Cholesterol: the BIG KILLER

It does contribute to the damage. watching your intake is important but heart disease is a complicated disease with many contributing factors.

My mom, only 53, suffered 3 heart attacks on Thursday and had emergency surgery that afternoon. Doctor said it was caused by high cholesterol. She's said to make a full recovery. Thing is my mom wanted to sign up to MFP this weekend and have me show her how it works so she could improve her diet. It is being changed radically due to poor food choices and it's made me want to take a closer look at mine and what I feed my own family.

The thing to remember about cholesterol is that *blood* cholesterol (the LDL type) is a contributing factor to heart disease, but that blood cholesterol is in most people not (and in a few people only moderately) affected by *food* cholesterol. Our metabolism is more complicated than that. Several foodstuffs, including eggs, got a bad rap because they contain cholesterol -- but then researchers checked if eating them actually raised blood cholesterol, and found that for most people, NO.

Also, remember that potatoes (cholesterol-free) fried in vegetable oil (cholesterol-free) -- AKA French fries -- if overconsumed can raise your blood cholesterol.

In women over 50, the higher their cholesterol is, the more healthy they will be (lower risk of heart disease). The link between the two is often stressed by doctors, but there is no proven link that cholesterol causes heart disease (although I think it can hasten up the damage if you have heart disease, or something like that).

Directly from the AHA's Guidelines for treatment of heart disease:" elevated LDL cholesterol
is a major cause of CHD. In addition, recent clinical trials robustly
show that LDL-lowering therapy reduces risk for CHD."

My job is to treat women with heart disease and those who are at risk for heart disease. It's irresponsible comments like yours that initiate misinformation and cause women to not seek medical care, or more tragically, suffer from a cardiac event.

The Framingham Heart Study is often cited as proof of the lipid hypothesis. This study began in 1948 and involved some 6,000 people from the town of Framingham, Massachusetts. Two groups were compared at five-year intervals—those who consumed little cholesterol and saturated fat and those who consumed large amounts. After 40 years, the director of this study had to admit: "In Framingham, Mass, the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person’s serum cholesterol. . . we found that the people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, weighed the least and were the most physically active."3 The study did show that those who weighed more and had abnormally high blood cholesterol levels were slightly more at risk for future heart disease; but weight gain and cholesterol levels had an inverse correlation with fat and cholesterol intake in the diet.

While it is true that researchers have induced heart disease in some animals by giving them extremely large dosages of oxidized or rancid cholesterol—amounts ten times that found in the ordinary human diet—several population studies squarely contradict the cholesterol-heart disease connection. A survey of 1700 patients with hardening of the arteries, conducted by the famous heart surgeon Michael DeBakey, found no relationship between the level of cholesterol in the blood and the incidence of atherosclerosis.9 A survey of South Carolina adults found no correlation of blood cholesterol levels with "bad" dietary habits, such as use of red meat, animal fats, fried foods, butter, eggs, whole milk, bacon, sausage and cheese.10 A Medical Research Council survey showed that men eating butter ran half the risk of developing heart disease as those using margarine.11

Mother’s milk provides a higher proportion of cholesterol than almost any other food. It also contains over 50% of its calories as fat, much of it saturated fat. Both cholesterol and saturated fat are essential for growth in babies and children, especially the development of the brain.12 Yet, the American Heart Association is now recommending a low-cholesterol, lowfat diet for children! Commercial formulas are low in saturated fats and soy formulas are devoid of cholesterol. A recent study linked lowfat diets with failure to thrive in children.13