Peanut Oil and Cholesterol

A sharp-eared listener wrote me a nice note saying he thought I’d made in mistake in talking about health benefits of peanut oil. I checked and sure enough I said that as a monounsaturated fat, it lowered your HDL cholesterol as if that were a good thing. Well, I had it backwards. We want our HDL cholesterol, the excess which can be eliminated by our liver, to be a high number relative to the LDL type which can clog up our arteries. Now, cholesterol is necessary for life; our bodies manufacture it. Fortunately, we can use diet and exercise to try to keep the good HDL number higher and the LDL number lower. However, even with the best lifestyle choices, some people need meds to help as the one thing we can’t change is our genetic inheritance.