Obama Cracks Jokes About Cholesterol Level And Personal Health – Is He Out of Touch?

I almost had a heart attack today (no pun intended) when I read that President Obama was joking about his cholesterol.  “I don’t want any lectures about my cholesterol,” he said, according to the pool report.

If President Obama needs inspiration to cut his cholesterol and push away that fried chicken the next time he sits down for a meal, he might want to read about my six year old identical twins and their cholesterol problem. Cholesterol is killing them. And it’s no joke!

If President Obama was to meet my twins he might ask them why he should pay attention to his cholesterol and how cholesterol impacts their health.  Too bad cholesterol has destroyed their ability to talk and their memories too. My children suffer from one of the worst genetic cholesterol diseases on the planet – Niemann Pick Type C. Millions of other people are suffering from cholesterol related illnesses that kill – just ask former President Clinton or the people on statin drugs.

I think President Obama should call the American Heart Association and apologize.  We need people in the highest levels of our government taking their personal health seriously and using their time in the public eye to educate.  How can you expect a nation to change their eating habits when you’re stuffing fried chicken in your mouth and cracking jokes about your health?  The PR people should be fired as Obama should know exactly what he should say to the public about his cholesterol and meals for him should be ordered in advance.

One of the last jokes Obama cracked was on Jay Leno about the Special Olympics and I wrote a blog about this too. I’d like the President to understand why my kids are “special needs” — they are literally losing their minds as a result of this genetic cholesterol illness.  In fact, 22 million children in the US are estimated to suffer from chronic and life threatening rare diseases like Addi and Cassi which are causing a major crisis in our education and health care systems.

I spend my days trying to educate people about cholesterol. Cholesterol problems are mainly genetic in origin. Many roads are leading to the Niemann Pick Type C gene on Chromosome 18 as one of the major drivers of cholesterol in the human body.  The NPC gene regulates human cholesterol at the cellular level and we are all born with this gene.  This is why Nobel  Prize cholesterol scientists Drs. Brown and Goldstein are studying the gene and publishing papers about Niemann Pick.  Addi and Cassi were simply born with genetic defects on this cholesterol processing gene have a fatal and relentlessly progressive neurological condition as a result.

The Niemann Pick Type C gene is also thought to be a culprit in obesity. Last year, I posted a blog about the genetic link to obesity and the Niemann Pick Type C gene from a research group at Inserm in France.  Given the First Lady’s interest in helping solving obesity in America, she might want to read it.