Blood Cholesterol: One of the Strongest Predictors of Chronic Disease

Diseases of affluence is a term used in referring to selected diseases and other health conditions which are usually linked to increasing wealth and luxury in a society. They include obesity, diabetes, cancer, hypertension. The assumption has been that increased luxury and wealth result in a better quality of life but this has not really been the case. When wealth comes, there is usually a change in lifestyle and food choices which greatly affect health.

One factor that has really contributed to chronic health conditions is diet. When people have luxury, they tend to switch to western diet and adopt a sedentary lifestyle. These can be disastrous to health. Because the vast majority of people in the United States and other Western countries die from diseases of affluence, the diseases are often referred to as “Western” diseases.

In the course of the China Study, Dr. Campbell and his team compared the prevalence of Western diseases in each county with diet and lifestyle variables. To their surprise, they found that one of the strongest predictors of Western diseases was blood cholesterol.

When it comes to cholesterol, there are two main categories: dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol.

Present in the food we eat is dietary cholesterol. Much like vitamins, minerals, fat, protein, and sugar, dietary cholesterol is a component of food. Where is this cholesterol found? Only in animal-based food. It is the one you find on food labels. How many organ meat did you eat last week? Your doctor cannot measure that just as he cannot measure dietary cholesterol. When your doctor checks your cholesterol levels, he cannot know how much dietary cholesterol you consume. What your doctor measures is the amount of cholesterol present in your blood. This second type of cholesterol which is made in the liver is called “blood cholesterol.” Dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol are identical but they do not represent the same thing. Dietary cholesterol does not necessarily turn into blood cholesterol. Hundreds of different chemical reactions and dozens of nutrients are involved in the extremely complex way the body makes blood cholesterol. As a result of this complexity, the health effects of eating dietary cholesterol may be very different from the health effects of having blood cholesterol.

As blood cholesterol levels in rural China rose in certain counties, the incidence of “Western” diseases also increased. What made this so surprising was that Chinese levels were far lower than we had expected. The average level of blood cholesterol was only 127 mg/dL, which is almost 100 points less than the American average (215 mg/dL)! Some counties had average levels as low as 94 mg/dL. For two groups of about twenty-five women in the inner part of China, average blood cholesterol was at the amazingly low level of 80 mg/dL.

If you know your own cholesterol levels, you’ll appreciate how low these values really are. In the U.S., our range is around 170–290 mg/dL. Our low values are near the high values for rural China. Indeed, in the U.S., there was a myth that there might be health problems if cholesterol levels were below 150 mg/dL. If we followed that line of thinking, about 85% of the rural Chinese would appear to be in trouble. But the truth is quite different. Lower blood cholesterol levels are linked to lower rates of heart disease, cancer and other Western diseases, even at levels far below those considered “safe” in the West.

At the outset of the China Study, no one could or would have predicted that there would be a relationship between cholesterol and any of the disease rates. What a surprise we got! As blood cholesterol levels decreased from 170 mg/dL to 90 mg/dL, cancers of the liver, rectum, colon, male lung, female lung, breast, childhood leukemia, adult leukemia, childhood brain, adult brain, stomach and esophagus (throat) decreased. As you can see, this is a sizable list. Most Americans know that if you have high cholesterol, you should worry about your heart, but they don’t know that you might want to worry about cancer as well.1

Low-density lipoprotein (LDL) and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) are two types of blood cholesterol. HDL is the “good” kind while LDL is the “bad” kind. Higher levels of LDL cholesterol were associated with Western diseases in the China Study.

Note:

1. T. Colin Campbell, PhD, and Thomas M. Campbell II, The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health, 2006, BenBella Books, Inc., Dallas, pp. 78–79.