Having high cholesterol is good for you. It's healthy. In fact, it's healthier. The higher your cholesterol, the better. Look, I'll show you.
Scientific studies show that people with the lowest cholesterol levels have higher risk of death, more likely to die. As the cholesterol level comes down, the risk of death goes up. It's science. So you don't want to lower your cholesterol.
You want to keep it high so you avoid dying. Of course, your doctor doesn't want you to know any of this. Because they make money by keeping you sick. It's all a big hoax. Big Pharma is raking it in.
They just want to sell you drugs. If I had a nickel for every influencer that repeats this stuff mechanically, I'd be a billionaire. First realization, this curve with cholesterol and mortality that is thrown around social media all the time, this same pattern is seen with lots of different metrics. We see it with BMI, for example.
People with normal BMI have a higher risk of dying. We see the lowest risk of death for people who are in the overweight range of BMI. We also see this with blood pressure. People with normal blood pressure have higher risk of death.
The lowest risk of death is actually seen in the hypertension range. We also see it with hemoglobin A1c, glycated hemoglobin. Lowest risk of death seen in a range where people are pre-diabetic.
So all of those are published in scientific studies. We've known this for years. When's the last time an influencer told you to keep your blood pressure high because of these same curves?
Just keep your A1c high, be pre-diabetic to have lower risk of death, and all doctors are wrong. Never happens, right? Why not though? We have the same curves, it's the same studies, it's the same argument.
If somebody told you to keep your blood pressure high or your A1c high based on these curves, this type of argument, you'd be immediately suspicious that something's fishy, something's not right. this person is probably not telling me the full story but cholesterol same argument people lap it up people buy it hook line and sinker most content on social media is made to be popular it's not made to be accurate or to be great science okay so we have a clear inconsistency on social media influencers will tell you something about cholesterol they won't tell you the same thing about other metrics even though we have the same type of data But why do we see this pattern in the first place? Higher risk of death with normal cholesterol, with normal blood pressure, with normal A1c, with normal BMI.
What's going on here? As we start to get older towards the last phase of our life, as we start to get sicker, weight loss is very common. Frailty becomes very common.
Old age and disease often also reduce our appetite. So we eat less and we eat less well. So we lose weight.
our BMI drops, our blood pressure drops, our hemoglobin A1c, our cholesterol, many of these physiological parameters, which typically are too high in middle-aged Westerners because people tend to be overfed in our society. As we get older and we get certain diseases, certain chronic diseases, cancer, chronic infections, liver disease, we start to get sicker, we start to get malnourished, we start to get frail, and a lot of these metrics tend to drip down. this is very common. in fact in studies that correct for chronic disease and malnutrition this effect, this pattern of the cholesterol curve completely goes away. the higher the cholesterol the higher the risk of mortality they see.
even correcting just for malnutrition makes that strange pattern go away of the high death with low cholesterol. and if we lower our cholesterol not because we're sick and we're approaching the end of our life, we're malnourished, we're frail. but because we're prescribed a medication or we have it naturally low, genetically low, we don't see higher mortality. In fact, when we see a difference, it's lower mortality, lower risk of death. We see that over and over and over again.
So having low cholesterol doesn't cause death. It doesn't raise your risk of dying. That's just a misunderstanding of the evidence. You'd have to be completely unfamiliar with this entire field to even suggest that, based on this type of data, these unadjusted observational correlations, it's not a serious scientific argument. So we often see the lower blood pressure, lower BMI, lower cholesterol in older people, in people with chronic disease.
So no wonder they associate with risk of dying. That has nothing to do with them causing death. Low cholesterol that is not caused by malnutrition actually associates with less death, not more. And randomized trials confirm it.
Lowering cholesterol lowers mortality. And in genetics, same thing. People with lower cholesterol have lower mortality.
So every line of evidence is pointing in the same direction. Don't get me wrong. cholesterol level is a rough metric of heart disease risk.
there are better metrics. we have a lot of content going over all that. just wanted to make this quick video to address this idea that high cholesterol is good for you because low cholesterol causes death based on these curves. it's not a serious argument.
but cholesterol is important for all kinds of physiological functions in our body, for membranes and for hormones. so you Why would you want to lower something like that? In fact, our body even produces cholesterol. Our liver produces lots of cholesterol.
So how can it be bad? Well, glucose is important for all kinds of physiological functions throughout the body. Our body makes lots of glucose.
The liver makes glucose. And yet we don't want the blood levels of glucose to be too high. We don't want to eliminate all glucose from everywhere in the body. That's not possible. You wouldn't be alive.
We just don't want the... blood levels to be too high that's called diabetes it's exactly the same logic for cholesterol levels in the blood you want to be careful with these one-liners these gotcha points on social media this stuff is not science this molecule plays important physiological roles so why would you want to lower its level is not a serious scientific argument nobody with any grasp of medicine even at a superficial level would ever suggest this because this is routine in medicine. There are dozens of molecules that are vital physiologically, and yet you don't want them too high. They can be incredibly detrimental, even lethal.
They can kill you if they're too high. Sodium, potassium, chloride. I mean, the list goes on and on.
There's literally dozens, if not hundreds of examples. So you want to get your guard up for this type of gotcha points. This is no scientific substance.
Wait. but the brain is made of cholesterol. the brain needs cholesterol. so why would you want to lower your cholesterol level?
that's dumb. you're just going to harm your brain. the brain makes its own cholesterol. it's separated from the blood by the blood-brain barrier. we want to keep the blood levels in the healthy range.
the brain doesn't need the cholesterol from the blood. you want to be careful with the ridiculous one-liners on social media, guys. this is not science. wait, but we only get plaque in our arteries.
not our veins. cholesterol is high everywhere so high cholesterol can't be the problem. it's got to be something else.
by this logic high glucose is not a problem, diabetes is not a problem if i'm diabetic i have high glucose everywhere, arteries and veins, and yet we only see plaque in the arteries so the high glucose can't be the problem. it's got to be something else. this is obviously an incredibly silly argument.
plaque grows in arteries because it's a higher pressure system actually plaque can happen in veins if the veins are transplanted to arterial territory so it's nothing fundamental about the wall of the vein. diabetes raises risk of plaque growing accelerates plaque growth in the places where the plaque can grow which is usually the arteries exact same thing is true for high cholesterol. you want to be really careful with these one-liners on social media.
get your guard up when you hear somebody talking like that. don't let These influencers talk to you like you're an idiot. You're not an idiot.
Demand higher quality. Demand more healthy skepticism of everyone. Yes, including me.
For questions about different LDLs, the small LDLs and the large LDLs, we have a whole video on that. Check it out right here. And for questions on damaged LDL, oxidized LDL, we got a whole video on that. I'll meet you in there. Bye-bye.