Why Cholesterol is Important and Why We Need to Stop Demonizing It

Cholesterol is a waxy type of fat, or lipid, which moves throughout your body in your blood. Your body makes cholesterol, but you can also get it from foods especially from animal foods. Your liver makes all the cholesterol your body needs.

When it comes to heart disease , diabetes, brain disorders, Diabetes, obesity, high BP, metabolic syndromes, auto-immune diseases we have an information overload and conflicting views/ideologies. As per many medical experts and latest researches, we have been mistreating these lifestyle illnesses which are completely reversible by doing some lifestyle changes.

Most of the modern day medicines tend to control symptoms but do not treat root causes of the disease. A high Cholesterol may not necessarily lead to heart disease however our lifestyle does.

Let’s look into importance of cholesterol and what latest researches say:

“Cholesterol” is needed by each and every cell in our body.
Cholesterol is used to produce/repair cell membranes, precursor to hormones like testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, cortisone,
Required to produce vitamin D from sunlight
Needed Generate bile acids that help you to digest fat.
Cholesterol also helps in the formation of your memories and is vital for neurological function.

As per many recent scientific researches :

Cholesterol is not a good indicator to predict heart disease. Better focus on Triglycerides and HDL levels. Keep Triglycerides levels low and HDL levels optimum. If this is done, it has been observed that the rest of the lipid parameters will auto-adjust for majority of the people.
Total cholesterol / HDL cholesterol ratio should be between 3 and 4 to ensure healthy cholesterol levels and a substantially reduced risk of heart disease. Total cholesterol-to-HDL cholesterol ratio is one of the best predictor of cardiovascular disease risk on the basic blood lipid panel.
Triglyceride / HDL ratio is the another way of calculating cholesterol link to cardiovascular disease. Less than 2 is good. Greater than 6 is very bad. Between 2 and 6 is bad and must be lowered below 2.
Cholesterol is not bad or good. Calling it bad is like calling Police are culprits in a crime scene location because they appear whenever a crime takes place or Calling firefighters as culprits as they appear wherever there is a fire accident. To make it simple, our body sends LDL cholesterol to do the patch work (repair) for already occurred damage and inflammation in the body or arteries.
VLDL particles are problem causing ones. These are very low density LDL particles and these can create a problem in the arteries due to oxidation, by forming plaque and eventually rupture of plaque which results in strokes.
We lower high cholesterol using statin drugs which have a lot of side effects. Long term usage has adverse effects.
Lot of people blame genetics. Yes, Genetics may load the gun but mainly our environment and our habits pull the trigger. Epigenetics play the role here. we cannot change the blueprint/core structure of our gene and it unique to each of us. However we can control the way our genes react and behave due to our environment and lifestyle choices.