Is cholesterol bad? Is low cholesterol safe? In this video, we’ll cover common cholesterol misinformation, how cholesterol was demonized, and the cholesterol truth you need to know now for better health.
Our bodies make 3000 mg of cholesterol each day! Babies are born with higher cholesterol, and our brain is composed of it. Cholesterol is vital for our cell membranes, hormones, vitamin D, bile salts, repair, and immunity.
Cholesterol isn’t a poison; it’s an essential building block! When a doctor measures your cholesterol, they’re measuring the cholesterol in the blood, not what’s deep in the cells.
There are two types of cholesterol: HDL and LDL. HDL carries cholesterol from the cells back to the liver for recycling, while LDL delivers cholesterol to the cells. There are two types of LDL cholesterol: small, dense LDL and large, buoyant LDL. Only an advanced lipid profile can discern the difference.
Small, dense LDL particles can cause inflammation and other problems, but this typically occurs only when your glucose is high or you have insulin resistance. If you’re on a low-carb diet and you don’t have insulin resistance, you’ll have more large, buoyant LDL. If you have high levels of large, buoyant LDL, it is not pathogenic!
Cholesterol is a building block of the precursor of cortisol, so if you’re dealing with stress, it could be the reason your cholesterol is high. Testosterone is also made from cholesterol, so if you take a drug to lower cholesterol, your testosterone levels may suffer.
If you have low cholesterol, you won’t produce enough bile. This will interfere with your ability to absorb fat, and you also won’t have enough raw material to make vitamin D.
High cholesterol is not a disease! If your cholesterol is high, it’s important to understand why. Consuming refined sugar and starch can raise your cholesterol and triglyceride levels. Inflammation and your body’s repair needs can also increase your levels.
Low cholesterol in older adults is associated with higher rates of death from all causes. Low cholesterol is linked to lowered immunity, depression, memory, and hormone issues. Cholesterol naturally rises in the winter and decreases in the summer. This could be related to your need for vitamin D.
First off, everyone should be doing their own research versus just blinding trusting a YouTube video or similar. It's your body, and you retain the abiilty to decide what to put into it, not the latest opinion online.
The above said, there is plenty of real research at the NIH and similar on exactly how statins work for cholesterol buildup. It is well-known that the American diet is rich in processed food with high-saturated fats. All of that contributes to poorer health than a natural diet with non-processed foods. After 20-40 years of eating that stuff from burgers to twinkies to microwave food, your body is going to have a reaction. This isn't rocket science. Statins do have a long track record in reducing high risk cholesterol which also has a long track record in contributing to heart attacks and similar.
Are statins perfect? Hell, no. I take them after doing my own research and being in that age 50s category of high risk cardiac arrest. They have reduced my bad cholesterol. So has changing my diet and avoiding crap. Statins also contribute to negative effects such as muscle pain and similar. So I don't plan to stay on them longer than I have to. But I'm not making a life change based on the latest traffic-building video. I challenge my own doctor regularly, drive her nuts to analyze the NIH studies I find, and we come to agreement on interpretation. That's how medicine should work.
You don't get a pass because you pay an HMO to give you health coverage etc. You're still responsible to take care of yourself.
How equipped are you to identify methodological flaws in published studies? The average person is very poorly equipped to do so and medicine is full of poorly designed studies, not to mention many outright frauds.
You certainly shouldn't just watch a random YouTube video and believe what it says, but there's nothing wrong with evaluating someone's body of work and concluding that they are generally reliable.
I would say, for at least my own case, I'm equipped rather well. I read and analyze reports on a regular basis. That's why I went looking through the research at the NIH for the basis of statins and went through multiple reports, not just one. But I agree, it takes practice to understand research writing and how to interpret their models. It's not like picking up People magazine and getting the whole picture of the article in 1 minute.
This would be a different question, but given that difficulty, isn't there clearly a need for independent disseminators of health information?
That means we need to be more discerning than just dismissing everyone who produces content on the subject as a fad influencer. If someone has a genuine passion for the subject and makes honest content, it would be useful to be able to identify them as such.
There is always room for "interpreters" and "disseminators." I mean, just about every news agency plays that role as well. People use the 5 o'clock news to give them summary bits because they don't have the time or know how to find the news themselves, or before the Internet, they couldn't get at it easily. The difference is in reading the source yourself versus taking someone's word for it. I find there's a huge difference in what the actual research reports say about statins versus what gets put in YouTube sound bytes or the mass media. I brought up those exact points, which forced my doctor to read the same reports herself and then others to back up her position.
