Doctors have told us for years that high cholesterol increases the risk of heart disease. This is because they believed that excess cholesterol clogged blood vessels and impeded the blood’s ability to circulate.
However, while it is true that cholesterol can line the walls of blood vessels, the amount of circulating cholesterol in a particular body does not correlate with its deposition in the vessels.
In fact, cholesterol may actually be a good thing. In numerous studies, researchers have proven that the ratio of “bad” to “good” cholesterol is far more important than its total amount and that homocysteine levels are the actual gold standard for predicting atherosclerosis.
As scientists learn more about how cholesterol behaves within our bodies, it is clearly losing its importance as reference for health. As cholesterol levels in the blood fall due to statin drugs, the number of heart disease diagnoses don’t follow suit.
Studies have been carried out on participants of many ages, and even so, there has been no correlation found between high cholesterol and strokes.
For many years Dr. J. C. Paterson and his team from London, Canada followed about 800 war veterans. Over the years, Dr. Paterson and his coworkers regularly analyzed blood samples from these veterans. Because they restricted their study to veterans who had died between the ages of sixty and seventy, the scientists were informed about the cholesterol level over a large part of the time when atherosclerosis normally develops.
Dr. Paterson and his colleagues did not find any connection either between the degree of atherosclerosis and the blood cholesterol level; those who had had low cholesterol were just as atherosclerotic when they died as those who had had high cholesterol.
Similar studies have been performed in India, Poland, Guatemala, and the USA, all with the same result: no correlation between the level of cholesterol in the blood stream and the amount of atherosclerosis in the vessels.
For now, the best indicators for heart health are (in order):
1. Arrhythmias
2. Homocysteine
3. Triglycerides
4. C-Reactive Protein (CRP)
5. Insulin
6. Cortisol
7. Estrogen
8. Testosterone
9. Lipid peroxidase
10. Cholesterol
For more information on cholesterol and atherosclerosis, please see the following resources:
Lupattelli G, Rufini S, Locati EH, Lombardini R, Ciuffetti G, Siepi D, Mannarino E. Hyperhomocyst(e)inemia is associated with carotid atherosclerosis. Angiology. 1999 Oct; 50(10): 823-30.
Selhub J, Jacques PF, Bostom AG, D’Agostino RB, Wilson PW, Belanger AJ, O’Leary DH, Wolf PA, Schaefer EJ, Rosenberg IH. Association between plasma homocysteine concentrations and extracranial carotid-artery stenosis. N Engl J Med. 1995 Feb 2; 332(5): 286-91.
Selhub J. The many facets of hyperhomocysteinemia: studies from the Framingham cohorts. J Nutr.2006 Jun; 136(6 Suppl): 1726S-1730S.
Wang H, Fan D, Zhang H, Fu Y, Zhang J, Shen Y. Serum level of homocysteine is correlated to carotid artery atherosclerosis in Chinese with ischemic stroke. Neurol Res. 2006 Jan; 28(1):
25-30.
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