Don't Hurry Your Death

Introduction

There are many conditions in Western industrialised societies today that were unheard of, or at least very rare, just a century ago. The same conditions are still unheard of in primitive peoples who do not have the 'benefits' of our knowledge. There is a very good reason for this: They eat what Nature intended; we don't. The diseases caused by our incorrect and unnatural diets are those featured on these pages.

Dietary Causes:

The first two dietary causes are obvious, and there are many pages and sites on the Internet devoted to the subject. It is the third one I want to concentrate on here, as low blood cholesterol, we are told, is desirable.

It isn't!

We have all heard the claims that a high blood cholesterol level is harmful: it increases the risk of a heart attack. We hear and see this message in news bulletins, magazine articles, advertisements for cholesterol-lowering foods ? even breakfast cereals ? and drugs several times every day. But is the evidence to clear?

Cholesterol is an essential chemical in our bodies with a wide range of uses and application. Just as our body temperature is held within very fine limits for the whole of our lives, so are hundreds of other processes and chemicals. We don't need to measure and 'correct' even one of them; our bodies can and do regulate these automatically within fine limits and with great accuracy. Unlike body temperature, cholesterol rises naturally as we age and the idea that everyone, young or old, male or female, should all have exactly the same amount of cholesterol in their blood is, frankly, ridiculous.

So, isn't it conceivable that if cholesterol isn't available in sufficient quantity, that deficiency could have catastrophic effects? Or that changing our levels of cholesterol artificially might be detrimental to our health?

Low cholesterol increases overall risk of death

After all that you have heard about cholesterol, you may be surprised to learn that as you age, your chances of an early death rise if your total cholesterol falls. This disturbing finding was published in the respected Journal of the American Medical Association.[i] What it showed clearly was that after the age of 50, heart death rates increased by 14% for every 1 mg/dL (0.026 mmol/L) drop in total cholesterol levels per year. The data showed that an individual whose total cholesterol levels dropped 14 mg/dL (0.364 mmol/L) during 14 years would be expected to have an 11% higher death rate than if his cholesterol level had remained the same or risen. To put this into a British context, if your cholesterol level drops from, say, 6 to a 'healthy' 5 mmol/L, your relative risk of an early death are increased by an enormous 3700%

But that isn't all: if you are already suffering from heart failure, lowering cholesterol will increase the time it takes for you to recover. In an analysis of 1,134 patients with heart disease, another recent study found that low cholesterol was associated with worse outcomes and lower survival rates in heart failure patients, while high cholesterol improved survival rates.[ii] This study is interesting from another perspective as it also showed that high cholesterol among patients was not associated with high blood pressure, diabetes, or coronary heart disease.

So if you approaching or above the age of 50 and your doctor tells you that your cholesterol is high and he wants to put you on cholesterol-lowering drugs, you might like to reflect on the fact that high cholesterol is actually protective.[iii]

Which all rather makes a nonsense of the 'high cholesterol = heart disease' myth.

References

[i]. Anderson KM, et al. Cholesterol and Mortality. 30 Years of Follow-up from the Framingham Study. JAMA 1987; 257: 2176-2180.

[ii]. Horwich, et al. Low serum total cholesterol is associated with marked increase in mortality in advanced heart failure. J Cardiac Fail 2002; 4: 216-224.

[iii]. Steffens DC, McQuoid DR, Krishnan KR. Cholesterol-lowering medication and relapse of depression. Psychopharmacology Bull 2003; 37: 92-98.