There might not be an area of nutrition and biochemistry that’s more fought over than cholesterol. On one side you have the skeptics who say that cholesterol isn’t the big, bad wolf that many experts would have us believe. On the other side, you have those who think that cholesterol is killing us all and that we need drugs to fix this…right now! People populating the middle ground are hard to come by.

I am by no means an expert in this area. But I tend to fall closer to the skeptical side than the ‘we need drugs’ side. There is certainly a correlation with high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease but I do not believe that it is causitive. For one, cholesterol is absolutely essential to human survival. No cholesterol in the body means no cells means death. And the amount of cholesterol absorbed from foods is negligable, so eating eggs and red meat isn’t going to kill you because of the high cholesterol levels in each.

The point of this post is to illustrate that it is not a cut and dried debate. We shouldn’t blindly believe our GPs or pharmaceutical companies. In fact, I have heard off the record reports that these companies actually encourage prescription of statins by GPs when they really aren’t needed. Oh, the almighty dollar!

Educate yourself. Arm yourself with knowledge! Then make a decision based upon something other than ignorance. Here are a few sites that you really need to visit:

• Cholesterol – you can’t live without it!
• Cholesterol Myths
• The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics