Cholesterol: The Hero We Deserve, Not the Villain We Were Sold
Nina Scheets
Sep 22, 2024
10 min read
Part 1
Cholesterol... What Is It, Really?
Cholesterol often gets a bad rap, but it’s actually a waxy, fat-like substance that’s essential for life. Found in every cell of your body, cholesterol is crucial for building cell membranes, producing vital hormones, and synthesizing vitamin D. In other words, your body can’t function properly without it!
Cholesterol comes in two main forms:
- LDL (Low-Density Lipoprotein): Often labeled as "bad" cholesterol because, in excess, it can contribute to plaque buildup in your arteries, raising your risk of heart disease.
- HDL (High-Density Lipoprotein): The "good" cholesterol that helps remove LDL from your bloodstream, keeping your arteries clear and your heart healthy.
The key to good health is finding the right balance between these two types. Your body naturally produces cholesterol in the liver, but you also get it from animal-based foods like meat, dairy, and eggs. The question isn’t whether you need cholesterol—it’s how to manage it effectively.
Cholesterol: The Hero, Not the Villain
Let’s get one thing straight: cholesterol isn’t the bad guy it’s been made out to be. In fact, it's the unsung hero of your body. And yet, we're constantly bombarded with cholesterol-lowering drugs that are doing more harm than good. So, let’s clear the air—cholesterol is essential, and here’s why.
First off, your body makes cholesterol in large amounts because it needs it. It’s not some extra fat clogging your system; it’s a critical component of every single cell membrane. Cholesterol helps keep those cell membranes waterproof, ensuring that the right minerals and substances pass in and out of your cells correctly. Without enough cholesterol, your cells can’t function as they should, which can lead to all kinds of health issues.
Here’s a shocking fact: there’s a strong correlation between low cholesterol levels and cancer. Research has shown that when total cholesterol dips under 180, especially below 150, your risk of developing cancer skyrockets.
Cholesterol is your body’s repair substance. When you get a cut, and a scar forms, that scar tissue is high in cholesterol. This repair process also happens in your arteries. If there’s a tear or weak spot, cholesterol rushes in to fix the damage. Without cholesterol, you’d be looking at things like embolisms, strokes, or worse. And let’s not forget that hormones like estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone are made from cholesterol.
Even more importantly, cholesterol is needed for producing adrenal cortex hormones, which regulate blood sugar, mineral metabolism, blood pressure, and help your body manage stress. Ever wonder why people on cholesterol-lowering drugs struggle with stress and seem more irritable? It’s because they’re low on the raw material their bodies need to keep stress in check. Oh, and depression? Yep, low cholesterol plays a role there too, since you need cholesterol to properly use serotonin, the “feel-good” chemical in your brain.
Digesting fats also depends on cholesterol, as your body makes bile salts from it. And don’t forget that your skin uses cholesterol to make vitamin D, one of the best natural defenses against cancer.
LDL: The Misunderstood Protector
Now, let’s talk about LDL, often demonized as the “bad cholesterol.” Newsflash: LDL isn’t bad at all. In fact, it’s vital for fighting infections and protecting you from harmful bacteria. As you age, higher LDL levels can actually provide extra protection from cancer and oxidative damage. So no, LDL doesn’t “clog” your arteries as you’ve been told—**calcium** does! Studies show that statins (those cholesterol-lowering drugs) can actually lead to more artery calcification.
Enter Vitamin K: This is what prevents calcium buildup in your arteries. But where do you find it? In foods like egg yolks, cheese, butter, and lard—the very foods doctors have been telling you to avoid! See the problem?
The Cholesterol Transport Team: HDL and LDL
HDL and LDL work together to transport cholesterol, just like a team. HDL (the “good” cholesterol) carries cholesterol away from your cells, while LDL delivers it to where it’s needed. It’s the same cholesterol being transported, but the lipoproteins carrying it differ in density, like little submarines that carry not just cholesterol, but essential fat-soluble vitamins and special fatty acids your cells rely on.
When you interfere with these “submarines” using statins, you block the transport of these crucial nutrients. Statins also deplete CoQ10, a vital enzyme that helps your muscles function. That’s why people on statins often experience muscle weakness and pain. Instead of addressing the real issues, doctors blame it on “old age” and keep prescribing more drugs. It’s a vicious cycle: start with a statin, then add a blood pressure med, and before long, you’re on Metformin for diabetes—none of which are solving the root problem.
Cholesterol Myths Busted
The myth that cholesterol and saturated fat clog your arteries has been thoroughly debunked. It’s calcium that’s doing the clogging. As Dr. Tom Cowan writes in his book Human Heart, Cosmic Heart, even young people who die in accidents are found to have some artery blockage, but the heart creates alternate routes to ensure blood keeps flowing.
