You Don't Know This About Cholesterol, But Should!

Interview: Christian, we hear reports, you mentioned plaque, and a lot of people associate that right away with cholesterol and cholesterol being a bad guy. What is cholesterol's role then in the big picture of heart health? Christian Wilde: Well, that's really a good question, because for 40 years, you couldn't get anybody to even give a patient a cholesterol test. Then they found out that there's something called overall cholesterol. Some time later, a test was developed for LDL cholesterol, and eventually HDL. It's kind of like in the movie "Jaws". Everybody went out to kill every shark in the ocean. Cholesterol is so important. You can't live without it. You have to have cholesterol. Right now, I run into people who say that their doctor has lowered their total cholesterol and their LDL to 100. Wonderful! Then I hear other people say that total cholesterol they've gotten down to 115 or 120, and they are so proud of that. But, study after study has shown that you can be too aggressive in lowering your cholesterol. It's the LDL that's the culprit. To drive the overall cholesterol down too much, puts the patient at great risk. One of the things is depression. One of the things is hostile attitude increases. Another factor, hemorrhagic stroke, the brain requires a certain amount of integrity from cholesterol to maintain the heath between the brain and the blood factor. If that is too low, and the integrity is compromised, the blood can leak through, and that is the worst possible stroke, a hemorrhagic stroke. A lot of these things in the research community; Scott, you know that the research community, generally speaking, is 15 or 20 years ahead of the physician's office. So, you need to become, we all need to become involved in our own health care. We need to become knowledgeable so we can interface intelligently and make our case. Nobody will have the vested interest in protecting your family, my family, more than ourselves.