The health promoting community over the past many years has basically gone nuts over cholesterol. It has been painted up as the big bad killer from improper dietary habits. The basic message has been to keep your cholesteral levels low, or die!

Well, as with most very one-eyed views, this has been a significant distortion of reality. Yes, it is wise to maintain healthful levels of blood lipids (all the fats in your bloodstream) including an appropriate HDL to LDL ratio. (Just so we're clear, those abbreviations stand for high density lipoproteins and low density lipoproteins.) But eliminating cholesterol is both very unhealthy and ultimately impossible.

Why unhealthy and impossible? Simple: your body actually manufactures cholesterol in the liver, because it is needed. Eliminating it completely from the diet will generally lower your levels but you can't eliminate cholesterol completely, since you make it yourself.

It is this actual need for cholesterol that has always made me a bit suspicious about claims it was like poison and especially suspicious of the drugs pharmaceutical companies rolled out to destroy, eliminate or reduce cholesterol, called statins. The research evidence on statins is clear enough. In very basic terms, they:

• don't significantly reduce the risk of death from heart attacks,
• don't extend longevity in post heart attack patients, and
• do result in assorted unwanted side effects.

They do let doctors feel like they are doing something and they may allow some patients to also feel more comfortable with the thought that help is being provided. I reject these spurious benefits however, since they distract from doing more constructive risk reduction and ultimately breach the principle of "do no harm".

So the time has come to ease up on cholesterol, not by simply reducing cholesterol containing foods, but by cutting back on the cholesterol bashing and blaming. Cholesterol simply isn't that bad and doesn't deserve the bad press it has received.

For those who will have some difficulty getting past the messages drummed into folk over the last few decades I suggest the following. Research the data on the number of heart attacks (myocardial infarctions or coronary occulusions) suffered by people with perfectly normal cholesterol (who were not receiving statins). Then look at the data on the number of people with raised cholesterol who show no signs of heart disease and have not had a heart attack.

What you will find is that it becomes quite difficult to understand just why quite so much fuss was made about cholesterol. You may also wonder why so many people have suffered quite bad side effects (including death) from drugs used to reduce cholesterol levels. The answers are to be found in complex relationships, perceived marketing opportunities and simple greed rather than in sound clinical science.