I liked The Cholesterol Code. But I think it started the story about 70 years too late.
The documentary follows Dave Feldman’s fascinating journey after his LDL cholesterol skyrocketed on a ketogenic diet.
Instead of simply accepting that high LDL automatically meant his health was deteriorating, he started asking questions.
That eventually helped lead to research on Lean Mass Hyper-Responders—people who can develop extremely high LDL on carbohydrate-restricted diets while simultaneously having high HDL, low triglycerides, and otherwise good metabolic markers.
And some of the early coronary-imaging research is fascinating.
But here’s my problem with the movie:
How did we become so terrified of cholesterol and animal fat in the first place?
That’s the part of the story I wanted more of.
Long before Dave Feldman started questioning conventional thinking about LDL, Ancel Keys and the diet-heart hypothesis helped fundamentally change how Americans thought about saturated fat, cholesterol, meat, eggs, and butter.
So while The Cholesterol Code asks an important question—
“What if a high LDL doesn’t tell us the entire story?”
—I think there’s another question we should be asking:
“Were some of our assumptions about cholesterol and animal fat oversimplified from the beginning?”
The movie is worth watching.
But sometimes understanding where science is going requires understanding where it came from.
And that’s where I think The Cholesterol Code could have dug much deeper.
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