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protect against heart disease and cancer.
Your body needs cholesterol to make all the sex hormones, including androgen, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and DHEA.
Your body uses cholesterol to make vitamin D, vital for the bones and nervous system, proper growth, mineral metabolism, muscle tone, insulin production, reproduction, and immune system function.
The bile salts are made from cholesterol. Bile is vital for digestion and assimilation of dietary fats.
Cholesterol acts as an antioxidant, protecting us against free radical damage that leads to heart disease and cancer.
Cholesterol is needed for proper function of serotonin receptors in the brain. Since serotonin is the body’s natural “feel-good” chemical, it’s not surprising that low cholesterol levels have been linked to aggressive and violent behavior, depression, and suicidal tendencies.
Mother’s milk is especially rich in cholesterol and contains a special enzyme that helps the baby utilize this nutrient. Babies and children need cholesterol-rich foods throughout their growing years to ensure proper development of the brain and nervous system.
Dietary cholesterol plays an important role in maintaining the health of the intestinal wall. This is why low-cholesterol vegetarian diets can lead to leaky gut syndrome and other intestinal disorders.
Finally, the body uses cholesterol to repair damaged cells. This means that higher cholesterol levels are actually beneficial. Meyer Texon, M.D., a well-known pathologist at New York University Medical Center, points out that indicting fat and cholesterol for hardening the arteries is like accusing white blood cells of causing infection, rather than helping the immune system to address it.
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    And, although there has been much alarm about cholesterol levels, in fact, the cholesterol found naturally in animal fats has many important functions (see sidebar).
    We’ll begin our critique of the lipid hypothesis by exploding four myths about the connection between saturated fat, cholesterol, and heart disease. *

    Myth #1: High-Fat Foods Cause Heart Disease
    Since the 1950s, scientists, medical organizations such as the American Heart Association, and government agencies such as the FDA have issued dietary guidelines, which they claimed were based on scientific research, urging the public to consume fewer animal products and substitute vegetable oils for animal fats. The food industry followed suit with advertising campaigns touting the health benefits of products low in fat or made with vegetable oils.
    Yet during the same time period, many studies were being carried out whose results directly contradicted the assumptions of the lipid hypothesis. Here is a selection of three such studies.

    The Masai of Kenya
    In the early 1960s, Dr. George Mann of Vanderbilt University studied the Masai people, cattle herders of Kenya whose diet consisted almost entirely of milk, meat, and blood. The Masai drank at least a gallon of milk per day, providing something like three-quarters of a pound of butterfat daily, and at festivals one person might eat four to ten pounds of meat!
    Not only did Dr. Mann discover the Masai to be virtually free of heart disease; their blood cholesterol was extremely low, about 50 percent lower than that of most Americans. When Dr. Mann studied 50 hearts and arteries from Masai tribesmen of all ages, he found as much atherosclerosis as in those of Americans. However, the types of plaques that caused obstruction (by sticking out of the vessel walls) were rare. In fact, he found no evidence that any of the 50 hearts had experienced a heart attack.

    Indian Railway Workers
    In 1967, Dr. S. L. Malhotra published a study of Indian railway employees in the British Heart Journal . He found that heart disease was seven times more common among workers in Madras compared to those in Punjab. Yet the Punjabi workers ate ten to twenty times more fat (and smoked eight times as much) as those in Madras. And the