MORE CHOLESTEROL MYTHS DEBUNKED
- Daniel Chong, ND
- 7 minutes ago
- 3 min read
You’re gonna want to read this one carefully....
OK, here’s something that might surprise you, and honestly, it surprised me when I first learned it too.
The standard narrative out there most people have heard goes something like this: cholesterol is crucial for the life of all cells and the liver makes the cholesterol, packages it into LDL, and ships it out to your organs and tissues that need it. So essentially LDL = delivery truck.
Simple, right?
Turns out, that whole narrative is off base and has actually even been called a “misleading keep-it-simple scheme” by researchers publishing in the journal Circulation Research.
Here’s what’s actually going on.
A large portion of the cholesterol in the LDL particles in your bloodstream is actually there because it was picked up from your peripheral tissues, first by HDL, then transferred over to LDL. You read that right. Most people think of HDL as the one that brings cholesterol back to the liver, but mostly it’s the picker-upper that then does a handoff of sorts to LDL to finish the job.
In fact, in an average person, somewhere between 30–60% of the cholesterol inside an LDL particle originally literally came from an HDL particle that collected it from cells around the body!
That means LDL is functioning significantly as a RETURN VEHICLE, bringing cholesterol BACK TO THE LIVER to be processed and excreted, not out to tissues and organs, all of whom make most or all of their cholesterol in house, with the small exception of tissues like the adrenal glands and gonads, which do take up small amounts of cholesterol from circulating LDL for hormone production. Be clear there though that this need is easily met even at even very very low LDL levels, as confirmed by the fact that people with lifelong extremely low LDL show no deficiencies in steroid hormone production. High levels not required.
Why does your body need to do this?
Because your cells make their own cholesterol, and too much of it is actually dangerous at the cellular level. Excess cholesterol can actually crystallize inside a cell and kill it. So cells have to offload the excess. Again here, HDL collects it, transfers much of it to LDL, and LDL carries it back to the liver.
So what causes cells to overproduce cholesterol in the first place?
Research points to a few key culprits: insulin resistance, chronically elevated blood sugar, and high fructose intake all appear to activate a cellular pathway (called SREBP2) that ramps up cholesterol synthesis. This is one reason metabolic health and cardiovascular risk are so tightly linked.
Important side note: what then is the primary effect of all LDL-lowering drugs? Enhancing this process above by directly or indirectly improving the binding of LDL particles to the receptors in the liver responsible for clearing them. The “side effect” is then fewer LDL particles floating around, and so fewer available to accidentally get stuck in artery linings.
Bottom line- the full picture is a lot more interesting than the simple delivery truck story, and people trying to convince you that higher LDL is good because it means more cells get this vital cholesterol in fact have no idea what they are talking about.
Here’s one other related quote to drive the point home:
“Hepatic cholesterol synthesis in humans is thought to contribute 10–20% of the total daily synthesis rate. Because the majority of cholesterol synthesis in the body occurs in extrahepatic tissues, and the only quantitatively significant site for excretion and catabolism of cholesterol is the liver, some 600–800 mg of cholesterol each day must be transported from peripheral tissues through the plasma compartment to the liver to account for daily cholesterol catabolism and secretion (as bile into the gut).”
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