The Cholesterol Myth that Could Be Ruining Your Health!

Hey, it's Marco! A delusion is a false belief held with conviction despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. In the medical field no delusion has had wider acceptance and a longer run than the belief that cholesterol levels in the blood are a major factor in the causation of atherosclerosis and its two chief complications - heart attack and stroke.
     Known as the Lipid Hypothesis or Cholesterol Theory, the seeds of this delusion were sown in the late 19th century by a German pathologist named Rudolph Virchow. He performed chemical analyses on arterial plaques taken from corpses and discovered that they contained large amounts of cholesterol. He theorized that cholesterol from the blood infiltrated the walls of the arteries and thus caused the plaques he found there. He called this process lipid insudation.
Further credence was given to this theory when researchers in the early 1900s fed rabbits and chickens a pure cholesterol diet and reported deposits on the arterial walls that they thought were atherosclerotic plaques.
     At this point it was thought that all the cholesterol in the blood came from the diet. But in 1925 it was found that the human body produces 80-90% of its own cholesterol and that diet is relatively unimportant. This caused some to raise questions about the validity of the Cholesterol Theory.

Cholesterol!

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