Your Cholesterol Matters Less Than You Think

The Cholesterol Hypothesis

The cholesterol hypothesis is the prevailing theory on why human beings develop heart disease. It goes something like this; elevated total cholesterol and, especially, elevated LDL cholesterol, is the primary cause of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. Further, replacing saturated fat in the diet with vegetable oils lowers serum cholesterol and, therefore, lowers cardiovascular disease risk. This information is decades old and has become medical dogma. Unfortunately, it’s not true.

Much of this information comes from the Seven Countries Study originating in the 1950s, although data is still analyzed today to glean more knowledge from it. It tied fat consumption to heart disease. The lead author, Ancel Keys, found the more fat a society consumed the higher the rate of heart attacks. It seemed to be very convincing evidence. This observation helped shape health policies for governments and the medical field. In fact, to some degree, it still does today.

Missing or Unpublished Data

There was a problem with it, though. Data showed that there were populations of people who consumed lots of fat but had low heart attack rates. Conversely, there was data showing there were populations of people who consumed very little fat but had high rates of heart attacks. This information was omitted from the study. The study also failed to account for the fact that the people who consumed the most fat were also most likely to consume the most sugar. While nutrition science is notoriously difficult, these seem like variables that shouldn’t have been ignored.

Superimpose the above inconsistencies with interventional studies conducted in the same time period and you’ll quickly see you’ve been misled. Ancel Keys’ study was an observational study. This means he observed a connection between two sets of data. Observational studies cannot prove cause and effect. For example, imagine this headline; “New science has observed a connection between high heel wearing and breast cancer.” Does wearing high heels cause breast cancer? Of course not. It just happens that people who wear high heels (mostly women) also develop the majority of breast cancer. This silly example shows just how easily an observational study can get it wrong.

The gold standard for proving cause and effect is an interventional study where populations are randomized and given either an experimental intervention or are controls, generally receiving a placebo. In dietary trials, placebos are difficult, if not impossible, to give so participants diets are often left unchanged for the control population.

The Sydney Diet Heart Study and the Minnesota Coronary Experiment

Around the same time that Ancel Keys was doing his work, two interventional studies were conducted. One was called the Sydney Diet Heart Study and the other the Minnesota Coronary Experiment. Both of these studies were incompletely published (data was missing) or went completely unpublished for reasons no one really knows. It is likely because they contradicted accepted dogma and scientific journals were hesitant to put their reputations on the line for something they viewed with skepticism. We know about them now because a group of researchers recently uncovered the unpublished data, reanalyzed it with modern methods and found some shocking results. The reanalysis of both studies was published in the British Medical Journal.

In both of these experiments, totaling about 10,000 participants, saturated fat was removed from the diets of the experimental group and replaced with vegetable oils. This is precisely what the American Heart Association says you should do. What did they find? They found that by removing saturated fat, the participants’ cholesterol went down. This is not unexpected. What they didn’t expect to find was that in both studies the low saturated fat group experienced more cardiovascular disease, more coronary heart disease, and an increase in all-cause mortality.

So let’s summarize; Removing saturated fat and replacing it with vegetable oils lowers cholesterol. But lowering cholesterol raised the risk of heart disease? Yes. This puts an enormous, truck-sized hole in the cholesterol hypothesis. In fact, in the Minnesota Coronary Experiment for every 30 points a person’s cholesterol dropped their risk of death increased by 22%.

This information is counter to everything nutrition science says. Three other randomized controlled trials have confirmed the results. Couple this with another very recent study evaluating over 68,000 elderly people which found an inverse relationship in those over 60 between LDL level and mortality, and I think we seriously need to evaluate the cholesterol hypothesis.

The Real Cause of Heart Disease

If cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease, what does? It’s quite simple actually – endothelial damage. The endothelia are the cells that line your blood vessels. There are things that are known to damage this lining – high blood pressure, inflammation, high blood sugar, smoking, oxidative stress, and aging. These triggers, and pursuant damage, set into motion a cascading set of events that allows your immune system (in the form of white blood cells) to infiltrate the lining of the vessels. Only after they do this do they begin the process of engulfing cholesterol, which eventually leads to arterial plaque formation. Control those triggers and you will never develop heart disease. If you do not control those processes, it doesn’t matter how low your cholesterol is. You will still develop heart disease. I hear you saying, “But how do I control aging?” That is more difficult as we will all age, but living a healthy lifestyle helps with all of those factors, including aging. Plus, aging alone is unlikely to be a significant cause of heart disease.

It’s important to recognize that cholesterol is not your enemy. Sedentary lifestyle, smoking, a diet high in refined food, the excess consumptions of sugar, and poor stress management are much more serious concerns. Lowering cholesterol for the sake of lowering it has no beneficial effect on your heart. As a matter of fact, the research shows it could be downright dangerous for it. So if you’ve been told you have high cholesterol and that lowering it will lower your risk, you might want to consider the information above and seek an alternative.

Swine Flu Pandemic? How Big Pharma used its power to scare the world

Remember the swine flu?  Last year it was all you heard about on the news.  Each evening we were shown statistics that gave us an up-to-the second tally of deaths linked to H1N1.  “Experts” were encouraging everyone to get the vaccinated against this serious threat.  Local clinics were swamped with terrified people demanding the vaccine for their entire family.  All of this was because the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the swine flu was a world wide pandemic.

