There has never been a direct link made between heart disease and stroke and cholesterol.
There is no such thing as “bad” cholesterol.
Lowering cholesterol generally does more harm than good.
When high-risk lifestyle patients are removed from the sampling (overweight, smoking, sedentary lifestyle), the bulk of those who die of heart attack or stroke actually had LOW cholesterol.
Cholesterol is a very necessary component to your body’s health.
See http://www.ravnskov.nu/cholesterol.htm
Don’t buy into the hype. Cholesterol lowering drugs are a multi-billion dollar business. There’s a reason to keep you in the dark. Mark my words, with the recent Vytorin news, you will see many more studies and articles come out that will question the true effectiveness of Statins.
Here’s another that just came out yesterday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/opinion/27taubes.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin
LEARN and be healthy.
Eat in moderation.
Keep your sugar intake down.
Exercise (real exercise - not a walk around the block once a week).
Get off your butt.
Don’t smoke.
Stop putting chemicals (legal and illegal) in your body. Lower your weight (most folks don’t need to be fat - stop telling yourself your fat butt is genetic).
If you do all of this - and you are fortunate to have a nicely balanced genetic makeup - you’ll live to a nice ripe old age.
Seems like you can't have it both ways. Good genes lead to good health - but not the tendency to be fat? I disagree - it's largely genetic whether your liver spews out cholesterol - or whether you are fat, or both.