The Cholesterol Myth
I was speaking with a patient this week about some of her health issues. Many people come into my office taking a boatload of medications. As we conversed about her and her husband’s prescriptions, cholesterol lowering medications were on both their lists. I had to keep myself from blurting out, “Why do people still believe this cholesterol crap?”
Since Ansel Key’s 1950’s study of diet and heart disease, the medical establishment has demonized cholesterol as the culprit in heart disease. But not just heart disease and heart attacks, high blood cholesterol levels has been considered the cause of fatal heart attacks. As a nation we have been encouraged to give up fats and fatty foods including eggs, bacon, red meat, and butter all in the name of living a longer healthier life.
The only problem is, it’s a big lie.
Cholesterol, my old friend, where would I be without you?
Dead, that’s where.
Not only is cholesterol a necessary part of every cell in your body, and used in abundance by your central nervous system (read: BRAIN), but cholesterol is the precursor for every steroid in the steroid “family” of hormones. This ‘Family’ includes Estrogen, Progesterone, Testosterone, DHEA, Cortisol, Aldosterone and a few lesser known but no less important cousins.
I am always amazed when I hear about doctors who tell older females that menopausal women “Have no more hormones.” In plain medical facts, if you had “no more hormones” you would be in the hospital or dead.
This doesn’t say much for the doctors understanding of the human body.
Let the Brainwashing begin.
Unfortunately many medical doctors in this country have forgotten their basic understanding of human physiology. (You know, those classes you have to pass BEFORE they let you into medical school.) They spend so much time learning to memorize symptoms in order to name a disease, that they stop asking why.
Why is the patient sick? Why is the cholesterol level so high? Why is the body pasting this sticky stuff inside arteries and blocking them up? And there are answers to all these questions, if you know where to look (hint – in the physiology textbook).
But modern medicine doesn’t need to answer these question in order to do what they have been trained to do: Prescribe drugs.
Please Dr., can I have some more?
Prescribing drugs to address a condition (notice I did not say cure a condition) might be an appropriate thing to do if the drugs worked and the patients recovered. But when you are talking about preventative medications, shouldn’t the medication actually be proven to prevent what it claims to prevent? Like fatal heart attacks?
Sadly, this has never been the case with cholesterol lowering medications. No studies have ever definitively linked a low total cholesterol level with decreased death rate from heart attack, though you have been lead to believe otherwise. However, many studies have pointed to the side effects and ineffectiveness of cholesterol lowering medications, which in turn cause patients to seek even more medications to alleviate the side effects.
“Let me take you off that harmful drug.” Said no doctor, ever.
A 2012 study in the Journal of Evaluation of Clinical Practice¹ followed 52 thousand people for 10 years. This study indicates that lower cholesterol levels don’t equate to less heart disease. For women, it seems that a slightly elevated cholesterol level may even be beneficial.
None of these studies ever seem to deter our friends with the prescription pads. Even worse they continue to give dietary advice that has been proven incorrect, frightening people away from moderate consumption of fats and meats, but condoning the wholesale misuse of sugar and artificial sweeteners.
Nina Teicholz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, notes that
“there has never been solid evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics, and bias.”²
When your doctor pulls out his prescription pad, what are you going to do?
1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21951982 Is the use of cholesterol in mortality risk algorithms in clinical guidelines valid? Ten years prospective data from the Norwegian HUNT 2 study.
2. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/377275/saturated-fat-and-skepticism-mona-charen