Catching Up with Dr Mary Newport | Ketosis, Cholesterol and Brain Health

**Benjamin Hopkins** (0:04)
Mary, Dr. Mary Newport, it's always a pleasure to see you. How have you been?

**Mary Newport** (0:08)
Thanks, things are going really well. It's summer here in Florida and it's been pretty hot and humid, and we've had a ton of rain lately. It might rain during this podcast. You might hear some thunderstorms coming through, potentially.

**Benjamin Hopkins** (0:24)
No issue here, no issue here. I guess, I mean, a bit of a thunderstorm is the release of the cholesterol code, which is the documentary which everyone should watch. What do you think will be the repercussions from that documentary?

**Mary Newport** (0:35)
The cholesterol code, it's really changed. I think it really could change the way we think about LDL cholesterol.
It creates a lot of controversy. Statins are very controversial because of their potential side effects and possible long-term effects. Some of them, for example, seem to increase the risk of developing diabetes, which seems kind of contradictory because diabetes itself is a risk factor for heart disease. So do you want to take a medication that might increase your risk? And it's not true of all statins. It's just certain types of statins, drugs have apparently carry that risk. Another thing about statins has to do with cholesterol in the brain. The brain is very cholesterol-rich. The brain is about 60 or 70% fat and a lot of that is cholesterol, and it's really the support structure for the brain. The networks in the brain are very delicate. I mean, there are trillions of neurons and other what are called glia, other brain cells, and it's all supported by cholesterol, and cells can make cholesterol. Most of the cholesterol in the brain actually is made by the cells within the brain, and if you deplete it, take a lipid-soluble statin that may enter the brain, how does that affect how cholesterol works in the brain? It's needed, for example, for neurons to fire, for them to connect with each other. It requires cholesterol literally at the synapse to do that. So there are many of the statins, one of the adverse effects is that they can cause confusion, and many elderly people are taking them. So it's hard to know is it the statin that is causing the problem or not, and really the only way to find out would be to talk to the physician and decide whether to at least reduce the statin or maybe stop it to see if the confusion resolves.
So LDL, there's just so much to it. Particle sizes is something that's been talked about a lot. Small dense particles are more likely to invade the arteries, the artery walls, and maybe cause problems. Large fluffy LDL isn't thought to do that so much. So the types of particles that you have can make a big difference. People who have diabetes, for example, are more likely to have these small dense particles, you know, predominantly more than the soft fluffy ones. And when you take coconut oil routinely, it tends to increase the light fluffy, large fluffy LDL particles and also increases HDL. I can't remember now if we talked since I had an article that was published with Dr. Fabian Dayrit in 2025 about 26 cholesterol studies that we analyzed to look at the effects on cholesterol levels. Do you remember whether we talked about that in a previous podcast?

**Benjamin Hopkins** (3:23)
We did a wonderful episode on that and it was illuminating. But for those who haven't seen it, maybe a quick synopsis would be good because it's super interesting.

**Mary Newport** (3:34)
Yeah, so one of the myths about coconut oil is that it increases your cholesterol level. And this has been out there for decades. And so a lot of people, you know, when we talk about cholesterol, I mean using coconut oil really for brain health because of medium-chain triglycerides, one of the fats, lauric acid is antimicrobial. So it has a lot of important properties that could be beneficial, but people are afraid of it because they have heard that it can increase your cholesterol level. And so what we did was we took all of the coconut oil studies that had complete lipid profile values from baseline until at the end of a coconut oil period, where people were consuming coconut oil. And these were studies from 1985 to 2024 And combine all the data on people who were using in the coconut oil arm of the study. And what we found when you added everybody together, the average change from the beginning to the end of the study was slightly less than baseline. It was actually went down a tiny bit. It was less than 1% for total cholesterol and for LDL cholesterol. And HDL cholesterol went up by almost 6% on average. And triglycerides actually came down almost 3%. So it really kind of flies in the face of what we've been taught for so many years. But when you look at short, medium and long studies, like the shorter studies, which could be like 3 to 7 weeks, there tended to be actually a slightly, I mean, it still wasn't a significant increase in total in LDL cholesterol. HDL cholesterol actually went by 10 percent, but the variability between individuals was very big. So some people had big increases in their cholesterol, others had big decreases in their cholesterol.