Office Hours: Cholesterol and Heart Disease — What I’ve Changed My Mind About

Welcome to office hours. This is our dedicated one on one space to go deeper, get clear, and explore what truly moves the needle for your health. I'm doctor Mark Hyman, and each week, we're gonna pull back the curtain and share the insights, the research, the lessons that don't always make it into our conversations with guests. Because at the end of the day, you are the CEO of your own health. And for many of you, your family's health too. And you might not feel it all the time, but you have far more power and agency than you realize. I'm glad you're here. This episode is brought to you by Function Health, empowering you to live one hundred healthy years with over 160 lab tests at just $365 a year. Sign up today at functionhealth.com/mark and use code mark twenty twenty six to get $50 towards your membership. Hey, everybody. You know, from time to time, science changes, and I change. I look at the data. I see what's changed, and I change my thinking. I change my practice. And I just don't wanna keep you up to date because science is an evolving process. We're constantly doing research. We're constantly learning, and old ideas may not always be the right ideas. And, even though they can be pretty strong, like, for example, that low fat diets are good for heart disease. Well, that ain't true. And we know what happened with that, with snack boat cookies, and we went low fat, and we all got fat. And we all got diabetes, and we all got more heart disease. So we have to look at the things that we hold on to, like these sacred idols, and we have to let them go if the science doesn't prove that they're true anymore. So today, I wanna talk about something I've changed my mind about over the years, cholesterol and heart disease. Now heart disease is the number one killer of Americans since the nineteen fifties, and yet so many are still approaching it with the same outdated framework that we've used for decades. Now for a long time, cholesterol was seen as the enemy. You gotta get it as low as possible. You gotta avoid fat. You gotta take a statin. And that was what we're all told. That's what doctors are trained in, and that's the story most people still believe. You go to your doctor, they check your labs, they do a cholesterol test, and they do the wrong one, by the way. And that's why at Function Health, we do the right ones, including ones you never get from your doctor, like APOB, which is far more important than all the other cholesterol tests, and LP delay, which most people don't check, which is highly important genetic marker. So you gotta know your numbers, but you gotta know the right number. So doctors check your old cholesterol number. They see your LDL high. They …