A study published in Circulation Journal revealed that the higher your cholesterol, the longer you live, particularly for women and men over 60. For men under 60, there’s a tiny risk of heart disease if cholesterol hits 350 or above, but how common is that? The truth is, most people don’t have cholesterol levels that high. Yet doctors are trying to push everyone into the same low range—around 200—which contradicts what the science actually says.
While statins are hailed as life-savers, medical trials show that lowering cholesterol leads to more cancer deaths. Sure, fewer people might die from heart disease, but many more die from cancer because cholesterol plays a crucial role in protecting against it.
In the end, while doctors may celebrate low cholesterol numbers, the long-term outcome is far from good. It’s time to stop treating cholesterol as the villain and start recognizing it for what it is—the body’s heroic repairman.
Oh, this is such a juicy topic! The whole “swap animal fats for vegetable oils” craze really took off, but it was based on shaky ground, to say the least. Let’s break this down.
Animal fats, like those found in butter, lard, and good old-fashioned bacon, are rich in saturated fat and cholesterol—the two things that have been demonized for decades. On the flip side, vegetable oils (think canola, soybean, corn oil) don’t have either of those things. So doctors in the 1950s were like, “Hey, if saturated fat and cholesterol are causing heart attacks, let’s just cut them out!” They started pushing vegetable oils as the healthier alternative.
But here’s where it gets interesting: Heart attacks weren’t skyrocketing because people were eating bacon and butter. What was actually driving up heart disease in the 1950s? Smoking. That’s right, smoking was a major contributor to heart disease, but instead of focusing on that, we villainized natural fats that had been part of the human diet for centuries.
Back in the 1950s, everyone was smoking like chimneys. It was considered glamorous and healthy (remember those old cigarette ads with doctors? Wild!). But smoking damages the endothelium (the inner lining of your blood vessels), leading to—surprise!—inflammation. This sets the stage for cholesterol to come in and try to patch things up, which over time can lead to heart attacks.
So, while doctors were busy telling everyone to ditch animal fats and pile on the vegetable oils, they were missing the elephant in the room—cigarettes were causing the majority of heart attacks. And once smoking rates declined, guess what happened? Heart attack rates started to drop, even as more people went back to eating things like butter, eggs, and bacon. Hmm… makes you think, right?
When doctors started recommending that people switch to vegetable oils, they claimed it would lower cholesterol and protect against heart disease. But vegetable oils are high in polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs), which are unstable and prone to oxidation when heated. What’s that mean for your body? When you eat oxidized fats, they can lead to inflammation and damage to your arteries—exactly what we’re trying to avoid!
These oils also contain an abundance of omega-6 fatty acids, which can throw off your body’s balance between omega-3s and omega-6s, leading to—you guessed it—more inflammation. So while the doctors thought they were saving us from heart disease, they were actually steering us toward inflammatory oils that could do just as much, if not more, damage.
The Real Culprit: Inflammation
In hindsight, it seems almost ridiculous that we blamed cholesterol and saturated fat for heart disease while ignoring inflammation. Inflammation is the real culprit behind arterial damage. When arteries are inflamed, cholesterol rushes in to repair the damage (like the hero it is). But if the inflammation persists, cholesterol can build up and lead to plaque. And what causes that inflammation? You guessed it—oxidized vegetable oils, a diet high in processed foods, and, oh yeah, smoking.
What We Know Now
Fast forward to today, and we know that saturated fats and cholesterol aren’t the villains they were made out to be. Studies have shown that there’s no clear link between saturated fat consumption and heart disease. Meanwhile, the damage caused by oxidized vegetable oils and the resulting inflammation is becoming more widely recognized as a major health risk.
We’ve been led to believe that cholesterol in our diet directly raises blood cholesterol levels and causes heart disease, but the body’s cholesterol levels are largely self-regulated. If you eat more cholesterol, your liver makes less, and vice versa. Plus, as we discussed earlier, LDL cholesterol helps protect against infections and oxidative stress, especially as we age.
In the end, swapping out traditional animal fats for vegetable oils wasn’t the heart-health solution we thought it was. In fact, the real issue was (and still is) inflammation—whether from smoking, processed foods, or these highly unstable oils.
So, the next time someone tells you to swap that butter for margarine or vegetable oil, think twice. Those old-school animal fats, rich in saturated fat and cholesterol, have been part of the human diet for millennia. They’re not the problem; it’s the newer processed oils and the lifestyles that came with them (like smoking) that have done the real damage.
