What's the best way to stay healthy in the face of so much conflicting nutrition information?

Well ideally you would go to the source the gold standard the pure viewed medical literature and read through the stacks of the latest medical journals

But who's got time for that? I do

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts podcast. I'm your host Dr. Michael Greger

Today we hope to settle the debate once and for all for the role of cholesterol in heart disease

The cholesterol controversy is over in fact you can argue was over a century ago

It seemed obvious in 1920 that high cholesterol levels in the blood infiltrating your artery walls was the cause of

coronary heart disease the number one killer of men and women

Confirmed as unequivocally as the revelation that blood circulated throughout the body or that the tuberculosis bacteria causes tuberculosis

The question is why did it take so long?

What is so puzzling is that why we have to work so hard to sell the message given what seems to be an unbeatable amount of hard evidence?

Many rejected the cholesterol heart disease link because so many patients were dying of coronary heart disease despite so-called perfectly normal cholesterol levels

Of course as I've detailed before having normal cholesterol levels in a society where it's normal to drop dead of a heart attack

Isn't exactly saying much

Ideally we want to get our total cholesterol well under 150 since having high cholesterol levels in your blood

Is thought of as the only direct atherosclerotic risk factor all the other things smoking high blood pressure diabetes in activity

Obesity just exacerbate the damage caused by the high cholesterol

Another factor may be the preoccupation of cardiologists with all the new fancy gadgets and procedures out there

It's like we train them to be highly skilled high-tech fighter pilots to fight a war

But then sent them on some boring preventive diplomatic mission

But the reasons maybe even more personal than that

As an editorial in the journal the American Heart Association asked nearly 50 years ago

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