Cholesterol Versus Homocysteine
Has your doctor ever recommended a blood test to check your homocysteine level?
After you have read this article, I guarantee you will wonder why. Not many people have ever heard of it, yet it is responsible for 15% of all heart attacks and strokes in the world.
Wouldn’t it be worth to know more about this major killer, more so when you realize that you can correct it by simply taking vitamin B? The research on homocysteine was done by Dr. Kelmer Mc Cully, a promising pathologist and researcher, who graduated from the Harvard Medical School in the mid 1960’s.
Dr. Mc Cullly was in particular interested in studies that involved the connection of biochemistry with disease. He earned a strong reputation and became assistant professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School.
Dr Mc Cully discovered that children who had a genetic defect that kept them from breaking down an essential amino acid called methionine. These children showed a tremendous buildup of a by-product, called homocysteine.
Dr. Mc Cully looked at two special cases of two under eight years old boys, who died from a heart attack. When he examined the boys’ pathology slides, he discovered that the damage to the arteries was similar to that of an elderly man, who had severe hardening of the arteries.
This led Dr. Mc Cully to wonder whether mild to moderate elevations of homocysteine that were present over a lifetime could be a cause of heart attacks and strokes in the average patient. Homocysteine is an intermediate byproduct that we produce when our bodies breakdown the amino acid called methionine. It is found in large quantities in meat, eggs, milk, cheese, white flour, canned foods and highly processed foods.
Unlike cholesterol, which the body needs for the production of certain cell parts and hormones, homocysteine provides no health benefit. The higher the level of homocysteine, the greater the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Homocysteine is converted by our bodies into either cysteine or back to methionine again. These products are not harmful, however, the enzymes to break down homocysteine into cysteine, need folic acid, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12. If we are deficient in these nutrients, the homocysteine levels in our blood begin to rise.
Dr. Mc Cully’s theory was shut down and he lost his job at Harvard’s, because at that time the cholesterol- heart attack theory was gaining tremendous momentum and Dr Mc Cully’s hypothesis were a threat to its future.
The cholesterol theory achieved great victory and killed all other threatening theories.
Drug companies made their fortunes and everybody was convinced that heart attacks and strokes were associated with high blood cholesterol levels. Are you? If you have read my article about Nutritional Medicine, you should know better!
Anyway, the medical society and the pharmaceutical Companies did an excellent job selling this to the medical community and to the general public.