ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, July 26, 1993                   TAG: 9309060256
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HOLD THE OATS

NOW, AS we understood it, high cholesterol was bad. It could line the walls of our arteries, constricting blood flow and increasing the risk of heart attack. Very bad.

Then, after plugging our bodies with oat bran muffins to soak up cholesterol and remove it, we found some cholesterol was good. There was the LDL kind of cholesterol, and that was still bad. But there was also the HDL kind of cholesterol, and that was good.

Or at least, not having enough of it was bad.

So we wanted to have as little as possible of the bad stuff, forcing us to cut back on the butter, but plenty of the good stuff, allowing us to drink moderately and purely for medicinal purposes, since researchers were speculating this might reduce heart disease by raising HDL levels in the bloodstream.

It was confusing at first, but after we got accustomed to the idea it had a certain appeal to those of us who like order in our lives. Our cholesterol, at least, fit neatly into the ``good'' category or the ``bad'' category. White hats, black hats. Life was simple.

We should have known better. Nothing else is this easy, so why expect our cholesterol levels to be? Now researchers find that ``good'' HDL might actively cause heart disease, possibly leaving a lot of doctors with a bit of egg on their faces, and throwing our dietary assumptions into question.

Worse, researchers don't really know what to make of this yet. ``Eventually, there will probably be dietary and diagnostic implications,'' one of the scientists reports - they just don't know what they are yet.

So we don't know just what we should do with this information until this research is complete. Not that we'll be sure, even then, about what we should and shouldn't eat. Obviously, this isn't an exact science. 


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