The Cholesterol Code - a review
The documentary follows David Feldman, a software engineer who unexpectedly found himself at the centre of one of the most contentious debates in modern medicine — whether high cholesterol drives heart disease.
I first met Feldman around 2018 at a low-carb conference in Colorado. Back then, he was walking around with a laptop full of graphs and data, enthusiastically showing anyone who would listen his theories about cholesterol metabolism.
He wasn’t famous. He wasn’t trying to build a brand. He was just a curious engineer trying to solve a problem that didn’t make sense to him.
Like many people, Feldman had adopted a low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet to improve his health. He lost weight, improved his blood sugar, slept better, and felt healthier overall.
“Everything got better, except one thing. One thing that could not be ignored,” he says in the film.
His LDL cholesterol level skyrocketed.
For most people, that would have been the end of the experiment. They would have abandoned the diet and followed conventional advice, assuming the high cholesterol meant they were heading toward a heart attack.
But not Feldman.
“Suddenly a lot of my fear became fascination,” he says.
Instead of backing away, he started investigating. He tracked everything — meals, blood tests, weight changes, energy intake, and metabolic patterns. What began as self-experimentation soon became an obsession with understanding what was actually happening inside the body.
And that led to the central question driving the entire film:
Why were some people becoming dramatically healthier on ketogenic diets while simultaneously developing extremely high LDL cholesterol?