Tag Archives: Cholesterol

An Article From September That I Missed

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Reason posted an article in September with the following title, “New Research Confirms We Got Cholesterol All Wrong.”

The article reports:

A comprehensive new study on cholesterol, based on results from more than a million patients, could help upend decades of government advice about diet, nutrition, health, prevention, and medication. Just don’t hold your breath.

The study, published in the Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology, centers on statins, a class of drugs used to lower levels of LDL-C, the so-called “bad” cholesterol, in the human body. According to the study, statins are pointless for most people.

“No evidence exists to prove that having high levels of bad cholesterol causes heart disease, leading physicians have claimed” in the study, reports the Daily Mail. The Express likewise says the new study finds “no evidence that high levels of ‘bad’ cholesterol cause heart disease.”

The study also reports that “heart attack patients were shown to have lower than normal cholesterol levels of LDL-C” and that older people with higher levels of bad cholesterol tend to live longer than those with lower levels.

It is estimated that 11 million Americans take statins to lower their cholesterol. A Forbes article from 2008 states that ” 25 million more should be on them (statins).”

The article at Reason concludes:

What’s more, if bad cholesterol isn’t so bad, then the benefits of so-called good cholesterol are also under assault. Recently, *HDL, the so-called “good” cholesterol, was itself deemed suspect in some cases.

Dietary fat also appears not to be the danger the government says it is. Another new study, reported on by Ron Bailey this week, suggests, as he writes, that the federal government’s warnings to avoid dairy products that are high in fat “is bunk.”

I’m not a nutritionist. I don’t know if the science on cholesterol is settled. But the federal government has warned us for decades about cholesterol in our bodies and in our food. The fact those warnings are now changing means the government has, despite what I’m sure are the good intentions of everyone involved, been handing out poor dietary advice and developing regulations that reflect that poor advice.

I’m one of many who has called out the DGAC and the federal government for foisting “decades of confusing and often-contradictory dietary advice” upon the American public. I also suggested, in a column last year, that one way the government might back up its claims to possess invaluable and unparalleled expertise in the areas of food policy and nutrition would be stop regularly reversing or altering its recommendations.

“The reason that we don’t know about these huge reversals in dietary advice is that the nutrition establishment is apparently loathe to make public their major reversals in policy,” Teicholz says. “The low-fat diet is another example: neither the AHA or the dietary guidelines recommend a low-fat diet anymore. But they have yet to announce this to the American public. And some in the establishment are still fighting to retain the low-fat status quo.”

I am not your doctor, nor your nutritionist. I have no idea what you should eat. Maybe the government should adopt that mantra, too.

We really don’t know as much about our bodies as we think we do.

A New Level In Government Overreach

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Breitbart.com posted an article today about a government panel of nutrition experts seeking ways to encourage Americans to make better nutritional choices.

The article reports:

The panel’s recommendations will help determine what gets into the new version of dietary guidelines being prepared by the Agriculture and Health and Human Services departments. The advice includes eating more fruits and vegetables and whole grains and limiting added sugars and fat.

However, the panel goes beyond previous versions of the dietary guidelines by suggesting a broad list of possible policy changes – a tax is just one – that could make it easier for people to follow that diet advice.

“Taxation on higher sugar- and sodium-containing foods may encourage consumers to reduce consumption and revenues generated could support health promotion efforts,” the committee wrote as part of the recommendations released this week.

Let’s look at some of the past mistakes of the government on the subject of nutrition. The food pyramid many of us were raised on was later revealed as less than ideal.

A Harvard public health website reports:

With an overstuffed breadbasket as its base, the Food Guide Pyramid failed to show that whole wheat, brown rice, and other whole grains are healthier than refined grains. With fat relegated to the “use sparingly” tip, it ignored the health benefits of plant oils—and instead pointed Americans to the type of low-fat diet that can worsen blood cholesterol profiles and make it harder to keep weight in check. It grouped healthy proteins (fish, poultry, beans, and nuts) into the same category as unhealthy proteins (red meat and processed meat), and overemphasized the importance of dairy products.

Recently, CBN News reported that new research shows that cholesterol is not the problem that scientists one declared it was:

Sinatra (Cardiologist Dr. Stephen Sinatra, author of the book, The Great Cholesterol Myth) used to believe high cholesterol was responsible for heart disease until he saw with his own eyes, in his own patients, that was’t true. He noticed many of his heart patients had low cholesterol and saw that many people with high cholesterol did not have heart problems.

“I was doing angiograms on people with 150, who had far advanced heart disease,” he recalled. “And the converse, I was doing angiograms on somebody with cholesterol of 280 and they had no heart disease.”

Sinatra is among a growing number of physicians who actually tout the benefits of high cholesterol in most cases.

“Cholesterol many times can be a gift in disguise, higher cholesterol,” he said.

He said high HDL cholesterol is good for you and says even LDL cholesterol is good for you as long as it’s the large, fluffy particles.

He admits the small, dense LDL particles are harmful. Therefore, he recommends, instead of getting your overall LDL cholesterol checked, you get it further broken down into particle size.

I have no doubt that sugary drinks and foods are not good for us. I also have no trust in the government actually being an expert on nutrition. Even the experts are not experts on nutrition. I also resent the fact that the government is trying to collect money from me because I occasionally drink a soda or eat a brownie. This suggested tax would impact people who eat sweet or salty things all the time and those who occasionally eat sweet or salty things. I truly resent Big Brother telling me what to eat. Big Brother does not have a great scientific track record.