Paleo Baby

If you’ve followed the NBT podcast for a while you probably heard Dr. Malcolm Kendrick talking about the tenuous connection between cholesterol levels and cardiovascular disease. Malcolm has published with The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics on this topic, including a recent review paper entitled LDL-C does not cause cardiovascular disease. In the paper, they include both total cholesterol and LDL-C in their discussions, and if you look at epidemiological data, I think they make a good point. For instance, total cholesterol had almost no effect on mortality in the HUNT-2 study in Norway, and higher levels were associated with lower mortality risk in women. Or the ESCARVAL-RISK study, where higher LDL-C is associated with lower all-cause mortality until it’s well above 200 mg/dl. Or the In-Chianti study, where people over 64 had the lowest mortality rates if they had an LDL-C greater than 130mg/dl. The question then becomes, if not cholesterol, then what? To answer that we must resist monomania a