StemCell Therapy

A R T I C L E

Cholesterol, longevity, intelligence, and health. The biological meaning of cholesterol is just starting to be explored. Everything that doctors know about cholesterol is wrong. New information about cholesterol is clarifying important issues in physiology and pathology. Medical magazines and television stations like to propagate the idea that cholesterol is bad stuff, and as a result, that cliche is known to almost every American. Recent journal articles have promoted the idea that "the lower the serum cholesterol is, the better" it is for the health of the patient.

The theory that heart disease is "caused by cholesterol" has gone through several stages, and most recently the use of the "statin" drugs has revived it in a radical way. One consistent theme for fifty years has been that people should eat more polyunsaturated fat and less saturated fat, to lower their cholesterol, and to avoid butter, cream, eggs, and "red meat," because they contain both saturated fat and cholesterol. Often, medical attention is focused on the fats in the atheroma, rather than on the whole disease process, including clotting factors, vascular spasms, heart rhythm, viscosity of the blood, deposition of calcium and iron in blood vessels, and the whole process of inflammation, including the reactions to absorbed bowel toxins.

Almost 100 years ago, some experiments in Russia showed that feeding rabbits cholesterol caused them to develop atherosclerosis, but subsequent experiments showed that rabbits are unusual in responding that way to cholesterol, and that even rabbits don't develop atherosclerosis from cholesterol if they are given a supplement of thyroid (Friedland, 1933). By 1936, it was clear that hypercholesterolemia in humans and other animals was caused by hypothyroidism, and that hypothyroidism caused many diseases to develop, including cardiovascular disease and cancer. There was already more reason at that time to think that the increased cholesterol was a protective adaptation than to think that it was maladaptive.

The strange idea that cholesterol causes atherosclerosis was revived in the 1950s when the vegetable oil industry learned that their polyunsaturated oils lowered serum cholesterol. (Many other toxins lower cholesterol, but that is never mentioned.) The industry began advertising their oils as "heart protective," and they enlisted some influential organizations to help in their advertising: The American Dietetic Association, the American Heart Association, the US Dept. of Agriculture and FDA, and the AMA. Besides the early rabbit research, which didn't make their case against cholesterol and might actually have had implications harmful to their argument (since Anitschkow had used vegetable oil as solvent for his cholesterol feedings), the oil industry helped to create and promote a large amount of fraudulent and unscientific work.

The death rate from heart disease in the United States began increasing early in the twentieth century, and it reached its peak from about 1950 to 1975, and then began declining. During the decades in which the death rate was rising, consumption of animal fat was decreasing, and the use of vegetable oil was increasing. In the southern European countries that have been said to show that eating very little animal fat prevents heart disease, the trends after the second world war have been the opposite--they have been eating more animal fat without an increase in heart disease.

The correspondence between heart disease and consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol is little more than advertising copy. If people were looking for the actual causes of heart disease, they would consider the factors that changed in the US during the time that heart disease mortality was increasing. Both increases in harmful factors, and decreases in protective factors would have to be considered.

The consumption of manufactured foods, pollution of air and water, the use of lead in gasoline, cigarette smoking, increased medicalization and use of drugs, psychosocial and socioeconomic stress, and increased exposure to radiation--medical, military, and industrial--would be obvious things to consider, along with decreased intake of some protective nutrients, such as selenium, magnesium, and vitamins.

But those harmful factors all had their defenders: Who defends socioeconomic stress? All of the social institutions that fail to alleviate it. In 1847, Rudolph Virchow was sent to Poland to study the health situation there, and when he returned, the highly regarded anatomist, physiologist and pathologist announced that the Poles wouldn't have a health problem if the government would stop oppressing them, and institute economic reforms to alleviate their poverty. The reforms weren't made, and Virchow lost his job. Other harmful factors, such as seed oils, degraded foods, and radiation, have specific, very well organized and powerful lobbies to defend them.

Despite the growing knowledge about the dangers of polyunsaturated fats, many medical articles are still advocating the "official" heart protective diet (e.g., "... diets using nonhydrogenated unsaturated fats as the predominant form of dietary fat," Hu and Willet, 2002).

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Cholesterol, longevity, intelligence, and health.

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