Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Cholesterol Madness
Heart disease is and has been the big killer in the modern nations for nearly a century. Prior to that and still in the less developed world, starvation/nutritional lacks and infectious disease killed off most people. Our agricultural technology, along with immunization, clean food and water, antibiotics and waste management have changed all that.
So doctors, scientists and politicians started asking why the heart? Soon the cholesterol madness started. After all, there was money to be made. It was and is too good for drug companies and food manufacturing to pass up on.
Cholesterol is essential to life itself. The body makes its own, more than you eat even on a fatty diet. You would die without it and if you don't eat any, your body makes it.
So our story goes on. Finding that the blockages in the blood vessels contained cholesterol, the simplistic cholesterol bad hypothesis formed. This was also supported by a relationship between higher levels in the blood serum correlating with higher heart disease. So the solution is to eat less cholesterol. Goodbye eggs, cheese, cream, butter, meat, shrimp,... Hello to margarine, coffee creamer, partially hydrogenated oil, soy oil, cottonseed oil, corn oil,...
The food industry loved it. Real food is hard to make money on. You have to pay those damn farmers. Animal products are expensive. Grains are cheap. Send them to the chemical factory and mark them up in a neat package.
unfortunately the cholesterol hypothesis has some problems. First is that eating cholesterol doesn't raise blood levels. There is no relationship at all. Remember the liver makes it. So the highly nutritious and inexpensive egg is maligned.
Now saturated fats do raise cholesterol in blood, so we were encouraged to cut down on them. Fair enough, but the instructions were to substitute other fats, the wonderful polyunsaturates to be specific. So a host of oils were introduced and pushed made from cottonseed, soybeans, corn and whatever. None being a significant part of the human diet previously.
Problem is that these oils/fats are mainly the omega-six variety. So we now have much more of them in our diet than ever before while little to no omega-threes. Hence imbalance in the body. This manifests in the cell membranes of our bodies, especially the brain, changing the geometry of receptor sites. Oops. Then there is the "microhormone" system at the cellular level controlling all functions made of these fatty acids. One of the imbalances caused is increasing blood pressure while increasing blood coagulation. Sounds like a heart attack to me. In fact, the rise in heart attacks the last century parallels the rise in intake of these fats.
In fact a whole host of problems is implicated. Restricting myself to the brain, this appears to be a factor in depression, also increasing the last century each decade. Depression rates across time and countries are correlated quite well to national soybean oil consumption, as is homicide rate by nation.
Oh, and did I mention cancer? These polyunsaturates are unstable and oxidize quickly. Hence the feared free radicals. Of course any vitamin E protection has been processed out by the manufacturer. So cancer is correlated to their use as well.
And don't even get me started on hydrogenated fats, also known as trans fats. These really gum up the works, like viscous oil in your gas tank. They raise your cholesterol as much as anything. And this crap is in everything practically. Chips, cakes, breads, muffins, TV dinners, coffee creamer, margarine, cooking oils, French fries,... Check the label.
So then we got on the low and no-fat kick. So typical of Americans, instead of eating low fat normal/natural foods (produce, whole grains, lean protein,...) we again turned to the food industry. Some of the cookies were good. I could eat a box or two easy. The cheese was terrible. Much of it was OK with enough sugar in it. We also got more unnatural chemicals. Olestra is my favorite. It washes fat-soluble vitamins out while giving you fecal incontinence (the shits). I figured I'd wait fifty more years for Depends.
So many of us ate this bovine diet. And of course we got all fattened up like domestic livestock. Hello diabetes. Now isn't that heart-healthy? I can't blame the low-fat thing totally. Plenty of unhealthy fats have contributed to our obesity epidemic. But I have seen plenty of people bloat up on grain diets. They just can't eat enough. Plenty of chubby vegetarians too.
Now all these diets are not that effective for lowering serum cholesterol. Especially when you are gaining weight. So we turn to the favorite tools of my profession-right out of the old drug-box. Problem is our old friend could lower cholesterol and to a much lesser degree heart attacks, but overall death rate didn't really change, sometimes it was worse. So quite a flop. Pay for some drug, have to keep track of taking it, suffer the side effects and you die sooner.
So then a whole new kid on the block, actually a gang. The Statins. Big Pharm licked its chops and every company wanted to have one. The data is impressive. They do lower cholesterol, lower heart attacks and even in the short-term of the studies lengthen life. Publish and market. "Thought Leaders" (doctors in universities getting money from big pharm) give talks, often with quite yummy food I am too cheap to pay for (usually). These are the new wonder drugs. Each time I pay attention, the recommended levels of cholesterol ah lower. Over half the population apparently needs them. By next year, we will discover pregnant women need them to keep the fetus from having a heart attack.
But then we read the small print... Myalgia. This means muscle aches, often intense. Even weakness. Like the flu. Fun! The liver works overtime. Well mine only works overtime for alcohol. The digestive track is upset. And wouldn't you know-the rodents they tested it on got cancer. Will humans be next in ten years or so? The experiment is underway. Are you the experimental subject? I would rather die in a quick fit of intense pain than rot for a year or two as a living corpse.
Then you look closer at the data. How will this affect me? Is the improvement worth the risks? It appears that the beneficial effect is smaller than advertised. Men over forty negligible. And how come lowering cholesterol with older drugs was not helpful? Must be something besides cholesterol.
Plenty of confounds too. The French eat all those yummy fatty foods and smoke a lot, but have less heart disease. The Mediterranean Diet is much better than the American Heart Association Diet in death rates, full of fatty olive oil. The Masai tribe lives lean and healthy on full-fat milk, meat and blood.
