Cholesterol

I wanted to update with a short post about what I've been doing, which aside from my new full-time job and uh, playing a little (hah!) WoW of an evening, I’ve been getting as much reading done as possible. I have two books on the go at the moment but I will write about the one I’ve been reading most this week, which is called The Great Cholesterol Con by Dr Malcolm Kendrick.

As far as I'm aware, the only family history of heart problems has been my Nanna's angina and the congenital bicuspid aortic valve that my father, my sister and I have. My father is now part robot with a metal valve that ticks (he sounds like the crocodile from Peter Pan) and every year I see my cardiologist who pokes and prods at me with a gel covered ultrasound wand. Apart from these issues, I am not aware of any other family member who has suffered from any type of cardiovascular problems, high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, myocardial infarction and the like.

Anyway, one major topic that often rears its ugly head when I mention eating a low carbohydrate diet is that of cholesterol and how eating foods with saturated fat and full of cholesterol must increase my cholesterol levels and thicken my arteries which is ultimately bad and will cause me to have a heart attack.

It turns out that the hypothesis that dietary cholesterol causes heart disease came about through a series of misinterpretations of studies and observations, along with a few doctored and fabricated experiments that show how dietary fat increases cholesterol. One such study was created by and American scientist called Ancel Keys whose ‘Seven Countries Study’ was pivotal in establishing the correlation between dietary fat and heart disease. He took samples from Japan (having the lowest dietary saturated fat intake and the lowest rate of CHD), Italy, England and Wales, Australia, Canada and the USA (having the highest sat fat and CHD) and plotted their results on a graph, thusly:

Clearly this proves the hypothesis.

Or does it?

What Ancel Keys failed to include in his study, were the results of the 15 other countries that provided data, not to mention that the results were only obtained from men and they weren’t selected at random. Any scientist worth his salt knows that for an experiment’s results to be considered valid the data has to be obtained randomly and all results must be included and not just the results that are cherry picked to conform to your hypothesis. This is entirely the opposite of what Ancel Keys provided.

Here is the original data collection:

As you can see, there are countries plotted all over the place with some high fat diets with low death rates, and some low fat diets with high death rates.

Here is a link to a very good blog post that explains it all in further detail (and where I swiped the above images from):

http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2009/02/cholesterol-presentation-between.html

We are told that if we eat a diet high in and cholesterol, we are at a higher risk of dying from coronary heart disease. Dr Kendrick goes on to show that the exact opposite of this is true and that actually data collected from numerous different sources show that there are more deaths from heart disease in people with lowered cholesterol. In fact, some of this data comes from the organisations that set out to prove that too much cholesterol was the problem!

I’m almost halfway through this book and I’m finding it entertaining, fulfilling and eye-opening. Yes, my diet is high in saturated fat. No it isn't going to kill me. I am healthier than I used to be and I know of many, many people who follow similar ways of eating who have experienced much improved health from eating more saturated fat and less starchy carbohydrate.