[rubashov]

> Cholesterol isn't bad, saturated fat isn't bad

The issue gets super complicated once you add chronic emotional stress. A huge problem with all these dietary disease models is they ignore cortisol and stress levels, which may ultimately turn out to be the single-most important variable.

In short, the original findings to do with fat intake -> cholesterol -> atherosclerosis weren't outright invalid. It's just that in healthy, unstressed people the final link to atherosclerosis doesn't actually happen, even in old age. But the situation in the industrialized world is massive numbers of people living in chronic stress, so who knows. Turns out chronically elevated cortisol levels produces the arterial damage that make "bad" cholesterol a problem at all.