By unnaturally curtailing your cholesterol consumption are you obstructing some of it’s enormous functions amongst your somatic microvita? :
- The highest concentration of cholesterol is in your brain.
- Your cell-walls are water-proof due to cholesterol.
- Your steroid hormones - cortisol, aldosterone, progesterone, estrogens, testosterone and their derivatives – are synthesized by cholesterol.
- Your vitamin D is made from the cholesterol in your skin when it is exposed to sunlight.
- It makes your bile which helps to digest fats alongwith with vitamins A, D, E and K.
- It helps to converts carotene to vitamin A & absorption of minerals.
- Within your cells, cholesterol is a precursor molecule in several biochemical pathways like that of intracellular transport, cell signaling and nerve conduction.
- Cholesterol is deployed in the insulation membranes of your nerves.
Cholesterol is so widely used that all of your cells manufacture it; 3 to 4 times more than whatever you eat. Even if you don’t eat it much, your liver & other tissues will compensate for the shortfall by producing it.
(image: rpi.edu/dept/bcbp/molbiochem/MBWeb/mb2/part1/lipoprot.htm)
So how come a -
- low HDL/LDL ratio is blamed for coronary heart diseases?
- high HDL/LDL ratio accompanies weight loss? [1]
First of all, does the correlation imply that your HDL/LDL ratio is the root cause? Or is it the other way round? When your diet & lifestyle -
- spoils your blood & it’s flow, it causes a low HDL/LDL ratio while pushing you towards a heart attack / stroke.
- reduces your weight, it results in a high HDL/LDL ratio in your arterial blood.
The main task of HDLs is to carry cholesterol from the peripheral tissues, including the artery walls, to the liver where it is recycled for other purposes.
Due to reasons we’ll visit in another post, overweight people are more susceptible to vascular damage & hence carry a higher risk of heart attack. Imbalanced HDL /LDL ratio is only a symptom of the deterioration.[2]
In other words, the logic can also be reversed, as in, your health condition impacts your HDL/ LDL ratio & not the other way round. Let’s not put your cart before the bull.
As per scientific evidence, it is just a possible secondary risk marker at worst, not the primary cause of coronary artery disease (CAD), myocardial infarction, atherosclerosis, stroke & everything else it is accused of.
In fact, many studies have found that even people with LOW cholesterol have an increased risk of atherosclerosis, cardiovascular illness & several other diseases:
1. In the Framingham Heart Study of subjects over 50 years of age they found an 11% increase overall and 14% increase in CVD mortality per 1 mg/dL per year drop in total cholesterol levels.[3]
2. In the Vorarlberg Health Monitoring and Promotion Programme, men of all ages and women over 50 with very low cholesterol were increasingly likely to die of cancer, liver diseases, and mental diseases (antisocial behavior, depression, suicide, etc.) [4].
3. As per the oxford journal [5] low levels of cholesterol were associated with 2.27 higher risk of non-cardiac death.
4. Other studies[6] also report increased death rate from different causes, cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s diseases, increased susceptibility to infections and other abnormalities when blood cholesterol was low.
5. Even people with low levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol & high HDL (good) cholesterol have suffered an increased occurrence of atherosclerosis & other cerebrovascular diseases [7]
On the other hand high cholesterol has worked out well for lot of people :
1. A study of elderly French women living in a nursing home showed that those with the highest cholesterol levels lived the longest (The Lancet, 4/22/89). The death rate was more than five times higher for women with very low cholesterol [8]!
2. A 2009 study of patients with acute coronary syndromes found an association of hypercholesterolemia with lesser mortality.[9]
3. Yale University researchers unearthed that old people with high cholesterol had half the number of deaths from heart attack as compared to their low-cholesterol peers .
4. Over 60 per cent of all heart attacks occur in people with normal cholesterol, and most of those with high cholesterol never suffer heart attacks at all [10].
“There is no such a thing as bad cholesterol.” – F. Batmanghelidj, M.D.
Cholesterol has been maligned so far due to faulty studies & many a times, deliberately so, to sell toxic cholesterol lowering statin drugs [11, 12].
So what’s the real source of injuries behind your ongoing atherosclerosis & artherosclerosis?
Is it high homocysteine levels as sometimes charged[13]? That may be just 1 of the risk factors involved otherwise why do high homocysteine therapies fail to reverse cardiovascular damages[14]?
Can anyone expect a mishap caused by your entire diet & lifestyle to be undone by just a bunch of isolated nutrients?
Revert back to What’s your Nutritional Quotient?
References :
1. Dattilo AM, Kris-Etherton PM. Effects of weight reduction on blood lipids and lipoproteins: a meta-analysis. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 1992;56:320-328.
2. Craig WE, Palomaki GE, Haddow JE. Cigarette smoking and serum lipid and lipoprotein concentrations: an analysis of published data. British Medical Journal 1989;298:784-788.
3. Anderson KM, Castelli WP, Levy D (April 1987). “Cholesterol and mortality. 30 years of follow-up from the Framingham study”. JAMA 257 (16): 2176–80.
4. Ulmer H, Kelleher C, Diem G, Concin H (2004). “Why Eve is not Adam: prospective follow-up in 149650 women and men of cholesterol and other risk factors related to cardiovascular and all-cause mortality“. J Women’s Health (Larchmt) 13 (1): 41–53.
5. Stephen B. Hulley, MD, MPH; Judith M.B. Walsh, MD, MPH; and Thomas B. Newman, MD, MPH “Health Policy on Blood Cholesterol – Time to Change Directions”
6. S. Behar, E. Graff, H. Reicher-Reiss, V. Boyko, M. Benderly, A. Shotan, D. Brunner; “Low total cholesterol is associated with high total mortality in patients with coronary heart disease” for the Bezafibrate Infarction Prevention (BIP) Study Group
7. van der Steeg WA, Holme I, Boekholdt SM, Larsen ML, Lindahl C, Stroes ES, Tikkanen MJ, Wareham NJ, Faergeman O, Olsson AG, Pedersen TR, Khaw KT, Kastelein JJ (February 2008). High-density lipoprotein cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein particle size, and apolipoprotein A-I: significance for cardiovascular risk: the IDEAL and EPIC-Norfolk studies“. J. Am. Coll. Cardiol. 51 (6): 634–42.
8. Cholesterol skeptics conference report
9. Wang; Newby, L.; Chen, A.; Mulgund, J.; Roe, M.; Sonel, A.; Bhatt, D.; Delong, E. et al. (2009). “Hypercholesterolemia paradox in relation to mortality in acute coronary syndrome“. Clinical cardiology 32 (9): E22–E28. (JAMA, 1994; 272: 1335–40)
11. Elevated Cholesterol Levels: Cause for Worry?
13. a b c Lonn, E; Yusuf, S; Arnold, MJ; Sheridan, P; Pogue, J; Micks, M; McQueen, MJ; Probstfield, J et al. (2006). “Homocysteine Lowering with Folic Acid and B Vitamins in Vascular Disease“. N Engl J Med 354 (15): 1567–77.
14. Bonaa KH, Njolstad I, Ueland PM, Schirmer H, Tverdal A, Steigen T, Wang H, Nordrehaug JE, Arnesen E, Rasmussen K (2006). “Homocysteine Lowering and Cardiovascular Events after Acute Myocardial Infarction“. N Engl J Med 354 (15): 1578.
Get back to your dietary roots.
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What are ya’ thinkin’?