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Cholesterol is good for sex, says heart doc

This story was taken from

 http://news.inq7.net/nation/index.php?index=1&story_id=38072

First posted 04:40am (Mla time) May 25, 2005 By Lynett A. Villariba Inquirer

TAKE it from the heart doctor: If you want a healthy sex life, you need cholesterol.

Lowering cholesterol levels beyond the normal also lowers the libido, cardiologist Conrado Dayrit warned. If that happens, he told his audience at a recent symposium in Manila, "it would make us function like vegetables, unable to rise to the occasion."

Dayrit, a former president of the Philippine Heart Association and the World Health Organization's expert on cardiovascular disease, rose to the defence of cholesterol against the anti-saturated fat hysteria.

Like saturated fats, cholesterol stands unfairly accused, he said. Both are antioxidants and free-radical scavengers that protect body cells from cancer.

Cholesterol is also responsible for that loving feeling because it unleashes sex hormones like androgen, testosterone, estrogen and progesterone. It is also important to the body for adrenalin and cell building. If cholesterol fuels the brain receptors that release natural "feel good" chemicals, then someone displaying aggressive behaviour and a tendency to depression may be suffering from lack of cholesterol, said Dayrit, also a US-trained pharmacologist.

Only after oxidation

Most of all, cholesterol is not the artery-clogging culprit that has made heart disease the No. 1 cause of death among Filipinos, he said. Citing new findings in the study of heart disease, Dayrit said that more than dietary cholesterol, it was the inflammatory process, microbial infection and free-radical injury to blood vessels that were contributing to the killer ailment. But don't go stuffing yourself with fat-laden lechon (roast pig) just yet.

"When cholesterol gets oxidized by rancid food oils in the body, it becomes artery-clogging," Dayrit said. Naturopath and nutritionist Dr. Bruce Fife -- who, along with scientists Vermen Verallo-Rowell and Fabian Dayrit, also spoke at the symposium -- said what mattered was the ratio of total blood cholesterol to good cholesterol carried by the high density lipoprotein (HDL) for elimination. A high total blood cholesterol level indicates the liver's deployment of the repair substance in large amounts when arteries are irritated or weak, said Fife, who is best known for his book "Coconut Oil Miracles." But it does not reflect the state of your heart's health unless balanced by an elevated HDL cholesterol level protective of the heart, he said. Bicolano model Dayrit belied the claim that all saturated fats increased blood cholesterol levels that caused heart disease and atherosclerosis. He cited a 1974 study that found Bicolanos -- whose diet is rich in saturated coconut oil -- to have a below-normal serum cholesterol level.

"If it is true that coconut oil causes heart disease, then coconut-consuming Filipinos, Indonesians, Sri Lankans and Polynesians should be dying of heart disease right and left. But they are not. In fact, they have the lowest prevalence of coronary disease," he said.

According to Dayrit, a 20-year study among Polynesian Maoris thriving on high amounts of unadulterated coconut showed an absence of heart disease or hypertension. A similar study of Sri Lankans whose diet is also rich in coconut, but in a less pure state, showed a remarkably low incidence of heart disease. In another study covering 12 countries to determine the relationship between heart disease mortality and fat calories consumed, the Philippines -- the only coconut oil consumer -- emerged with the lowest mortality rate.

One fat lie

Dayrit said a listing from the Department of Health showed that even as heart disease was No. 1, Filipinos who succumbed to heart attacks comprised only about 16 percent of all deaths. In comparison, he said, in 1950, heart disease was found to cause half of the deaths (51 percent) in the United States. Since then and up to the end of the century, Americans had blamed the high heart mortality rates on saturated coconut oil and cholesterol. But if that were true, he said, why were Bicolanos -- who, he pointed out, were getting 62.4 percent of their fat calories from saturated coconut oil -- found to have the lowest heart and brain death rates among five regional groups in Luzon?

Dayrit, one-time research committee chair of the Asia-Pacific Society of Cardiology, pointed out that there has been no study demonstrating high blood cholesterol as causing heart disease. It's all one (saturated) fat lie.

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