How Bad is Cholesterol?

Most of us have been brainwashed into thinking that cholesterol is a harmful foreign substance that should be avoided at all costs. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Four Key Points:

Diet has hardly any effect on your cholesterol level.
There is no evidence at all that lowering your cholesterol level will lengthen your life.
The drugs that can lower it often have serious effects.
Cholesterol is probably just a marker for an underlying imbalance that is not being addressed by just lowering cholesterol.

The truth is, your body needs cholesterol.

Cholesterol is an essential component of all cell walls and it is the major building block for your hormones (including sex and adrenal hormones) and it’s absolutely vital for the proper functioning of your liver and nervous system. It even helps (in conjunction with sunlight on the skin), in the production of vitamin D. The body uses large amounts of cholesterol on a daily basis and is so important that with the exception of brain cells, every body cell has the ability to make it.

I know you’ve been told over and over that high cholesterol is the main culprit causing heart disease. But high cholesterol is not necessarily dangerous by itself, although it probably reflects an unhealthy condition or some underlying imbalance. Decreasing the cholesterol will do nothing to improve the underlying problem, which is causing the increased cholesterol. And when you lower the levels too much by taking cholesterol-lowering drugs the results can be detrimental to your health.

Many studies have shown that there is no correlation with high cholesterol and heart disease, as people with low blood cholesterol develop heart disease just as much as people with high cholesterol.

More and more studies are coming out showing just how unhealthy lowering cholesterol might be. In fact, the cardiovascular protection the new cholesterol-lowering drugs, the statins, may give are probably due to other mechanisms other than cholesterol lowering. Unfortunately, they also stimulate cancer in rodents, disturb the functions of the muscles, the heart and the brain and pregnant women taking statins may give birth to children with malformations more severe than those seen after thalidomide.

The fixation on cholesterol as a major cause of heart disease disregards the science and discounts the real causes such as chronic inflammation often caused by the damage that sugars wreak on tissues via glycation, including the lining of arteries. The studies that have linked insulin resistance to heart disease are much more significant than the cholesterol studies.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Thiruvelan R.

8:45PM PDT on Apr 8, 2012

Yes Stop early high cholesterol with proper diet, exercise and certain lifestyle changes, you can also visit http://healthy-ojas.com/cholesterol/cholesterol-details.html for more detials

send a green star

federico b.

9:24AM PST on Feb 20, 2012

Grazie

Past Member .

10:52AM PDT on Sep 9, 2011

i just quit taking my cholesterol meds, they were giving me really bad headaches. my doctor probably wont be pleased...

Michele W.

1:02PM PDT on Jul 30, 2011

Thank you

Karin M.

6:23AM PDT on Jul 30, 2011

thanks.

10:16PM PDT on Jun 4, 2011

Oh my gosh, I've thought this for years and it has been a fight with my doc because I refuse the meds.

Sheri P.

9:27PM PDT on May 8, 2011

I am confused...

Shin T.

11:00PM PST on Nov 10, 2010

Thank you for very informative presentation especially person like me who need correct information of cholesterol.

Edith B.

9:12PM PDT on Sep 27, 2010

Why, then, do the cardio-vascular surgeons stay so busy doing heart bypass surgeries for blocked arteries? Four people in my family have had bypass surgery due to blockages in the arteries going to their hearts. Doesn't cholesterol cause these blockages?

NO EMAILS P.

12:21AM PDT on Aug 14, 2010

thanks