High cholesterol is bad for you

everyone knows that, right?

i say bullshit.  if our government says it, that means nothing.  the pharmaceutical companies make a fortune selling cholesterol lowering medicine.  my guess is all that does is make them rich and the people taking the medicine poorer and less healthy.

here's a short article about cholesterol.  there are also a couple of books about it. 

anyone disagree?

Good read.

Put your money where your mouth is

If you or your loved ones have a Ischemic Cardiovascular or Cerebral Vascular Event or Diabetes.

And you are advised to take a Statin.

Then practice what you preach will you and don't take them.


Idiots buying books and reading articles by these dumb asses who are making money by peddling crap and equally as culpable are the conspirators like club dirt who push this crap.

Idiots who care not one dime about peoples health. Hell bent on fooling vulnerable people to buy their books.

If you knew anything at all, which obviously you don't.

then you would know about

Framingham Massachusetts


you would know about the 4S Study


you would know about WOSCOPS


but you don't, but yes you care to know about idiots like those in your linked article.

 I can't abide BS'  ers.

Anyone reading this forum, DO NOT stop taking your cholesterol lowering medication, because of the BS posted in post #1.


Keep following the advice of your doctor who follows evidence based medicine and follows the guidelines issued by the authoritative medical bodies such as

American Heart Association

NICE

European Cholesterol Guidelines

High Cholesterol NHS



These are just a few of thousands of guidelines all with the same message, Guidelines on Cholesterol, Heart Disease, Stroke, Diabetes, issued by every country in the developed world, and it is consensus of  medical opinion throughout the world.

World Health Organization 07 June 2009

Coronary heart disease (CHD) accounted for over 450 000 deaths in the United States of America in 2004. The burden of CHD in the United States is enormous; more than 13 million people are affected, and the costs of direct health care exceed US$ 150 billion annually.


Lowering total blood cholesterol should therefore remain a priority in the United States, as every 1 mg/dl decrease in cholesterol offers a potentially powerful 1% reduction in CHD mortality.

In the United States, recent increases in physical activity, echoing trends in Canada, Finland and elsewhere, are encouraging. Although engaging in adequate physical activity confers many health benefits, we found that in the United States, as elsewhere, reductions in CHD mortality would be modest. Interventions promoting physical activity among individuals seldom show long-term sustainability. However, physical activity in populations may be increased by 4% to 9% through multiple interventions.



The Healthy People 2010 (HP2010) initiative promoted by the government of the United States contains targets for heart disease and stroke that explicitly address risk factor prevention, detection and management, along with prevention of recurrent events. HP2010 objectives include a 20% reduction in age-adjusted CHD mortality rates (from an overall rate of 203 per 100 000 population in 1998 to 162 per 100 000 in 2010). They also include specific targets for reducing mean total blood cholesterol (to 199 mg/dl)



note CHD =Coronary Heart Disease 

Keep following the advice of your doctor who follows evidence based medicine and follows the guidelines issued by the authoritative medical bodies such as


yes, listen to the medical expert. No need to alter your nutritional inputs, the cure is in the drugs

evidenced based medical bodies


"and it is consensus of  medical opinion throughout the world."


Well, so long as BMA says so,,,,,,,


TAKE TOUR STATINS BOY!!

yes, listen to the medical expert. No need to alter your nutritional inputs, the cure is in the drugs

if you cared to look at the guidelines then you would know that nutrition and exercise as well as drugs are all important. But you are only interested in what the health ranger says Mike Adams says and what  Mark Twain says and what Gary Taubes says.


Quote from NICE GUIDELINES

Blood cholesterol has a log–linear relationship to the risk of CHD and is a key modifiable risk factor. It is estimated that in high-income countries blood cholesterol levels in excess of 3.8 mmol/litre are responsible for more than 50% of CVD events4. Blood cholesterol can be reduced by dietary change, physical activity and drugs. This guideline addresses the identification of those at high risk, and the modification of lipids in these people and people with established CVD. Treatment should be aimed at reducing overall risk.


