High cholesterol foods
- They DO NOT cause heart disease!

Saturated fats and high cholesterol foods are widely blamed for causing heart disease. This belief is accepted, without questioning, by nearly all doctors as well as lay persons.

And so doctors constanly remind us to avoid such foods - which tend to be highly enjoyable - while health authorities spend huge sums of money to wage anti-cholesterol campaigns.

If you deeper at the scientific evidence, however, you will realise that saturated fats and high cholesterol foods do not cause heart disease.

Firstly, high cholesterol foods do not raise blood cholesterol levels. The Masai trible in Africa probably eat more cholesterol than any other group of people - their diet consists of ony meat, milk and blood. Yet they have very low blood cholesterol levels.

Secondly, having high blood cholesterol levels does not significantly increase your chances of dying from heart disease. At the same time, low cholesterol can affect your nervous system, causing symptoms that include depression and suicidal tendencies!

Taking drugs to lower blood cholesterol, will also not reduce the risks of heart disease. Instead, such drugs come with serious side effects that include liver damage. They could also increase your chances of developing cancer.

Cholesterol sceptics

There is a large and growing group of scientists, doctors, academics and science writers who reject completely the idea that saturated fats and high cholesterol foods cause heart disease. Several hundred of them have joined a group called The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics (THINCS).

Members of the group may disagree about what causes heart disease. But they all agree on one thing - that the cause is not saturated fats and cholesterol.

For decades, enormous human and financial resources have been wasted on the cholesterol campaign, more promising research areas have been neglected, producers and manufacturers of animal food all over the world have suffered economically, and millions of healthy people have been frightened and badgered into eating a tedious and flavorless diet or into taking potentially dangerous drugs for the rest of their lives. As the scientific evidence in support of the cholesterol campaign is non-existent, we consider it important to stop it as soon as possible. -- THINCS website

This group is led by Dr Uffe Ravnskov, who is an independent researcher - a researcher not financed by drug companies or other groups with vested interests.

Dr Uffe Ravnskov is best known as the author of The Cholesterol Myths. The main point of his book is that cholesterol is healthy, not harmful. Now this is a radical idea. In fact, it is so radical that, when Dr Uffe Ravnskov was featured on a television show in Finland, his critics set his book on fire!

It is not as if Dr Uffe Ravnskov is a crackpot making wild claims. He is well qualified. He graduated with a medical degree in 1961 and, in 1973, obtained a PhD in Chemistry. Between 1975 and 1979, he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Nephrology, University Hospital, in Lund, Sweden.

Dr Uffe Ravnskov went into private practice in 1980 and, in 2000, retired to become a full-time independent researcher. He has published over 80 scientific papers and letters in peer-reviewed journals criticizing what is commonly called the Lipid Hypothesis of heart disease – the belief that saturated fats and cholesterol clog arteries and cause atherosclerosis and heart disease.

Uffe Ravnskov began studying cholesterol in 1989, the year Sweden launched an anti-cholesterol campaign against high cholesterol foods.“Very soon I realised that the scientific evidence behind the campaign was non-existing,” he writes.

Findings of Dr Uffe Ravnskov People with high cholesterol levels live longer! Old people with high blood cholesterol are less likely to die from heart attack, cancer and other diseases, compared with those whose blood cholesterol levels are lower. Cholesterol is not a deadly poison, but a substance vital to the cells of all mammals. There are no such things as good or bad cholesterol. A high cholesterol is not dangerous by itself, but may reflect an unhealthy condition, or it may be totally innocent. Many scientific studies have shown that people with low blood cholesterol are just as likely to develop atherosclerosis (hardening of arteries) as people whose cholesterol level is high. Your body produces three to four times more cholesterol than the cholesterol you eat. The more high cholesterol foods you eat, the less cholesterol your body produces. More than 20 scientific studies have shown that people who suffered a heart attack had not eaten more fat of any kind than other people – they had not eaten plenty of saturated fats and high cholesterol foods,

Among the research findings and cholesterol myths published in scientific journals, Uffe Ravnskov discovered that:

• Lowering cholesterol did not result in lower death rates from heart disease. Insead, it resulted in higher death rates from all causes.
  
