The Best Medication for Lowering Your Cholesterol with Evan H. Hirsch, MD - #149

The Best Medication for Lowering Your Cholesterol with Evan H. Hirsch, MD - #149

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Hey there, welcome back to the EnergyMD podcast. I'm Evan Hirsch and we help you resolve your chronic fatigue, whether it's from chronic fatigue syndrome or long COVID naturally so that you can get back to living your best life. So really excited because today I'm going to be talking about the best medication for lowering your cholesterol. So if you've gone to your primary care physician,

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or cardiologist and you've been told that your cholesterol is high, you may have gotten a few bits of advice. One is to modify your lifestyle and diet. So that means exercising more and eating better. Oftentimes, this can be different recommendations might range from getting rid of all of the grains that you're consuming to getting rid of all the meat that you're consuming. There's actually research on both of those that a Mediterranean diet without a lot of meat, but a lot of vegetables and some grains.

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can be very helpful for folks. And then there's research to also suggest that going grain-free and consuming grass-fed meat products with lots of vegetables can also be very helpful. So it might be a little bit confusing for you. And then you might've gotten recommendations for exercise. And then you might've gotten recommendations for medications. So the main medication that's currently being used in conventional medicine right now are statin medications. So this could be Simvastatin or

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Lipitor or some of these others that you might have heard of. So those medications are HMG CoA reductase inhibitors. They can be helpful, but they are not without their side effects. So they do have potential side effects. They can pull CoQ10, which is a major component of the mitochondria, out of the cells in the muscles and consequently people can get muscle cramps. There are also some other side effects potentially of diabetes and blood sugar dysregulation.

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So what is the medication that we can use that doesn't have these side effects? Well, it turns out that this medication is thyroid. So there is a very strong association and research supports this, that increasing thyroid function in the body will significantly decrease cholesterol and especially LDL cholesterol. And this has to do with the fact that thyroid plays a significant role in your metabolism.

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and it brings the, decreases the levels of the LDL in the process. Thyroid also has a significant effect on blood sugars and can regulate your blood sugars properly and is related to the adrenals and the mitochondria, which I call the big three, so that you can really optimize the thyroid by optimizing your adrenal gland function, which is really considered the sentinel gland. It's one of the most important glands in the body that helps to regulate hormones.

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The adrenal gland produces cortisol, which is responsible for our get up and go in the morning, as well as managing insulin and consequently blood sugars. And then also helps with inflammation. So that's the adrenal gland. The mitochondria produces about 70 to 90% of the energy that we have. Um, and then it also causes hormones to be absorbed better into the body. So consequently that combination of the adrenals, which make the thyroid work better.

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mitochondria, which helps with the absorption of the thyroid can really help improve thyroid function. And then you add in the thyroid that you're taking. And typically you might get prescribed levothyroxine, which is T4. There are two main thyroid hormones, T4 and T3. And everybody really requires a bit of a different combination. You know, there's about 4.6%

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of individuals in the United States above the age of 12 that have Hashimoto's or low thyroid or hypothyroidism. So it's important to note that there are a lot of people who are suffering with this condition and it may be playing a role. So if you have elevated cholesterol and you're like, you know, I'm doing everything right. I'm exercising, I'm eating right. Why is this happening? It could be that your thyroid is off. So when you get the testing done, you're going to want to get.

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three tests that I recommend. One is TSH, the thyroid stimulating hormone. Ideally, this number's gonna be between.5 and 1.5. If it's above 1.5, it indicates that the brain is yelling at the thyroid to make more thyroid. It's inversely proportional to the level of thyroid in the body. So TSH is high, it means your levels of thyroid are low. And then free T4, we want that number to be above 1.2.

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And then free T3, we want that number to be above 3.0. So I give you these numbers, but it's important to remember that all laboratory tests are imperfect. So thyroid is very much dependent on the adrenals, as we previously mentioned. And so if you have chronic stress, whether it's mental, emotional, physical, like the toxic five that we talk about in our program, and I'll talk about more in a little bit.

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your adrenals are going to be compromised in terms of the amount of cortisol that they produce and consequently the thyroid is not going to be functioning optimally. Oftentimes the thyroid is going to be falsely elevated to compensate for low adrenals. If you are menopausal or perimenopausal this will also be the case because the ovaries are not producing the estrogen and progesterone that they need as well and the thyroid needs to compensate for that. So thyroid may become

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falsely elevated. So you may still have low thyroid symptoms. So you do have to take that into context, but if your thyroid levels are low, oftentimes you'll get a prescription for levothyroxine, the T4, and you'll take it. And then six to eight weeks later, your practitioner will retest and see what your levels are like and determine what next steps are. So what I prefer to do, I am an MD,

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was board certified in family medicine and integrated medicine, but then went online so that I could help people across state lines. And so I now operate as a coach. So I don't prescribe anymore, but what I do use thyroid glandulars, as well as herbs and vitamins that help improve the thyroid function. These are basically enzymes and things that help with the conversion of T four to T three, which is a very important part of this process, as well as optimizing the overall thyroid function.

