I received an email today containing the December edition of the E-newsletter from the International Atherosclerosis Society. Right there on the first page was a announcement for a new book and a link to Amazon.com for it. The new book is

Hyperlipidaemia: Diagnosis and Management – 3rd Edition

The review of this book states the following: Read more »

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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Finally the New York Times comes up with a halfway decent review of Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories. In yesterday’s Science section John Tierney (obviously not a member of the Kolata/Brody/Burros coven) takes a serious look at Gary’s book and what it has to say about the mainstream medical/nutritional establishment’s recommendation to follow a low-fat diet.

Gary Taubes spends many pages in detailed analysis of how the mainstream went wrong in promulgating these incorrect recommendations for so many years despite the mountains of contradictory evidence. John Tierney brilliantly sums up the same situation in just a few paragraphs using a TV show most of us are familiar with as an example: Read more »

I just ran across a video of Dr. Malcolm Kendrick discussing the lack of correlation between cholesterol levels in the blood and heart disease. As you may remember I reviewed Dr. Kendrick’s book The Great Cholesterol Con in a previous post. His book is by far and away the better of the two books out there with the same title. Dr. Kendrick has a wealth of experience from which to draw and writes in a clever, witty and easily readable style. If you’re still worried that cholesterol may be the cause of heart disease, you need to read this book.

When I reviewed this book earlier, it took several weeks to get. Now the books are available from Amazon.com and can be had quickly. Add it to your low-carb library.

One caveat about the video. Despite how compelling the data are, they still come from observational studies, and, as such, can’t really be used to prove causation or lack thereof. The reason for this video is that so many people have tried to prove that cholesterol causes heart disease with the use of observational studies, it’s nice to see one that clearly shows the opposite.

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I just read Jane Brody’s article in today’s New York Times.

Yeesh.

It reminds me of a joke I once heard about a redneck who went to see Hamlet for the first time. When he emerged from the theater a friend asked him what he thought of the play. The redneck replied: It wasn’t nothin’ but a whole bunch of quotes strung together. That’s the way I feel about Ms. Brody’s article. It ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of false, undocumented, never proven, non-verified statements all strung together.

Here’s what happened to Jane that set her off on writing this twaddle.

She has been bopping along for most of her 65 years slowly following her own idiotic nutritional advice. And, I’m sure, feeling very full of herself for being so very, very good. She goes in for a routine check up and discovers – GASP! – that her cholesterol is slightly elevated. It was 222 mg/dL with a high normal being 200 mg/dL. Never mind that her HDL is nicely positioned at 69 mg/dL or that her triglycerides are pretty low at 99 mg/dL, she freaks out over her total cholesterol (a meaningless reading) and her minimally elevated LDL levels (134 mg/dL). Now if she were a reader of this blog – or even of the pertinent medical literature – she would know that a low triglyceride level and a high HDL level means that her LDL is of the large particle variety that is not only not dangerous, but actually beneficial.

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