Those who have challenged the importance of LDL cholesterol say we’ve been measuring things incorrectly.
What researchers are learning is that cholesterol may not be a direct indicator of heart disease and total cholesterol — the accumulation of three types of fat in the blood — could be a useless metric.
Paying attention to triglycerides, however, might be the best number to monitor regarding heart health.
Lustig, an outspoken critic of the processed food industry, is one of those people. While not involved in the most recent BMJ research, said it proves that LDL cholesterol doesn’t matter.
But he’s not the first person to suggest so.
In the 1960s, there was a battle going on over what caused heart disease. There were two camps. One said sugar was the culprit while the other said dietary fat, particularly saturated fat, was the bad guy.
John Yudkin, a British physiologist and nutritionist, suggested sugar was to blame. Ancel Keys, an American scientist, pushed the dietary fat issue.
The two battled it out during the 1970s, but three major findings relegated fat as heart health enemy number one.
The first, Lustig says, was the issue of familial hypercholesterolemia, a genetic disease where people lacked an LDL receptor in their liver, causing them to die of a heart attack as early as their teenage years.
The second was that dietary fat raised LDL cholesterol.
“That is true. I’m not going to argue that,” Lustig said.
The third argument in the fat-is-bad argument was that elevated LDL levels in the larger population correlated with heart disease.
“That was the idea, and therefore fat was the problem, sugar wasn’t. Yudkin was thrown under the bus, died basically a forgotten man, and the low-fat hypothesis ruled the day, destroyed our diets, and basically caused the obesity and metabolic syndrome pandemic we now experience,” Lustig said in an interview with Healthline. “It turned out those three items, all of which were semi true, turned out to be irrelevant and were unrelated.”
Source:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/bad-cholesterol-may-have-bad-rap#How-the-Cholesterol-Hypothesis-Came-to-Be
Written by Brian Krans — Updated on June 25, 2016