I read Dr. Malcolm Kendrik’s book The Great Cholesterol Con in the UK-published edition several months ago, but have waited until now to review it because I was waiting to get the copy I had ordered from Amazon.com in the US to compare. Unfortunately, the version that Amazon.com sent me after three months of waiting was the same UK edition that I already had. Apparently the book hasn’t been picked up and published by a US publisher. More is the pity because the UK publisher did a sorry job on what is a truly wonderful book.

Dr. Kendrick’s writing style is accessible, humorous and to the point. He slashes and burns the diet/cholesterol/heart hypothesis in easy-to-understand terms and with great verve. I didn’t really find much in the first part of the book that I disagreed with except for one little throw away sentence about prions causing mad cow disease. I’m one of those folks who just don’t buy that entire premise, so Dr. Kendrick’s referring to it as established medical fact was a little jarring. Other than that one false note, I was completely engrossed in the book. As anyone who reads this blog knows, Dr. Kendrick was preaching to the choir with me, but the choir certainly enjoyed it.

I’m going to excerpt a fairly long section for a couple of reasons, one of which is totally self serving. First, I want you to get the feel for Dr. Kendrick’s writing style, and second, I’ve been wanting to write a section on this blog about ad-hoc hypotheses for a while so that I could link back to it and not have to explain the term each time I write about it. Dr. Kendrick has done it perfectly, so I’ll simply link back to this post and let him do all the work.

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