Now the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has published an article accusing the World Health Organization of conflicts of interest with regard to H1N1.  The authors accused the organization of exaggerating the severity of the virus, and of taking advice from experts with ties to vaccine- and antiviral-producing pharmaceutical companies.

Almost exactly one year ago Dr Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization announced to the world that there was pandemic in full effect.  She told us that she had consulted with leading scientists, doctors and virologists to make her decision.

The WHO offers advice to governments for situations just as these.  If there is a major pandemic they advise governments on how to handle it.  Following the WHO’s advice, governments bought billions of dollars worth of vaccines, oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza).  And according to the BMJ, the vast majority of it is sitting unused.

The First Sign that Something was Up

For some reason, the WHO changed the definition of ‘pandemic.’  In response to the chicken flu outbreak in 1997 in Hong Kong, the WHO began to organize a pandemic preparedness plan.

The WHO’s first influenza pandemic preparedness plan was stark in the scale of the risk the world faced in 1999: “It is impossible to anticipate when a pandemic might occur. Should a true influenza pandemic virus again appear that behaved as in 1918, even taking into account the advances in medicine since then, unparalleled tolls of illness and death would be expected.” (From the BMJ)

The WHO is rightfully concerned about a flu pandemic of that scale.  An estimated 50 million people, about 3% of the world’s population (1.6 billion in 1918), died of the disease. A total of 500 million, or 1/3 were infected.  How could the WHO compare the swine flu last year to the 1918 flu?  They aren’t even close.

The WHO has been accused of removing the words “enormous numbers of deaths and illness” from the definition of pandemic.  I guess if you remove those words the 1918 influenza pandemic and the swine flu “pandemic” of 2009 could be categorized together.

Maybe, just maybe, this is the problem

The initial preparedness program was written entirely by people who stood to gain from frightening the world into stockpiling antiviral drugs (namely Tamiflu and Relenza).  Roche, is the manufacturer of Tamiflu, and GlaxoSmithKline, manufacturers Relenza.  Both companies had employees on the committees advising Dr. Chan on whether or not to issue a pandemic warning.  On the initial preparedness program it said:

“R Snacken, J Wood, L R Haaheim, A P Kendal, G J Ligthart, and D Lavanchy prepared this document for the World Health Organization (WHO), in collaboration with the European Scientific Working Group on Influenza (ESWI).” What this document does not disclose is that ESWI is funded entirely by Roche and other influenza drug manufacturers. Nor does it disclose that René Snacken and Daniel Lavanchy were participating in Roche sponsored events the previous year, according to marketing material seen by the BMJ/The Bureau. (From the BMJ).

Why are these antiviral drugs considered so important in a pandemic?  Because vaccines are likely to take months to be available in the numbers required for a true pandemic of the scale that hit in 1918.  These antivirals could be life saving if a truly virulent strain of flu emerged.  They would also be a windfall of revenue for the pharmaceutical companies making them.

Of course, there are many natural remedies that boost immunity very effectively, but they are not marketed because they don’t have the big money of Roche or GlaxoSmithKline behind them.  That’s for another blog though.

The WHO says it checked into the backgrounds of the people it relied on to make its guidelines which called for countries to stockpile antiviral drugs.  It says it investigated the financial ties of these scientists to the pharmaceutical industry.  But, according to the BMJ they are refusing to release the information they gathered in their investigations.  This lack of transparency is concerning.

Because of these recommendations that the WHO put forward, mostly established by scientists with significant ties to Big Pharma, Roche and GlaxoSmithKline made $12 billion on antiviral drugs with the lion’s share going to Roche and Tamiflu ($10 billion).

And all this for drugs that should have never been approved for use in the US! An FDA advisory committee originally recommended that Relenza not be approved because it had safety concerns and showed very little benefit over placebo in US trials.  The FDA did not adhere to the advice of its committee (it is not required to) and approved it because “they would feel better if there was something on the market in case of a pandemic,” and  “it wasn’t a scientific decision.”  This is according to Dr. Michael Elashoff who was a former employee of the FDA, and was the statistician working on the Relenza account.  This fact, according to Dr. Elashoff paved the way for Tamiflu’s approval later that same year.

Dr. Chan wants the WHO’s work on H1N1 examined.  She asked for an independent review of how the WHO handled H1N1 in January.  Hopefully this will produce some results, but I doubt it.

Traditional medicine is filled with conflicts on interest from Big Pharma.  This is just another example.  The swine flu was not a major pandemic and according to the WHO “the overwhelming majority of patients experienced mild symptoms and made a rapid and full recovery, even without medical treatment.”  If that was the case, and I believe it was, why did they instruct countries to stockpile billions of dollars worth of pharmaceuticals?  I think the answer is clear.  Big Pharma was able to strategically place scientists on influential panels to sell drugs.

During the swine flu “pandemic” I recommended that patients take a little extra vitamin C, D, and A, get plenty of rest and eat as healthy as possible.  Those recommendations are far safer than running out and vaccinating yourself or prophylactically taking Tamiflu, both of which have serious side effects.  Remember, a conservative approach is almost always the best way to tackle a problem.