By Kennedy Shelley
We’ve been told for nearly 50 years “you need to lower your cholesterol.”
But new research confirms findings from 2012 that people with higher cholesterol live longer.
Fat and cholesterol have been the villain in our war on heart disease.
This is mostly due to the work of Ancel Keys who created the “Lipid Heart Hypothesis.” He was the strongest proponent that dietary fat causes heart attacks.
In other words, anything that reduced dietary fat intake would reduce cholesterol which would protect you from a heart attack.
They sold it by saying, when you pour grease in your pipes you clog them up. Eating fat does the same to your arteries.
The problem with this idea is that you don’t pour fat into the blood, food is digested. The liver produces cholesterol in the blood and even a vegan is going to have cholesterol.
It is impossible to be alive and not have it, it’s in every cell of your body. And while cold grease is hard, the body is 98 degrees and at that temperature fats become liquid.
But Keys’ ideas had popular support despite a lack of evidence to prove his idea.
Along come statin drugs. Finally, there was a pill that would reduce our cholesterol without changing our diet.
But it didn’t lower all the cholesterol, only LDL, which the drug manufacturers always referred to as the “bad cholesterol.”
So began the statin saga. These medications have become the most popular on the planet.
Since they were introduced, these drugs have made Big Pharma nearly a trillion dollars.
And yet people are still having heart attacks.
Just how effective are these at keeping you alive? We have spent nearly a trillion dollars to buy on average an extra 3.2 days of life.
When you break down all the statistics and look at expected life expectancy and your heart attack risk, on average you get a couple of extra days if you religiously take your statin drug.
This was the result of a large study that was published in the British Medical Journal.
It turns out that most of the positives that happen from taking statins might not be in lowering cholesterol, however.
A couple of statins, most notably Crestor, seem to reduce cardiovascular inflammation which may be the reason why these drugs seem to help some people. (See this article in Freedom Health News).
Why isn’t this discussed much?
Here are how many billions Pfizer makes each year in sales of the number one statin drug in the world, Lipitor:
This is a drug that is off-patent since 2011, so there are generics, yet they sold two billion dollars’ worth last year.
The fight against cholesterol is a huge cash cow for Big Pharma, don’t expect them to start telling you all the research anytime soon.
The HUNT study out of Norway set up to track cholesterol and mortality. The conventional wisdom was – the higher the cholesterol, the earlier you die.
They found the opposite.
High cholesterol leads to a longer life.
Since 2012 doctors have known those who had higher cholesterol live longer than those with low.
Yet billions of dollars of statin drugs are still being sold with the stated goal of lowering cholesterol.
And the HUNT study was just confirmed again. When you lower your cholesterol level to “healthy levels” according to Big Pharma, you die earlier.
Before your doctor or your neighbor tells you, your high cholesterol is going to kill you, you might want to point out to them that the evidence for a long life is on your side.
