Heart Disease: We Have Been Misled (Part I)

Heart Disease: We Have Been Misled
Part I: Why cholesterol and fat, especially saturated fat, do not cause heart disease.

Just as with the myth of the AIDS virus (search this journal's archives for my accounts of this disgusting lie), the medical-scientific establishment has also failed the public about heart disease. And with the now wide-spread use of statin drugs drifts into the land of criminal negligence in the destruction of human health for corporate profits. For decades, people were told that cholesterol and fat, especially saturated fat, hold the key to that blight of civilization: ateriosclerotic heart disease. Despite the many paradoxes which tarnish this pet theory at its firmament, its shadow lingers on in current medical practice. Insofar as it does, people are being misled and their health compromised. I say this in no uncertain terms.

Our story begins in the 1950's with an epidemiologist named Ancel Keys. He has just heard the decontextualized results of a laboratory experiment indicating a connection between cholesterol and experimental heart disease (not true arteriosclerosis as humans get) in rabbits. This, and possibly other unknown factors, leads him to conclude that fat is at the root of the relatively recent, sudden, and alarming increase in cardiovascular disease in the industrialized world. And so, presumably utterly convinced of this proposition he carries out an epoch-making experimental survey, the so-called Seven Countries Study. In this study, he compares seven mostly modernized countries as to fat intake and heart disease. He finds a correlation, and this published research lays the ground-work for a flurry of activity. So that not too long after, the fat-in-diet=heart-disease hypothesis becomes the inviolable creed of the medical and scientific world.

This new orthodoxy proves to be quite the sales pitch for the food-processing industry, which, since World War II, had managed to establish a firm foothold in manufacturing and the market. And now, with the new gospel demonizing traditional animal fats and cholesterol-rich foods, their businesses marketing industrial substitutes-- viz. corn oil, corn syrup, margarine, soy protein, etc.-- run as if on greased wheels. Suddenly, grandmas pies are no longer baked with lard (which gives them that flaky, golden quality) but with crisco.

Fortunately, not everyone bought into this new fad. One such notable exception was Dr. John Yudkin, physiologist at Queens College in London. He delved into the literature, especially Ancel Key's work, and found it flawed, deeply flawed. To begin with, correlation is not causation, and neither Key's, nor anyone else, ever did or could show that fat or cholesterol actually causes heart disease, or anything like it. Dr. Yudkin saw this clearly, and illustrated it by coming up with several even superior correlations. He found that the sales of television sets correlate far more strongly, for instance. But most importantly, he found that the intake of sugar has a far more precise and telling correlation to heart disease than fat.

And not only when he was conducting his research but historically as well. For before the 1900's the consumption of sugar was a rare treat, averaging only a handful of teaspoons per person per year. But as this commodity became available to the common man, heart disease began to rise, almost exponentially. The rate of increase began to slow down in the 30's and 40's (at about 100 grams per person per day in England!) and about the same time heart disease sky-rockets. It turns out that the trend is almost perfect-- it can be shown that whenever a population switches to a diet containing lots of refined sugars, they predictably develop not only rotting teeth but heart disease as well. Now, the average American consumes 120 grams of sugar per day (much of it through high-fructose corn syrup)! And, heart disease rates are higher than ever.

Not content with such statistical associations, Yudkin conducted several restrospective studies with heart disease patients in the hospital. Comparing them to patients without heart disease, he found that they had consumed a diet with twice as much sugar, but that the relative fat intakes were identical. Even more, he carried out pioneering experiments into the biochemistry and metabolism of sugars, and it is now known that refined sugar does indeed play havoc with internal biochemistry, meddling especially with the most potent hormone insulin. And there is good supposition that this could actually effect bodily tissues, including the endothelial lining of the coronary arteries, the loci of atherosclerotic heart disease.

You can read about Yudkin's pioneering research in his book, "Sweet and Dangerous", in which he sought to warn the public about the dangers of refined sugar.

But now, our trail returns to those apparently enigmatic fats and cholesterol...At about this same time, a massive study was set up: the Framingham Study, which tracked tens of thousands of residents of Framingham Massachusetts for decades, and attempted to find risk factors for heart disease. This study was to make history. But it was primarily a history of misreading rather than honest scientific inquiry. Having found that cholesterol levels in the blood appeared to be a risk factor for developing atherosclerosis, the new diet orthodoxy inaugurated by Key's research felt supremely vindicated. Clearly, they thought, the answer is here (although very few seemed to want to include that the much stronger risk factors were obesity, high blood pressure, smoking, etc. to say nothing of Yudkin). Low-fat foodism, buffered opportunistically by the growing vegetarian ideologies, was the Final Solution for heart disease.

