Low cholesterol levels are associated with increased risk of haemorrhagic stroke and higher cholesterol levels are associated with improved survival in those who have suffered an ischaemic stroke.
'Heart disease' is a term usually used to describe the gradual 'furring up' of the arteries around the heart due to a process known as atherosclerosis (or arteriosclerosis). Eventually, one or more artery may become completely blocked, starving some of the heart muscle of blood. If this persists, heart muscle will die, and this is what a heart attack is.
Atherosclerosis can occur in other blood vessels too, including those supplying blood to the brain. This condition, termed 'cerebrovascular' disease, can ultimately result in a stroke through essentially the same process that underlies heart attacks. These forms of strokes are termed 'ischaemic' strokes (ischaemia is a term that refers to a lack of blood supply).
A minority of strokes are not caused by blockage of a blood vessel, but by bleeding from one. In this case, strokes are referred to as 'haemorrhagic' strokes.
'Raised' cholesterol levels are said to be a risk factor for heart disease. Given that most strokes are caused by the essentially the same process as heart attacks, one might imagine that raised cholesterol is a risk factor here too. However, in reality cholesterol levels appear to have little or no relationship to stroke risk [1,2]. In fact, previous evidence has found that
lower levels of cholesterol, including 'unhealthy' LDL-cholesterol, are associated with an increased risk of haemorrhagic stroke [3].
Comment: Keep in mind that we've been cultivating fruit (and only some fruits) for only the past few thousand years, (many fruit trees for only the past few hundred years) and the fruit that we see today - Fuji apples, Bartlett pears, navel oranges - have been recently bred to be far sweeter than the wild varieties and hence, they are more fattening due to their higher fructose content.