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More than 16 percent of U.S. adults have high cholesterol, defined as 240 mg/dL and above, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even the average level for Americans, 200 mg/dL, is borderline high, they say.
This high cholesterol, public health agencies say, is putting people at an increased risk of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S. This stated "fact" scares millions of Americans into take statin cholesterol-lowering drugs to get their levels as low as possible ... but what if this "fact" was actually not true?
Does Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease?Cholesterol is actually an essential part of your body, used to produce cell membranes, steroid hormones, vitamin D and the bile acids your body needs to digest fat. Your brain needs cholesterol to function properly, as does your immune system, and if a cell becomes damaged, it needs cholesterol in order to be repaired.
In fact, making excess cholesterol is actually your body's response to inflammation, which it does to help heal and repair your cells. So if you have high cholesterol you probably have high inflammation levels too (more on this later).
Many Americans are under the mistaken impression that all cholesterol is bad, but in reality cholesterol is good for your body and necessary for you to live. Unfortunately, the "lipid hypothesis" (aka the "diet-heart hypothesis"), the one that claims foods high in saturated fats drive up your cholesterol levels, which clog your arteries and lead to heart disease, is widely accepted and has helped to spread the misinformation about cholesterol throughout the public.
But the lipid hypothesis is actually seriously flawed.
In his book
The Cholesterol Myths, Uffe Ravnskov, M.D., Ph.D., explained that Ancel Keys, who performed the study upon which the Lipid Hypothesis is based, used cherry-picked data to prove his point that countries with the highest intake of animal fat have the highest rates of heart disease.
Ravnskov revealed that the countries used in the study were handpicked, and those that did NOT show that eating a lot of animal fat lead to higher rates of heart disease were left out of the study, leading to entirely skewed, and faulty, data.