Does Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease ?

Cholesterol is a high-molecular-weight alcohol known as a sterol. It is found in every cell in the body. Without it, the body could not make hormones, vitamin p, and the membranes of our cells. Cholesterol is so vital that if you eat none, your body will manufacture it. YOU TURN ON THE TELEVISION and see the governor holding a news conference. He is announcing that electricity will be banned immediately. The recent death of three children due to a downed electrical wire has outraged everyone. "Enough is enough," he says. "For complete safety, we have no other choice." Then, due to the loss of power, your set goes off.

That is precisely what researchers say in response to those who blame cholesterol for causing heart disease. Cholesterol is entirely beneficial until a lack of insulating nutrients causes it to be mishandled by the body. Not only is cholesterol harmless when consumed as part of a healthy diet, it is beneficial.

Cholesterol is an innocent and essential substance that is always traveling down the highway of your bloodstream. Then, out of nowhere, a drunk driver known as a free radical slams into it. Careening out of control, cholesterol slams into your artery wall. The body then covers up the whole accident scene with plaque. If the artery is not strengthened where it had been weakened by the accident, it might rupture. Result? Your arteries are thinner. When a clot from platelets that are too sticky comes down the highway, it gets stuck where the road is too narrow. Depending on which artery gets blocked, you will either have a heart attack, stroke, or a dangerous cutoff of circulation somewhere else in your body.

It is no surprise that the epidemic of coronary artery disease began a few years after this nutrient-deprivation experiment began. Coronary artery disease, which will hereafter be referred to as heart disease, is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. It appeared in the medical literature for the first time in 1912 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Even in the teens, the degeneration of arteries was so rare that the famous cardiologist Dr. Paul Dudley White spent ten years looking for it and found only three cases.413Today over sixty million Americans have some degree of coronary disease. One in three persons will die from it. The imbalance in nutrients that occurs due to our modern deprivation experiment upsets the ability of the body to handle cholesterol correctly.