A new study from South America adds substance to the stress-heart disease hypothesis that Malcolm Kendrick espouses in his book I recently reviewed.

Researchers studying a group of subjects in Latin America experiencing their first heart attack found that psychosocial stress was the leading cause, followed by high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking, and abdominal obesity. Last on the list of risk factors evaluated was dyslipidemia, but, as we will see, being last in reality doesn’t mean being last in the cholesterol-fevered minds of the researchers.

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If you went through the copy-paste-enlarge gyrations to be able to read the yellowed clipping taped on to the back of my Framingham study booklet you know that Dr. Kannel, the head of the Framingham study at the time, didn’t mince words about the association of serum cholesterol with heart disease. His strong statements came, strangely enough, as a ‘clarification’ to the report published under his name showing no such association.

See Dr. Kannel’s remarks in an enlarged section of the yellow clipping below.

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Have you ever watched a movie that had a surprise ending, say, The Sixth Sense, for example, then watched it again? Once you know the ending, you see all kinds of things that make the ending obvious that you didn’t see the first time through. When you have a movie (or a novelistic) experience like this, it makes you appreciate the talent of the creative people who make the movie (or write the novel). If these folks had just sprung the surprise ending on you without cleverly concealing all the clues, you would feel cheated.

It’s kind of the same with scientific research. Researchers uncover scientific knowledge bit by painstaking bit–sometimes over years–until a piece of the scientific puzzle is clarified. Once this piece is known, you can roam back through the scientific literature and find all the papers that lead to its clarification. Just as you would feel cheated if you watched The Sixth Sense a second time and didn’t see all the evidence of what was going on (which is really obvious once you know the ending) and were just slapped in the face with the surprise ending, you should find something amiss if practically the entire scientific establishment touts something as a fact and you can’t go back and find the evidence that leads to this conclusion.

I’ve been making this quest back through scientific time to look for the clues that lead to the conclusion (the surprise ending) that diet causes cholesterol to go up and that diet causes heart disease. So far, I haven’t found the clues. In fact, I’ve found clues that deny the conclusion.

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I’ve had a hectic past few days what with switching the website, blog and bulletin board to a new server and a new tech person along with all the other trials and tribulations of simply maintaining life on a somewhat even keel. I didn’t even get to play golf once.

In catching up on my reading I came across an article in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal that set my teeth on edge. The piece was entitled: Meditating for Heart Health. It was a balanced take on the idea that Transcendental Meditation (TM) improves heart health. Followers of TM have claimed that its practice can help reduce blood pressure, reduce arterial plaque, reduce the incidence of heart attack, and even reduce mortality. And they have the studies to prove it. One of the studies mentioned in the article is found in an issue of last year’s American Journal of Cardiology and presents data showing that subjects with high blood pressure who took up TM and other behavioral stress reducing interventions had reduced rates of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality after a follow up of 7.6 years. The references at the end of this paper list a number of other studies purporting to show the same thing. I pulled down a few of these and thumbed through them and they all pretty much indicated the same thing. I didn’t go over the statistics with a fine-toothed comb like I usually do simply because I didn’t have the time, and the studies all told me what I wanted to know, which is that there is evidence that TM and other sorts of meditation and stress reduction decrease mortality, or at the very least, don’t appear to increase it.

Why does all this stick in my craw? Because it reminds me of the paper that put Dean Ornish on the map, the one he’s been running around crowing about since.

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Well, the fallout continues over the sloppy JAMA studies purporting to show that reducing fat in the diet doesn’t prevent heart disease, colon cancer or breast cancer.

The New York Times followed up the front page, main headlined article with the lead editorial the next day entitled “Low-Fat Diets Flub a Test” devoted to the same topic.

The editorial starts off

The more we learn about nutrition, the less we seem to know. That is the clearest lesson to emerge from a large study of low-fat diets that has left diet aficionados thoroughly confused.

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