You read a nutrition book then you start trolling forums and dishing out health advice.

you said this

' Ditch the exercise altogether, if you are prone to putting on that much fat, exercise is more likely to make you fatter then it is to make her burn off fat, because exercising leaves you feeling that much hungrier.'

then you said this in the same text

'I lost 45 lbs in 100 days by cutting out all sugar drinks, and walking'


please note walking is exercise.


You were overweight
You buy and read Gary Taubes book.
You say 'but after being into it for about a year'


A year of your own personal experience of nutrition and book reading and you start dishing out advice



You should look at the NICE Guideline as a starters on the path to a better understanding of a subject you know nothing about.



You have not even looked at The Framingham study in your own back yard,
It has followed Cardiovascular events in Framingham since 1948, three generations continuously monitored.The 4S study and others.

Yet you are inspired by books written by clowns.


Yet when it comes to the crunch if you  or your family have a Cardiovascular or Cerebral Vascular event you will take the Statins. Period. All you BS then goes out of the window. Easy to say don't take things when you or your family do not have those conditions. Very selfish indeed.

Fortunately people like yourself and Dirt are and infinitesimal minority.

bma, i do practice what i preach and i do care about my health and the health of my family.  and i'm not saying i have all of the answers, i'm just raising the issue and giving my opinion. 

anyway, why do we thing high cholesterol is bad?  because that's what we were always told and the people who told us were always told and so on.  why can't i question that.  they used to say that eating foods high in cholesterol, like eggs, raised our cholesterol.  now i think we know that's not true. 

they used to say that a high cholesterol number was bad.  then they broke it down between HDL and LDL and said one should be high and one shouldn't, or whatever they said.

why should i believe anything these people say about cholesterol.

but there's more.  much more.  the drug companies make tens of billions  off of cholesterol drugs.  do you think they have influence over our perception of cholesterol and the information the doctors get?  do the drug companies have my interest in mind or would they rather make $20 billion off of lipitor? 

and cholesterol is such an easy issue to manipulate.  it can all be synthesized down to a number. a simple blood test tells your doctor your cholesterol is 250.  take these pills for the rest of your life and ion 4 months, it'll be down to 190.  look, that's a success anyone can see.

i'm not saying you should believe anyone who writes a book about cholesterol.  i sure as hell don't believe a doctor or drug company commercial that tells me to take a pill forever because my cholesterol number is high. 

i believe what makes sense.  i believe in the paleo diet.  i believe humans evolved over many years by eating a certain diet and our bodies want us to continue eating that optimal diet of natural, whole foods- fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, nuts.  so yes, i'm going to eat eggs and no i'm not taking lipitor. 

as to the various medical conditions you cited, i have no opinion about that.  my general opinion is diet and exercise will cure or prevent a lot more than medicine.  however, there are flaws in the human existence where we are benefited by resorting to science and medicine. 

BE

I respectfully suggest that you refrain from giving specific advice .

If you look at the anxiety forum Spitfire documented the experience of his father and himself with anxiety, personal accounts are helpful and do not give specific advise to others.

In the forums you have laid down advise about no taking drugs everything is nutritional and environmental based. Quoting absurd figures on chronic disease from the Health ranger Mike Adams.

By all means outline how you were overweight  and sought alternative means to achieve weight loss, by reading specific books. Just say it worked for you and that was your personnel experience, don't give out specific nutritional and exercise advice to people and your thoughts on the value of medications. Just say the book helped you, it worked for you and if they want to read it, this is the title and author. Leave it at that.


Have you ever contemplated that someone might actually stop taking a medication because of your views on medications and nutrition. And what the consequences may be for that individual.


