Question: "Please expand upon eliminating grains for stubborn cholesterol. What can I eat instead? Which do I eliminate / add back in first?"

Dr Esselstyn: Everybody is going to be a little bit different in this but what we've tried on occasion with somebody who says, "Dr Esselstyn, we've been pure with your diet but my cholesterol won't come down at all! It never goes below 220!"

Well, a couple of points I want to make: if we had a thousand people who absolutely followed our program to a T, everybody's going to be different. Everybody has a different thermostat in their liver for making cholesterol. There will be some who will have a total cholesterol of 102, some with 130 or 160 or 180 or 200 or 220 but your liver wasn't made to produce so much cholesterol that would give you heart disease. Your liver is going to behave itself. But when you eat in a way that you destroy the endothelial capacity to make nitric oxide. Now with the lack of nitric oxide, your endothelial lining becomes splintered with holes and gaps and crevices; cholesterol creeps through, gets into the sub-endothelial space, begins this whole process of oxidative inflammation and plaque formation, and now you're often running with that.

So when we have taken several people and who, let's say, have a cholesterol 240 or 220 (it's stubborn), just for two weeks, we ask them to eliminate absolutely every grain! Just for two weeks: no grains. Let energy your energy food has to almost now be largely potatoes although all the other wonderful foods will help contribute. But to make up for that lack of of energy production from grains, we can get it from the potato for those two weeks. We've seen drops of between 30% and 40%!

Now what do you do when you get a drop and you start you start back in and create the whole problem again? No you can try to be a little selective and when you start back in, start with something like brown rice and then have your cholesterol checked in another two weeks now. If you're gonna do this with each grain, I don't want you to have to go to your doctor to get a cholesterol every week. So often what the patients do is this: they'll buy these home cholesterol determination kits (either to a drugstore or over the Internet) where you just do a little tiny finger prick. They are actually really quite reliable in terms of their accuracy. Then you can get an idea of whether this shifting in their grains [is helpful]. They may find that your level will stay as low with brown rice; you might not have to add too many other grains. You might then decide you're going to add something like barley or rye. Check it again. So these are just some some thoughts.

But remember this: there have been many many patients who came to our seminar who long before they came to the seminar, they discovered they simply couldn't take a statin. It absolutely gave them horrible cramps, [or] it injured their liver, [or] it gave them diabetes, or it gave them brain fog. So they had to abandon their statin. Interestingly enough, and you'll see this in my book [that] even those patients — if they follow the program, they're absolutely fine! Do you suppose the people in Okanawa [or] rural China are taking statins? Or Central Africa: are taking statins? Where's their heart disease? No heart disease! Why? They're thriving on Whole Food Plant-Based nutrition without oil.