Cholesterol: The Popular Villain

It has become ingrained in the American consciousness: cholesterol at “elevated” levels is bad and signals the onset of cardiovascular disease. This is such a prevailing belief that it has almost morphed into a “truth”.  Most distressingly, I hear it more frequently these days, not less. In an era when most faddish health claims usually have a mercifully short shelf-life, cholesterol has been public enemy #1 for more than a quarter century. More and more people, some of them quite young, are diagnosed, warned about cardiovascular risk, and urged (ordered) to begin treatment with medication.

Cholesterol has over the years been misunderstood and misrepresented. It has been wrongly maligned, in part by drug companies interested in selling as much product, to as many people, as they can. The generally negative impression most people have of cholesterol emerges from an oversimplification of the role it plays in health.

Your cholesterol level is by no means the only assessment factor that reveals the overall state of your cardiovascular health, though it has, in the past 20 or so years, become just that: a kind of battleground pitting good cholesterol versus bad, with numerical thresholds that establish high, or “bad” numbers versus low, or “good” numbers. In truth, cholesterol is a necessary and extremely important substance in our bodies. It is one of the fundamental building blocks of things like hormones and cell membranes.

Artificially lowering cholesterol levels through medication without addressing the cause for the elevated level in the first place has its own risks. Among the many possibly detrimental impacts of this artificial lowering is a loss of the ability to synthesize the hormones our bodies require to function correctly. Another is the impact on our myelin, or nerve sheaths. They, as well as our cell membranes, can be weakened or damaged by artificially low cholesterol levels. There is some evidence that a serious expression of this has been observed in an increase in the incidence of Alzheimer's Disease.

The key idea that I'd like you to take away from this article is this: Cholesterol is a good and necessary substance in our bodies. The trouble begins when it is not eliminated properly, and treatment should always begin with an assessment that determines the causes for this improper elimination. Efforts to lower cholesterol levels should first be undertaken through nutrition, rather than medication. It can be achieved; in fact, it's done all the time.

Next: Understanding what your cholesterol numbers really mean