart disease, even when there are multiple risk factors.
This near-90% drop in events like heart attacks or sudden death occurred at an average LDL level of 100 mg/dL, compared to 138 mg/dL in those without the genetic mutation. This means LDL can drop below even 100 mg/dL. Why does a drop in LDL cholesterol by about 40 mg/dL from a lucky genetic mutation lower the risk of coronary heart disease by nearly 90%, while the same reduction with statin drugs lowers it by only about 20%? The most probable explanation? Duration. When it comes to lowering LDL cholesterol, it’s not only about how low it is, but how long it’s been low.
That’s why healthy lifestyle choices may wipe out about 90% of our risk for having a heart attack, while drugs may reduce it by only 20% to 30%. If you’re getting treated with drugs later in life, you may have to get your LDL under 70 mg/dL to halt the progression of coronary atherosclerosis. But if we start making healthier choices earlier, it may be enough to lower LDL cholesterol just to 100 mg/dL, which should be achievable for most of us. That’s consistent with country-by-country data that suggested death from heart disease would bottom out at a population average of about 100 mg/dL, as seen below and at 5:21 in my video.
But that’s only if you can keep your LDL cholesterol down your whole life.
If you’re relying on medication later in life to halt disease progression, you may need to get your LDL below 70 mg/dL, and if you’re trying to use drugs to reverse a lifetime of bad food choices, you may not get to zero coronary heart disease events until your LDL drops to about 55 mg/dL. If your heart disease is so bad that you’ve already had a heart attack but you’re trying not to die from another one, ideally, you might want to push your LDL down to about 30 mg/dL. Once you get that low, not only would you likely prevent any new atherosclerotic plaques, but you’d also help stabilize the plaques you already have so they’re less likely to burst open and kill you.
Is it even safe to have cholesterol levels that low, though? In other words, can LDL cholesterol ever be too low? We’ll find out next.
Doctor’s Note
Didn’t know atherosclerosis could start at such a young age? See Heart Disease Starts in Childhood.
For more on drugs versus lifestyle, check out my video The Actual Benefit of Diet vs. Drugs.
Want to learn more about so-called primordial prevention? See When Low Risk Means High Risk.
Does Cholesterol Size Matter? Watch the video to find out.
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