Well, if you were confused before, it gets worse than that.
First up, cholesterol is cholesterol. There are no good or bad versions. There is just cholesterol.
The job of cholesterol is, in ridiculously oversimplified terms, to hold together every cell in the body of every mammal. It does other stuff too - repairs cells, forms into hormones etc. But the cell integrity thing is the big one. So rather than being a purely bad, evil thing, its kinda, like, well, actually a bit important. At least, it is important if, for example, things like LIVING are important to you.
Now, because cholesterol is kinda critical to the structure and function of every cell in your body, sometimes when your body is broken it tends to produce more cholesterol to repair the broken bits. Now, dumb as I am, this even makes sense to me: body makes more of the stuff that fixes cells when cells are broken. That would explain why after the age of 65, life expectancy is PROPORTIONAL to cholesterol levels.
Understanding this you wouldn't then be surprised to find that often when doctors examine sick people they see more cholesterol in their blood; especially in people who stuff themselves senseless with non-nutritious food while living a life that ensures their muscular systems don't actually need any food. Of course, doctors decided to see it the other way: sick = cholesterol therefore cholesterol = sick therefore get rid of the cholesterol and you get rid of the sickness. Not unsurprisingly, this strategy hasnt worked at all: cholesterol lowering medications have failed to avert death by comparison to not taking the medication!
Interestingly, new research has found that muscle growth occurs in proportion to a weight-trainers cholesterol levels and/or intake. Makes sense: more repair stuff = more muscle growth!
As to the good and bad 'stuff' they keep referring to, thats not the cholesterol at all. Rather the good and bad stuff is referring to 'lipoproteins' that carry both cholesterol and fat through your blood. There are VERY basically 2 'types' of these carrier proteins (called lipoproteins): High Density Lipoprotein (HDL) and Low Density Lipoprotein (LDL). The general rule of thumb is that HDL (so-called "good") carries fat and cholesterol OUT of the tissues for breakdown and excretion. The LDL (so-called "bad") carries fat and cholesterol INTO the tissues.
So as you'd expect, getting fat - which tends to result from too much crap food and regular alcohol - tends to also result in more LDL (to carry all that fat and crap INTO tissues) and, sometimes, less HDL (no need to carry fat out of the tissues when there is already plenty floating around)! But the issue here is that you are getting SICK! You are killing yourself! No wonder you have more cholesterol; your body is trying to repair the damage you are doing!
Getting lean will probably reverse all the get-fat behaviour; UNLESS you get lean by abusing your body with over-exercising and malnutrition! Remember, cholesterol is the bodies major 'fix it' stuff. So you might actually produce MORE cholesterol when you try to kill yourself with a retarded diet - eg you mostly starve except for the occasional hit of high-carb, low-nutrition, conveniently packaged supermarket plastic food (including the stuff supermarkets try to pass off as 'fruit' and 'veggies'). People would do well to realise that 'Weight-loss' isn't synonymous with 'healthy'. Thats why weight-loss also happens to most dying people!
The point is that having high cholesterol is a sign that something is probably wrong. But the PROBLEM isnt the cholesterol! Lowering your cholesterol is like unplugging the temperature gauge in your car when it says the engine is overheating: the engine is still going to blow up!
2 comments:
Great post...the history of the whole cholesterol obsession is quite instructive.
Like a dude who limits his search for his lost car keys to the spot under the lampost (i.e. he looks only where he can see, even though there's a decent chance the keys have dropped outside the light thrown by the lamp), scientists focussed on cholesterol as the heart-disease villain pretty much because it was the one variable they had a decent test for.
Gary Taubes wrote a great book (despite the risible title, imposed on him by the stupid publishers) called "Good Calories, Bad Calories". It shows up the complete dearth of solid evidence showing causation between dietary fat intake and heart disease, and explains why we've been peddled that nonsense for so long (for the curious reader, Taubes actually argues that it is chronically elevated insulin levels, caused by excessive carbohydrate consumption, that is the culprit in causing the modern diseases).
Thanks for your feedback, Harry. There is another article on my biologiclabs.com site on the whole 'fat causes heart disease' conspiracy.
If anything can be learned from all this its that investigative journalism is dead and nobody cares! You don't have to look too far into these subjects to get a very clear picture of whats going on and that the Health Department prescriptions are flat out wrong.
Post a Comment