Summary:
Bad science does NOT make cholesterol "bad."
Cholesterol (not total cholesterol - but they are related) is your health FRIEND.
Cholesterol is the body's repair substance.
Cholesterol functions in intracellular transport, cell signaling, and nerve conduction. But who needs that?
Cholesterol
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Forgive the author for interchanging the words "cholesterol" and "total cholesterol" in places.
Cholesterol: the mere mention of the word scares a lot of people. So-called medical authorities have unfairly and unjustifiably terrorized people for the last 55 years by blaming cholesterol for heart disease when nothing could be further from the truth. I urge you to think of cholesterol for what it really is—your friend—who got blamed for only trying to help.
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Imagine we do a study of fires. We measure the size of the fire and count the number of firemen present.
We find that the bigger the fire, the more firemen are present.
We conclude that firemen are the greatest "risk factors" for fires, and reducing their numbers would help extinguish the fire.
Worse, we take aggressive steps to prevent firemen from getting to the fire. What do you think will happen? The fires will get worse.
Now substitute “heart disease" for "fire" and "cholesterol" for "firemen," and you get the cholesterol argument that has been foisted upon us all these years:
We examine people with heart disease and see that cholesterol is present, so cholesterol is a "risk factor" for heart disease. We decided that reducing cholesterol will prevent heart disease. We take aggressive steps (e.g. statin drugs) to reduce cholesterol even though no one has established that cholesterol causes heart disease.
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Uses of cholesterol
Cholesterol is required to build and maintain the integrity of cell membranes; it is required to establish proper membrane permeability and fluidity. Cholesterol also functions in intracellular transport, cell signaling, and nerve conduction.
Cholesterol is an important component for the manufacture of bile acids, steroid hormones, and fat-soluble vitamins including Vitamin A, Vitamin D, Vitamin E, and Vitamin K.
Thus, cholesterol is essential for all animal life and it is primarily synthesized from simpler substances within the body.
Cholesterol is the body's repair substance.
When there is damage to an artery, cholesterol is sent by the liver to repair the damage. The more severe the damage, the more cholesterol is sent.
This cholesterol is transported in the blood via LDL (low-density lipoprotein) particles.
For some perverse reason, we call this "bad" cholesterol. It's like calling firemen sent to the fire "bad" men.
When the repair is done, any excess cholesterol is sent back to the liver via HDL (high-density lipoprotein) particles.
For some unfathomable reason, this is called "good" cholesterol.
The firemen sent to the fire are "bad" but become "good" once their work is over. How ridiculous can we get?
Keep in mind that LDL and HDL are not types of cholesterol but merely different types of transport vehicles. Cholesterol is simply cholesterol.
Whoever came up with this "good" and "bad" classification for cholesterol should be tried and convicted of crimes against humanity.
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Most of the cholesterol we need is manufactured by the liver. We can raise our blood cholesterol by only a very small amount by what we eat. The reason is simple. The body determines how much cholesterol we need. If we eat a lot of it, the body cuts back its production to maintain the right level. If we eat less, it produces more.
Cholesterol is found only in animal foods such as meat, fish, cheese, eggs and butter.
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If you have followed what I've just said, you will understand that cholesterol does not cause heart disease; rather, inflamed arteries cause raised cholesterol levels since more has to be sent to help fix the problem. Merely reducing cholesterol does not get to the source of the problem and may actually make it worse, just as getting rid of the firemen will simply allow the fire to spread.
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It should be a simple act of logic to deduce that lowering cholesterol cannot reduce the risk of heart disease. However, study after study has given the lie to the lipid hypothesis, but it seems to have eternal life.
I've mentioned the Masai and the Samburus in Kenya.
A 1957 study of the largely vegetarian Bantu found that they had as much plaque buildup in the arteries as other races from South Africa who ate more meat.
The 1968 International Atherosclerosis Project, in which over 22,000 corpses in 14 nations were cut open and examined for plaques in the arteries, showed the same degree of atheroma in all parts of the world - in populations that suffered from a great deal of heart disease, and in populations that had very little or none at all.
