Many people are very concerned about their cholesterol levels because their doctors have convinced them that cholesterol causes heart attacks and strokes. Most of this information has come from the 1940’s and since then much research has been done where we can flesh out this information even more. Look at the other video I made on Cholesterol called “The Great Cholesterol Myth” where you can be brought up to date with all this research which shows some flaws in this old line of thinking.
Today I will share with you how we view the issue within the lens of Ayurvedic medicine.
First and foremost we look at digestion, because if you are not digesting the food well and breaking it down into very small particles for absorption into the bloodstream, then some residues of food can be left behind. This residue of partially digested food is known as “ama” in Ayurveda. It is sticky and clogging and considered cold.
The other compound you can produce from incomplete digestion is known as “ama visha.” The word visha means poison and it is produced in two ways within the digestive tract. First, either the ama can rot and ferment and produce ama visha, and second, when the liver is hot and angry from holding onto too many toxins, it can process the food incorrectly and turn it immediately into ama visha. The western way of saying this is that the liver mistakenly oxidizes the food when it is toxic and hot and angry, which it is in the vast majority of the population.
Both ama and ama visha can contribute to heart attacks and strokes.
Ama can not only clog the original channel or the digestive tract, but all other channels in the body can clog once ama is formed. And the arteries, veins and capillaries are considered channels (which carry blood). In fact the whole physiology is made up of a huge network of thousands of macro and micro-channels, carrying bodily fluids such as blood, urine, lymphatic fluids, tears, and sweat.
Ama visha contributes to heart attacks and strokes due to its inflammatory nature, injuring the walls of the arteries as the blood mixed in with hot ama visha courses through, damaging and weakening the inner lining of the arteries.
So the first thing we look at in Ayurveda is the health of the gut microbiome, the liver, the gall bladder and the pancreas, in addition to other Ayurvedic factors which have to do with the nervous system and the downward flow of food through the gut. We also give lots of guidelines which you should follow while you are eating the food.
The second thing we look at in Ayurveda is the channels themselves. There are foods which contain cholesterol, such as red meats like beef, pork, ham, bacon, sausage, duck which contain cholesterol and are clogging in nature. Also aged hard cheeses and cold dairy such as ice cream, frozen yogurt and cold milk are all channel-clogging. This is why we recommend A2, non-homogenized milk from grass-fed cows which has been boiled.
Then there are foods which contain no cholesterol which can also clog channels such as arteries. These foods are: unfermented soy such as tofu, edamame, and soy milk, nut butters such as peanut butter, almond butter, sunflower seed butter and tahini. (As a side note: you can water down the tahini by adding lime juice, a little water, ground cumin, a chopped green chili and chopped fresh cilantro, all of which thins it out and takes away its channel-clogging tendency).
Other vegetarian sources of channel-clogging foods are brown rice, winter squashes such as butternut squash, acorn squash and pumpkin, chia seeds, pumpkin seeds and hemp seeds, mushrooms, bananas, chocolate, cacao and too many large beans.
Also avoid processed oils, vegetable oils and seed oils – when you heat them they form nasty compounds which can clog our arteries. The reason for this is that these oils contain unsaturated fats which have double bonds that are chemically reactive. When the oil is heated the oxygen in the air reacts with these double bonds in a process called oxidation.
Some of the oxidized fat molecules join together, forming long chains or networks. This is called polymerization. These polymers become thick, sticky and varnish-like. They are what form the hard brown coating on frying pans, deep fryers and baking sheets that can be difficult to remove.
Keep this in mind as we now talk about a wonderful food which contains cholesterol and it will not clog your arteries. It is known as ghee, or clarified butter.
The ancient doctors said to follow this process to make a fat which will not clog your arteries, which you can use in cooking: take heavy cream, turn it into yogurt overnight, then clarify this cultured butter. Store it at room temperature in a glass container and use it for most of your cooking.
It turns out that ghee is mostly saturated and monounsaturated fat, which are very stable when heated. It contains much less polyunsaturated fat than oils such as soybean, corn, sunflower, safflower, flaxseed, and mustard seed.
Ghee is the most stable, butter is the second (though its milk solids burn sooner) and olive oil, especially extra virgin (despite a common misconception), are the three most stable oils.
While avocado oil and coconut oil are also very saturated, they are considered less stable when cooking than ghee, butter and olive oil, and are also hard to digest and not recommended.
