To sell statins, we’re told cholesterol damages arteries—in reality, it repairs arterial injury. Statins hence don’t prevent death and give 20% of users muscle, liver, or nerve damage.

SS

Weird that converging lines of evidence completely disagree and that LDL/apob’s causal relationship with CVD is so well understood that any number of therapies using any number of pathways to lower LDL can be reliably and predictably modeled.

When LDL is above our naturally low threshold it gets trapped in the artery wall, where it accumulates and undergoes modifications, triggering immune responses that lead to plaque formation. That’s not repair— that’s atherosclerosis and the only pathway to regression (healing) is extremely low LDL, in other words, literally the opposite of what’s claimed.

>in reality, it repairs arterial injury

This is 100% correct. How so?

* The vessel walls (of arteries and veins) are made up of a lot of collagen.

* Arteries are more “pressurized” than veins, so they need to be stronger.

* The vitamin most involved in collagen turnover/maintenance is Vitamin C.

* A chronic Vitamin C deficiency adversely affects collagen turnover and vascular walls (esp. in arteries) start to get weak spots.

* Arterial plaques (made of cholesterol) are an attempt by the body to patch up these weak spots.

* This is the reason you most often see arterial plaques in arteries that are subject to the strongest pressure pulses (ie. coronary arteries around the heart itself).

If you took, say, 1000mg time release vitamin C every day… you’d *never* get a heart attack. Probably never get a stroke either. Maintenance of vascular elasticity goes a long way towards healthy blood pressure as well.

And the reason you don’t hear much about this is because treatments for arteriosclerosis, “cholesterol” and blood pressure are worth hundreds of Billions $$$ every year.

If everybody got enough vitamin C, all of that spending (on health problems) would be wiped out.