Cholesterol Scam Exposed - Throw Away Your Statins!

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Health

Pharma

Readers of this site have known it for some years, but the news is coming out more and more clearly: Cholesterol is a scam perpetrated by pharmaceutical interests at the cost of the health of millions of believers in modern medicine.

Not only do cholesterol lowering medications - the so-called statin drugs - have appalling side effects, they are practically useless, while having been the greatest money makers for pharmaceutical companies for the past two decades. We are talking about billions of dollars every year ... best selling drugs ... pervasive advertising ... and an appalling lack of evidence.

The Great Cholesterol Con - by Anthony Colpo

The role of cholesterol as an important, even vital substance for our health has been suppressed by those interested in selling us the medication. The rationale was prevention of heart attacks, but it turns out to have been an empty promise, according to a commentary on scientific studies recently published in The Lancet.

Eating saturated fats (or eggs) does not affect your cholesterol level. High cholesterol does not cause heart attacks.

Of course if you paid attention, you know that ... but many don't, even people who are otherwise well informed. My friend Vince, who forwarded the article that follows here, commented in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way:

I am stunned. I am shattered.
I am a Broken Man ...
If I can't believe in cholesterol any more,
CAN THE TOOTH FAIRY BE FAR BEHIND?

But read for yourself ... here is what Dr Malcolm Kendrick has to say about the scam in his recent article in the Daily Mail.

- - -

Have we been conned about cholesterol?

by MALCOLM KENDRICK -
(see original article with interesting comments here)

Conventional medical wisdom about cholesterol — and the role of statins — is now being challenged by a small, but growing number of health professionals. Among them is Dr Malcolm Kendrick. A GP for 25 years, he has also worked with the European Society of Cardiology, and writes for leading medical magazines.

When it comes to heart disease, we have been sold a pup. A rather large pup.

Actually, it's more of a full-grown blue whale. We've all been conned.

If you've got a raised risk of heart disease, the standard medical advice is to take a cholesterol-lowering statin drug to cut your chances of having a heart attack — because, as we all know, cholesterol is a killer.

Indeed, many of you already believe that you should take statins for the rest of your natural lifespan.

Nearly everybody is in agreement about the need to lower your cholesterol level. The NHS spends nearly £1 billion a year on prescriptions for statins and possibly the same amount administering the cholesterol tests, surgery visits and the rest.

But is it all worth it? According to an article being published in the medical journal The Lancet this week, the answer is probably no.

A leading researcher at Harvard Medical School has found that women don't benefit from taking statins at all, nor do men over 69 who haven't already had a heart attack.

There is a very faint benefit if you are a younger man who also hasn't had a heart attack - out of 50 men who take the drug for five years, one will benefit.

Nor is this the first study to suggest that fighting cholesterol with statins is bunk. Indeed, there are hundreds of doctors and researchers who agree that the cholesterol hypothesis itself is nonsense.

What their work shows, and what your doctor should be saying, is the following:

• A high diet, saturated or otherwise, does not affect blood cholesterol levels.

• High cholesterol levels don't cause heart disease.

• Statins do not protect against heart disease by lowering cholesterol - when they do work, they do so in another way.

• The protection provided by statins is so small as to be not worth bothering about for most people (and all women). The reality is that the benefits have been hyped beyond belief.

• Statins have many more unpleasant side effects than has been admitted, while experts in this area should be treated with healthy scepticism because they are almost universally paid large sums by statin manufacturers to sing loudly from their hymn sheet.

So how can I say saturated fat doesn't matter when everyone knows it is a killer? Could all those millions who have been putting skinless chicken and one per cent fat yoghurts into their trolleys really have been wasting their time?

The experts are so busy urging you to consume less fat and more statins that you are never warned about the contradictions and lack of evidence behind the cholesterol con.

In fact, what many major studies show is that as far as protecting your heart goes, cutting back on saturated fats makes no difference and, in fact, is more likely to do harm.

So how did fat and cholesterol get such a bad name? It all began about 100 years ago, when a researcher found feeding rabbits (vegetarians) a high cholesterol carnivore diet blocked their arteries with plaque.

But it took off in the Fifties with the Seven Countries study by Ancel Keys, which showed that the higher the saturated fat intake in a country, the higher the cholesterol levels and the higher the rate of heart disease.

The countries he chose included Italy, Greece, the USA and the Netherlands. But why these particular ones?

Recently I did my own 14 countries study using figures from the World Health Organisation, and found the opposite.

Countries with the highest saturated fat consumption — Austria, France, Finland and Belgium — had the lowest rate of deaths from heart disease, while those with the lowest consumption — Georgia, Ukraine and Croatia — had the highest mortality rate from heart disease.

Added to this, the biggest ever trial on dietary modification put 50 million people on a low saturated fat diet for 14 years.

Sausages, eggs, cheese, bacon and milk were restricted. Fruit and fish, however, were freely available. I’m talking about rationing in Britain during and after World War Two. In that time, deaths from heart disease more than doubled.

Even more damning is what happened in 1988. The Surgeon General's office in the US decided to gather all evidence linking saturated fat to heart disease, silencing any nay-sayers for ever.

Eleven years later, however, the project was killed. The letter announcing this stated that the office "did not anticipate fully the magnitude of the additional expertise and staff resources that would be needed".

After eleven years, they needed additional expertise and staff resources? What had they been doing? If they'd found a scrap of evidence, you would never have heard the last of it.

Major trials since have been no more successful. One involved nearly 30,000 middle-aged men and women in Sweden, followed for six years.

The conclusion? "Saturated fat showed no relationship with cardiovascular disease in men. Among the women, cardiovascular mortality showed a downward trend with increasing saturated fat intake." (In other words, the more saturated fat, the less chance of dying from heart disease).

Even stronger evidence of the benefits of increased fat and cholesterol in the diet comes from Japan. Between 1958 and 1999, the Japanese doubled their protein intake, ate 400 per cent more fat and their cholesterol levels went up by 20 per cent.

Did they drop like flies? No. Their stroke rate, which had been the highest in the world, was seven times lower, while deaths from heart attacks, already low, fell by 50 per cent.

It's a bit of a paradox, isn’t it? That's one of the features of the dietary hypothesis - it involves a lot of paradoxes.

The most famous is the French Paradox. They eat more saturated fat than we do in Britain; they smoke more, take less exercise, have the same cholesterol/LDL levels, they also have the same average blood pressure and the same rate of obesity.

And you know what? They have one quarter the rate of heart disease we do.

The official explanation is that the French are protected from heart disease by drinking red wine, eating lightly cooked vegetables and eating garlic.

But there is no evidence that any of these three factors are actually protective. None. By evidence, I mean a randomised, controlled clinical study.

Every time a population is found that doesn't fit the saturated fat/cholestrol hypothesis - the Masai living on blood and milk with no heart disease, the Inuit living on blubber with low heart disease - something is always found to explain it.

One research paper published more than 20 years ago found 246 factors that could protect against heart disease or promote it. By now there must be more than a thousand.

The closer you look the more you find that the cholestrol hypothesis is an amazing beast. It is in a process of constant adaptation in order to encompass all contradictory data without keeling over and expiring.

But you don't need to look at foreign countries to find paradoxes - the biggest one is right here at home. Women are about 300 per cent less likely to suffer heart disease than men, even though on average they have higher cholesterol levels.

For years there was an ad hoc hypothesis to explain this apparent contradiction - women were protected by female sex hormones.

In fact, there has never been a study showing that these hormones protect against heart disease in humans.

But by the Nineties, millions of women were b