The Sound Of Settled Science

Yeah, a socialist foreigner cardiologist in training is who we want to listen to...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jan/23/nhs-bill-andrew-lansley

Andrew Lansley is leading us to an Americanised system of privatised care with no accountability. We will all be worse off - Aseem Malhotra

Not only is the 'saturated fats = BAD' meme false but the 'exercise burns excess body fat' meme is also false.
The reason that both these memes are false is that fat storage in the body is regulated by the hormone insulin and consumption of carbohydrates triggers insulin release in the body.
It's all about insulin.

Gary Taubes at Stanford
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMQKtvj1htU

And yet, the LA Times is certain that climate science is settled, and they will publish no dissent.

http://talkingabouttheweather.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/you-dare-to-question-the-great-los-angeles-times/

Barry Groves was on to this more than a decade ago. The physicians are starting to catch on. Eventually dieticians will start trying to understand the research and give it another decade and the guidelines of the health bureaucracies will start to change. In the meantime, millions worldwide will die prematurely needlessly from a diet with lipophobic diets excess in starch and sugar.

I find more interesting the research of Dr. Kenyon on how insulin triggers cellular and tissue aging (activating daf-2 and suppressing FOXO genes) and research showing higher levels of blood sugar and insulin (as measured by HgbA1c testing) increases the annual rate of loss of brain mass, with no lower bound. That is, there is no u-curve. The lower the blood sugar, the greater the retained brain mass. Reading the typically vitriolic response of pro-carb zealots to the recent science, this might explain a lot.

What are we to do with all the health care industry's food cops? We're not going to stand by and let parents decide what their kids can and can't eat are we??

It isn't that long ago that vitamin E was being recommended by the cardiologists. Then, it was found to be, at best, useless, and even interfered with statin blockers. Medicine is still far less of a science than people, including patients, would like to believe.

Good point, Tregonsee. One has to personally vet all such claims with some critical thinking and additional research. Vitamin E is indeed beneficial to the heart, as vitamin E in tocotrienol form, which enhances the effectiveness (with co-enzyme Q10 and L-carnitine) of mitochondria. This gives the heart cells more energy. The problem was that tocotrienol forms of vitamin E are more expensive and people generally supplement with tocopherols. Large doses of tocopherols interfere with the uptake of tocotrienols, so taking normal vitamin E supplements was counterproductive. Better to eat organs rich in mitochondria, like heart and liver.

I used to worry about my "cholesterol", until I ran onto this:

http://www.ravnskov.nu/cholesterol.htm

Ravnskov and other cholesterol skeptics say that Big Pharma underwrites much of the research that supposedly supports use of their products. The board that dictates to doctors what a healthy cholesterol level is has members beholden to the industry that makes billions selling statins.

This is actually old news. Over 5 years ago a respected Vancouver cardiologist gave a talk entitled "Cholesterol: why everything you've learned is wrong". I was happy to go to that talk as he and I had sparred for quite a while as I never accepted the cholesterol hypothesis. Statins work, but they have nothing to do with cholesterol. They increase the efflux of endothelial progenitor cells from the bone marrow and inhibit prenylation of proteins. That latter form of protein modification is involved in production of plaque and growth of vascular smooth muscle. Oh, and incidentally statins lower cholesterol and CoQ10 levels - that's one of their side effects. Every patient I put on a statin is advised to take CoQ10 as well.

Diabetes is by far a greater problem and this is exacerbated by "fat free" food which is loaded with sugars. It's bizarre being in the US where it's virtually impossible to find yogurt that doesn't have added sugar and no yogurt seems to contain any fat. Body fat is a hormonally active organ and visceral fat is particularly bad. Excess carbs are immediately converted to fat. What is considered to be a normal HGBA1c level is likely far too high as there is a linear relationship between HGBA1c and heart disease incidence from 0.05 and up. The upper limit of normal for HGBA1c is given as 0.06 currently. If you can get your HGBA1c under 0.05 you're doing well. The heart disease data is from a British paper which didn't seem to make much of an impact on the lipocentric cardiology population.

The main problem we're dealing with is that the human body wasn't designed to live a long time. We're living far longer than the design specs call for and hence are finding all of the design mistakes which weren't considered when the original specs called for survival long enough to breed + 15 years or so and didn't worry about much past that.

When I was at a CME event in the US a couple of years ago, there was the obligatory review of cardiology with all of the associated lipophobia. I asked the question of why the US was still so lipocentric given that the cholesterol hypothesis has essentially been demolished. The cardiologist pondered this for a moment and then his answer was "because the lawyers still believe it".

Loki, not enough doc's like you around. I do much better on lowcarb than anything else.
You don't happen to practice in BC?

Funny how similar the low fat brigade is to the climate change alarmists. I am Considered a kook on both fronts.

In other news Dr Atkins was a cardiologist.

One of your commentators mention the Cholesterol skeptics. I ran into that site about 10 years ago . I read a lot about it and after that I made a point of asking people I knew that complained of muscle and joint pain particularly in the shoulders if they were on statins. Many of them were. If you ask them to think of when the pain started and many correlate the onset of the pain to the statins.

There is another very informative web site about how harmful statins are to your overall health. The website was developed by a Medical Doctor who happened to be an astronaut. He states that statins totally destroyed his health in a 6 month period. His name is Dr. Duane Graveline and his website is http://www.spacedoc.com/index.php . It has a lot of well researched information . This is coming from M.D.s and not wing nuts.

I am amazed that there are not more class action lawsuits about these statins because every person I have talked to that is or has been on statins have suffered some degree of significant side effects.

OWJ

I was just going to say, Atkins was onto this decades ago.

And he was viewed as a quack, a nutbar, a pariah, in the health and medical industry. But his evidence was clear, as were the case histories of his successes. Yet his reasoning and understanding of how the body processed carbs (immediate and fast conversion to blood sugar, causing insulin levels to spike) was sound, and supported his thesis.