ROMA (ITALPRESS) – Cholesterol is an indispensable fat substance for the body: it contributes to the formation of cell membranes, it is necessary to produce some hormones and participates in the synthesis of vitamin D and biliary acids, fundamental to manage fats. Our body produces most of the cholesterol, especially in the liver, while one part comes from food: the problem is therefore not cholesterol itself, but when it is present in the blood in excessive amounts. In particular high levels of Ldl cholesterol, the so-called bad, can promote the formation of plaques in the arteries and increase the risk of heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases: Hdl cholesterol instead helps to remove excess cholesterol from the tissues and bring it back to the liver.
“There was a need for some biological clarity on cholesterol in a context in which he prevailed a statistical-epidemiological medicine: cholesterol is a molecule that has won thirteen Nobel Prizes, indispensable to life and that somehow he was framed in a path that led him to be a culprit. In fact, it is not: in my book this is presented in the form of a trial, because if it must be a guilty one, it takes an accusation, a defence and argument. It transforms a biological reality not only into a slogan, but in an intrinsically bad concept: there is all an intricate dialectic of metabolism and transformation of lipoproteins that lead some to be statistically associated with certain pathologies, so using the bad term is essentially a nonsense; cholesterol moves between the different lipoproteins and is the overall picture that we must see.” Fulvio Ursini, director of the food science school at the University of Padua, interviewed for Top Medicine, TV format of the ITALPRESS press agency.
Negative narrations about cholesterol, Ursini explains, derive from the fact that it is “associated statistically not so much to pathology, but to an increase of risk that very often is extremely marginal: the mechanism for which cholesterol hurts is not there and can not even exist. On the risk assessment, we cannot be nailed to numeretti: one thing is to use an indicator of some kind, another is to identify a culprit. This is why I want to defend this poor molecule, which has done so well and is nailed: the main responsible of cardiovascular diseases is to be sought in another way. Usually to describe these things I use a metaphor: we take trucks running on a road, these carry cholesterol and in part are also made of cholesterol; if I have so many trucks it is easy that someone goes off the road and makes an accident, but it is also possible that if I have few someone has broken brakes. With modern medicine when I have so many trucks down: statistically I can lower those with broken brakes, but the target is not that but adjust the brakes so that the traveler is safer. Instead, you move the target from something that is witness to something that is actually guilty: these are the broken brakes, not the load inside the truck”.
The discovery of Ancel Keys, he added, would concern not the Mediterranean diet but “that what they ate in the Western world, especially the Americans, killed them: on the basis of this he did a study on 22 countries, then he chose seven and saw that the more fat they ate, the more cardiovascular diseases. On the basis of this result the American sugar industry has heavily criminalized lipids: it did a nice business creating the fashion of the so-called Processed Food, but at the same time filled the Americans with sugars and of course increased cardiovascular diseases. The high amounts are bad for any stuff, but fat is not guilty: it is not true that they increase cholesterol.”.
Instead of in the latter, Ursini underlines, the true culprit must be identified in “an altered diet, which generates the pathological situation that we then call disease and refer it to a culprit who is thrown at a time by the media: the demonization of fats we will keep it forever. I’m not saying to fill us with butter croissants, but that to be wrong is the total quantity: we can even find the evolutionary reasons why we eat too much. The example of the scandal of sugars and fats arrived in a court: they condemned the researchers paid to speak ill of fat.”.
Physical activity concludes, “it affects a lot against cardiovascular risk: 30 thousand years ago they didn’t even know what the heart attack could be, people moved and were in a feeding condition for which there was a period of fat, with so much food available, and one of lean, in which it was missing. To have survived have been the most able to accumulate energies: we are biologically made to accumulate energy when famine arrives, but if this does not come we find more loads.”.
-Photos taken from video Top medicine
(ITALPRESS).
