[Henk0]

Amazing how alive this cholesterol myth still is. Anecdotally from my own experience talking to people, the fear of cholesterol and saturated fats is most present still in the US and UK, two of the countries with the worst rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. When I studied clinical psychology a few years ago, we had a ’health psychology’ course with an American standard textbook on nutrition. Cholesterol was mentioned literally once in the book, only in the context of how ’bad’ it was. Nowhere did the authors think to discuss why we produce it at all, and what actual functions it has in the body. The idea that dietary cholesterol will just randomly ’clog up’ your arteries was ridiculous from the get-go. The most sensible and well researched hypothesis about heart disease and the role of cholesterol I’ve come across so far is laid out in a long series of blog posts on scottish doctor Malcolm McKendrick’s homepage. The very short an incomplete gist: stress and associated episodes of increased blood pressure, together with the oxidizing effects of elevated blood sugar caused by high glycemic load diet causes damage to blood vessels. Cholesterol is part of the immune response to this damage and acts as a band-aid on the damaged area so it can heal.