Oh, cholesterol…

So, Dr. Stephenson was talking to us in class today about something he read in the Journal of Clinical Cardiology recently, saying that they believe we should all strive for the lowest total-body cholesterol count possible. Basically, we shouldn’t try to have a count of “below 200” or “around 150″…we should just go and go until it’s as low as it can go.

Anyway, he then mentioned some studies that show up years ago on the same subject… These studies said that people who had low cholesterol were less likely to die of cardiovascular diseases. However, keep in mind, this data only reflected death by cardiovascular problems, not by other factors.

Essentially, it came out that, yes, people with cholesterol counts around 130 or a little higher did well…but people lower than that started to die off. Why’d they die off? Suicides and murders. Apparently, people who had extremely low cholesterol counts died because cholesterol is a relatively key component of cell membranes, especially those in your brain…so people would start getting either really depressed and would kill themselves, or they would get psychotic enough that someone would kill them…

Take home message: eat a lot of fatty stuff and die happy, rather than depressed or crazy.