OK, software is compiling so I've got some downtime. Here goes, in classic flamewar style.

Yet when I first opened my medical practice in the mid 80s, cholesterol, and the fear that yours was too high was rarely talked about. Somewhere along the way however, cholesterol became a household word -- something that you must keep as low as possible, or suffer the consequences.

Yes, between the 1980s and now, dozens of clinical trials have been completed showing a dose-response relationship between LDL-cholesterol and risk for myocardial infarction. This is what changed "along the way."

You are probably aware that there are many myths that portray fat and cholesterol as one of the worst foods you can consume. Please understand that these myths are actually harming your health.

What is true is that, for a typical American diet, ~70% of the cholesterol in your body is produced by your body. The actual uptake of cholesterol per se is, truly, not thought to be that important. Diet more broadly, however, is important, since your diet supplies your liver with the raw components for cholesterol synthesis. Diet matters. Genetics matter. ~50% of the population variability in cholesterol levels is due to genetic factors, and ~50% is due to genetic factors.

In addition, the AHA updated their guidelines in 2004, lowering the recommended level of LDL cholesterol from 130 to LDL to less than 100, or even less than 70 for patients at very high risk. In order to achieve these outrageous and dangerously low targets, you typically need to take multiple cholesterol-lowering drugs. So the guidelines instantly increased the market for these dangerous drugs. Now, with testing children's cholesterol levels, they're increasing their market even more.

These are evidence-based guidelines, not wantonly chosen. Again, there is a dose-response relationship between LDL-C and risk for vascular disease. The lower your LDL-C, the lower your risk of vascular disease will be. The author presents no evidence of harm from having an LDL-C of 70, nor am I aware of any evidence suggesting so.

No physician that I know routinely worries about total cholesterol, and furthermore a high TC is almost always caused by high LDL-C, so I see this as a red herring.

Notice please that LDL and HDL are lipoproteins -- fats combined with proteins. There is only one cholesterol. There is no such thing as "good" or "bad" cholesterol.

Agreed. There are good and bad lipoproteins; it's not so simple for HDL, but most evidence suggests that LDL - especially small, dense LDL particles - is harmful at most concentrations. Really, this quote from Ron Rosedale seem completely reasonable to me.

Cholesterol is a vital component of every cell membrane on Earth. In other words, there is no life on Earth that can live without cholesterol.

This is trivially true, but meaningless. Water forms 70% of your body. This doesn't mean that you can't kill yourself by drinking too much water (acute hyponatremia --> brainstem herniation, anyone?).

If your cholesterol level is too low you will not be able to use the sun to generate sufficient levels of vitamin D.

But wait, I thought we just established that cholesterol != lipoproteins? If so, there should be no problem with driving down LDL-C to very low levels. More seriously, there must be some empirically-identifiable cholesterol level below which you fail to generate vitamin D. I suspect that level is impossible to achieve, and therefore think that this is also a red herring.

Additionally, it provides some intuitive feedback that if cholesterol were so dangerous, why would your body use it as precursor for vitamin D and virtually all of the steroid hormones in your body?

This is silly. Why, if oxygen is dangerous, do we have an electron transport chain? Let's not get teleological up in here.

Sally Fallon, the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and Mary Enig, Ph.D, an expert in lipid biochemistry, have gone so far as to call high cholesterol "an invented disease, a 'problem' that emerged when health professionals learned how to measure cholesterol levels in the blood."

We also invented myocardial infarction at the same time, I guess.

And one meta-analysis of over 41,000 patient records found that people who take statin drugs to lower their cholesterol as much as possible may have a higher risk of cancer[...]

True. But others show the opposite (say, for prostate cancer http://www.webmd.com/prostate-cancer/news/20100628/statins-m... ) and people who look at the balance of the evidence feel that it's not clear because the studies so far haven't really been designed to interrogate that question. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20099992

I'll try to continue with the rest of this long article later.