Cholesterol the Myth and the Lies

When visiting a Doctor or attending fitness clubs we are faced with a multitude of notices and you can bet that one will be telling you to get your cholesterol checked. Its so important that we know our level because if it is too high then we need to take Statins to reduce it.

Everyone knows someone who has high cholesterol and is on statins, everyone should get tested and everyone must conform to the limit.

HOLD IT RIGHT THERE .......

That is all wrong. No really it is and it is not me saying it, its a lot of very well educated scientists who have been saying it for a while now. Our Cholesterol level is irrelevant. I say irrelevant but what I mean is that it is not important in the way doctors have been telling us for years.

It all started with a cock up and the best way I have had it explained is like this.

If you are doing research into the cause of house fires you will see that at every house fire there are fire engines and firemen, so therefore it follows that fire engines and firemen must cause house fires. Simple. If you remove those then the fires will stop. No arguments the fire service cause house fires and it's completely proved by research.

Well you probably believed it with cholesterol so why not with fires?

 

The thing is that cholesterol is often present in people and someone made the huge leap from that to heart attacks and other problems. But for Cholesterol read the fire service, it turns up after an event. This event is inflammation in the body. When the body finds inflammation it uses cholesterol to help heal it in the same way that it would create a scar over a wound. So, in fact if you lower the cholesterol with drugs you stop the body healing itsself and unless you are tackling the inflammation you are turning off the water in the fire service pipes and letting the house burn out of control.

Some news papers and medical journals have been publishing this but unfortunately the sale of Statins was $82billion in 2011 so there is a lot of pressure to keep people popping them.

There is also the problem that although the original research has now been completely discredited a lot of doctors who trained under the cock up theory keep saying "everyone knows high cholesterol is bad for you" and ignoring the fact the world has changed.

Companies selling products that they claim lower cholesterol like flora and other chemically manufactured gunk make way too much money to admit that what they are really selling is a cock up theory from 40 years ago.

The evidence is out there, in publications by doctors, scientists, cardiologist and on the web, but the drug industry is worth billions and in some cases your GP will be getting a nice little incentives to both test you for cholesterol and then prescribe you the drug the drug company rep has paid him to promote.

 

There is so much money to be made by scaring people about cholesterol, it sells all kinds of foods and it makes people take unnecessary drugs. Doctors make a profit from it and even Sainsburys teams up with Flora margarine to offer people unnecessary testing in the supermarket ending the in store advert with "helping you live well for less" shouldn't that be live less well.

 

It started with a research cock up 40 years ago, so isn't it time it stopped.