Ghee, when made correctly as just described, has amazing health benefits beyond its cardio-protective properties. Look at my other video I made on ghee for more information.
In the old days, in the 1940’s they described HDL’s as the “good guys,” and LDL’s as the “bad guys,” capable of causing heart attacks and strokes. The research has not demonstrated this. What they found instead is that there are some large, buoyant LDL particles which are beneficial, but it is the small, dense LDL particles that are more likely to enter the artery wall, become oxidized and contribute to plaque formation. They are generally considered more likely to promote atherosclerosis or plaque formation.
Calcium adheres to the plaque which forms in our arteries, but ghee comes to the rescue again – it contains ample amounts of Vitamin K2 which prevents calcification of the arteries. This happens because Vitamin K2 makes sure that the calcium we take in makes its way into the teeth and bones, and away from the arteries and other organs and glands.
Will ghee make your cholesterol go up? You bet it will! Will it raise your LDL’s? Yes, which is a good thing since ghee elevates the soft fluffy protective type LDL’s.
And this is why I have seen Vegans, who have no cholesterol in their diet (remember, cholesterol comes from an animal), they are skinny and they have severe heart attacks as they eat a diet filled with channel-clogging foods such as tofu, edamame, almond butter, brown rice, cacao and heavy oils such as avocado and coconut oils.
Then we have people who eat red meats, cold dairy and hard cheeses, deep-fried foods using bad vegetable oil blends who also have heart attacks.
Then we see people who avoid all the channel-clogging foods, and have cultured ghee and extra virgin olive oil in their diets who also include whole boiled milk and freshly-made soft-curd cheeses such as paneer, cottage cheese, ricotta cheese and mozzarella.
And they don’t have heart attacks and strokes. Is their cholesterol high? Yes! Are their arteries clean? Yes!
One other point I have to quickly mention: always take good care of the liver and the gall bladder, because they are responsible for producing and dispensing the bile which breaks the fats down into very small particles so you can use them to make cell walls, hormones, and nourish the entire brain and nervous system.
This is another whole area which is discussed in my book Healing the Thyroid With Ayurveda and in even more detail in my upcoming book, due out January 2027 called Ayurveda for Raising Healthy Children. You can also view my videos on the gall bladder and I discuss the liver in many of the videos I have made. We have protocols for cleansing the liver and flushing the bile, but they are different for different body types.
Research shows that oxidized LDL is considered a major driver of plaque formation. So keep this in mind: take good care of your liver – keep it clean and cool, because if it is hot and toxic it will oxidize the LDL. And again, please avoid those oils I just mentioned, as they all oxidize when heated.
One important clinical note I can add here: I noticed two patterns emerge in my practice over the 40 years I have been seeing patients:
One is that people who eat out often wind up with clogged arteries – this is because the restaurants all use a blend of vegetable oils, because they are cheaper. And two, many people I see from India tell me they avoid ghee because they know it has cholesterol in it and instead favor ground nut, mustard oil, canola oil or sunflower oil, thinking that they are doing their arteries a favor. They usually wind up with clogged arteries and many of them have had to have stents put in.
I mention all this so that when your blood work comes in and your doctor scares you and tells you your cholesterol is high or your LDL’s are high, that you can rest assured that if you are eating in the way I described that your arteries are clean. If you are not certain you can always get an ultrasound of your carotid arteries or a CT coronary scan of your heart arteries to see if plaque has built up from the old days when you were eating incorrectly.
If that is true, then please contact me and I can show you how to scrub the plaque out of the arteries. Doctors will want to put you on a statin drug but all it does is lower cholesterol and doesn’t have the capability of scraping out the plaque.
And if they reflexively want to put you on a statin drug, please keep in mind how they hurt the liver. And the liver is the very organ you want to keep clean because the liver is a filter – the blood comes in dirty and sticky and leaves clean. But you do have to clean out this filter several months out of the year to keep your blood clean and flowing. A statin drug cannot do that.
Also avoid red yeast rice, niacin and fish oil, which the liver hates as well. If you are worried or confused you should be under the care of an experienced Ayurvedic physician who spent years learning proper cleanses which are tailored to each individual patient and who can direct you in a good diet and daily routine.
Having high cholesterol or high LDL’s isn’t a death sentence. It may not be a bad thing in the end if you know more details as described here.