  
• Trials with anti-cholesterol drugs produced both positive and negative outcomes, but the trial researchers cited only the positive outcomes.
  
  
• To promote the idea saturated fats and high cholesterol foods cause heart disease, scientists had systematically ignored or misquoted studies that contracdict this idea.

'Bad' cholesterol myths

Another of the cholesterol myths that Uffe Ravnskov uncovered concerns LDL (low density lipoprotein), which is widely labelled as “bad cholesterol”.

Dr Ravnskov discovered that LDL actually protects against infections. This led him to put forward the hypothesis that high cholesterol, rather than promoting hardening of the arteries, may protect against it.

These and other research findings are summarised in Uffe Ravnskov's book, The Cholesterol Myths. The book was first published in Sweden in 1991, and in Finland in 1992. That was when his critics burned the book during a television show about it.

In 2000, an updated and expanded English edition of The Cholesterol Myths was published in the United States. In 2002, a German edition of The Cholesterol Myths was published.

In his book, Uffe Ravnskov critically analyzes and demolishes the nine main myths of the Lipid Hypothesis:

1. High-fat foods cause heart disease
2. High cholesterol causes heart disease
3. High fat foods raise blood cholesterol
4. Cholesterol blocks arteries
5. Animal studies prove the diet-heart idea that diet affects heart disease
6. Lowering your cholesterol will lengthen your life
7. Polyunsaturated oils are good for you
8. The cholesterol campaign (to have people reduce their cholesterol levels) is based on good science
9. All scientists support the diet-heart idea.

All the above statements, Uffe Ravnskov maintains, are not true. They are all cholesterol myths. And he backs his assertions with solid scientific research.

Ancel Keys' Seven Countries Study

Uffe Ravnskov starts off with a critical analysis of the original 1950s research that gave rise to the idea that a diet rich in saturated fats and high cholesterol foods causes heart disease – Dr Ancel Keys' Six Countries Study, which later became the more famous Seven Countries Study published in 1980.

The Seven Countries Study gathered data on heart disease of some 13,000 men in Greece, Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Japan, Finland and the Netherlands over several decades. It is widely considered to be one of the greatest epidemological studies ever undertaken.

Ancel Keys showed that countries with the highest animal fat intake have the highest rates of heart disease. And this is frequently cited as “proof” that saturated fats and cholesterol cause heart disease.

Uffe Ravnskov reveals, however, that Ancel Keys had deliberately hand-picked the countries he included in his studies. In other words, he chose to study only those countries that supported his hypothesis.

There are many other countries where high consumption of animal fat and high cholesterol foods did not cause heart disease. But Ancel Keys ignored those countries.

Cholesterol myths about statins

Uffe Ravnskov is also highly critical of statins, the cholesterol-loweing drugs that are widely hailed as miracle “wonder drugs”. He presents scientific evidence that show:

• Drug trials involving statins produced only neglible reductions in the rates of heart disease
• Lowering cholesterol did not reduce the death rate from heart disease but INCREASED the overall death rate from all causes
• Whatever positive benefits associated with the use of statins are due to factors other than cholesterol-lowering.
• Statins are probable carcinogens and women on statins have reported higher rates of breast cancer.

Uffe Ravnskov warns that exposure to carcinogens may result in cancer only after 20 or more years.

And since there has not been controlled studies on statins over such long periods, we do not know whether the use of statins will lead to increased rates of cancer in the coming decades. He warns: “Millions of people are being treated with medications the ultimate effects of which are not yet known.”

Click here for Part II of this article, to better understand why high cholesterol foods are healthy.

2011 Update: The Cholesterol Myths is no longer in print and has been replaced / updated by a new book, Fats and cholesterol are GOOD for you.