Cholesterol is a much debated topic in the medical community. Cardiologists and Big Pharma (big pharmaceutical companies) will tell you that lowering your cholesterol keeps your heart healthy. This is why cholesterol-lowering statin drugs are the leading drug category in terms of sales.

But Dr. Joseph Mercola warns: drastically lowering your cholesterol levels will increase your risk of dying!

Your body needs cholesterol in the same way that it needs air and water. Cholesterol is found in every cell of your body and is involved in important processes, including the production of bile acids, cell membranes, hormones, and vitamin D, Dr. Mercola explains.

Statins sell because of the fear that cholesterol increases your risk of suffering a heart attack. But not only is this treatment ineffective, it is also dangerous.

Lowering cholesterol does not address chronic inflammation--one of the root causes of heart disease and many other diseases. 

Inflammation is your body’s response to foreign threats. For example, if you suffer damage to your arteries, inflammation causes your blood vessels to constrict and your blood to thicken. The damage you sustain is patched by a protective scar known as plaque.

Your liver makes more cholesterol to replace the damaged cells during inflammation because your cells cannot form without cholesterol. The plaque, the thickening of your blood, and constricting of your blood vessels, is what increases your risk of high blood pressure and heart attacks, NOT cholesterol, Dr. Mercola points out.

There are no studies showing that cholesterol can damage blood vessels and cause plaque and heart attacks. In animals, cholesterol must be artificially increased to levels never observed in humans before it can damage an otherwise healthy blood vessel.

Statin side effects are also more dangerous than high cholesterol. Statins inhibit the production of cholesterol supposedly to help you have a healthier heart. But ironically, what Big Pharma doesn’t tell you is that these drugs deplete your body’s supply of CoQ10 (CoEnzyme Q10), which provides energy to your heart. 

Using statin drugs to lower cholesterol will not help you reduce your risk of heart disease. Read Dr. Mercola’s  latest cholesterol article to get more detailed information and learn the eight steps to naturally lower your cholesterol.

What do you usually have for breakfast?  Eggs, toast and orange juice sounds pretty good, no? If this is your idea of a healthy breakfast, you’d be shocked to learn that you’re actually serving your family some of the foods that you should be avoiding!

Dr. Joseph Mercola gives you this list of 5 common foods considered healthy but are actually harmful to your health. You be the judge.

# 1. Wheat Bread
You work to put “bread” on the table. But Dr. Mercola says bread on the table is not a good idea. Wheat and nearly all types of grains rapidly turn into sugar and cause a spike in your insulin levels. Insulin is the culprit behind flabby stomachs, double chins and rolls on arms and thighs. Excess weight and obesity contribute to diabetes, heart disease, and many other diseases.
Wheat is also often contaminated with mycotoxins and all forms of wheat are capable of causing health problems like Celiac disease or gluten intolerance, developmental delay in children, headaches, infertility, irritable bowel syndrome, miscarriages, and rheumatoid arthritis.

# 2. Pasteurized Dairy
Raw milk is one of the healthiest foods you can consume but pasteurization negates its health benefits. Calves fed with pasteurized milk die before maturity. Pasteurization destroys enzymes, depletes vitamin content (and completely destroys vitamin B6 and B12), denatures fragile milk proteins, kills beneficial bacteria, promotes pathogens, and is associated with allergies, arthritis, cancer, colic in infants, growth problems in children, heart disease, increased tooth decay, and osteoporosis.

# 3. Orange Juice
Dr. Mercola points out two little know facts about orange juice:

•    There is more vitamin C in a single orange than in a full glass of commercial orange juice.
•    Real, fresh orange juice only lasts a few days. It if last for weeks (or months), then it's an industrial product.

It’s healthier to eat a fresh orange rather than drink commercial orange juice. But if you have diabetes, are overweight, or suffer from high blood pressure, you should avoid all types of fruits and fruit juices. Fruit juice contains about eight full teaspoons of sugar per eight-ounce glass in the form of fructose, which is as dangerous as regular table sugar and also cause a major spike in your insulin levels.

