Cholesterol- Guilty as Charged?

Lately, my studies have lead me to a very controversial topic in the nutritional world.  A substance that has largely been blamed for crimes it simply does not, and has never, committed. What I’m talking about, of course, is Cholesterol.

I hinted a bit towards this in my previous post before I went off on the whole Matrix-tangent, but I’d like to restart the topic and roll on from there.  Sally Fallon’s speech, “The Oiling of America”, has a lot of great information about how exactly Americans have come to fear foods that have been condemned as high in cholesterol and fat.  I listened to her speech the other day, and was surprised and shocked by just how beneficial cholesterol truly is for our bodies.

Now, cholesterol has a lot of beneficial functions for our bodies, but for the sake of not boring you to death, and for the sake of not providing info that I don’t totally understand yet, I will stick to some of the more understandable roles of cholesterol has.

The first and, I believe, the most important role of cholesterol is the fact that it is nature’s healing substance.  Cholesterol is a vital substance for healing wounds!  As Sally Fallon says in her speech, it would be very difficult to recover from injuries when you have low cholesterol.  This ties into exactly how we have come to blame cholesterol for heart attacks.  Now correct me if I’m wrong here, but the way atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) is formed is by a build up of cholesterol, and other fatty-like substances, in the body.  But the question that gets screwed up here is why cholesterol is in building up in the arteries in the first place.

“Well, because American eat too much butter, red-meat, lard, etc.. and we all know cholesterol from these foods like to be dumped into the arteries.” says conventional wisdom.

Baloney would be an accurate term to use here.  Cholesterol does not build up in your arteries because you are eating too much fat.  (Assuming, of course, that you are eating high quality fats like good quality butter, coconut oil, grass-fed meats, cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil etc… and avoiding those terrible fats found in fast foods, trans fatty-foods, and refined carbohydrates.)  The reason why cholesterol is building up in your arteries is because it is trying to heal cracks and tears in the artery itself.  It’s trying to fix the problem being caused in your arteries because of poor diet (trans-fatty foods, refined carbohydrates etc…).  Why?  Again, because it’s your body’s natural healing substance.

As Tom Noughton says in his documentary Fat Head: “to blame cholesterol for causing heart attacks is like blaming the police for causing crime.  Just because the police are at the scene of the crime doesn’t mean you should try to get rid of the police to lower crime problems.”  Cholesterol is in the same boat.

A secondly, cholesterol is vital for the production of the sex hormones estrogen and testosterone.  As a result, people on low-fat diets may not have as much of a sex drive because their low-fat diets do not supply enough cholesterol for their body.

Cholesterol is also a very powerful antioxidant.  Yeah, you read that right, cholesterol is an antioxidant.  It protects us from free radicals just like the glorified Vitamin C. Also, kind of a thrown in to the subject, it is also known that coconut oil and good quality butter have antimicrobial properties that can help battle bacterial infections.

And finally, cholesterol is absolutely essential for brain and nevrous system development.  It is very important for memory as well as the production of serotonin in the brain.  In fact, Mary Enig writes in her book, Know Your Fats, that: “Research at the University of California, Berkley… has shown that the cholesterol in eggs is helpful to older people whose memory is declining.” (57). Sally Fallon also writes in her book Nourishing Traditions about the importance of cholesterol for infant development.  If I remember correctly from Nourishing Traditions, a breast-fed baby gets about 90% cholesterol from her mother’s milk.  If cholesterol was such a terrible thing, why are babies meant to have a diet that’s as high as 90%?  Of course, humans were not meant to continue this diet as they age, but still, I think this shows the importance cholesterol plays in our lives.  That it’s meant to be a good thing for our bodies, not a bad thing.

I think I’ll call it a day right there.  Cholesterol is HUGE topic, and we really only brushed the surface of the matter with this post.  If you want to learn more, I suggest reading some of Sally Fallon and Mary Enig’s work.  The beginning section of Nourishing Traditions is a great way to get broken into the matter of cholesterol.

So go out there and buy some Kerrygold Butter and ENJOY IT! (And stay the hell away from partially hydrogenated foods as best you can…)

Peace,

E.M.R