But the story was never that simple. You see, it turns out that what the researchers found in Framingham was much different: high cholesterol was only a risk factor for one specific group, younger men. Not the elderly, and not women! And furthermore, as the study's leader, Dr. William Castelli announced in 1992, "the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate...the lower the person's serum cholesterol". In other words, in Framingham it was found that not only was serum cholesterol only an important risk factor for a narrow group (and even that remains a mere correlation), but that there is an inverse relationship between saturated fat and cholesterol in diet, and cholesterol in the blood-stream! The very firmament of low-fat foodism is undermined by this fact. It is ironic that the study most pointed to as proof of the orthodoxy, is perhaps its most convincing undoing.
You can read about the truth in Framingham in:
K.M. Anderson, W.P. Castelli, and D. Levy "Cholesterol and Mortality. Thirty years followup from the Framingham Study." Journal of the American Medical Association 257, no. 16 (1987): 2176-80

It turns out, however, that this finding is not new news. Anthropological study of primitive tribal groups had already found that most consume a very high-cholesterol diet and yet their populations show very low serum cholesterol. And they don't get heart disease. Period. But of course, this medical-anthropological research, like Dr. Yudkins, was swept under the rug by an establishment eager to maintain an orthodoxy, and a promising market for cholesterol-lowering drugs. If you want to read about hunter-gatherer nutrition and disease, Dr. Boyd Eaton's work is seminal, and the current leading expert is Dr. Loren Cordain. The website, www.beyondveg. org is a good place to start in this literature.

And in terms of finishing the demolition of the idea that cholesterol and fat in diet lead to heart disease there is always the pesky fact that before 1900 heart disease was pretty much unheard of. But, starting in the teens, and burgeoning by the 40's and 50's, it was a major blight. And, since then, in the last 60 years, we've been eating less saturated fat and cholesterol, not more, and yet heart disease still increases. Ah, the paradoxes they do abound!

Instead of taking the approach of observing populations with and without these blights of civilization, and looking at the patterns of life behind each, the heart-disease orthodoxy jumped on the increasing trend in institutional science to try to do everything with statistics, and to fudge the statistics to reach pre-determined outcomes. The most flagrant example of this sloppy science is still the HIV-AIDS correlation, which, in the late 80's and early 90's became a guaranteed hit with the re-definition of AIDS to be presence of HIV antibodies plus some other disease! In the heart-disease camp, a less flagrant but still deceptive analogue of this is the assumption that a high-cholesterol level is indicative of "morbid" cardiovascular conditions.

But it turns out that a voluminous search of the medical literature finds that for every study correlating cholesterol with heart disease, there is one which doesn't. Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, author of "The Cholesterol Myths", has searched this literature more deeply than anyone else, possibly. And his conclusion is that cholesterol is a benign substance, necessary for health. You can investigate his research here: http://www.ravnskov.nu/cholesterol.htm or better yet, read his book.

Perhaps most damning result of all the studies about cholesterol and heart disease is this: that at least half of all people who get heart disease do not have high cholesterol! That's what they found in Framingham, and elsewhere. Folks, this is the hall-mark of at best a weak co-factor, and certainly not the driving agent of a morbid etiology.

But what about those cholesterol lowering drugs? Sure, the statin studies with the most positive results show a decrease in CHD by 25% But, in these same studies, overall mortality, the benchmark of solid epidemiology, remains basically the same. It turns out that lowering your cholesterol through statins puts you at higher risk for commiting suicide! And their affects on CHD itself are actually due to anti-inflammatory effects rather than cholesterol lowering. You're much better off taking aspirin...or vitamin C.

But enough of this. My point is amply demonstrated. To continue to bandy about saturated fat and cholesterol being somehow responsible for heart disease is to willfully ignore the facts. So, tuck in to those foods you love to eat-- steak, eggs, cream, coconut oil-- they nourish you and will not harm your heart. Your best bet is to ignore those who insist otherwise, against the odds. Or, if you feel like it, try to talk to them about it. You may just save your own life and others.


Chris



























to be continued