The Strongest Mammals On Earth Are Plant Eaters And The Impacts Of Low Cholesterol On Mental Health

i’ll take terrestrial mammals for um 300. there is no question that the largest strongest terrestrial mammals on this planet are now and always have been complete plant eaters and there are reasons for that nature only provides enough energy for animals that size who live in large groups through plant foods you simply cannot bio-concentrate into uh the bodies of other animals and support a large number of predators so yes the largest strongest animals are strict herbivores they are now always have been but even more importantly and equally interesting all large-bodied social mammals living in large groups are strictly herbivores and again it’s because of energy dynamics and so that again argues uh for human beings being uh strict uh herbivores um and i always like to point out to people that you know we humans are odd creatures we are in love with the romance of killing so we tend to idolize predators and things that seem to have a lot of power but when we got ready to build our civilizations we didn’t hook our plows and our wagons and our coaches to lions tigers and bears we hitched them to horses and oxens and elephants because only they had the strength and the stamina to do the work that needed to be done so as i once heard this young man say if you want to be strong as an ox you need to eat like one

um are there risks are there risks to depression from low cholesterol so i’ve got the um depression from low cholesterol question you may both want to address this but i’ll say this if we look at populations around the world and look at populations who have very low cholesterol levels like some of the rural chinese for example that you know we know have very low low low cholesterol levels i have never seen any evidence that they have greater amounts of depression in fact i i think it may be the opposite but i don’t know and you may want to weigh in on this no yeah i think you’re absolutely right brenda yeah so the issue is why is your cholesterol low one of the things to note is that acute illness lowers cholesterol when people get admitted to the hospital almost inevitably their cholesterol drops severe infection will lower it and so you know one of the issues here is temporal sequencing is there something wrong with someone causing their cholesterol to be low and that’s why they’re depressed and that’s why their cholesterol is low and it’s not the low cholesterol causing the depression and i completely agree at the population level if you shift the bell curve for cholesterol we tend to see much better mental health in whole populations that generally have much lower cholesterol than prevails in the u.s if you’re talking about somebody who is living in a culture like ours where average cholesterol is much higher than it should be specifically ldl but also triglycerides and then you’re using medication to lower the cholesterol well you know you really change the equation it’s no longer just cholesterol and mental health it’s pharmacology and cholesterol and the reason you needed the pharmacology and mental health it’s a much more complex equation i i think the only proviso to add to all of this is we know there is a lot of cholesterol in the brain the brain is a fatty organ and cholesterol is certainly important to brain development so you know this argument took hold i think because there is a plausible biological pathway by which cholesterol deficiency could impair brain function and conceivably affect both cognition and affect but i think that’s very unlikely if not unheard of with regard to lifestyle i think the only way that that becomes a real concern is with medication that may interfere with certain specific biochemical pathways that’s possible it is possible that some of the highly effective drugs that interrupt cholesterol biosynthetic pathways could have an effect on affect we’d have to allow for that what’s the remedy well healthy lifestyle for the most part will help you not need those medications in the first place and will defend you against depression as well

i want to start off by uh sort of channeling bill clinton he said he famously said it depends on what your definition of is is and what i’m referring to it depends on what your definition of low is the problem is that all most or all of the values we have for what’s normal in western countries are taken from what are what is in my opinion a sick population people who are eating animal foods that have artificially driven up their cholesterol levels have artificially spiked their fertin and iron levels and then when we compare vegans to a plant-based people to these populations we say oh my god you’re at risk for deficiency oh my god your level is so low no the level in my opinion is really where it needs to be and the idea that um you will have because you have uh very low cholesterol levels you’re going to somehow be demented again i think is um uh put the rest by the adventist health studies one and two because even when i was a lacto-ovo vegetarian granted i didn’t eat a whole lot of cheese and stayed away from dairy for the most part because i was lactose intolerant and trust me you wouldn’t want to be around me if i drank milk um but my cholesterol level was like down around 116 which i think most people would go oh that’s gonna low so i i think i don’t think that that’s a real thing i think that people are looking for reasons to attack um or call plant-based diets into question and to do it by suggesting that we need more cholesterol is like saying that we need more smoke in our lungs and that’s why we need to bring back cigarettes it’s just crazy you