The researchers said the findings were a “huge surprise”.

Doctors say there’s ‘no evidence’ high levels of bad cholesterol causes heart disease

Pass the butter.

Most Nutrition Research Is Bunk

Government nutrition advice based on decades of “research” by nutrition epidemiologists has now been shown to be mostly unwarranted scaremongering, writes Stanford University statistician John P.A. Ioannidis, who has been at the forefront of criticizing the misuse and abuse of statistics to justify the publication of shoddy and just plain wrong research in numerous disciplines.

Where I looked out our van’s window at a landscape of skeletal cows and chartreuse rice paddies, Keller saw a prehistoric crime scene. She was searching for fresh evidence that would help prove her hypothesis about what killed the dinosaurs—and invalidate the asteroid-impact theory that many of us learned in school as uncontested fact. According to this well-established fire-and-brimstone scenario, the dinosaurs were exterminated when a six-mile-wide asteroid, larger than Mount Everest is tall, slammed into our planet with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs. The impact unleashed giant fireballs, crushing tsunamis, continent-shaking earthquakes, and suffocating darkness that transformed the Earth into what one poetic scientist described as “an Old Testament version of hell.”

Afterward, according to science, the dinosaurs took 100,000 years to die off —  a  “heartbeat” in geological time, we’re told.  But 100,000 years is an eternity in a dinosaur’s time. It still doesn’t make sense.

Grab a coffee. (And then marvel at the lack of self-awareness in the concluding paragraphs.)

…about four in ten people who are thought to be unconscious are actually aware

One in five people with severe brain injury from trauma will recover to the point that they can live at home and care for themselves without help

 

The term [permanent vegetative state] should be dropped and that pain relief should be given to patients affected

 

These are the startling conclusions of a new US practice guideline for managing prolonged disorders of consciousness (PDOC) issued earlier this week.

h/t Instapundit. Read it all.

Rogue Health;

The country with the world’s highest meat consumption appears to be Hong Kong, according to the National Geographic. (Although Hong Kong isn’t a self-governing nation, but an administrative district.)

 

[…]

 

Hong Kong is also number three in the world in per capita beef consumption, so their meat isn’t just chicken or seafood.

 

Together with China and Macao, Hong Kong is fourth in the world in per capita pork consumption.

 

If our health authorities are right, then people in Hong Kong should be dropping like flies from heart disease and cancer.

 

But they’re not.

Thousands of people take omega-3 supplements regularly and for years. The belief that it protects the heart has spread – and is promoted in the marketing of the supplements – because the results from early trials suggested the capsules had cardiovascular benefits.
 
Small amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, are essential for our health. Omega-3 fats are found in certain foods – most famously in oily fish such as salmon and cod liver oil, which contain the long chain fats called eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Nuts and seeds, and in particular walnuts and rapeseed oil, contain another sort of omega-3, called alpha­linolenic acid (ALA).
 
But a major review by the respected Cochrane collaboration of all the well-conducted trials carried out internationally to test the effect of omega-3, involving more than 112,000 people, says there is no evidence that the supplements do any good.
 
[…]
 
The belief that omega-3 supplements could protect against cardiovascular diseases came from a couple of positive results from trials in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said Lee. “We’ve all believed it for quite a long while,” she said. “But none of the trials since have shown these results. We somehow haven’t adjusted to that data.”

Just eat whatever the hell you want. (h/t TH)

Indeed.

“The majority of papers that get published, even in serious journals, are pretty sloppy,” said John Ioannidis, professor of medicine at Stanford University, who specializes in the study of scientific studies.
 

This sworn enemy of bad research published a widely cited article in 2005 entitled: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
 
Since then, he says, only limited progress has been made.

Except in climate science. Because trillions of dollars now depend on it being unassailable.

A few years ago the health division of the National Academies commissioned a panel to review all the science to date and concluded that there was no evidence that people would benefit from giving up moderate sodium intake. Some studies suggested that people who consumed very little sodium had a greater risk of dying from stroke or heart disease. At the time, the doctor who led the panel, Brian Strom of Rutgers University, told me the 1,500 milligram goal was derived from a process that was “not entirely rational.”

If you’re craving an essential nutrient, you should probably pay attention.

The truth is that there’s no evidence that reducing cholesterol prolongs life. Disturbingly, there’s a consistent and confounding increase in deaths from other causes when you reduce cholesterol below 180 mg/dl. Yet every two years, experts from around the world meet and decide that the optimal cholesterol level is invariably lower than it was decided to be at the last meeting – without having any solid evidence to back it up.

h/t Instapundit