Quote from: Adio on February 15, 2013, 06:09:51 PM
You have got to be kidding me. Who led you to believe that? Are you even in the healthcare field? What studies have you been reading? Lipids are a lot more complicated than simple "good" and "bad" cholesterol.
Why does someone have to be in the healthcare field to do their own research and recognize bad science when they see it? It really just takes a functioning brain with average to slightly above average intelligence and the willingness to do the reading and wade through the data.
The entire lipid hypothesis was first invented by Ancel Keys, who collected data on heart disease and cholesterol from 22 countries, picked the 7 that fit his theory that high cholesterol leads to heart disease, threw out the other 15 which didn't fit, and presented his data to Congress, which completely bought it, despite the fact that the majority of doctors at the time did not agree with Keys' research (because it was bad science). No study that has been done since to try to prove high cholesterol raises risk of death from heart disease has ever actually proven that. There was the Framingham Study that followed 5,100 Framingham, MA residents for two decades and tracked their dietary habits, cholesterol and rates of heart disease. They found cholesterol has no predictive value as to deaths from heart disease. There was the Western Electric Company study that followed 5,400 men and showed the men with lower cholesterol had a higher level of overall mortality. Then there was the MRFIT sudy which followed 12,000 men with very high cholesterol (over 290 mg/ml) for seven years and split them into two groups-- one group told to do everything the way they were doing and one that was told to quit smoking, eat a cholesterol-lowering diet and treat their high blood pressure. Their cholesterol and blood pressure went down yet they had higher rates of death including a higher risk of lung cancer despite the fact that 21% of them quit smoking compared to just 6% of the control group, which led the researchers to hypothesize that the lower cholesterol levels increased their overall risk of cancer. The study that's usually cited as being the conclusive proof that high cholesterol causes heart disease and the one that sparked the famous frowning bacon TIME magazine cover took 3,800 men with high cholesterol, told them all to eat fewer eggs, fatty meat and drink less milk and gave half of them a placebo and half a cholesterol-lowering drug. The cholesterol levels in the diet group dropped 4% and the levels in the statin group dropped 13%. In the non-treatment group, 30 men died of a heart attack. In the treatment group (which lowered cholesterol), 38 men died from a heart attack. A difference of a whopping 0.2%. And this was the groundbreaking study that cemented the "lower your cholesterol" believe into our society. There's more, but I think that's more than enough for now. It's a shaky history of claims being made with no evidence to back them up, studies constantly failing to prove those claims, yet the health care industry still jumping to make them because that's what the media was publishing and doing something, even if it might not do any good and may actually cause harm, was seen as better than doing nothing.
And now there's a multimillion dollar industry formed around cholesterol-lowering drugs, low fat foods, and the AHA "heart check seal" costs companies tens of thousands of dollars to get on their products, so you know no one's going to do anything any time soon to start looking in another direction despite the fact we've been doing exactly what they've been telling us to do and things have only gotten worse since the 80s.
And I sure as heck know that it's not just good and bad cholesterol. There's LDL, HDL, VLDL, triglycerides, etc, but for the sake of getting on T, all the guy's doctor seems to be caring about is his LDL. It's not just laypeople who oversimplify.
For anyone interested in learning a good deal about the history of cholesterol and diet (mostly in America, but gradually this changed the recommendations through the world) which looks with greater detail into these studies, check out the book
Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. It's pretty science heavy and there's a lot to it-- it's a commitment, but it's the best introduction out there.
And I know this is a very controversial topic. I don't expect everyone to agree with me. I just hope everyone does their own research and chooses their diet and health regimen based on their own research and study and not based on what the media tells them or even their doctor (not that I want you to disagree with everything your doctor says-- just research it and learn on your own to supplement what he tells you and realize even modern medicine isn't perfect). Agree with me, disagree with me-- just think for yourself. That's all I ask.
