SNEAK PEEK: A New Golden Age of Cholesterol

We're on the cusp of a new golden age for this essential substance

The First Golden Age of Cholesterol—that was basically all of human history right up until the twentieth century.

Sure, the Agricultural Revolution—the spread of fixed-field cultivation from the Near East about 10,000 years ago—introduced grains to human diets in a way that was unheralded, causing a whole lot of pain and also civilisation as we know it; but for the vast span of our time as modern humans, some 200,000 years, the healthiest people have been those who’ve built their diets around nutrient-dense animal foods. And what nutrient-dense animal foods contain in abundance is cholesterol, as well as the highest-quality protein, fats, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, cofactors and miraculous substances whose properties we’re only beginning to discover. (Just like some ridiculous proportion of matter in the universe is reckoned to be “dark matter,” so there are thousands upon thousands of compounds in food we know absolutely nothing about—experts actually call them “nutritional dark matter.”)

The importance of nutrient-dense, cholesterol-rich animal foods: That’s the message of the book I consider to be the greatest book on nutrition ever written, Weston A. Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939), which I’m sure you’ve probably never read, even if you’ve actually heard of it. Price was a dentist in turn-of-the-twentieth century Cleveland, Ohio, and he went on a globe-trotting adventure with his wife in an attempt to understand why his patients’ faces, especially the children’s, appeared, quite literally, to be collapsing before his eyes. It wasn’t just that cavities were becoming a more serious problem: his patients’ jaws, inner mouths, cheeks and noses weren’t developing properly either. Price thought, wisely, that the cause was changing diet, and the growing prevalence of industrially produced foodstuffs (refined grains, canned goods, sugar syrups), and he found confirmation of his thesis in the diets of traditional small-scale societies in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australasia and Polynesia.

Whether it was the Inuit eating prodigious quantities of salmon, salmon eggs and caribou; high-alpine Swiss farmers and their diet of rye bread, butter, cheese and milk; or East African pastoralists keeping things just as simple by eating only meat, milk and blood from their cattle—every group Weston Price found in “perfect health” on his journey valued animal foods packed with cholesterol above all else.

I often say that if Nutrition and Physical Degeneration had been the foundation for the emerging discipline of nutritional science, we’d be living in a very different world today. But instead, cholesterol became the most demonised substance in all of health, except tobacco, and now we’re here instead of there.