Tag: cholesterol

Don’t Give Up The Fat!

The rate of cardiovascular disease suffered by both rural and urban Chinese males is almost indistinguishable from the rate experienced by American males, while the rates…for both rural and urban Chinese women is significantly higher than those suffered by American females….The notion that the Chinese don’t have disease of the heart…is what we like to call a vampire myth–it simply refuses to die.

–Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades

They go on to explain that part of the issue leading to confusion is that heart disease normally manifests as stroke in the Chinese, but as heart attack in Americans. A city-dwelling Chinese man only has half the heart attack risk of his American comrade–but six times the stroke risk. The underlying cause is exactly the same: coronary heart disease.

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Finishing Up Cholesterol

Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.
–Albert Einstein
When I say “finish up” of course I don’t mean that there’s nothing more to say. There’s always more that someone can say. Hence the continued existence of the Internet. And Alex Baldwin.
In the last few posts we talked about what cholesterol is, why you need it, why LDL and total cholesterol levels are not reliable markers for heart health, why HDL and your ratio of HDL to triglycerides is important, and that the real culprit in heart issues is ultimately inflammation.

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Knowledge, Not Numbers #2

…High cholesterol levels are really a symptom, not a cause of cardiovascular disease. Not understanding this fact, a lot of people take medicine to try to lower their LDL cholesterol levels artificially. Attempting to control through medication the enzymes that produce elevated cholesterol is analogous to playing pool with a rope.

–Dr. Doug McGuff

Let’s review.

We’ve already discussed how both LDL and HDL are lipoproteins that carry cholesterol around the body. LDL carries it to areas damaged by inflammation; HDL carries it back out.

When LDL particles are big and fluffy in size, they can easily be carried away by HDL and they are not so susceptible to oxidation, human “rusting,” that damages them and you. Very small LDL, sometimes known as VLDL, is very susceptible to oxidation and cannot be easily carried away by HDL. (Of course all this is very simply put.)

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Knowledge, Not Numbers

A good decision is based on knowledge, not numbers.

–Plato

In the previous post we discussed some important foundational ideas when talking about cholesterol. Today we’ll start going into all this just a bit deeper, starting with what all those numbers mean and why I say that your total cholesterol number is meaningless for you, personally.

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The Earth is Flat and Cholesterol Will Kill You

In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research.
–Ronald Fisher
One of the most pervasive myths out there is that having high cholesterol will give you heart disease, and that eating cholesterol gives you high cholesterol. Like all good myths, there is a kernel–a small kernel–of truth to this. But in the main I’m just going to tell you right up front right now: this is baloney.

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Cholesterol Mythology

Not really, and actually my cholesterol was 190 when I had the heart attack. 190, which isn’t that high.

–Mike Ditka

Guess who else’s cholesterol was well within the Mythical Safe Range when he had his first heart attack? Dwight Eisenhower, who was the ideal weight for his height and was very fit when his first heart attack hit at age 64. His cholesterol was 165.

So of course he was put on the now ubiquitous low-fat diet, which included lots of healthy whole grains like oatmeal and lots of margarine, almost no meat, and no fats but margarine and corn oil. What was the result of this amazingly healthy diet? Well, strangely he started gaining weight for the first time in his life. So much so that he kept cutting his food portions down till he was nearly starving: to no avail. Even more oddly, his cholesterol just kept going up and up. From 165 to 259. Just a couple days after Eisenhower got that highest reading, Ancel Keys got his face on the cover of Time for promoting the new “lipid hypothesis,” which blamed fat for everything and advocated, for the first time, a low-fat diet as the cure for all America’s heart disease problems.

Which, as we all know, has clearly been an incredible success, since Americans have no heart disease anymore.
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Pardon Me; Your Bias is Showing 2

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.

― Michael Crichton

In the previous post I got all worked up over a news article claiming that eating red meat raises the risk of developing diabetes. I may still be slightly worked up, so you might want to go have some chocolate and get back to me tomorrow.

The article was biased from the outset, was not a real “study” at all, relied on notoriously inaccurate data, and ignored important variables altogether. Not to mention that no hypothesis was formed for the purpose of testing and truth-finding. No, we skipped that inconvenient step completely and just jumped to calling it a full-fledged theory and telling everyone how to eat based upon it.
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Objections, 3

Nullis in Verba

–Motto of the Royal Society of London

In Objections 2 we started talking about fat and explored just a little bit of the history behind the rise and dominance of the lipid hypothesis–that fat is the cause of obesity and health problems.

Now let’s talk a bit about the science.

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