The Great Cholesterol Hustle

Hustle 1: Cholesterol is “sticky” so it clogs arteries.
Hustle 2: Statin drugs (think Lipitor), the second most prescribed class of drugs worldwide, will lower your “bad” cholesterol and help you live longer.
Hustle 3: Eating cholesterol increases cholesterol levels in your blood.
Hustle 4: Cholesterol is the leading cause of heart disease.

The Truth is Often Harder to Swallow Than a Pill

If you have had a physical exam this year, weather voluntarily or through your companies work well program chances are they drew serum cholesterol levels.

Chances are they reviewed your LDL-C and HDL-C numbers with you and maybe briefly discussed that other “not so important” lipid level: Triglycerides.

They checked briefly to make sure your fasting blood sugars were less than 100.

They did a risk analysis on your body weight, made sure you were not smoking and then sent you home with instructions to follow a fairly low fat diet, focusing on “healthy carbs”, more fiber and plenty of fruits and vegetables.

You may have even felt good about yourself because you had an LDL-C of 70 and and HDL that was in the 40’s, Triglycerides? Can’t remember.

Maybe your blood sugars were “just fine” at 96 and yeah, you had a little belly fat, but we all have some of that.

Feeling good, but knowing you could makes some changes you wen’t home, made a goal to drink a bit less alcohol, exercise just a bit more and maybe eat less fried fatty foods.

This would have been fine, except it is not.

You could be ripe for a heart attack, ready to “kick the proverbial bucket” and not even know about it.

Because this physical exam and how they chose to focus on your labs (today we are looking at cholesterol) was pretty much worthless.

It is no longer debatable

The whole theory that cholesterol causes heart disease was wrong in the first place!

A mixture of misinformation, scientifically questionable studies, corporate greed, and deceptive marketing has conspired to create one of the most indestructible and damaging myt...