I don't think you could list the risk factors for Coronary  Heart Disease, I don't think you would be able to identify the major and the minor risk factors, and that you could not identify the ones that can be modified and the ones that can't. I believe you have little medical knowledge at all.

bma, we are the minority.  the majority thinks eating snackwells is ok because they are lowfat while eating eggs or coconut is bad because of all that fat.  the majority thinks you shouldn't use butter because of all that fat but it's ok to ingest some scientifically engineered butter procuct with the fat removed but some strange ingredients i can't pronounce are included instead.  judging by the dairy aisle in the grocery store, the majority thinks the fat free yogurt is better than the full fat yogurt even though they make the fat free yogurt by replacing the fat with sugar and some other shit i can't identify.  the majority thinks i should eat a bag of microwave popcorn instead a handful or two of nuts. 

the majority thinks if i eat eggs every day, my cholesterol will go up and that will make it more likely that i have heart problems.

i disagree with all of that. 

Not just told proven.
Mortality of a population rises with cholesterol level. Proven.

Yes HDL and LDL absolute levels are significant but the ratio of the 2 is even more significant,this has been known, maybe not to you.

The drug companies do not influence the doctors prescribing of cholesterol drugs, the evidence based medicine from trials produces data. Authoritative independent bodies such as NICE produce the prescribing guidelines to doctors, what conditions to use them for, how to calculate risk factors, a calculation based on age, sex, smoking, diabetes, HDL/ LDL RATIO, using the software on your computer in your consulting room, the risk factor gives a score of the risk of having a cardiovascular event in the next 10 years and if that score is in the rnge, the statin is prescribed along with all other risk factor advise. Diet even the strictest can only drop cholestrol down by a certain small amount. Using Eupopean units, for example a Cholesterol of 7.5mmol/l could not be reduced to the below 5 by diet alone....

based on this statement, i think there is a gap between our respective understandings of the medical and pharmaceutical industries that cannot be bridged.

The drug companies do not influence the doctors prescribing of cholesterol drugs,
here's the first article i found.  i'm sure there are many others.  this is the first line.

A dozen pharmaceutical companies have given doctors and other healthcare providers more than $760 million over the past two years - and those companies' sales comprise 40 percent of the U.S. market.

if that doesn't raise a red flag about drug companies and doctors, nothing will. 
here's an older article on the pharmaceutical lobby in washington.  hard to trust anything any of these people say when this kind of money is involved and "successful" drugs make billions of dollars.

as for the framingham study, here's what the guy who wrote the cholesterol myth said about it

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 higher cholesterol levels of 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.

here's more

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 cited 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 to 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 it is something else, like stress perhaps, that is causing the heart disease.

Dr. Malcolm Kendrick noticed that in the MONICA study that has been going on for about 40 years, there is no association between high cholesterol levels and heart disease. See the graph for yourself at the bottom of the article. (Dr. Kendrick wrote another interesting piece about the "disappointing results" of low fat diets in the Women's Health Initiatives heart intervention study, and the lack of association between death rates from CVD and saturated fat consumption based on the MONICA study).

anyone can create a study to say anything and results can be interpreted and manipulated to fit an agenda.  and there are huge agendas when it comes to our diets and drugs.  the politicians want to stay in power and the pharmaceutical companies can make that happen.  the doctors listen to and take money from the pharmaceutical companies.  the huge wheat and corn industries that make chips and snackwells and all the other artificially lowfat and low cholesterol food products have a huge incentive to have people believe fat and cholesterol are the enemy. 

Have you ever contemplated that someone might actually stop taking a medication because of your views on medications and nutrition. And what the consequences may be for that individual.


no. do i need to start adding a disclaimer?

disclaimer : i am not a doctor and i don't play one on tv.

in my personal opinion, drugs are bad. The human body is a machine, and it needs to be fueled properly. The solution lies in decomplexifying, not adding more layers of complexity (imo), so if one would like to better their own personal health, i believe they are better served to run a science experiment of their own, by utilizing FOOD as their medicine.

I did this and it worked for me, and there are countless others out there with the same story to tell.

OR, you could subject yourself to a FOR PROFIT doctor, and let him sign your prescription, and hope that drugs will cure what ails ya.

I have no agenda to profit from this discussion, do you?

