The Cholesterol Myth

If we could eliminate heart disease tomorrow, the average life expectancy of every American would increase by an estimated ten years. Although mortality from heart disease has decreased due to medical advances, the incidence of heart disease is on the rise. 

We are led to believe that elevated cholesterol is the cause of heart disease. As a result, we have declared war on dietary cholesterol, and that has also meant a war on dietary fat. The result of that dietary approach has been an epidemic of obesity. That is why the focus of the medical community has shifted to reducing blood cholesterol levels to the lowest levels possible. Not surprisingly, the most profitable drugs (statins) known to the pharmaceutical industry are the primary weapons in this continuing war. But what if cholesterol was only a minor, secondary player in heart disease?

Protecting yourself against heart disease requires far more than just simply lowering your cholesterol levels. In fact, 50 percent of the people who are hospitalized with heart attacks have normal cholesterol levels. What's more, 25 percent of people who develop premature heart attacks have no traditional risk factors at all. So, if elevated cholesterol isn't the primary cause of heart disease, what is? 

I am not saying that cholesterol has no role in heart disease, only that it is a secondary factor that plays a far lesser role in fatal heart attacks than silent inflammation. If your goal is to reduce the chances for a fatal heart attack, then it's far more important to decrease silent inflammation than to decrease cholesterol. So how did the importance of inflammation get lost, and how did hype over cholesterol get started? To answer those questions, you have to go back nearly 150 years.

One of the greatest physicians in the 19th century was Rudolf Virchow. Nearly 150 years ago, he stated that atherosclerosis is an inflammatory disease based on his observations of autopsies of the very rare number of people who had actually died of a heart attack. At the turn of the 20th century, the greatest physician in America was Sir William Osler. When asked why he didn't include a chapter on heart disease in the classic textbook of medicine, he replied that the disease was so rare that most physicians would never see it. However, all this began to change.