Is Cholesterol a Con Game?

For the past seven years, I have had an inner sense that the Cholesterol scare was for the function of making the pharmaceutical companies rich. Sorry if that sounds cynical, but I have my reasons about the studies of cholesterol, as I will point out. My first red flag regarding cholesterol came in the year 2000. I wanted to lock in our term life insurance rate for a 10 year period when we were in our mid forties. Therefore, I called up our life insurance company. They sent out their nurse to our home to provide a thorough blood work to be done on both of us, which included a cholesterol test. When the results came back, at first, I was shocked to hear what my cholesterol was 245!

However, when I was provided with their highest health rating and a low premium lock-in rate for 10 years I thought there was a mistake. I had to ask the insurance company about that "245" number. Back in the year 2000, the number 200 was the key target one was to achieve for a good cholesterol reading. Today, I believe it is even lower.

The nurse explained to me, it's not the number you look at but your ratio of good cholesterol (HDL ) to the bad cholesterol (LDL), and that my ratio was extremely low. In other words, my good cholesterol outpaced the bad cholesterol three to one, which was more important than a total cholesterol count. The LDL would have been considered high if the HDL didn't outpace it by that much. My husband's total cholesterol number was lower than mine but his ratio was not as good, so they gave him one notch down from being considered an excellent rating like me.

From that point on, I figured if an insurance company is going to put their money on me with that 245 cholesterol reading, they must know something that I don't know. Furthermore, regardless how many times I have had my cholesterol tested; doctors would only focus on the number rather than the ratio, concluding I should watch my cholesterol and take drugs. Therefore, this began my curiosity on whether or not cholesterol is just a way for the drug industry to pour more drugs onto us to maintain what they called a "good cholesterol" reading. I normally take all types of studies with a grain of salt seeing one day you find out this can kill you and the next day it's taken away. However, you have to ask yourself why all the conflict? Why is the focus on the whole number when an insurance company uses the ratio as the benchmark for issuing out their premiums? That to me says something is not conclusive.

So, recently, my husband received a cholesterol reading of 225 in his blood work. This time he was put in a "moderate" risk group, yet his reading was about the same as it was in the insurance evaluation. That's when I decided to see what was out on the Internet on Cholesterol and perhaps confirm my inner sense about Cholesterol.

I'm not a doctor, nor a scientist. I'm just someone who wants to know the truth about cholesterol and hope I'm wrong that we as consumers are not being conned into believing a high Cholesterol reading causes heart disease. The following information demonstrates just some of the confusion that is out there regarding cholesterol. There is a lot more if you want to put searches in Yahoo or Google about "myths of cholesterol." As a matter of fact, there are some things that are more concerning than cholesterol, like calcium and chlorinated water when it comes to heart disease.

Calcium causes heart disease more than Cholesterol?
I've come across lots of information on calcium being a large cause of clogging the arteries that will lead to heart disease. Here is just one article on this that I found interesting. http://www.cholesterolwarning.com/calcium.htm After you read that, go to http://educate-yourself.org/fc/ for an interesting argument about how a cured patient is a lack of income source for the drug and medical industry.

The water you are drinking might be the cause of your heart disease?
There are several articles out there about how chlorinated water contributes to plaque build up in your arteries. Here is one, I found interesting. http://nov55.com/hrt.html So I started thinking when did we start chlorinating our city waters? I found it was around 1908 starting with my home town Chicago and then New Jersey to kill diseases like cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery, and hepatitis. Could this be a larger reason for heart disease? I guess if it was, the big pharmaceutical companies wouldn't have any drug for that.

There also appears to be fewer studies on cholesterol really being the villain of heart disease in comparison to studies on other factors causing heart disease, like stress. Furthermore to this, you can read about how cholesterol tests are inaccurate too. Perhaps these are the points we need to be more concerned with and not a high cholesterol reading?

Now, I had to consider when did all this cholesterol talk begin? When did we start seeing a lot of drug companies advertising on television? I recall in the late 1980's when my mother was told about her high cholesterol in her early 60's. That's when I became more aware of it. I'm sure it was in the media before that. However, personally it began for me with my mother being told she needed to take cholesterol medicine. Then it seemed that all we were reading was about our cholesterol, and what we should not eat. I might be wrong, but I believe we started seeing drug companies around the year 2000 advertising all sorts of drugs including cholesterol drugs on television. Many of them wouldn't even tell you what they were for, however you should ask your doctor for that purple pill. It sure felt like there was a drug pusher out there on TV. The final conclusion is; we have seen a trend growing from the 1980s to present with all sorts of conflicting information on cholesterol.

Ask yourself why are there many books out there on the myths of cholesterol? Someone is challenging the medical and drug industry, yet the media doesn't seem to find this news? This is one article that I believe sums up heart disease pretty good. http://www.westonaprice.org/moderndiseases/hd.html
Scroll down in that article to "The Ten Commandments For Advoiding Coronary Heart Disease".

My grandmother, her sister and sister's husband lived on a farm in a small town of Michigan, back in the 1980's before they passed away. They ate all sorts of fatty foods, literally eating fat off of steak because it tasted good. They were from Germany, coming over at the turn of the century and cooked everything from scratched. They lived till their early 90's. I believe heart disease begins with genetics and continues with stress. Diet and exercise are important, however not as important as that.

Therefore, you be the judge whether you want to take everything for face value what the medical and pharmaceutical industries are dishing out to us. You have to wonder with all the vitamins, minerals that are injected unnaturally into our foods, could we be harming ourselves by not staying on a more natural path of eating. Recently, I wrote an article on the Promise Activ SuperShots which includes plant sterols to reduce your cholesterol. The FDA approved the effects of plant sterols against cholesterol allowing the claims. I will not be surprise if you start seeing more claims of plant sterols in 2008 and more injections of this in our foods. The bottom line is "ching, ching!"