A friendly journalist asked me if I had seen the paper from Norway which looked at cholesterol levels heart disease and overall mortality. Amazingly, as I have sensitive antennae for such things, I had not heard of the HUNT 2 study. Not quite so amazingly, no-one else seems to have heard of it either.

Strange, in a world where the most ridiculous dietary studies are plastered across the front pages of the newspapers, and get top billing on the BBC. You know the type of thing…. Eating red meat regularly ‘dramatically increases the risk of death from heart disease’ A typical headline from the Daily Mail.

But when a ten year study looking at cholesterol levels, overall morality, and heart disease comes out….Silence. I wonder why? Perhaps it has something to do with the results. (See below) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2753.2011.01767.x/pdf

A friendly journalist asked me if I had seen the paper from Norway which looked at cholesterol levels heart disease and overall mortality. Amazingly, as I have sensitive antennae for such things, I had not heard of the HUNT 2 study. Not quite so amazingly, no-one else seems to have heard of it either.

The graph on the left looks at overall mortality vs. cholesterol levels. The one on the right looks at ischaemic heart disease and cholesterol levels in both men and women.

As you can see, for women the story is very straightforward indeed. The higher the cholesterol level, the lower the risk of overall mortality. With regard to heart disease alone, the highest risk is at the lowest cholesterol level. For men there is more of a U shaped curve, but overall mortality is highest at the lowest cholesterol level.

This was a ten year study done in Norway, looking at fifty thousand people – with no pre-existing heart disease. So what we have here is five hundred and ten thousand years of observational data.

These findings do not surprise me in the least, for I have seen many other studies demonstrating exactly the same thing. The lower your cholesterol level, the shorter your life expectancy. Just to take one example. An Austrian study twice this size of this Norwegian one came to the following conclusions:

‘In men, across the entire age range, although of borderline significance under the age of 50, and in women from the age of 50 onward only, low cholesterol was significantly associated with all-cause mortality, showing significant associations with death through cancer, liver diseases, and mental diseases.’  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=adam%20%20eve%20cholesterol%20austria

Added together these studies looked at two hundred thousand people, with a total of two million years of observational data which is a pretty damned impressive amount of work and figures.

I am willing to bet that you have heard nothing about either of them. But how could you? The Austrian study passed by the mainstream media without a whisper, as did HUNT 2. The boy tried to shout that the Emperor had no clothes, but the crowd had stuck in ear plugs. For who wants to hear such an annoying message anyway?