Before going into these trials, however, a few facts about cholesterol will be helpful. Everyone has been bombarded by the food industry and health pundits with the need to reduce cholesterol levels, but how many people really understand what it is? My guess is very few.
It is normal to have cholesterol in the bloodstream. It is a fatty substance used by the body to maintain organs such as the liver and brain, the structure of the cells of which is fat based. Cholesterol is a building block for complex steroid hormones such as cortisone and sex hormones.
Therefore you cannot do without cholesterol. However, you do need to keep its levels in the blood within certain limits. If it is too high, the excess appears to be deposited in the walls of the blood vessels, along with other fats (lipids). This produces first the fatty streaks, then the atheromatous plaques.
The same goes for another curious link to lowered cholesterol. Several early studies suggested that although lowering cholesterol reduced heart attack deaths, it was linked to increased deaths from accident, suicide, and violence. These have turned out to be statistical eccentricities, and not true differences. It is difficult to see how reducing blood cholesterol levels could make a person more vulnerable to a mugger’s attack or to death from a road accident!
Does lowering cholesterol actually improve heart disease? Dozens of studies have set out to answer this question, but few have given adequate answers. This is mainly because of flaws in the design of the trials, rather than that cholesterol reduction was in fact a failure. The first few trials of cholesterol reduction were aimed at whole populations, without screening for cholesterol levels.
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