The Benefits of High Cholesterol

[Guest guest]

Thank you I enjoyed the article so much. Cholesterol management is the biggest

medical hoax in history.

Frank ND

 

 

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dippitydodahff

Friday, October 20, 2006 5:49 PM

The Benefits of High Cholesterol

 

 

The Benefits of High Cholesterol

By Uffe Ravnskov, MD, PhD

 

http://www.westonaprice.org/moderndiseases/benefits_cholest.html

 

People with high cholesterol live the longest. This statement seems

so incredible that it takes a long time to clear one´s brainwashed

mind to fully understand its importance. Yet the fact that people

with high cholesterol live the longest emerges clearly from many

scientific papers. Consider the finding of Dr. Harlan Krumholz of the

Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Yale University, who

reported in 1994 that old people with low cholesterol died twice as

often from a heart attack as did old people with a high cholesterol.1

Supporters of the cholesterol campaign consistently ignore his

observation, or consider it as a rare exception, produced by chance

among a huge number of studies finding the opposite.

 

But it is not an exception; there are now a large number of findings

that contradict the lipid hypothesis. To be more specific, most

studies of old people have shown that high cholesterol is not a risk

factor for coronary heart disease. This was the result of my search

in the Medline database for studies addressing that question.2 Eleven

studies of old people came up with that result, and a further seven

studies found that high cholesterol did not predict all-cause

mortality either.

 

Now consider that more than 90 % of all cardiovascular disease is

seen in people above age 60 also and that almost all studies have

found that high cholesterol is not a risk factor for women.2 This

means that high cholesterol is only a risk factor for less than 5 %

of those who die from a heart attack.

 

But there is more comfort for those who have high cholesterol; six of

the studies found that total mortality was inversely associated with

either total or LDL-cholesterol, or both. This means that it is

actually much better to have high than to have low cholesterol if you

want to live to be very old.

 

High Cholesterol Protects Against Infection

Many studies have found that low cholesterol is in certain respects

worse than high cholesterol. For instance, in 19 large studies of

more than 68,000 deaths, reviewed by Professor David R. Jacobs and

his co-workers from the Division of Epidemiology at the University of

Minnesota, low cholesterol predicted an increased risk of dying from

gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases.3

 

Most gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases have an infectious

origin. Therefore, a relevant question is whether it is the infection

that lowers cholesterol or the low cholesterol that predisposes to

infection? To answer this question Professor Jacobs and his group,

together with Dr. Carlos Iribarren, followed more than 100,000

healthy individuals in the San Francisco area for fifteen years. At

the end of the study those who had low cholesterol at the start of

the study had more often been admitted to the hospital because of an

infectious disease.4,5 This finding cannot be explained away with the

argument that the infection had caused cholesterol to go down,

because how could low cholesterol, recorded when these people were

without any evidence of infection, be caused by a disease they had

not yet encountered? Isn´t it more likely that low cholesterol in

some way made them more vulnerable to infection, or that high

cholesterol protected those who did not become infected? Much

evidence exists to support that interpretation.

 

Low Cholesterol and HIV/AIDS

Young, unmarried men with a previous sexually transmitted disease or

liver disease run a much greater risk of becoming infected with HIV

virus than other people. The Minnesota researchers, now led by Dr.

Ami Claxton, followed such individuals for 7-8 years. After having

excluded those who became HIV-positive during the first four years,

they ended up with a group of 2446 men. At the end of the study, 140

of these people tested positive for HIV; those who had low

cholesterol at the beginning of the study were twice as likely to

test postitive for HIV compared with those with the highest

cholesterol.6

 

Similar results come from a study of the MRFIT screenees, including

more than 300,000 young and middle-aged men, which found that 16

years after the first cholesterol analysis the number of men whose

cholesterol was lower than 160 and who had died from AIDS was four

times higher than the number of men who had died from AIDS with a

cholesterol above 240.7

 

Cholesterol and Chronic Heart Failure

Heart disease may lead to a weakening of the heart muscle. A weak

heart means that less blood and therefore less oxygen is delivered to

the arteries. To compensate for the decreased power, the heart beat

goes up, but in severe heart failure this is not sufficient. Patients

with severe heart failure become short of breath because too little

oxygen is delivered to the tissues, the pressure in their veins

increases because the heart cannot deliver the blood away from the

heart with sufficient power, and they become edematous, meaning that

fluid accumulates in the legs and in serious cases also in the lungs

and other parts of the body. This condition is called congestive or

chronic heart failure.