Addendum: If you think that recommended cholesterol levels are based on science, think again. Let me tell you a story as told by Mary Enig (who wrote the definitive work "Know Your Fats"):
Gary Taubes, a staff writer for Science wrote an article called "The Soft Science of Dietary Fat" for the 30 March 2001 issue of Science. He had reviewed all the available information on the demonization of dietary fat and cholesterol issues and listened to the tapes of the 1984 Cholesterol Consensus Conference.
He presented the graph which showed quite clearly that :
serum cholesterol levels (he meant "total cholesterol") of 200 mg/dl to 240 mg/dl were definitely in the normal "total cholesterol" range,
for which there was no increased risk of heart mortality in males and
even above 240 mg/dl there was a decrease in risk for women.
But what Gary Taubes didn't know was that there was a political decision being made on the floor of the NIH (Building 10) Mazur Auditorium that day in December 1984. The decision would allow the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to have yet another even more extensive long-term "trial" to work on. The NHLBI could not get more money from Congress for more large trials such as the MRFIT or LRC and they were developing the National Cholesterol Education Program.
With the cutoff number at the lower end of the normal range (200 mg/dl), they could include all of the healthy normal citizens in the range that would need treatment with diet, and since the diet would never work to permanently lower those normal levels (eg, 200 mg/dl to 240 or 260 mg/dl) to below 200 mg/dl, they could recommend that all these people should go onto cholesterol-lowering medications.
(A simple example of how the pharmaceutical industry controls the politicians and the pseudo-scientists at the WHO, AMA and AHA.)The three men who were heading the NHLBI (Cleeman, Lenfant, and Rifkin) were standing together in the Mazur Auditorium just before the Cholesterol Consensus Conference began. They discussed the cutoff level of serum cholesterol to put into the consensus report. One said to the other two,
"But we can't have the cutoff at 240 [mg/dl]; it has to be at 200 [mg/dl] or we won't have enough people to test." Several of us from the University of Maryland Department of Chemistry Lipids Research Group stood directly behind them and within clear earshot. We looked at each other and, of course, were not surprised when the final numbers came out. This small chat did not get onto the tapes that Taubes reviewed.
So when it comes to chronic diseases, we have "science by consensus"—the same kind of consensus that, for centuries, led people to believe that the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it.
Consensus is what got >70% of the world jabbed with a toxin!
Index & Upcoming (short) blogs on cholesterol and statins
Number 1: Cholesterol fun (true) facts - completed
Number 2: Is the actual cholesterol molecule important? c - completed
Number 3: What is an optimal TC value? Remember, no one knows their actual cholesterol molecule value. - completed
Number 4: Surprising fact about cholesterol as an antibiotic - completed
Number 5: TC simple math - dumb doctors - completed
Number 6: What is LDL really? - completed
Number 7: Statins - do they lower the cholesterol molecule? - completed
Number 8: What did we learn from the new "biologics" to lower "cholesterol" - completed
Number 9: Niacin and other "cholesterol" management treatments - completed
Number 10: What did Natasha Campbell-McBride say about cholesterol/lipids? - completed
Number 11: What is a QALY, and how does it relate to "cholesterol"? - completed
Number 12: Idiot doctor from Johns Hopkins, Roger Blumenthal - completed
Number 13: Statins cause Alzheimer's and ALS - THEHIGHWIRE - completed
Number 14: Statin drugs CAUSE diabetes - completed
Number 15: The statin merry-go-round to poor cardiovascular outcomes - completed
Number 16: How statins CAUSE heart disease - completed
Number 17: How statins CAUSE heart disease - part 2 - completed
Number 18: Women and statin drugs - completed
Number 19: If not "cholesterol," then what? - completed
Number 20: If not "cholesterol," then what? - part 2 - completed
Number 21: Statins and erectile dysfunction - completed
Number 22: Who says statins do NOT extend life? - completed
Number 23: Statins cause strokes. - completed
Number 24: Statins & Cholesterol Summary - completed
Number 25: The history of the demonization of animal fat - completed
Number 26: The history of the demonization of cholesterol
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