12/04/2026
Interesting read
The Cholesterol Myth Is Keeping Menopausal Women Sick!
Almost everything you've been taught about cholesterol is based on research done primarily in men, not women, and certainly not menopausal women.
And this matters enormously.
Allow me to enlighten you in what cholesterol is...
Your liver produces about eighty percent of your cholesterol deliberately, because you cannot survive without it.
Cholesterol is the precursor to every single s*x hormone you produce. Estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, cortisol, all made from cholesterol. Without adequate cholesterol, your body cannot produce the hormones you need.
It's essential for brain function, your brain is the most cholesterol rich organ in your body. Neuronal membranes, myelin sheaths, and neurotransmitter production, all depend on it.
It's required for vitamin D synthesis, cell membrane integrity, and bile acid production for fat digestion.
This isn't a toxin contaminating your bloodstream as you have been told. This is a vital molecule your body manufactures because you need it.
So, what is actually happening in menopause is that when estrogen declines, cholesterol often rises....naturally. But immediately, mainstream medicine treats this as a problem to fix.
Modern science began to ask why is your cholesterol rises and what they found is incredible.
Your body is attempting to compensate for declining hormone production. Cholesterol is the raw material, so when estrogen and progesterone drop, your body increases cholesterol availability to try to maintain some level of hormone synthesis.
This isn't a problem, this is adaptation at it's finest.
And when you aggressively lower cholesterol during menopause through extreme dietary restriction or statins, you're removing the very substrate your body needs to produce hormones that support brain function, bone health, muscle maintenance, and metabolic regulation.
The higher cholesterol is necessary for when post menopause we move from ovarian estrogen to the intracrine hormone production. (I will explain this further in the next post I write, because another lie you are being told is that we no longer produce hormone at any meaningful level.)
But what you need to understand is that the cholesterol lipid hypothesis was wrong....
For decades we were told that high cholesterol causes heart disease. The mechanism seemed simple, cholesterol accumulates in arteries, forms plaques, causes heart attacks, so lower the cholesterol, and prevent the heart attack was their answer...
Except it's not that simple.
What actually drives cardiovascular disease is metabolic dysfunction which is insulin resistance, chronic inflammation, oxidative stress, and endothelial dysfunction.
Cholesterol shows up at sites of damage because it's part of the repair process, so blaming cholesterol for heart disease is like blaming firefighters for fires because you always see them at the scene.
The risk factors that actually predict cardiovascular events are not total cholesterol or LDL. They're markers of metabolic dysfunction such as high triglycerides, low HDL, elevated fasting insulin, high inflammatory markers and visceral fat.
You can have "healthy" cholesterol numbers and still be at high cardiovascular risk if your metabolic health is poor, and you can have cholesterol numbers that make your doctor nervous whilst having excellent metabolic health and low true risk.
So, what we see so often is that when women follow standard advice to aggressively lower cholesterol in menopause, what happens is that your hormone production suffers more. You've already got declining estrogen and progesterone and now you're restricting the raw material which means brain fog worsens, mood destabilises and energy crashes.
Your brain function declines, memory issues get worse, difficulty concentrating, mental sluggishness, because your brain needs cholesterol.
Muscle maintenance becomes harder and you accelerate muscle loss at exactly the life stage when you can least afford it, your skin ages faster, your joints ache more, and your energy tanks.
And the cruel irony to this nonsense? Your actual cardiovascular risk might not improve at all, because you haven't addressed the underlying metabolic dysfunction that's the real problem.
The medical business model then offers statins to lower cholesterol. But in women without existing cardiovascular disease, the benefit is marginal at best and some studies show no mortality benefit whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the side effects of statins cause muscle pain, cognitive issues, fatigue, and increased diabetes risk, which is particularly concerning when insulin resistance is already elevated in menopause, plus CoQ10 depletion which affects your mitochondrial energy production, which means you are trading questionable cardiovascular benefit for definite quality of life impairment.
So now you are probably wondering well if cholesterol isn't the driver, what should you focus on?
Insulin sensitivity, this is huge because insulin resistance is one of the strongest predictors of cardiovascular disease and it increases dramatically in menopause.
Inflammation, because chronic low grade inflammation drives arterial damage. So, reduce inflammatory inputs from seed oils, processed foods and plant heavy low fat diets and increase anti-inflammatory nutrients from animal foods, including the fat they told you to fear.
Visceral fat, the fat around your organs is metabolically active and inflammatory, and this matters far more than your cholesterol number....
Muscle mass, because maintaining muscle protects against metabolic disease, cardiovascular disease, and all cause mortality. Building muscle requires adequate protein and dietary fat, including cholesterol.
And finally metabolic flexibility, an ability to efficiently burn both glucose and fat for fuel because this predicts longevity far better than cholesterol levels.
The advice you've been given probably looked like this... reduce saturated fat, eat more plants, use vegetable oils, limit eggs and red meat, and load up on fibre.
But what actually supports metabolic health in menopause looks completely different.
Generous animal protein, because you need significantly more in menopause to maintain muscle and metabolic function.
Adequate animal fat, including saturated fat. It provides stable energy, supports hormone production, improves satiety, delivers fat soluble vitamins.
Nutrient density such as organ meats, fatty fish, eggs, red meat, and butter. These deliver bioavailable minerals, complete proteins, omega-3s, and vitamins.
Stable blood sugar, which means avoiding constant glucose spikes from high carbohydrate diets.
Eliminate seed oils, these are highly inflammatory and cause far more harm than the saturated fats you've been told to avoid.
And what happens when you make this shift? Well, your metabolic markers improve, triglycerides drop, HDL increases, inflammation decreases, blood sugar stabilises, visceral fat reduces, energy improves and muscle increases.....
Yes, sometimes LDL stays elevated, but in the context of excellent metabolic health, that's not a problem. It's your body maintaining the cholesterol it needs to function.
So lovelies, your elevated cholesterol in menopause is not the emergency it's being treated as. And I know how it feels when you don't understand the truth because mine was also elevated and my Doctor scared the living daylights out of me. But modern science knows very well that your body isn't breaking down, it's adapting. Yet the medical model still continues....why? Because it is obviously highly profitable.
If they are supplying medications and hormone replacement for a menopause that really is metabolic, and symptoms can go with the right diet.
If they are supplying medication for your cholesterol, when cholesterol is there to repair, what next are they going to profit from? Because treating the wrong issue is costing you not only your money BUT your health too.
The question you need to know be asking yourself isn't "how do I get this number lower." The question is "how do I support my metabolic health so my body can regulate itself properly."
Because when you support metabolic health, when you provide adequate nutrition, when you maintain muscle mass and insulin sensitivity, your cardiovascular risk decreases regardless of what your cholesterol number does.
The science has moved on, the evidence has evolved, yet you are still suffering....
It's time the advice caught up, and it's time menopausal women stopped being collateral damage in a decades old mistake.
Come and join us in The Menopause Revival Community for the support that is going to make a real difference to your health.