You cannot solve a problem of decades of misinformation by telling people to just shut up and listen to the professionals. That's how we got here in the first place, people stopped asking questions and just gobble up what the pros put on their plate. No thanks

Why would any profession want to problem solve their way out of their profit stream? That is counter our evolutionary tendency towards survival. So question everything all the time, ESPECIALLY when the person claiming to have the answers has their personal profits at stake. This goes for books you read, and professionals for whom you seek their services

anyone can create a study to say anything and results can be interpreted and manipulated to fit an agenda



i don't feel good, give me a drug (or make me think you're giving me a drug and give me a placebo instead) and magically watch both methods have similar results

Quote Originally Posted by be easy:

anyone can create a study to say anything and results can be interpreted and manipulated to fit an agenda



i don't feel good, give me a drug (or make me think you're giving me a drug and give me a placebo instead) and magically watch both methods have similar results

False

You know nothing about medical trials. that is blatantly obvious.

False
the active drug has to show statistical significance of benefit, if it has equal effect to placebo, then the drug is useless an abandoned at a very early stage

BE
in my personal opinion, drugs are bad. The human body is a machine, and it needs to be fueled properly. The solution lies in decomplexifying, not adding more layers of complexity (imo), so if one would like to better their own personal health, i believe they are better served to run a science experiment of their own, by utilizing FOOD as their medicine.


the dumbest post ever on Covers


Antibiotics
Antimalerials
Anti epileptics
Vaccines
Insulin
Anti Cancer drugs
Thyroxine

on and on ad infinitum


Without antibiotics millions would be dead
Without insulin millions would be dead
Without vaccines millions will be dead

on and on ad infinitum


If you have children will they be vaccinated
If they have pneumonia or meningitis will you allow antibiotics

If any of your loved ones require a transplant will you allow imunosuppressant drugs to stop organ rejection

If anyone you love has cancer will you allow chemotherapy

If anyone you know has a heart attack will you allow streptokinase  iv to be given

on and on add infinitum


are you mad

The drug companies do not influence the prescription written by the doctor.



The doctor prescribes according to Guidelines that are based on Evidence Based Medicine, not to drug companies.


.

i couldn't disagree with that statement any more. 

as for BE's statement, i agree with it.  the default position is to eat and live the way evolution has dictated over many years.  there will be instances where that's not enough and medicine needs to take over but a lot of medicine is bullshit and unnecessary, particularly if people at and lived right to begin with. 

BE


I will help you out with the risk factors for Cardiovascular disease

The main ones

The sad thing we can't do anything about these

Age-------------- risk increases with age

Sex--------------males greater risk

Genetics ( pedigree family history) of premature heart disease. Unless this is due to familial hypercholestraemia which we can do something about with treatments

wrong

please list the bullshit and unnecessary

medicines

let me see your list

or is it just a statement you plucked out of the air

List them please

club dirt
the default position is to eat and live the way evolution has dictated over many years.


Describe the way evolution has dictated what we should eat and how we should live

how can YOU CHALLENGE

The drug companies do not influence the prescription written by the doctor.


tell me how the drug company instructs the doctor in his consulting room to prescribe a certain drug

first name a drug then describe how the drug company instructs the doctor to prescribe that particular drug to a particular patient


Statins several Statins made by different companies. So the drug company would have no point in instructing the doctor to prescribe a statin, because he could prescribe any one of several


100 or more different arthritis drugs
100's of different antibiotics
100 of different blood pressure pills
many insulins
ad infinitum

get the picture

bma, read about the paleo diet.  plenty of articles out there can explain it much better than i can.

as for bullshit medications, start with cholesterol lowering drugs, heartburn drugs, many of these add, adhd drugs they give kids, some diabetes drugs.  now, you seem to like to take everything BE and i say to the extreme.  i'm not saying these drugs are bullshit in every case.  but there are a lot of diet and exercise related ailments that can and should be addressed with diet and exercise rather than some pill that may not work, may have dangerous side effects and may have side effects we don't know about when you consider our corrupt government and the for profit drug companies are the ones testing them.