Wednesday, September 2, 2009

A Must Read If You Want to Understand Health

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/559885/posts

A summary of Dr. Uffe Ravnskof's outstanding work to put the myth into the statement "high cholesterol increases your risk of cardiovascular heard disease (CVD)."

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Statins For Women - Ladies, Do Your Homework!

After a cursory Google search, I turned up these relevant links:

From http://www.cure-guide.com/Natural_Health_Newsletter/Statin_Drugs/statin_drugs.html
Excerpt: "The same week that the US Government decreed that 17 percent of its population should take statin drugs, another study was released that showed lowering cholesterol in women had no effect on mortality. Yet the government would still like men, women, and children to line up for prescriptions.

A study published by the American Medical Association in May examined the results of 13 clinical trials looking at the effect of statin drugs on women. They found that lowering cholesterol with drugs had no effect on mortality regardless of whether they had heart disease or not.

Walsh JM, Pignone M. Drug treatment of hyperlipidemia in women. JAMA 2004 May 12;291(18):2243-52."

Read on here:
WHY DON'T STATIN DRUGS WORK FOR WOMEN?
http://majidali.com/why_dont_statin_drugs_work_for_women.htm

Cholesterol Lowering Statin Drugs for Women, Just Say No by Jeffrey Dach MD
http://jeffreydach.com/2008/01/27/cholesterol-lowering-statin-drugs-for-women-just-say-no-by-jeffrey-dach-md.aspx
Quick excerpt: "The title of this chapter asks a crucially important question for women who are taking statin drugs for the primary prevention of heart attacks and stroke. Simply stated, such women are spending thousands of dollars on statin drugs only to buy a real risk of poisoning their livers, muscles, and other body organs for preventing diseases that they do not have."

Why The Cholesterol-Heart Disease Theory Is Wrong
http://www.becomehealthynow.com/ebookprint.php?id=1112
Quick excerpt: "First little problem - dietary intake of cholesterol has no impact on the level of cholesterol in your blood. If we look at two major long-term studies, Framingham and Tecumseh, it is clear that those who ate the most cholesterol had exactly the same level of cholesterol in their blood as those who ate the least cholesterol"

"‘But, hold on, that doesn’t matter,’ (the sound of goalposts being desperately moved fills the air) ‘It is not cholesterol in the diet that causes the cholesterol level to rise, it is the consumption of saturated fat?’Look again at the Tecumseh study. To explain that table in a little more detail. Basically, it divides people into thirds with high, average or low blood cholesterol levels. The absolute values are not important.Having done this we can examine the level of saturated fat consumed by these three groups. As can be seen:
Those in the lowest third of cholesterol levels consumed 52g/day of saturated fat
Those in the mid-range consumed 54g/day of saturated fat
Those with the highest levels consumed 54g/day of saturated fat
Which lead to the conclusion, from the authors that:
‘Serum cholesterol and triglyceride values were not positively correlated with selection of dietary constituents.’
I shall translate those weasel words into plain English. ‘You can eat as much saturated fat as you like and it makes no difference whatsoever to your blood cholesterol levels.’"

If you wonder why your doctor prescribed statins for you, and you should given their side effects (easily found on Google also), by all means ask him/her!! I am not qualified to give medical advice, but given what I know about heard disease, the cholesterol myths and side effects of medications, my doctor would have to be very, very convincing to get me to take statins, male or female, but especially if I was a female!

Note: I do not advocate for the accuracy of these links, and in fact disagree with many of the conclusions therein. These links are useful to the extent that they highlight that absurdity of prescribing statins to women, when there's no evidence that women benefit from the use of these drugs!

The Right Food - The Original Anti Oxidant (brought to you by millions of years of human evolution)

http://www.stumbleupon.com/s/#3vHfTv/www.nature.com/oby/journal/v17/n9/abs/oby2009203a.html/

Bottom line - if you eat the typical western diet with a lot of carbs, many of them with a high glycemic index, you better eat a bunch of anti-oxidants with that high GI diet - you'll need them. That's because you torpedoed your body's naturally high defense for oxidative stress with the high GI diet.