Many people have high cholesterol due to genetics. In these cases even if you ate a 100% perfect diet it would only impact 25% of your cholesterol levels - which any physician would not be satisfied with.
You wouldn't tell someone with diabetes or asthma to just live healthier and avoid their medication. There's nothing wrong with taking a pill, we're not cavemen living off the land.
Eating healthy is a sub-optimal solution. Typically we see the most significant results with lifestyle changes + medical interventions and pharmaceuticals - more than either alone.
There's a strange belief, I believe most born out of morality, that medicine undermines discipline or healthy lifestyle. But it does not, they work in tandem, each making the other stronger.
It is true that taking medication is "easy" - not that easy, though. But easy != evil or immortal. If it's so easy, that's a good thing. It means we can stack it on top of lifestyle changes for very little marginal cost. If you're already working out and eating good, that's great. Go to your cardiologist and see if you're a candidate for statins or hypertension medication.
Lose weight, yes.
Exercise, yes.
Accept a potentially fatal genetic defect when an option is available? No.
Advise not callously generalizing your opinion on things like this. It's clear that you either spoke without knowing more, which happens, or you really don't seem to care to know more. I hope you're not in the latter.
The dietary impact on cholesterol in the blood is surprisingly low. Looking it up, this source says diet can affect 20-30% of your blood levels [1]. I don’t have a great statistic about exercise, but I’d encourage you to question what you think you know — at the very least I’ll claim you’re mistaken about the importance of dietary impacts on cholesterol, which perhaps should give you pause about your other beliefs
Dietary cholesterol has little impact on blood cholesterol. However the post that started this debate mentioned mass loss. And that does have a decent correlation. Go from obese to not obese and the median person's cholesterol will drop quite a bit.
It’s possible the comments have changed, but I see nothing in the thread about mass loss. I do agree about weight though — losing weight is largely diet.
> Go from obese to not obese and the median person's cholesterol will drop quite a bit.
This is really interesting, I don’t think I’ve heard that before. Do you have a source you could share?
Edit: this doesn’t necessarily prove you wrong, but this paper argues there’s little correlation between bmi and cholesterol [1]
There isn't. I'm 15% body fat, eat healthy (avoid saturated fats, prioritize fiber), exercise 5-6 times per week, and have hypercholesterolemia. I, along with my parents, have very high LDL and ApoB and nothing I can do about it in terms of diet, exercise, or weight.
I'm also not uncommon. They suspect as much of 30% of the population could be like this. There's a lot of ignorance in this thread.
eat healthy as in: only once a day and only six days a week. only water for drinking and only fresh stuff to eat, no meat, no eggs, nothing cooked, nothing baked, nothing fried, nothing grilled, nothing processed, no sugar and no salt.
Being a major shift from the good life one should start it with a 7 day water fast. (do I have to say "ask your doctor before embarking"? done)