What if everything you thought you knew about cholesterol was wrong? Dr. Annette Bosworth, MD (Dr. Boz), has spent years helping patients understand the truth about cholesterol. She’s seen firsthand how common myths can sabotage your health. This post will debunk three of the most persistent cholesterol myths, setting the record straight and helping you focus on what truly matters for your well-being.
Video Summary made with Artificial Intelligence.
Myth #1: Cholesterol is Unhealthy
Think cholesterol is the enemy? Think again.
The Myth: Cholesterol in the body is unhealthy.
The Truth: Cholesterol is absolutely essential for life. It’s not some evil substance waiting to clog your arteries. Your body can’t even live without it. Here’s why cholesterol is so important:
- Cell Structure: Cholesterol is a key building block in the cell lining of every cell in your body. It strengthens the cell membrane and protects it from temperature changes. Without cholesterol, cells would melt if they got too hot or crystallize if they got too cold.
- Digestion: Cholesterol is the main ingredient in bile. Bile helps you absorb fats and also helps your body get rid of toxins.
- Nerve Function: Cholesterol is a major component of the myelin sheath, the protective layer of fat around every nerve.
- Hormone Production: Cholesterol is needed to create sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen.
- Vitamin D: Your body needs cholesterol to make vitamin D.
These fat-based molecules simply couldn’t exist without cholesterol. It’s that vital.
Myth #2: Eating Cholesterol Raises Your Cholesterol
Have you been avoiding eggs and other cholesterol-rich foods? It might be time to reconsider.
The Myth: Eating cholesterol will raise your blood cholesterol, leading to clogged arteries.
The Origin of the Myth: An old article unfairly demonized cholesterol, and that fear has stuck around for decades.
The Truth: Dietary cholesterol has very little impact on your blood cholesterol levels. How little? Less than 1%.
Your body tightly regulates cholesterol levels. Your liver and brain make most of the cholesterol you need. But every single cell in your body has the DNA to make cholesterol if needed. It’s that important.
Myth #3: High Blood Cholesterol Causes Heart Disease
Is your doctor overly focused on your cholesterol numbers? Here’s a different way to think about heart health.
The Myth: High blood cholesterol causes heart disease.
The Flaw in the Dogma: This idea is based on a 50-year-old belief that needs a serious update.
The Real Culprit: Inflammation: Plaques do build up in your arteries, but they’re filled with cholesterol that got there because of chronic inflammation. Inflammation prevents your body from processing cholesterol efficiently.
Instead of focusing solely on the amount of cholesterol in your blood, we should look at how long it stays there. Dr. Boz calls this “residency time.”
Here’s how it works:
- Cholesterol leaves the liver.
- It travels through your body.
- It gets recycled back into the liver.
The shorter the residency time, the healthier you are. Cholesterol needs to leave the liver for us to survive. But when cholesterol is delivered slowly and struggles to get recycled back into the liver, problems arise.
The longer a cholesterol droplet stays in your bloodstream, the more likely it is to become oxidized and dangerous.
What increases the residency time of cholesterol? High blood sugar.
Instead of fixating on cholesterol numbers, Dr. Boz recommends focusing on blood sugar. Learn how to fix your blood sugar levels in this video.
Cholesterol: Rethinking What You Know
It’s time to look beyond just the “high cholesterol” number. Cholesterol is essential for cell structure, digestion, nerve health, hormone production, and vitamin D synthesis. Eating cholesterol has very little impact on blood cholesterol levels. And high blood cholesterol doesn’t automatically cause heart disease; inflammation and cholesterol residency time are more important factors.
Are you ready to rethink what you know about cholesterol?
Disclaimer
This content is strictly the opinion of Annette Bosworth, MD. Our content informs and educates viewers. Medical advice is not given on this channel. Your personal physician gives the medical advice and treatment specific to your situation. Dr. Boz channel only educates. Consult your doctor or qualified health professional regarding specific health questions. Neither Dr. Bosworth nor the publisher of this content takes responsibility for possible health consequences of any person(s) receiving this educational content. Ask your health advisors before beginning any nutritional supplement or lifestyle program.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Don’t take statin drugs “to reduce cholesterol.