Part 3: The Cholesterol Con—Selling Sickness, Suppressing Health

The Myth That Became a Multi-Billion Dollar Business.

What if one of the most common beliefs about heart health was never true?  
What if the cholesterol kills narrative was engineered not for your well-being, but for the bottom lines of the world’s most powerful industries?  
This is the story of manipulated science, suppressed truth, and a business model built on lifelong medication.

The Birth of a Scapegoat: Cholesterol on Trial

In the 1950s, the diet-heart hypothesis took hold. Saturated fat and cholesterol were blamed for heart disease.  
The science was shaky from the start. Studies that didn’t fit the narrative were ignored or buried.  
By the 1960s, cholesterol was a household word—synonymous with danger, despite being essential for life.

Winners: Margarine and vegetable oil producers, processed food giants.  
Losers: Ranchers, egg farmers, and anyone seeking real food nutrition.

Food for Thought:  
If you can create a villain, you can sell the cure.

Industry Influence: Science for Sale

In 1967, the Sugar Research Foundation secretly paid Harvard scientists to downplay sugar’s role in heart disease and pin the blame on fat and cholesterol (Kearns et al. 2016, JAMA Internal Medicine).  
Decades of dietary advice focused on lowering cholesterol, while sugar quietly fueled an epidemic of metabolic disease.

Winners: Sugar industry, cereal and soda companies, cholesterol-free product lines.  
Losers: Public health, as diabetes and obesity soared.

Food for Thought:  
Science for sale is science for control.

Statins: The Blockbuster Drug Built on a Lie

Statins, cholesterol-lowering drugs, became the best-selling pharmaceuticals in history—despite questionable benefit for most people.  
Many statin trials were funded, designed, and published by the very companies selling the drugs.  
Side effects—muscle pain and deterioration, memory loss, increased diabetes risk—were minimized or ignored (Diamond and Ravnskov 2015).

Winners: Pharma giants like Pfizer (Lipitor), Merck (Zocor), AstraZeneca (Crestor)  
Statin sales: Over $20 billion per year at their peak  
Losers: Millions of patients put on lifelong medication, many without clear benefit and much harm.

Food for Thought:  
If you can get the whole world on a pill, why would you ever want a cure?

The Real Science: Cholesterol Is Essential, Not Evil

Cholesterol is crucial for cell membranes, hormone production, brain function, and immune health.  
Recent meta-analyses show no link between dietary cholesterol and heart disease or mortality (De Souza et al. 2015; Ravnskov et al. 2016).  
Many people with heart attacks have normal or low cholesterol.  
Low cholesterol is linked to depression, cognitive decline, and increased mortality in the elderly.

Winners: Heart-healthy food brands, cholesterol test manufacturers, statin drug makers.  
Losers: The public, misled and over medicated.

Food for Thought:  
Demonize the nutrient, control the market.

Suppression and Spin: How Dissent Was Silenced

Scientists and doctors who questioned the cholesterol theory were ridiculed, blacklisted, or lost funding.  
Alternative research—on inflammation, metabolic health, or nutrient-dense diets—was marginalized or ignored.  
Medical guidelines, written by panels with industry ties, has kept the cholesterol myth alive for decades.

Winners: Industry-funded research labs, medical journals, and expert panels  
Losers: Independent researchers and the millions denied real solutions

Food for Thought:  
Silence the critics, sell the myth.

The Human Cost: A Nation Afraid of Real Food

Eggs, butter, red meat—vilified and replaced by processed, low-fat, high-sugar foods.  
Generations grew up afraid of the very foods their ancestors thrived on.  
Meanwhile, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and dementia continue to soar at astonishing rates.

Winners: Processed food companies, statin manufacturers, medical device makers.  
Losers: The public, suffering from the fallout of decades and decades of orchestrated misinformation and outright lies.

Food for Thought:  
A fearful population is a profitable population.

The Real Heart Disease Was in the Boardroom

The cholesterol con wasn’t just a scientific mistake—it was a deliberate strategy to sell products, drugs and procedures.  
You were NEVER meant to be healthy—you were meant to be managed, profitably.

But the truth is out. The only question left: What will you do with it?

Teaser for Next Segment

You’ve seen how a myth became a money machine. Next, we expose the carbohydrate catastrophe—the engineered rise of processed carbs, the explosion of diabetes and obesity, and how the cycle of profit keeps spinning.

Ready to see how deep the manipulation goes? The next part will reveal how your plate became the frontline of a billion-dollar battle.

Share your stories and questions below. The only way to reclaim your health is to question everything they want you to believe.