The Cholesterol Myth and The Great Global Diet Fraud (4 out of 10)

In case you are wondering about the image choice, cod fish is also high in saturated fat.

So you finished reading the third installment and decided to stick around. Congratulations, you deserve a reward for your healthy skeptic mind. A friend asked “if what I’m saying is true, then why would these people even do it?” Well, very prominent people have received Nobel prizes (and that is a lot of money and prestige) for their “doctored” results, for sure they have some incentives to make sure the story sticks. Not to mention that not many of those doctors educated in the diet-heart myth would be filling to accept that they had spent all their money and effort learning fraudulent knowledge.

And we could also mention big Food and Beverage companies that is taking the fat out of natural products and replace it with sugar and claim its healthy. For example, lets talk about yogurt. They are naturally high in fat, taste good, and because fat oxidizes over time, we call it goes “rancid”, has limited shelf life. Once you take the fat out, it would last longer. Of course without the fat in the yogurt, it would not taste as good, so they dumped some sugar in it and cover the taste. Sugar also acts as a “natural” preservative by the way. Last but not least, you slap it with a “healthy” moniker and charge higher price. So not only would you end up with a product that has unnaturally long shelf life, you could charge a premium on it. This was the scheme 30 years ago. Now everybody is doing it making it virtually impossible to buy natural yogurt anymore or you need to go to a premium supermarket to buy them at premium price.

Last but not least, we have the pharmaceutical companies that are definitely getting richly rewarded for their “life saving” cholesterol lowering drugs.

Now that I have given you a glimpse of the diet-heart conspiracy motivations, allow me to bring you to the next myth:

“Myth 4: Cholesterol Blocks Arteries”

So let me show you the chart progression so far on how this myth relates to the big scheme of the diet-heart myths Dr. Uffe Ravnskov already proven to be false, which are animal fat consumption causes heart disease, high cholesterol causes heart disease, and saturated fat causes cholesterol.

chart2

This myth arose in the 1953, again popularized by Dr. Ancel Keys, the same person that created Myth 3. He simply stated that a major characteristic of sclerotic artery (i.e. the hardening of arterial wall) is the presence of abnormal amounts of cholesterol in the artery. And this cholesterol is derived from the blood.”

Interesting considering that he didn’t give any research or proof to back up this claim. He said so and that’s the end of it. In physics we call this postulate, not law and yet the medical community considers this as a law.

Its even interesting considering that in 1936, Pathologist  Kurt Landé and the biochemist Warren Sperry of the Department of Forensic Medicine at New York University already did a study on relation between blood cholesterol and atheroschlerosis (the medical term for sclerotic artery) with 390 sample sizes and the result was no relation. Further study in Canada by Dr. Paterson and Dr. Derrick in 1957 to proof Dr. Key’s postulate also came up with no correlation. As with even further study in India by Dr. Mathur in 1961 with 200 sample sizes. Sorry folks, this episode’s myth buster is incredibly short. You can read on Advances of Pharmacology volume 2 that as I quote from page 213, “…no strict correlation is found in individual cases when blood lipids are measured post-mortem with atherosclerotic involvement..”.

Yes, you can also argue that perhaps blood cholesterol immediately dropped the moment you died, in which Dr. Mathur already proven is not the case. The blood cholesterol stayed relatively stable for the first 16 hours.

If you want to read further proofs that this myth is not grounded in reality, you should read more from Dr. Ravnskov’s book where he thoroughly debunked the famed Farmingham study Dr. Keys uses to build his conspiracy.

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