Comments on: The American Heart Association: Do These People Read Their Own Data?

By: TallDog

TallDog — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:47:57 +0000

Does anyone know what percentage of the heart attack victims in the UCLA study had “dangerously high” cholesterol (over 240)?

I can’t seem to find this anywhere. I’m starting to think they buried the number.

I didn’t see that figure in the study.

By: gallier2

gallier2 — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 07:41:26 +0000

@Stanek
it was Max Planck not Rutherford

By: D. Stanek

D. Stanek — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 22:49:48 +0000

When I was in engineering school, we used a term for the eggheads who were wedded to their nutty highbrow ideas. In this case the term applies to the AHA. They are a bunch of “highly educated nitwits.” I’ll take the advice of a well read person with common sense (like you) over a PHD or doctor any day. Is there any hope these people’s paradigms will ever change. Unfortunately physicist Ernest Rutherford I think said it best, “New ideas are accepted only when the older generation of experts dies out.”
Keep up the good work.
-ds

The paradigm will shift when the people whose careers depend on it are gone.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 10:47:36 +0000

About the low fat products. I was a little surprised to see that the low-fat yoghurt that is sold at the supermarket contains as much (and sometimes more) sugar than is found in coca-cola (per 100mL, that is). Both being about 10-11% sugar.

Yup; my wife likes full-fat yogurt, but it’s hard to find sometimes.

By: Wes Hopper

Wes Hopper — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:38:56 +0000

My wife and I went on low carb about 14 years ago, and I suffered the agonizing fate of losing 55 lbs of ugly fat around my middle. We avoid anything marked “low fat” for the poison it is. I had a complete checkup that included artery scans and ultrasounds last year and my arteries showed no signs of clogging anywhere.
Kind of surprised my cardiologist because most guys “my age” are clogged somewhere. Thank you, Dr Atkins, RIP.

Well said. I don’t touch anything marked “low fat” either.

By: Goat

Goat — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:00:48 +0000

“I’m afraid it keeps going because it’s a multi-billion dollar industry now. I’m not sure what will finally kill it.”

What will kill it is enough people refusing to care what their LDL levels are, refusing to take the statins, refusing to eat “healthy-whole-grains” as prescribed.

That is, of course, unless we get socialized medicine, at which point the conventional wisdom will become law. Then it will be “go on a statin or lose your medical care”.

The current health-care bill will, from what I’ve heard, put the government in charge of prescribing specific treatments. That’s going to be a disaster if it happens.

By: donny

donny — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:54:01 +0000

http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2010/03/lipoproteina-and-fairies-at-bottom-of.html Peter makes the idea of ripping cholesterol out of artery walls and transporting it back to the liver look pretty stupid here. Um, maybe your body makes HDL when you're healthy-- less oxidized ldl in the artery wall because ldl are part and parcel of the freaking repair process. Hdl's job might be to assist in ldl turnover-- so that in case the need for repair does actually come up, the ldl is up to the job. And now for a little crazy; http://naivenutrition.blogspot.com/2010/03/tumour-necrosis-factor-to-rescue-no.html Yup; I believe high HDL may be more of a marker for good cardiovascular health than an actual cause. So eating lots of good quality fat may be improving our health and merely raising HDL as a by-product, in which case the HDL-raising drugs coming down the pike won't do much. I'd rather eat the butter and skip the pills.

By: Ted Hutchinson

Ted Hutchinson — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:52:56 +0000

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19812604
Vitamin D production after UVB exposure depends on baseline vitamin D and total cholesterol but not on skin pigmentation.

So as you lower your cholesterol level you also lower the capacity of skin to generate vitamin D from cholesterol when exposed to UVB from sunshine.

Low solar UV-B exposure and/or low 25(OH)D concentrations are associated with an increased risk of CVD. Large nonrandomized studies indicate that CVD mortality is more than twice as high in older individuals with deficient 25(OH)D concentrations compared with those individuals who have adequate 25(OH)D concentrations.

Good info. I wonder if the drive to lower cholesterol also increases the risk of skin cancer.

By: Todd

Todd — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:55:01 +0000

In Anthony Bourdain’s latest No Reservations episode, titled Obsessed, he closes the show on the topic of how he’s been on Lipitor for a while, and first his doc had him cut out butter, then cheese, and finally pork. Here’s a guy who needs to find out that it’s his carnivore tendencies that have kept him in reasonably good health thus far, and his docs advice is actually going to hurt him more than help. Somebody needs to bring Fat Head to his attention!

Here’s the clip where he talks about his doc (he starts right at the end of part 4, and continues here in part 5):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMaIElVj31c

Yee-ikes! Somebody introduce this man to Eric Westman or Mary Vernon! I just watched a lecture this week by Dr. Vernon in which she outlined some key metabolic pathways. It’s sugar and starch that lead to bad cholesterol profiles, not fats.

By: Micki

Micki — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:44:33 +0000

One reader asked about the VAP Test. Thanks for directing them to this answer. Read more about the test at http://www.thevaptest.com, and via Facebook, just search for “VAP Cholesterol Test.” Thanks for the post, very intriguing read!