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And then when I use a glandular, which is basically ground up thyroid gland, typically from New Zealand bovine or New Zealand cows, I have people ramp up. I do what's called a subjective ramp up. These glandulars are usually a combination of T4 and T3, usually heavier on the T3, oftentimes similar to something like an Armour thyroid or an NP thyroid that have that combination. And we start off with a very little amount.

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and we ramp up, we increase by a small amount, whether it's a capsule, half a capsule, whatever the individual needs, every two weeks until we get them to their ideal thyroid dose. And we do this because it saves a lot of time, energy and money. You don't have to basically take a year's worth of laboratory tests every two months in order to determine what your optimal dose is. Because when you get too much thyroid in your body, your body lets you know you have certain symptoms.

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And you know, maybe it's heart palpitations or insomnia or headaches, body pain, um, diarrhea, all of these things can happen when you take too much thyroid. So if you experience that, then you need to back off and that's going to be your ideal dose. Now, I definitely don't recommend that you do this on your own, work with somebody who is skilled in this, who understands it, because you can, um, by taking too much thyroid, you can cause all those symptoms that I mentioned.

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You can cause a rapid heart rate as well. You can also cause osteoporosis. So you definitely want to be under the guidance of a practitioner who knows what they're doing. But I just wanted to give you that as an example of how really you can optimize your thyroid. Now it does have to be taken into context with the adrenals and the mitochondria. And I do recommend doing a, uh, supporting the adrenals first, then the mitochondria and then the thyroid. And then the sex hormones after that.

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So the hormones really are a three-legged stool, the adrenals, the thyroid, and the sex hormones, and they all have to be present and accounted for in order for things to function optimally. So that brings us to the kind of understanding more about the thyroid. But what is going on underneath the thyroid? Why do people end up with thyroid conditions? Well, this is the same reason why people get chronic fatigue syndrome and long COVID.

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It's because of the toxic five, the toxic five or a combination of heavy metals, chemicals, molds, infections and nervous system dysfunction that accumulates in the body over time. Okay. When you have these things in your body and by heavy metals, it could be because you have mercury fillings in your mouth. These are silver fillings. It could be because you've had exposure to lead paint or lead gasoline. It could be, you know, from smoking cigarettes,

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or having secondhand smoke and your exposure to cadmium, you know, with chemicals, we're talking about pesticides and herbicides and insecticides and plastics bromine from the new car smell. There's a number of things. And then half of the buildings in the world have water damage. Most of those have molds in them. So that can be an exposure. And then nervous system dysfunction can come from really significant trauma and abuse. It can come from, from more mild trauma.

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rejection from a peer group, anything that has shown you that the world or convinced you in some way that the world is not a safe place to be that can also change your nervous system. And then these other, these toxins, the toxic four of the five can actually cause nervous system dysfunction as well. So those are all things that end up accumulating in your body over time and then can cause autoimmunity. 90% of all people who have low thyroid have Hashimoto's or low high

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autoimmune hypothyroidism. So basically this is where the immune system is trying to get rid of these toxins and in the process ends up attacking the thyroid. And there's a number of different mechanisms for that, but I'm not gonna go into that today. But if you really wanna resolve your thyroid issue, you can go ahead and you can remove the toxic five. And oftentimes, depending on where the toxic five are in the body, if they're affecting the mitochondria,

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then you're going to have fatigue since the mitochondria makes 70 to 90% of our energy. If you have it in the muscles, you're going to have inflammation in the muscles and potentially fibromyalgia. If you have some infections in the bottom of the feet, you can be diagnosed with plantar fasciitis. There's certain infections like Bartonella and some other infections that can cause that. So really important to kind of always think of what is the why under the why.

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So what is the reason, you know, why is somebody's cholesterol elevated? Well, it could be because of lifestyle, diet, exercise, eating habits, or it could be because they have low thyroid. So let's optimize the thyroid. And then let's figure out why the thyroid is low. Because inevitably if the thyroid is low, there are other issues that we want to address. And there's definitely, research shows that there is a relationship between low thyroid and having a heart attack or stroke.

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So really important to get this right to optimize your thyroid so that you can really improve your longevity and decrease your chance of getting a number of these illnesses the longer that you live. So hopefully this was helpful for you today. Thanks so much for paying attention and I'll see you in the next video. So if you have chronic fatigue, whether it's from long covid or chronic fatigue syndrome.

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Go ahead and click the link below to watch my latest master class, where I go deep into our four step process that has helped thousands of others resolve their symptoms naturally. After you watch that video, if you're interested in seeing if we're a good fit to work together, you can then get on a free call with me. All right. Thanks so much. I'll see you over there.