Health & Nutrition by Michael R. Eades, M.D.

I have a close friend who was an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal for 13 years, during which time he broke a number of large stories. He left the WSJ to start a company to help businesses deal with the media. He had seen from the inside how businesses had tried to influence him and his colleagues, and he knew the business men were going about it all wrong. For the last 15 years or so he’s helped them get it right.

A couple of times per year my friend puts on seminars for people wanting to learn about how the media work. He invited me to one a few years ago in Las Vegas, and I can tell you, it was an eye-opening experience. The program started with my friend asking the attendees to write a few sentences describing what they thought constituted ‘news.’ Before you read on, stop for a moment and come up with your own definition of news. Have you got it? At this meeting virtually everyone (including yours truly and his lovely wife) came up with something on the order of: ‘News is when something happens of sufficient importance to the readers or viewers of a particular media format in a defined local (could be local - could be national) that it requires reporting.’

My friend gathered the papers and started reading them to the group. One after the other was a variation on the theme above. After he had read a dozen or so, he looked at the crowd and said: “Let me define news for you. News is what the media wants you to know.”

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Today I’ve been inundated with comments, emails and even a phone call or two about the ’study’ that hit the news this morning allegedly showing that the Atkins diet causes blood vessel damage, and increase in ‘bad’ cholesterol and increased levels of inflammation. I figured I would take this opportunity to describe how this kind of information gets out there and discuss this ’study’ in particular.

To begin with, this isn’t really a scientific study published in a peer-reviewed journal. It was a brief presentation (about 15 minutes including questions) made at the annual scientific meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida a couple of days ago. To better understand where presentations like this one fit in the hierarchy of the scientific world, let’s take a look at how these huge meetings are organized.

The annual Scientific Sessions of the American Heart Association is an enormous meeting with thousands and thousands of attendees. This year’s meeting, which is still going on, is being held at the giant convention center in Orlando, Florida. When the organizers of these kinds of meetings start working on putting them together - which they do years in advance - they begin to contact all the big guns for the major lectures. These lectures are presented during the prime times of the conference when nothing else is going on and they can be attended by all attendees. These lectures held in the huge auditorium are usually by well-known, established researchers who present the data from many years of their work on specific inquiries.

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I’ve posted on the health benefits of intermittent fasting (here and here) and on my thoughts on the inflammatory properties of food and overnutrition. These posts, particularly the one on inflammation, inspired a host of questions on whether intermittent fasting decreases inflammation. Based on my knowledge of the medical literature on inflammation and intermittent fasting I’m pretty sure that it does. A recent paper presents data indicating that it indeed does.

The April 2007 issue of Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism includes an article on the positive changes in inflammatory markers brought about by the intermittent fasting Muslims undergo during Ramadan.

As the authors put it in the introduction: Read more »

On the flight from London to Rome I read an article on the immune system and cancer. It got me to thinking about the immune system and a whole lot of other health problems.

It’s sunrise in The Eternal City right now. I’ve been up early watching the dawn break over St. Peters, which is a couple of miles below the hotel. I figured everyone was getting tired of travel disaster stories, so I thought this would be a good time to sketch out my views on the inflammatory basis of heart disease.

If you read enough in the medical literature you will perceive a change in outlook on the underlying cause of many of the so-called diseases of civilization, especially heart disease. Most authors – mainly, I suspect, out of desire to keep their academic positions and reputation with their peers – throw a bone to the lipid hypothesis before admitting that it probably isn’t the only cause of coronary artery disease. Over the last decade or so the progression has been thus: elevated cholesterol causes heart disease – elevated cholesterol and maybe a little inflammation cause heart disease – elevated cholesterol and inflammation cause heart disease – inflammation along with elevated cholesterol cause heart disease – and now, among the more enlightened – inflammation causes heart disease. In my opinion, it probably is inflammation by itself that is the driving force behind the development and progression of most cardiovascular disease.

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