I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Marvellous are thy works; And that my soul knoweth right well.Psalm 139:14 (KJV)
Cholesterol is good for you. It is in the lining of your cell walls. About 25% of your body's cholesterol is in the brain. The body produces stress hormones, sex hormones, and vitamin D from cholesterol. Cholesterol is necessary to repair the body and when a person is stressed or injured, the liver produces more cholesterol. But medical doctors have set arbitrary limits of how much of this good stuff you should have, and therefore to lower your cholesterol, they will prescribe a drug with many known side effects including muscle damage, kidney failure, peripheral neuropathy and memory loss. Statins are derived from the poison husk of red rice which kills its predators. Interestingly, statin poisons lower cholesterol, and perhaps that is the point: if you lower cholesterol, your mortality rate goes up.
Doctors have decided that this cholesterol which our livers produce and release into the blood stream is bad for us. Yet the mechanism which the liver "decides" to release cholesterol may be a necessary part of the normal function and often of healing the body. Who do you think is smarter? Your doctor or your liver?
Actually it isn't a question of whether the liver is smarter but of the designer of the liver being smarter. If the one who designed your liver knew what he was doing, then perhaps we should not second guess this mechanism governing cholesterol production and thus allow a mere human being to determine what our serum cholesterol levels should be. For the designer of the liver may actually be smarter than the doctors who are trying to fix arbitrary limits on the liver's production of cholesterol.
The final concern has to do with money. The designer owns the cattle on a thousand hills (Psalm 5.10). He is wealthy beyond our imagination. The pharmaceutical companies require continual sales of statins to pay their employees (not least of all their CEOs gargatuan 7 figure salaries), their shareholders, and their promotion efforts, including the transfers to doctors on panels which decide what cholesterol levels should be. In investing, we call this a conflict of interest. The designer has no conflict of interest, because he has no need of our money.
First published at righteousinvestor.com