The Cholesterol - Heart Disease Myth

In the last decade, cholesterol has become a familiar word in many homes - Dad can't have bacon and eggs for breakfast because of the eggs' cholesterol, we buy low-cholesterol margarine to lower our risk of heart disease, you buy the low-cholesterol sausages because they are healthier for you, even though they cost more. The reason that cholesterol has become such a buzzword in our homes is that it is linked to heart disease. But, is the link statistically and scientifically valid? We explore the concepts that cholesterol really is not to blame for the current high rates of heart disease.

Cholesterol is said to cause blockages in the arteries, circulating in the blood, sticking to artery walls, and eventually blocking blood flow to the heart. The facts that it has been found that arteries become blocked by the fat makes it intuitive that consuming less animal fat will lower your risk of heart disease. However, studies do not come to this conclusion. In fact, cholesterol is an essential part of your body. The body uses cholesterol as a bandage to have a tiny tears in damaged arterial walls - it also does this for other wounds.

However, they consistently is not found to be a link between cholesterol can see it, and cholesterol in the blood. A study sponsored by the German Ministry of Research and Technology showed this, as does the fact that in Japan, the number of heart attacks has dropped in recent years, while cholesterol consumption has actually risen. A long study was recently completed, where researchers observed 10,000 people with high cholesterol levels. Half of the participants received a statin drug (a cholesterol lowering drug), while the other half were told to eat a normal diet, and make sure they got enough exercise. The findings were surprising - despite the fact that these statin drugs are prescribed to tens of thousands of people with high serum cholesterol, they were found to have no effect on the death rate due to coronary heart disease. The control group, that ate a normal diet, and get a normal amount of exercise, was found to have no higher incidence of fatal heart attacks and non-fatal arterial disease. These drugs also have some serious side effects, such as liver failure, muscle deterioration, and they can even cause sudden death. It makes you wonder how many deaths are actually attributable to statin use, rather than prevented by these drugs.

In fact, studies repeatedly demonstrate that dietary cholesterol is not linked to serum cholesterol, and that serum cholesterol is not even linked to heart disease. But first things first! The Framingham study, one of the more famous studies on the topic, set out to prove that people who ate more cholesterol in their diet, had higher levels of blood cholesterol. The researchers were surprised and disappointed - in fact, there was little or no difference in the participants' blood cholesterol levels, even when the amount of cholesterol consumed varied widely. There have been many studies since which have borne this principle out.

The Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial was one of the largest studies to ever be performed on coronary heart disease and cholesterol levels. It involved over 350,000 men and women, over a wide variety of demographics. This study had participants cut down their cholesterol consumption, saturated fat consumption and total calories, by significant amounts, over a long period. However, there was absolutely no effect on heart disease occurrence, and serum cholesterol was only modestly affected.

In fact, the benzenes and other chemicals in margarine and spreads have been linked to increasing levels of coronary heart disease - your best advice is to eat as naturally as possible, cutting out processed foods as much as you can.