I'll take one of your points as an illustration of why I see value in this sort of content.
Not all studies separate out LDL into its different types, so you could be doing your own research and agreeing with your doctor that your situation is high risk, without being aware that you have the innocuous type of LDL that only gets checked on advanced lipid panels.
There's just so much to stay on top of that really no one can, patients or doctors. That's why my process starts with this sort of general overview, followed by my own investigation, followed by asking my practitioner questions.
My doctor has been trying for a couple of years now to put me on statins, but I'm resisting. I've learned from this and several other videos on the topic more than the material provided to me by my doctor, which clearly looked like pharmaceutical one-sided marketing material. I had to put my eyes on actual studies to learn about potential adverse effects of these drugs.
I did a second blood test last summer, and my LDL values went down by 20+% without me even trying. Yesterday I got my latest test results, they had gone up again slightly, but after watching the video, I thought it could be due to the season, and the need for the body to produce more vitamin D in winter. (?)
Interestingly, my blood pressure is perfect, I had an ultrasound and CT scan done to check for potential plaque buildup in my arteries. Ultrascan came out negative, and I expect the ct scan results will be similar...
This has strengthened my resolve to avoid the statins, despite my doctor still subtly insisting, but I think my mind is made already...
It's truly alarming how little doctors know about a lot of this stuff.
I think she knows, but her profession forces her to "follow the orders" and act in that way.
It annoys me a bit the fixation on the LDL, without taking into account my metabolic health, which is never part of the discussion. And now, despite ultrasound showing without ambiguity that my arteries are healthy, I feel she's now moving the goalposts by trying to make me take them for prevention.
No thanks. I read a few studies and know precisely what I would be exposing myself to. I won't take that chance...
That's so much worse. Most of the time, they just don't know much beyond what was required for the license (which is a lot).
The doctors I've known personally aren't very curious individuals. They're practitioners of a complex craft and like the status that comes from it.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36102667/
This being completely outside of my field, I'd rather read the hedged and uncertain conclusions of a meta-study than hear absolute truths from a health guru on Youtube~~
As a general trend I've noticed is that a lot of the "mainstream science has it completely wrong" videos base their assessment on old science from my parent's generation that has been corrected since (e.g. sugar is good, all fat is bad... no up-to-date doctor will still confidently claim this). Similarly, high cholesterol is not considered necessarily bad anymore. It's just a marker amongst others, and context matters when this marker comes back high.
I think what you're seeing though is a mainstream deterioration of trust in medical science.
Which in my opinion, is warranted. But we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Problem is, "this being completely outside my field" is the position of 99% of the population, so what is a non-expert to do?
We need trustworthy and incentive-aligned experts. Unfortunately, the US academic system has very messed up incentives.
I agree, but the same thing can be said about many of these health gurus. Their incentives are usually pretty opportunistic, too, especially when they sell some magic health supplement on their channel.
As a non-expert, it's hard to assess whether one or the other expert is incentive-aligned, so, metastudies are probably the best next thing we can do...
Fair enough.
I'd rather hear someone put the pieces together in a coherent easy to follow narrative that discusses the mechanisms than just present a summary of findings from problematic empirical studies.
It is an attempt at dymystification, whereas in the mainstream, pharmaceutical-peddlers seem bent on the opposite. Gotta look critically on either side, but I feel much more aligned with the person who treats the body as an interconnected system. TCM is another world entirely.
TCM as in traditional Chinese medicine?
Yessir
Science is often boring and not easy to follow, without a clear and simple narrative. That's probably also why there are so many problematic empirical studies. Too many cofounding variables.
Tbh, deepdown, I agree... i prefer reading a quanta magazine article on a topic I am not familiar with than the original article. More catchy, with a clear narrative, and gives me the illusion of understanding some abstract math.
But for health-related topics, the quest to create catchy and superficial YT videos can have more dramatic consequences.
Did you watch the video or have familiarity with the person who made it? Because, I don't find that to be a fair assessment.
I have read lots of primary sources in health and nutrition science. The Eric Berg videos I've seen generally present the material accurately, in the cases I'm able to judge.
They are also often poor empiricists. Most of our examples of poorly identified studies (other than econ ones) that we discuss in econometrics courses come from health and medicine. Despite the importance of doing so, they receive basically no training in addressing endogeneity problems.
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/statin-nation-the-documentary/
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2026/02/18/the-latest-lancet-paper-on-statin-adverse-effects-part-one/
I trust you, bro
I started eating more butter eggs and animal fat, now my testosterone is at 1054, the exam max recommended was at 880 lol