The Great Cholesterol Debate
I can hear your thoughts as you read the title of this post. “What debate? Cholesterol is bad…right?” But is it really?
I have a couple of clients who are dealing with a doctor’s report of high cholesterol. So I started looking around. In a nice synchronicity, the breaking medical news this week is a major study done with stating (cholesterol reducing) drugs and a dramatic reduction in strokes, heart-attacks, etc.
Study: Statin Helps Even if Cholesterol is Normal as reported on NPR.
Statin drugs are used by millions of people to reduce elevated cholesterol levels. The drugs lower the risk of heart attacks, strokes and other life-threatening events.
Now the new study shows that men and women who have normal cholesterol levels but signs of inflammation in the blood vessels can cut the risk of heart attack or stroke in half.
But I have a couple of problems with this study. The first seems obvious to me, but apparently not to everyone else. Why do these people have ’signs of inflammation in the blood vessels’ to begin with? Perhaps, instead of doing a medicinal ‘preemptive strike’ and treating the possibility of an eventual problem, we should be looking for the origins of the problem and supporting these people in better vascular health. Maybe the inflammation is a result of poor diet, high stress, or an insidious micro-organism that needs to be dealt with. A systemic inflammation doesn’t come from nowhere. If you fixed the inflammation, you wouldn’t need the statin drugs.
The second is an issue with the research.
The trial was stopped partway through because an independent monitoring board judged the results to be strong enough already to prove that testing and treatment work. But the early halt to the study means there are no long-term data on the safety and effectiveness of this approach.
That’s right. Doctors are now considering prescribing life-long statin medication without any longitudinal studies. Might there be a serious health concern resulting from taking a medication everyday for the rest of your life? Maybe not. Maybe so. We don’t have that information. And we won’t have it for 15-20 years. To me, it seems wholy irresponsible to leap into this new protocol without thinking about the possible long-term side-effects.
So that’s the breaking news in cholesterol-land. But what about the other side of the coin? Do you ever wonder what cholesterol actually does? If it is in so many things, it must have some kind of function, right?
I found a couple of articles through The Weston A. Price Foundation that directly (and scientifically) contradict the popular cholesterol hypotheses.
Cholesterol: Friend of Foe? by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, MD.
The Benefits of High Colesterol by Uffe Ravnskov, MD, PhD.
Dr. Campbell-McBride opens with this information:
Our bodies are made out of billions of cells. Almost every cell produces cholesterol all the time during all of our lives. Why? Because every cell of every organ has cholesterol as a part of its structure. Cholesterol is an integral and very important part of our cell membranes, the membranes that enclose each of our cells, and also of the membranes surrounding all the organelles inside the cell.
When you think about some of the places we find cholesterol sources, this makes even more sense. Egg yolks, cream, human-breast milk…all food designed to be cholesterol-rich to support a growing body and brain (be it chicken, cow, or person). Cholesterol is essential for your brain. Cholesterol plays a pivotal role in the creation and maintenance of your hormones – which in turn regulate a variety of functions throughout your body.
So, while I currently believe that the jury is still out regarding the dangers or benefits of cholesterol in the body, I am currently more inclined to buy the Weston A. Price platform. And I will be continuing to research this.
What do I think you should do about your high cholesterol? Read up on what cholesterol does in the body. Adjust your diet to include organic, free-range, grass-fed cholesterol products (meat, eggs, dairy). And most importantly: remember that cholesterol responds to support the body in times of stress, so if you are stressing about your diet and your cholesterol numbers you are giving that cholesterol something else to deal with. Relax, don’t worry, enjoy yourself. Don’t Panic.