Let’s stop blaming natural foods like butter, lard, and eggs for heart attacks and look at the bigger picture.
Now, let’s dig into it because the financial incentive behind statins and the real science on cholesterol levels are two sides of a coin that people need to flip over and examine. This topic is definitely eye-opening!
The Statin Money Machine
First off, let’s talk about why doctors seem so eager to prescribe statins. Statins are big business, and the pharmaceutical industry rakes in billions from them every year. Doctors, influenced by the constant barrage of marketing and clinical guidelines set by organizations with ties to Big Pharma, often feel like they’re doing the right thing by lowering cholesterol. But here’s the thing: many doctors receive financial incentives from pharmaceutical companies, whether it’s through speaking engagements, research grants, or bonuses for reaching certain treatment benchmarks. So when the message is “lower cholesterol at all costs,” the prescription pad comes out faster than you can say "lipid panel."
Equating High Cholesterol with Heart Attacks: A Myth
This brings us to the myth that high cholesterol equals heart attacks and strokes. Doctors have been trained to look at cholesterol like it’s a ticking time bomb, when, in reality, it’s more like the body’s fire extinguisher. The idea that high cholesterol is directly linked to heart attacks and strokes has been debunked by several studies, but the fear of high cholesterol persists because it’s profitable. Statins are handed out like candy, and patients are told to obsessively monitor their cholesterol numbers without anyone stopping to ask if the data even supports this approach.
The Honolulu Heart Study: Higher Cholesterol = Longer Life
One of the most compelling pieces of research that flips the cholesterol narrative on its head is the Honolulu Heart Study. This long-term study, conducted over several decades, found something that should have turned the medical world upside down: the higher your cholesterol, the longer you live. Yep, you heard that right! Participants with higher cholesterol levels had a lower risk of death compared to those with lower cholesterol.
This study blew apart the conventional wisdom that low cholesterol is always a good thing. It showed that there’s no simple, one-size-fits-all relationship between cholesterol levels and your risk of having a heart attack or stroke. In fact, the study suggested that cholesterol is protective, especially as we age. It’s like cholesterol is part of the body’s natural defense system, and when you lower it artificially with statins, you may actually be increasing your risk for other problems, like cancer or neurodegenerative diseases.
No Clear Correlation Between Cholesterol and Heart Attacks
The truth is, there’s no clear, consistent correlation between your cholesterol level and your likelihood of having a heart attack or stroke. People with low cholesterol can have heart attacks, while those with high cholesterol can live long, healthy lives. The real issue seems to be inflammation, not cholesterol itself. When your arteries are inflamed due to poor diet, smoking, or stress, that’s when cholesterol gets involved to try and repair the damage. But in a body that’s chronically inflamed, cholesterol can build up and contribute to plaque. So it’s not the cholesterol that's the problem—it’s the underlying inflammation and damage to your arteries that’s the real culprit.
The Cholesterol-Lowering Craze
Why, then, are doctors so obsessed with lowering cholesterol? Part of it comes from outdated studies and the persistence of old medical dogma, but a big part of it is that prescribing statins is easy. It’s a quick fix. You have high cholesterol? Here’s a pill. Patients feel like they’re “doing something” to reduce their risk, and doctors feel like they’re practicing good medicine. But lowering cholesterol at all costs ignores the broader picture of overall health. What’s your diet like? Are you exercising? What’s your stress level? None of these get the same attention as that magical cholesterol number.
The Bigger Picture: It’s About Health, Not Just Numbers
At the end of the day, what we’re seeing is that cholesterol numbers don’t tell the whole story. In fact, artificially lowering cholesterol with statins might even do more harm than good. Lowering cholesterol without addressing the root causes of inflammation, or without considering how cholesterol is helping the body, can be a dangerous game.
The Honolulu Heart Study and others like it show that high cholesterol is not the villain it’s made out to be. We need to shift the conversation away from cholesterol numbers and focus more on overall health, including diet, lifestyle, and stress management. Statins may lower your cholesterol, but at what cost? Lowering cholesterol might decrease your risk of a heart attack slightly, but as we’ve discussed before, it also increases your risk of cancer, muscle issues, and neurodegenerative diseases. So, what’s the trade-off here?
Think Critically About Cholesterol
The next time you hear that high cholesterol automatically means heart disease, remember the Honolulu Heart Study and the bigger picture. It’s not about forcing everyone’s cholesterol down to an arbitrary number. It’s about understanding that cholesterol plays a critical role in your health, and that blindly lowering it, especially through statins, can have consequences. If we keep treating cholesterol like the villain, we’re missing the mark. It’s time for doctors and patients to think critically, not just about cholesterol but about the whole body and what really contributes to heart health.
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