Cholesterol-Heart Health- A new way to interpret cholesterol levels!

Last week I talked about heart health and how all that we have been told may no longer hold true with new science coming in every day. Cholesterol is an important factor in this. Unfortunately in the effort to sell more and more statin drugs the facts about cholesterol have been skewed to this end. Statin drugs are now being prescribed as “preventitive” for people who do not have elevated cholesterol levels using a series of “risk assessments”. Statins have always been a source of controversy: people seem to either love them or hate them, and discussions about them generate a lot of emotion. The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics denies that cholesterol has anything to do with cardiovascular disease. An article in the Huffington Post calls statins “an unsafe, unnecessary product that will now be recommended to healthy people to make them sicker.” Dr. Mercola says they can actually make heart disease worse and cause premature aging, and no one should take them unless they have the genetic defect of familial hypercholesterolemia.
Cholesterol is essential for our health. It allows our body to make repairs, insulate our nerves, form cell membranes, and produce vitamin D as well as certain hormones. The body manufactures 70-80% of our total cholesterol, the rest comes from diet. (The less we eat the more the body produces.)