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Alliance for Natural Health On November 29, 2011
http://www.anh-usa.org/starting-children-on-drugs/
That seems to be the path a new recommendation is putting us on.
An expert panel appointed by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, is now urging cholesterol screening for all children between ages 9 and 11 [1]—before puberty, when cholesterol temporarily dips—and again between ages 17 and 21. News accounts discuss a family who put their daughter on cholesterol-lowering medicines when she was 5 (“that gives me hope that she’ll be healthy”) and a doctor at Johns Hopkins who thinks his 12-year-old son should be tested “because he has a cousin with very high ‘bad’ cholesterol.”
What is “bad” cholesterol, anyway? Conventional medicine says HDL cholesterol is good, and LDL is bad. But scientists at Texas A&M University have found that LDL cholesterol is actually needed by the body to build new muscle [2]—a finding that is particularly important both for kids and for the rest of us as we get older and lose muscle more rapidly. It also helps get vitamin D [3] around our body.
Moreover, as we reported last year [4], people with high cholesterol live the longest. Dr. Harlan Krumholz of Yale’s Department of Cardiovascular Medicine found that old people with low cholesterol died twice as often from a heart attack as did old people with high cholesterol. Many studies have found that low cholesterol is in one respect or another worse than high cholesterol. A review of nineteen large studies of more than 68,000 deaths by the Division of Epidemiology at the University of Minnesota found that low cholesterol predicted an increased risk of dying from gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases.
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