Does Higher Cholesterol Lead to Longer Life?
Does conventional wisdom about cholesterol stack up to reality? Find out why higher cholesterol may not be a bad thing.
I know that some of you are going to be shocked by this post. I get it. Until I did my homework, I too believed what my doctor told me and bought into the overblown hype from the constant commercials on TV. But like many things related to nutrition and exercise, you have to dig and keep digging to get to the facts.
Here are the facts…
Total cholesterol is a poor if not utterly worthless risk marker for heart disease
Older people with higher cholesterol actually live longer
A recent review in the prominent medical journal BMJ regarding LDL cholesterol, the risk marker considered most significant, found either no association or an inverse association between LDL and death rates.
Here’s a quote from John Abramson, a physician and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, “The typical scenario is that you have a cholesterol test and your LDL comes back high, so your doctor tells you, ‘Try exercising and eating less saturated fat. You do, your LDL doesn’t drop, so your doctor says, ‘OK, let’s put you on a statin and you won’t have to worry about it.’ But the truth is that eating a healthy diet and exercising, even if they don’t lower LDL, will reduce your risk of heart disease many times more than taking a statin ever will.”
In other words, most research hasn’t shown that having high cholesterol alone causes heart disease — instead, it could just be a symptom of that condition.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Framingham Heart Study — one of the U.S.’s largest, longest, and most influential pieces of cholesterol research — did find that having high cholesterol before age 40 was associated with premature death, but having the same numbers at age 50, 60, or 70 actually correlated with living longer. All in all, concludes Christopher Gardner, a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine… having high cholesterol, even high LDL, is an “overblown risk factor” for heart disease.
So, don’t simply accept what the static commercials are leading you to believe, it’s a little more complicated, and a lot more controversial.
Watch this video to learn more…
