Cholesterol

I listened to an interesting interview today with blogger/author, Zoe Harcombe as part of the Real Food Summit.  You can sign up by email if you are interested in listening to any of the other speakers. The summit is running for a few more days. 

I found the interview very interesting - she spoke mainly about obesity and the counter-intuitive data and messaging we are fed - avoid fat, eat highly processed, vitamin fortified grains, etc.  It seems as though she has put a lot of effort into her research and since she is a mathematician she has been able to take the data from studies, do the number crunching herself and come up with some different results.  She has a great website with lots of interesting blog posts. The one I have linked has to do with cholesterol and what we have been told by the medical profession about the dangers of high cholesterol and its relationship to heart disease.  I have been doing some reading on cholesterol because when I got my vitamin levels checked a few weeks ago I was told I have 'high' cholesterol and that I may need to go on medication to reduce it to 'normal' levels.  My total cholesterol is 270, my HDL is 87 and my LDL is 173, but my LDL/HDL range is totally normal at 2.0.  So I have been thinking, is this something I should be concerned about?  I have always been taught that LDL is 'bad' and HDL is 'good' and high cholesterol = heart disease.  Is that true?  Apparently not.  Apparently there isn't really a link between high cholesterol and heart disease and from the reading I have done I have decided that I am not going to be concerned about it and I am most certainly not going to take a cholesterol lowering drug!
Another interesting article about cholesterol is here.