This whole cholesterol thing reeks of bad science and profit motive. Doctors are brainwashed from the start and most of their information is tainted by the propaganda and biased information from Big Pharm. I remain quite skeptical.
So doctors, scientists and politicians started asking why the heart? Soon the cholesterol madness started. After all, there was money to be made. It was and is too good for drug companies and food manufacturing to pass up on.
Cholesterol is essential to life itself. The body makes its own, more than you eat even on a fatty diet. You would die without it and if you don't eat any, your body makes it.
So our story goes on. Finding that the blockages in the blood vessels contained cholesterol, the simplistic cholesterol bad hypothesis formed. This was also supported by a relationship between higher levels in the blood serum correlating with higher heart disease. So the solution is to eat less cholesterol. Goodbye eggs, cheese, cream, butter, meat, shrimp,... Hello to margarine, coffee creamer, partially hydrogenated oil, soy oil, cottonseed oil, corn oil,...
The food industry loved it. Real food is hard to make money on. You have to pay those damn farmers. Animal products are expensive. Grains are cheap. Send them to the chemical factory and mark them up in a neat package.
unfortunately the cholesterol hypothesis has some problems. First is that eating cholesterol doesn't raise blood levels. There is no relationship at all. Remember the liver makes it. So the highly nutritious and inexpensive egg is maligned.
Now saturated fats do raise cholesterol in blood, so we were encouraged to cut down on them. Fair enough, but the instructions were to substitute other fats, the wonderful polyunsaturates to be specific. So a host of oils were introduced and pushed made from cottonseed, soybeans, corn and whatever. None being a significant part of the human diet previously.
Problem is that these oils/fats are mainly the omega-six variety. So we now have much more of them in our diet than ever before while little to no omega-threes. Hence imbalance in the body. This manifests in the cell membranes of our bodies, especially the brain, changing the geometry of receptor sites. Oops. Then there is the "microhormone" system at the cellular level controlling all functions made of these fatty acids. One of the imbalances caused is increasing blood pressure while increasing blood coagulation. Sounds like a heart attack to me. In fact, the rise in heart attacks the last century parallels the rise in intake of these fats.
In fact a whole host of problems is implicated. Restricting myself to the brain, this appears to be a factor in depression, also increasing the last century each decade. Depression rates across time and countries are correlated quite well to national soybean oil consumption, as is homicide rate by nation.
Oh, and did I mention cancer? These polyunsaturates are unstable and oxidize quickly. Hence the feared free radicals. Of course any vitamin E protection has been processed out by the manufacturer. So cancer is correlated to their use as well.
And don't even get me started on hydrogenated fats, also known as trans fats. These really gum up the works, like viscous oil in your gas tank. They raise your cholesterol as much as anything. And this crap is in everything practically. Chips, cakes, breads, muffins, TV dinners, coffee creamer, margarine, cooking oils, French fries,... Check the label.
So then we got on the low and no-fat kick. So typical of Americans, instead of eating low fat normal/natural foods (produce, whole grains, lean protein,...) we again turned to the food industry. Some of the cookies were good. I could eat a box or two easy. The cheese was terrible. Much of it was OK with enough sugar in it. We also got more unnatural chemicals. Olestra is my favorite. It washes fat-soluble vitamins out while giving you fecal incontinence (the shits). I figured I'd wait fifty more years for Depends.
So many of us ate this bovine diet. And of course we got all fattened up like domestic livestock. Hello diabetes. Now isn't that heart-healthy? I can't blame the low-fat thing totally. Plenty of unhealthy fats have contributed to our obesity epidemic. But I have seen plenty of people bloat up on grain diets. They just can't eat enough. Plenty of chubby vegetarians too.
Now all these diets are not that effective for lowering serum cholesterol. Especially when you are gaining weight. So we turn to the favorite tools of my profession-right out of the old drug-box. Problem is our old friend could lower cholesterol and to a much lesser degree heart attacks, but overall death rate didn't really change, sometimes it was worse. So quite a flop. Pay for some drug, have to keep track of taking it, suffer the side effects and you die sooner.
So then a whole new kid on the block, actually a gang. The Statins. Big Pharm licked its chops and every company wanted to have one. The data is impressive. They do lower cholesterol, lower heart attacks and even in the short-term of the studies lengthen life. Publish and market. "Thought Leaders" (doctors in universities getting money from big pharm) give talks, often with quite yummy food I am too cheap to pay for (usually). These are the new wonder drugs. Each time I pay attention, the recommended levels of cholesterol ah lower. Over half the population apparently needs them. By next year, we will discover pregnant women need them to keep the fetus from having a heart attack.
But then we read the small print... Myalgia. This means muscle aches, often intense. Even weakness. Like the flu. Fun! The liver works overtime. Well mine only works overtime for alcohol. The digestive track is upset. And wouldn't you know-the rodents they tested it on got cancer. Will humans be next in ten years or so? The experiment is underway. Are you the experimental subject? I would rather die in a quick fit of intense pain than rot for a year or two as a living corpse.
Then you look closer at the data. How will this affect me? Is the improvement worth the risks? It appears that the beneficial effect is smaller than advertised. Men over forty negligible. And how come lowering cholesterol with older drugs was not helpful? Must be something besides cholesterol.
Plenty of confounds too. The French eat all those yummy fatty foods and smoke a lot, but have less heart disease. The Mediterranean Diet is much better than the American Heart Association Diet in death rates, full of fatty olive oil. The Masai tribe lives lean and healthy on full-fat milk, meat and blood.
This whole cholesterol thing reeks of bad science and profit motive. Doctors are brainwashed from the start and most of their information is tainted by the propaganda and biased information from Big Pharm. I remain quite skeptical.
