 That is bad for you. It's going to clog your arteries. High cholesterol is going to give you a heart attack. These ideas are so ingrained in modern culture and conventional wisdom, they're just taken for granted. And can we even convince people otherwise if they're willing to listen? In this video, I'm going to go over the origin of the lipid hypothesis, how that ties in to the creation of the USDA dietary guidelines, as well as what cholesterol does in the body, and why studies that are used to show that high cholesterol is bad for us are incorrect. So the original lipid hypothesis was based off of a study done in the 1910s where Russian scientists fed cholesterol to rabbits, which are obligate herbivores, and it gave them atherosclerosis. So I mean shouldn't we throw this out the window because we're giving herbivores cholesterol? Well, apparently not, because Ansel Keyes, who was an exercise physiologist in the 1950s, took this hypothesis and ran with it. And he conducted the seven-country study where here we can clearly see that, yeah, in these seven countries, fat percentage in the diet is associated with risk of heart disease, but we didn't look at the original data where 22 countries, he literally excluded like two-thirds of the countries in the study to fit his hypothesis. So now we have crooked science on top of crooked science. And then Earl Butts, who was an economist at the time, saw the potential in this. But before we go into that, I actually happened to have written an essay on this back when I was in Hunter College. Francis Moore LePay had a popular vegetarian cookbook, Diet for a Small Planet, popularizing the idea that meat-free diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol would reduce obesity, heart disease, cancer, also asserting that a vegetarian way of life would reduce world hunger, energy costs, and the environmental impact of agriculture. As vegetarian ideology popularized, the Secretary of Agriculture at the time, Earl Butts, who was also an economist with ties to large agricultural corporations, started enacting policies to prepare the increase in crop production. These policies shifted farm animals from pastures to feedlots, where government subsidized corn and soil was to be grown, allowing increased efficiency of food production through feeding cows and the excess being pressed into oils for human consumption. This vegetarian agenda of eating more grain and cereal products, as well as using pollen saturated oils through corn and soybean oil, as opposed to saturated fats like butter and lard, to perfectly into the new agribusiness or increasing profit margins. Even though eggs and meat are profitable, ventures on large scales, the initial investment percentage to produce grains and vegetable oils is far greater than the former. Man, I'm a genius, man. I should look at, I should reread this essay. I did that a while ago. Okay, so this guy, this guy was, this is the guy at Earl Butts, Secretary of Agriculture herself. I think that whole, this whole idea and the origin of the lipid hypothesis, I think we get a very good idea of why the USDA dietary guidelines occurred. Now we look at cholesterol. Cholesterol is an organic molecule, it is a sterile, a type of lipid molecule, and is biosynthesized by all animal cells, because it is an essential structural component of all animal cell membranes, and is essential to maintain both membrane structural integrity and fluidity. Cholesterol allows animal cells to function without a cell wall. This allows animal cells to change shape rapidly. In addition to its importance for animal cell structure, cholesterol also serves as a pre-perser for the biosynthesis of steroid hormones, bile acid, and vitamin D. Cholesterol is the principle sterile synthesized in all animals. So obviously, a lot of vital functions in the human body for cholesterol. Now, why is HDL and LDL viewed as very differently? Because HDL brings cholesterol away from cells, so we think it's good for us, and LDL cholesterol brings, you know, fat 2 cells, so they think it's bad for us. But a great analogy for this is firefighters going to put out a fire. Would you blame the firefighters for the fire? Just as we blame cholesterol for trying to put out inflammation in the body, it really does not make any sense. And, you know, to me, with just the information I've gone over already, that's plenty. But this article published in the Iris Times, no evidence how cholesterol causes heart disease, say doctors. And what this study went over was LDLC does not cause cardiovascular disease, a comprehensive review of current literature. And this not only went over that, it went over that total cholesterol isn't associated with heart disease, it went over that statins are ineffective. And it also showed these people literally cherry picked data, they ignored contradictory evidence and inverse associations. So what were the abstract to this study? For half a century, a high level of total cholesterol or low density lipoprotein has been considered to be the major cause of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. And statin treatment has been widely promoted for cardiovascular prevention. However, there is an increasing understanding that the mechanisms are more complicated. And that statin treatment, in particular, when used as primary prevention, is of doubtful benefit. The authors of three large reviews recently published by statin advocates have attempted to validate the current dogma. This paper delineates the serious errors in these reviews, as well as other obvious falsifications of the cholesterol hypothesis. Expert commentary. Our search for falsifications of the cholesterol hypothesis confirms that it is unable to satisfy any of the Bradford Hill Criteria for causality, and that the conclusions of the authors of the three reviews are based on misleading statistics, exclusion of unsuccessful trials, and by ignoring numerous contradictory observations. The studies a little too long for me to go over right now. But you know, some interesting points from the article were that people are taking all these statins, despite unproven health benefits, you know, there were inverse associations with LDL and they couldn't find any reasonable correlations between high total cholesterol and atherosclerosis. And then what's really interesting is these claims disappeared when the statin companies had to publicize their research. So new regulations introduced in 2005 by health authorities in Europe and the US specified that all trial data had to be made public. And when this happened, all of these claims disappear. Thank you guys for watching. I'm putting all the links in the description to this video. This isn't really to are you against vegans because they'll just run in a circle like a chicken with their head cut off. It's more for people that are concerned about cholesterol and fat and taking the diet and just the average person that is so stuck in modern conventional wisdom. If you guys would like to support me, please just share the channel. I am on Twitter, Instagram, trying to be I'm really active on Twitter lately. I post a couple times a day above that guys, you know, leave a comment below. Let me know what videos you guys would like to see and just any anything else you think I could improve the video or whatever it is.