If there will be a general theme to our second year of blogging, it will be chronic infections – how they interact with the body to promote disease, and how we can use diet-related techniques to successfully combat them.
Blood lipids, such as LDL and HDL cholesterol, provide a fascinating window into health. We’ve already discussed both LDL and HDL (Low Carb Paleo, and LDL is Soaring – Help!, March 2, 2011; Answer Day: What Causes High LDL on Low-Carb Paleo?, March 3, 2011; HDL and Immunity, April 12, 2011; HDL: Higher is Good, But is Highest Best?, April 14, 2011; How to Raise HDL, April 20, 2011), but there’s quite a bit more to be said.
The extraordinary Portuguese blogger Ricardo Carvalho, better known as O Primitivo, of Canibais e Reis did some great work a few years back assembling World Health Organization statistics into an Excel database. One of the fruits of this labor was that he was able to correlate disease rates against serum cholesterol levels for all the countries in the database. His post about that is here and he created a great graphical representation of the results which I’ve reproduced here (click here to enlarge):
There’s a lot of interesting. information in this graph.
On the upper right are some correlation coefficients between serum cholesterol and disease incidence. Most diseases are either uncorrelated with cholesterol, or negatively correlated, meaning that mortality goes up as cholesterol goes down.
