The Scourge of Cholesterol

In the near future, people will probably look back at this era and call cholesterol the scourge of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This is ironic because in the last 40 years we have learned so much about preventing high cholesterol and heart disease. These human torments do not have to worry us anymore, but they persist because heart disease remains the number one killer.

Why is this so? It's an easy answer - just examine the changes in our diets over the last forty years. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, I was a teenager and I can remember clearly what we ate. There was no fast food until the early 60's when McDonald started spreading across the United States (I do believethat the hamburgers and French fries they served were better tasting than the ones they sell today). They had a sparce menu: hamburgers, French Fries (which were great tasting), soda pop, and milkshakes.

Today at McDonalds and other chains you have menues that take 10 minutes to read, and there are a dozen or more different national fast food chains dispensing their fatty, salty foods across America.

Fast Food

Fast food was a novelty 40 years ago. Today there are many more fast food outlets in a town or city than there are supermarkets or natural food vendors. And the variety of fast food choices is phenomenal. Many of the foods taste incredibly good and probably are incredibly bad for you. They are loaded with saturated fats, trans fats, salts, and sugars. As you read the pages on this web site you will understand why these are so bad for your cholesterol levels.

A large part of the advertising on TV concerns fast food. The concept of national chains like McDonald's has permeated to other foods like pizza. This would be fine if the pizza were made from local sources, but in most cases the pizza and the condiments that go on it come shipped from some other location. And the ingredients make the pizzas taste great, but again probably raise your cholesterol and play havoc with your arteries.

Prevention of Heart Disease

In the last forty years we have come several light years in our understanding of the causes of high cholesterol and its consequence - heart disease (atherosclerosis). The usual way of lowering high cholesterol today is by medication. The pharmaceuticals are all too happy to oblige in this respect. We are so medicated as a society that trace amounts of medication are found in our river drinking water.

Doctors dispense medication like candy. And the chances are that if you get on it you will stay on it. The pharmaceuticals make gobs of money this way and want this to be the status quo. I see commercials on TV about medications and then I hear a list of the possible side effects - which it would seem to me that it would scare a drunk person sober before taking that medication. What are we doing to ourselves?

Obesity

Today we have the fattest society that has ever been. Most adults are overweight and a large percentage of them can be classified as obese. Few people exercise - many people get their exercise by clicking the remote to change the channel.

Obesity is now a childhood problem - we have a growing number of obese children. I see overweight tweens riding electrified motor scooters. At that age I was peddling a single-speed, old-clunky bicycle to a vacant field somewhere to play in a softball game with other boys. These children need exercise - you don't get exercise riding a motorized vehicle - don't parents realize this?

Availability of Soda Pop

A small number of teens (thank God) across America have died from drinking too many soda pops. The caffeine, sugar, and sodium in each can add up to a fatal mixture when five or six cans are consumed in just a few hours. Soda pop is too available and is drunk in place of water or just to get high off of the caffeine. Too much sugar is consumed in this manner increasing the risk of diabetes a closely related illness to high cholesterol which recently has become a problem with children.

Web Page Dedication

This web page is dedicated to explaining all these issues and many more in the hopes of helping you understand and overcome the problems related to high cholesterol. Many of the ways to lower your cholesterol will be presented. Above I presented a somewhat grim view of our society's ills, but I want to say that it is the greatest time to be alive. We have so much to be thankful for and a wonderful future lies ahead of us. We have to overcome the scourge of high cholesterol and then we should be able to live a long healthy life without the fear of heart disease and heart attacks.

So please read through the pages in this web site. If you want more timely issues join the email list or go to the Lowering Your Cholesterol blog.

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