Marcos Llorente shares a controversial view on cholesterol: “It is not bad for health”

Marcos Llorente has sparked fresh discussion on social media after stating in Instagram stories about cholesterol that it “is not bad for health”. In them, the footballer shares several views from Joan-Ramon Laporte, emeritus professor of clinical pharmacology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and author of “Chronicle of an Intoxicated Society”, notably on cholesterol and statins.

Llorente begins the series with an image of a chapter from the book devoted to the “cholesterol myth”. Ironically, he writes: “Don’t worry... You already know that all I can do is kick a ball and that I learned to read a few years ago,” before explaining that the material he shared comes from Laporte’s book, which he says he read recently.

He then reproduces several claims from the work, including that “cholesterol is not bad for health. On the contrary: it is an essential molecule for the body”. He also shares the idea that “there is no good cholesterol and bad cholesterol”.

That latter claim challenges the common distinction between HDL and LDL cholesterol, although these lipoproteins have different functions and different associations with cardiovascular risk. More broadly, Llorente’s posts question the relationship between cholesterol and cardiovascular disease, as well as the benefit of lowering cholesterol levels through medication.

The extracts he shared also include the assertion that “lowering cholesterol does not improve life expectancy”. The material posted refers to an analysis of 46 clinical trials, 26 of them involving statins, according to which lowering cholesterol would not have reduced mortality. Another study, involving 11 clinical trials and more than 90,000 participants, is also cited: according to that analysis shared by Llorente, taking a statin daily for five years would increase life expectancy by only around three or four days. The post therefore raises the question of the scale of the benefit provided by this treatment.

Other major analyses of clinical trials have, however, reached different conclusions. The Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ (CTT) collaboration, which has conducted several meta-analyses of randomised trials, has found an association between LDL cholesterol reductions through statins and a reduction in major cardiovascular events.

The 2025 European guidelines rely on this body of evidence and regard LDL as a causal factor in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. They therefore do not consider LDL irrelevant, nor do they reduce the decision to treat to average life-expectancy gains alone.

The European Society of Cardiology and the European Atherosclerosis Society recommend assessing overall cardiovascular risk and retain statins as the first pharmacological option to lower LDL when treatment is indicated. The benefit depends on each patient’s risk level and on the extent of LDL reduction achieved. Not everyone with high cholesterol therefore automatically has the same indication for a statin: the recommendations use risk categories and other factors, with far more intensive treatment for patients who already have cardiovascular disease than for people with no cardiovascular history.