# 4. Soy
Soy has long been touted as a "near perfect food." But Dr. Mercola warns that exclusively giving babies soy infant formula is like giving them five birth control pills! The phytoestrogens in soy mimic the effects of estrogen and were found to have adverse effects on human tissues. Drinking just two glasses of soy milk daily for a month can alter a woman’s menstrual cycle.
Numerous studies also reveal that soy products may:

•    Cause severe, potentially fatal food allergies
•    Contribute to thyroid disorders, especially in women
•    Increase the risk of breast cancer in women, brain damage in both men and women, and abnormalities in babies
•    Promote kidney stones
•    Weaken the immune system

# 5. Vegetable Oil
Polyunsaturated vegetable oils like corn oil, safflower oil and canola are the worst oils you can eat and use for cooking, as these are rich in unhealthy omega-6 fats. Polyunsaturated oils also tend to become easily oxidized or rancid when exposed to heat from cooking, which results in the formation of trans fat and damaging free radicals.

Angiogenesis is the natural process your body uses to build new capillaries -- the smallest blood vessels -- from existing capillaries. Blood vessels are normally formed while you're still in the womb, but there are certain points in adulthood when you grow new blood vessels, Dr. Joseph Mercola explains.

For example, women create new blood vessels each month to form uterus linings. In pregnancy, new blood vessels also form the placenta, which connects and delivers nourishment to the fetus.

Your cardiovascular system houses a network of some 19 billion capillaries. Studies show that the growth of these blood vessels can greatly influence your health.

Dr.  William Li, president and medical director of The Angiogenesis Foundation, says the excessive or insufficient growth of capillaries is a common denominator in many debilitating conditions like age-related blindness, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetic ulcers, stroke, and many others. 

Your body can regulate the number of blood vessels it needs at any given time using an elaborate system of stimulators and inhibitors. Defects in this system can lead to certain diseases, Dr. Li explains.

When your body cannot grow enough new blood vessels, it can lead to problems such as erectile dysfunction, heart disease, the inability to heal chronic wounds, neuropathy, and stroke.

On the other hand, when your body cannot “prune back” extra blood vessels, this promotes arthritis, blindness, cancer, endometriosis, and multiple sclerosis.

 
Cancer and Capillaries

Like other cells in your body, cancer cells cannot survive without the nutrients and oxygen provided by capillaries.

Many people carry cancer cell clusters in their bodies, but not all of them actually develop cancer. Dr. Li believes that as long as your body has the ability to properly balance angiogenesis, blood vessels will not be formed to feed these microscopic tumors. It is only when cancer cells get their own blood supply that they turn deadly.


Anti-angiogenesis therapy is the method of cutting off blood supply to cancer cells. Unlike healthy vessels, tumor vessels are abnormal and poorly constructed and because of that, they're highly vulnerable to treatments that target them, Dr. Li explains.

Obesity is also dependent on angiogenesis because like tumor cells, fat cells grow when capillaries grow.

Dr. Li points out that there are about a dozen anti-angiogenesis cancer drugs that have significantly increased the survival rates of patients. But what is more exciting and promising about angiogenic research is not just making better drugs to fight cancer; it’s in preventing cancer from occurring in the first place, Dr. Mercola points out.

There are a large number of fruits, herbs and vegetables that are natural angiogenesis inhibitors. According to Dr. Li, anti-angiogenesis foods include:

•    Artichokes
•    Berries – blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries
•    Cherries
•    Garlic
•    Green tea
•    Kale
•    Maitake mushrooms
•    Parsley
•    Red Grapes

Different foods have different levels of potent anti-angiogenic compounds. But it is interesting to note that when researchers evaluated a combination of two of the least potent teas, they found that the combination tea had greater potency than any given tea by itself. This means that there’s synergy.

Synergy is what makes fresh, whole foods nutritious. Because the sum is greater than the individual parts, Dr. Mercola believes that it's far more important to focus on eating a diet of whole, organic foods, than putting much attention on individual nutrients.

Foods will soon be scored according to their anti-angiogenetic, cancer-preventive properties. But why wait for this rating system when you’re already aware that optimal health hinges on a healthy diet based on a wide variety of whole, organic foods. In the same way that a single food contains synergistic compounds, and a combination of foods can work together synergistically, a healthy diet will help you prevent cancer and other diseases in more ways than one.