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Uffe Ravnskov, who wrote the book The Cholesterol Myths, goes through study after study destroying the idea that high cholesterol levels are the cause of heart disease. In the Framingham heart study done near Boston that spanned 30 years , the researchers concluded that high cholesterol was a risk factor for heart disease, but when one really dissects the data, one must question how they came to that conclusion. For example, when the participants of the study are plotted on a graph it clearly shows that those with cholesterol levels between 182 and 222 did not survive as long as those with cholesterol levels between 222 and 261. The study shows that about half the people with heart disease had low cholesterol, and half the people without heart disease had high cholesterol.
Most studies have found that for women, high cholesterol is not a risk factor for heart disease at all - in fact, the death rate for women is five times higher in those with very low cholesterol. In a Canadian study that followed 5000 healthy middle-aged men for 12 years, they found that high cholesterol was not associated with heart disease at all. And in another study done at the University Hospital in Toronto that looked at cholesterol levels in 120 men that previously had heart attacks, they found that just as many men that had second heart attacks had low cholesterol levels as those that had high. The Maoris of New Zealand die of heart attacks frequently, irrespective of their cholesterol levels. In Russia, it is low cholesterol levels that are associated with increased heart disease. The Japanese are often sited as an example of a population that eat very little cholesterol and have a very low risk of heart disease. But the Japanese that moved the US and continued to eat the traditional Japanese diet had heart disease twice as often as those that maintained the Japanese traditions but ate the fatty American diet. This suggests that perhaps it is something else, like stress perhaps, that is causing the heart disease.
These are but a small sample of the studies that contradict the idea that cholesterol is the villain in heart disease.
If cholesterol were standing trial in a court of law, it wouldn't be convicted
as guilty with so much evidence to the contrary. So why has this idea held
on so long? Perhaps pharmaceutical companies and the processed-food industry have a lot to gain by keeping
this belief alive. Doctors don't have the time to read the studies, and if
they have time at all, will often just read the abstracts, which often have different
conclusions than what the data actually shows. If you have high cholesterol and you are taking, or thinking about taking cholesterol-lowering drugs,
consider reading The Cholesterol Myths so that you can make an informed decision regarding this important issue.
Ravnskov, Uffe, MD, PhD The Cholesterol Myths: Exposing the Fallacy that Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease, New Trends Publishing Inc., Washington D.C., 2000.
Anderson KM, Castelli WP, Levy D. Cholesterol and Mortality. 30 years of follow-up from the Framingham Study Journal of the American Medical Association 257, 2176-2180, 1987.
Krumholz HM and others. Lack of association between cholesterol and coronary heart disease mortality and morbidity and all-cause mortality in persons older than 70 years. Journal of the American Medical Association 272, 1334-1340, 1994.
Forette B, Tortrat D, Wolmark Y. Cholesterol as risk factor for mortality in elderly women. The Lancet 1, 868-870, 1989.
Dagenais GR and others. Total and coronary heart disease mortalityin relation to major risk factors - Quebec cardiovascular study. Canadian Journal of Cardiology 6, 59-65, 1990.
Shanoff HM, Little JA, Csima A. Studies of male survivors of myocardial infarction: XII. Relation of serum lipids and lipoproteins to survival over a 10 year period. Canadian Medical Association Journal 103, 927-931, 1970.
Bottiger LE, Carlson LA. Risk factors for death for males and females. Acta Medica Scandinavica 211, 437-442, 1982.
Beaglehole R and others. Cholesterol and mortality in New Zealand Maoris. British Medical Journal 1, 285-287, 1980.
Shestov DB and others. Increased risk of coronary heart disease death in men with low total and low-density-lipoprotein cholesterol in the Russian Lipid Research Clinics prevalence follow-up study. Circulation 88, 846-853, 1993.
Marmot MG, Syme SL. Acculturation and coronary heart disease in Japanese-Americans. American Journal of Epidemiology 104, 225-247, 1976.
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