Originally Posted by
LongT
I guess that this might start a bit of a controversy but have any of you read and believe or don't believe the book "The Cholestrol Myth"? Among other things they say that you can have too low cholestrol numbers. They also say that the numbers them self are not all that important. They like the triglycerides to HDL ratio better than HDL/LDL.
Bill
There's truth to that. The linkage of cholesterol to heart attack is based largely on a statistical correlation. That data is pretty good as far as it goes, but statistical correlation isn't the same as causation. Of course there are the arterial plaques so something is going on, but the exact process isn't as well understood as some would have people believe.
As pointed out, many feel that triglycerides may be as important, if not more important than cholesterol, and there's also data supporting histamines and radicals as important factors. Th science continues to evolve, and keep in mind that it wasn't that many years ago that there's wasn't the separation of HDLP and LDLP as being good and bad.
One of the problems with health science is that there's a tendency to try to make decisions based on incomplete understanding of how things work. It wasn't all that long ago that the "experts" urged that folks move away from saturated fats like butter to less saturated fats like those in margarine, whet we now call transfats. That turned out to be brilliant advice.