121–130 of 148 posts
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I've always wondered if the reason a daily aspirin prevents heart attacks isn't because it prevents clotting, but because it's an anti-inflammatory.
If true then aspirins may be just as useful as statins while being cheaper and safer. (But you won't see anyone funding a clinical trial to prove this, any time soon!)
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But dietary cholesterol itself only comes from animal products, which is probably why the Dr. said to cut out all animal products.
What I have found and read recently-ish about as well is that dietery cholesterol will actually not have any bad effect on the cholesterol in your bloodstream. If I eat eggs and bacon my cholesterol basically stays the same as if I don't and my body just manufactures more of the bad stuff. https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/how-its-made-cho... > In fact, cholesterol production is so important that your liver…
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We know that high cholesterol is a cause of heart disease rather than a mere correlation because people with genetic Hypercholesterolemia have a rate of heart disease 10-20x that of the general population, independent of other risk factors: https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2020/06/01...
Do we know that people with hypercholesterolemia don't just have a heart/blood vessel/metabolic defect that also causes high cholesterol?
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Robert Lustig is right that fructose (half of common sugar) is responsible for a variety of ills: exactly the ones Americans die of, by the millions. There is a lot of Lustig material on youtube, all of it excellent, all thoroughly grounded in rigorous experimental science. We need more Robert Lustigs. The normal metabolic route is that excess fructose, beyond what the liver can afford to process immediately or store…
I'd expect taking statins to then increase risk of heart failure, were it that simple.
More particularly, permanent muscle damage.
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Robert Lustig is right that fructose (half of common sugar) is responsible for a variety of ills: exactly the ones Americans die of, by the millions. There is a lot of Lustig material on youtube, all of it excellent, all thoroughly grounded in rigorous experimental science. We need more Robert Lustigs. The normal metabolic route is that excess fructose, beyond what the liver can afford to process immediately or store…
But aren't statins successful in preventing heart disease, in clinical trials? My understanding was that other classes of medicine that reduce serum cholesterol levels have shown no effects on heart disease in clinical trials.
Vendors have eagerly sought for any hint of evidence of preventing heart disease, or anything else, for decades, and have come up empty. That does not stop physicians from prescribing statins for slightly elevated cholesterol. Pharmaceutical companies love drugs like statins that don't cure anything, so you have to take them every month, forever. They have proven very skilled at manipulating the opinions of medical doctors, e.g. scandalously in the case recent case of opioids.
Making your liver ignore signals to produce the cholesterol your body needs to function is a very bad idea, on par with irradiating your thymus gland when it becomes enlarged (which was done, and recently! Your thymus gland is part of your immune system, enlarged when it is working.)
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I think specifying meat vs other sources is more of an inaccuracy thing and can be corrected easily without involving interpretations. "eats healthy" on the other hand is an exercise in assigning values to one way of eating over another. If you talk to a keto guy and you tell him you "eat healthy too" he might assume you're doing keto too. Talk to a vegan they probably think you're vegan as well etc. :)
Well, we know they don't eat like a pig, stocking their mouth with burgers and fries and deep fried mars bars. That's something...
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We know that high cholesterol is a cause of heart disease rather than a mere correlation because people with genetic Hypercholesterolemia have a rate of heart disease 10-20x that of the general population, independent of other risk factors: https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2020/06/01...
That's still only evidence of correlation, not causation.
In case of people who have a high level LDL cholesterol, the phagocytes - the scavenger cells in blood consume more cholesterol particles in general. The result is cholesterol is more likely to stick to the walls of affected blood vessels.
This is one of the most thoroughly researched topics in medicine.
Does it mean high LDL will always result in a heart attack? No! Just like not every cigarette smoker dies of lung cancer.
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Robert Lustig is right that fructose (half of common sugar) is responsible for a variety of ills: exactly the ones Americans die of, by the millions. There is a lot of Lustig material on youtube, all of it excellent, all thoroughly grounded in rigorous experimental science. We need more Robert Lustigs. The normal metabolic route is that excess fructose, beyond what the liver can afford to process immediately or store…
Can you share a good article about the misconceptions of cholesterol and the dangers of statins? I've been looking for a decent source. I have a family member on a statin now.
Off the top of my head, I remember the "zero carb down under" channel where some are hosted, including Lustig's talks.
/r/KetoScience delves into the research, if you are so inclined.
I have an auto-immune disease. The medication prescribed has the side effect of making my "bad" LDL cholesterol skyrocket. I tried everything from diet, to exercise to bring it back down but nothing worked. I'm now on a Statin medication which solved the issue but I'm not thrilled about yet another medication. Before my disease I ate like an average American (sugar, meat, dairy etc.) and my LDL cholesterol was high.…
High LDL or high cholesterol doesn't mean anything, per se. The HDL:LDL ratio is a little more important but not so much. Triglycerides and glucose levels are a much bigger indicator of health. Inflammation is the biggest indicator, but AFAIK we do not have ways to measure it directly.
HDL, LDL, cholesterol, triglycerides are fats, but are often not directly correlated with dietary fat. There is more and more evidence triglycerides increases as sugar and refined carbs increase in your diet. This is the biggest misconception in dietary history and we're 20 years away from science and doctors to integrate this new piece of information.
I am close with someone who has chronic high cholesterol, in addition to a 6-pack abs. She exercises 5x/week and eats .5kg of animal products/week at most, usually white meat. She just visited her heart Dr and was told that her cholesterol is too high and that she needs to cut out animal products entirely as a next step. I am thinking...is this really the modern answer to someone's high cholesterol if they consistent…
This shows that doctor's actually know that a diet and other lifestyle factors are the key to health. Not eating pills.