Reinhard Stompe

Cholesterol in your skin, under sunlight, becomes vitamin D. Cholesterol in your glands becomes testosterone, oestrogen and the hormone that holds a pregnancy. Cholesterol in your liver becomes the bile that lets you digest a single mouthful of fat. Cholesterol in every membrane you own is what keeps the cell the right stiffness to work. Cholesterol in your brain, a quarter of all you have, insulates every nerve you think with. Cholesterol in breast milk, in quantity, is how a baby's brain gets built, and the formula tin has almost none. Every animal with a backbone runs on it, without exception. The body makes about 80% of its own, every day, because it refuses to be without it, and makes more the moment you eat less. And somewhere in the last 50 years we were taught to be afraid of it. Afraid of cholesterol. We check a number before we eat a yolk. We hand a lifelong tablet to 8 million people in England whose only symptom was the number. When the trials were finally read properly, the tablet moved a 3 in 100 risk to a 2 in 100, and raised the diabetes risk by a tenth for the privilege. The molecule that builds every hormone you have is now something you take a drug to suppress. Low cholesterol went from a sign of a starving patient to a treatment goal. No animal has ever lowered its own cholesterol. Every other creature on earth still makes as much as it can. One species takes a tablet first.