I'm wondering if eventually the lipid hypothesis will be reversed or radically re-interpreted.

For example. There are 79 mg of cholesterol in a Big Mac -- heart attack on a bun, right? Eat one of those a day and you're sure to keel over dead long before your time.

But wait. How much cholesterol does the liver produce each day? 1-2 grams. Split the difference and say it's 1.5 grams. Thats 1,500 mg of cholesterol that your liver produces each day. Why? Because cholesterol is a structural component. It helps crosslink and therefore stabilize the "lipid membrane", the double layer of long chain fats that make up your cell membrane. And it makes up the entrance pores to the cell membrane that things like glucose use to get in and out of the cell (which is why statins increase the risk of diabetes.) And it is a precursor to hormones.

So 1500 mg of cholesterol needed daily to stay healthy. Compared with the 79 mg of cholesterol in the Big Mac.

That Big Mac is 5.2% of the cholesterol your own body makes when it is healthy.

So is the body so exquisitely and delicately balanced that adding 5% more cholesterol doubles or triples the blood level? I doubt it.

So what if we are actually missing the boat? What if high cholesterol is associated with atherosclerosis but not causative? What if the body cranks up cholesterol production to try to fix whatever problem is causing the atherosclerosis?

Imagine cholesterol as lumber -- a structural component. Now imagine that a tornado sweeps through a town. An alien high above looks down, sees that some damage has been done, and also sees lumber trucks everywhere and concludes that the lumber trucks must be causing the problem.

I know -- I'm probably tilting at windmills here, but something about that whole theory just doesn't sound right to me.