Don't Lower Your High Cholesterol

Roughly one in four American adults over 40 take a pill every day to suppress a molecule their own liver makes on purpose. I believe the number of people on some kind of cholesterol lowering medication sits somewhere between 40 and 90 million depending on which year of data you pull, and close to 93 percent of those prescriptions are statins specifically, according to the CDC’s own numbers. Even the low end puts us in one of the most widely prescribed drug categories in the country, aimed at a molecule the body cannot function without.

Your liver makes most of the cholesterol in your blood. Diet accounts for a small share of it for most people. When your liver ramps up production, that’s usually a response to something, not some sort of scary malfunction. Cholesterol is the raw material for pregnenolone, which becomes progesterone, testosterone, estrogen and cortisol. It builds the membrane around every cell in your body. Your skin uses it to make vitamin D. Your liver uses it to make the bile acids that let you digest fat in the first place. Dr. Ray Peat wrote about cholesterol as a protective substance, something the body produces more of during stress, inflammation and tissue repair, closer to an antioxidant and a repair material than a random substance clogging a pipe.

HDL and LDL are lipoproteins, the “delivery trucks” that carry cholesterol and fat through blood that can’t dissolve fat on its own. LDL carries cholesterol out to tissues, HDL carries some of it back to the liver. Somewhere along the way, one got called good and the other got called bad, and the label stuck harder than the biology behind it.