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Low cholesterol increases death rates in young
Part 2: Deaths in the young
In 1991 the US National Cholesterol Education Programme recommended that children over two years old should adopt a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet to prevent CHD in later life. Tp support their recommendation, they published a table showing a good correlation between dietary fat and cholesterol intakes and blood cholesterol in seven to nine-year-old boys from six countries. And the figures were compelling: the children eating less meat , fat and cholesterol did have lower blood cholesterol.
What it did not show, however, was the even stronger correlation between blood cholesterol and childhood deaths in those countries.[1]
The figures for the six countries are tabled below.
| Blood Cholesterol (mmol/L) |
Childhood deaths |
|
| Finland | 4.9 | 7 |
| Netherlands | 4.5 | 9 |
| USA | 4.3 | 12 |
| Italy | 4.1 | 12 |
| Philippines | 3.8 | 72 |
| Ghana | 3.3 | 145 |
You can see quite clearly that the death rate in the young rises dramatically as blood cholesterol levels fall.
That doesn't mean that the one necessarily causes the other, but added to the other evidence across other age ranges, it does support such a conclusion.
Reference
1. Child mortality under age 5 per 1,000. 1992 Britannia Book of the Year. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago.
Part 1. Introduction | Part 2: Deaths in the young | Part 3. Middle aged deaths | Part 4: Elderly Deaths
Last updated: 1 December 2011
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