The Cholesterol Myth and The Great Global Diet Fraud (2 out of 10)

All right, so we here we are picking up after busting up Myth 1: High Fat Foods Causes Heart Disease. I understand its pretty hard to accept since 99.9% of you have been told since high school biology that cholesterol is bad, eat 2 eggs a day max, etc. But as we peel off all the founding arguments of this global fraud, I hope you, dear readers, will bear with me, keep an open mind for how all these past studies are done, what was the actual result, and draw your conclusion based on logic and common sense. Let go deeper into the rabbit hole on Dr. Dr. Uffe Ravnskov‘s book.

Myth 2: High Cholesterol Causes Heart Disease

Your first question upon reading the title will probably be “What is the difference with the first myth?” Well, the first myth is about what you eat and heart disease. This myth is about what is actually measured in your blood and heart disease. Allow me to explain. These days, whenever I catch up with my old high school buddies, one of the things they like to compare is their cholesterol level. Their reaction gets even worse when they learned that I never measure my cholesterol level. And this post will show you why you don’t really need to.

Blood_Glucose_Testing_-_Kolkata_2011-07-25_3982

“Healthy” Range

Early since high school, and later if you go to medical school or even half decent personal training certification, they will tell you that less than 200 mg/dL cholesterol level is considered healthy. 200 – 239 mg/dL is borderline high, and over is 240 mg/dL is high. You can read all this on National Institute of Health report on the cholesterol levels.If you are one of those rare individuals that has Familial Hypercholesterolemia, this is correct. If you don’t regularly monitor your cholesterol level, you can easily get a heart attack. You can read more from the National Library of Medicine regarding Familial Hypercholesterolemia.

However, Familial Hypercholesterolemia is a heredity disease. Either you have it since birth or you don’t. And the prevalence rate is only one out of 500. National Institute of Health has the latest study on Familial Hypercholesterolemia done by David Marais, published in 2004. That is a very small minority of the population mind you. Mind you the prevalence of peanut alergy is 1.1% of the general population in USA i.e. 5.5 out of 500. This number is based on study of peanut and tree nut allergy prevalence done by Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1999. Are you going to tell the everyone to avoid peanut because of this? Lets dwell further on studies done on the general population.

Cholesterol and Old Women

Another thing is that a whole lot of old people are being told to take cholesterol lowering pills by their doctors as a precaution. However, past study done by Dr. Forette in France in 1989 actually showed that old women with HIGH cholesterol level (considered dangerous) actually live longer, with less cardiac issues than those with low cholesterol (i.e. the healthy range). You can read about the research called “Cholesterol as risk factor for mortality in elderly women” published by NIH in 1989. So why are we telling women to lower their cholesterol when they should be doing the opposite?

Now of course this is a limited study on a specific group of population. South Asians and Jamaicans might react differently. But we need to bear in mind that this study proves that you can’t make a general claim that everybody must maintain a low level of cholesterol

Cholesterol Standard Bearer Study

Any medical student worth his or her salt will probably then go to the famous Multiple Risk Intervention Trial (i.e. Mr. Fit) study done in 1982 that covers 12,866 high-risk men aged 35 to 57 years over 7 years of study. Surely such a large study will show beyond doubt that those taking life-changing cholesterol lowering diet will show significant improvement from the control group right?

Bear in mind that the treatment group receives stepped-care treatment for hypertension, counseling for cigarette smoking, and dietary advice for lowering blood cholesterol levels while the control group are just left to fend themselves with whatever is available at their community. Also that smoking has been proven beyond doubt to cause coronary heart disease as written by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in 2015 regarding the effect of smoking on heart and blood vessels.  Turns out total mortality rate for the treatment group is 41.2 out of 1000 while the control group was 40.4 out of 1000, difference of 0.8 person in every 1000. That’s right, MORE people DIED after receiving the treatment. To be fair, those that died out of coronary heart disease is 17.9 deaths out of 1000 in the treatment group  and 19.3 deaths in the control group, difference of 1.4 deaths. But if you can claim the 0.8 deaths increase is not statistically significant, then I have the right to say the 1.4 deaths decrease is insignificant too right? after all its still within the same order of magnitude.

Who knows maybe more people died due to stress of not being able to eat their favorite cheese.

Other studies

If you read further into the book, it gets even more interesting how animal studies decades past that is supposed to show higher LDL causes heart disease is literally animal torture similar to recent studies  I debunked in which Australian researchers torture fed mice with food that contains 80% fat just to make their point that fat is bad. Some things never changed, including desperate people). Not to mention past studies that supposed to show cholesterol being dangerous to Americans also shows the opposite on Canadians, Stockholmers, Russians or Maoris. Also regarding the accuracy of triglyceride measurement etc.

So there you have it folks, the conclusion of Myth 2. Next time you hear the familiar mantra of “sir, your cholesterol is too high”, kindly ask the person making that statement the following question:

    1. What study is used to make this statement
    1. Who funded the study, and what are the background of the researchers
    1. What are the population demographics and size of the study
    1. How was the study actually conducted
  1. What was the actual result of the study

You might be surprised on what you find.

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