Replies

“You have no credentials”

This guy is not a scientist. He’s just another cardiovascular surgeon. Sewing grafts onto blood vessels doesn’t make you an expert on lipids, or inflammation, or atherosclerosis. He did not discover the concept of vascular inflammation, and if you look at the biomedical literature over the past decade alone you will see a huge amount of literature on the topic of inflammation and vascular disease. It’s an absolutely established concept. Not something new that this guy came up with. There is nothing Earth shattering or new about what he is saying. Patients with lupus, for example, can have very early and very severe atherosclerotic vascular disease, related in large measure to the vascular inflammation that occurs as part of that disease. Nothing new.

The irresponsible part is when he implies that cholesterol levels don’t matter. There is absolutely no scientific basis for that statement, and a plethora of published data to the contrary.

I didn’t attack you, and I respect your right to your opinion.

The question that ought to be asked about the cholesterol, is whether the cholesterol is following onto damage or whether it is causing damage. You don’t want to necessarily blame the trucks with the asphalt to patch road potholes for causing the road potholes, even though pothole-free roads won’t have any of these trucks on them.

I’m a physician. What I am saying, and I can back it up with more publications than you would have time to read, is that cholesterol deposition, and inflammation play crucial roles in the genesis and progression of coronary artery disease. Further, they are linked.

That is nice. Did you ever stop to think that the relationship is associative and not causative? Cholesterol is a marker. You would be better of at looking at Triglyceride and HDL ratios. These are predictive.

Thanks for your reply. I worked at the Northwest Lipid Research Center many decades ago. What you say about reading the available research is important, and more than many on this thread are willing to do.

Biological effects of different things can be complicated. For example, alcoholics often have very clean arteries in spite of the inflammatory effects of alcohol. Inuits who eat a traditional diet high in cholesterol often have low rates of heart disease. Vegetarian Hindus have about the same level of arteriosclerosis as meat-eating Americans. In Americans, high cholesterol levels correlate closely with heart disease. There's some evidence that people on long-term antibiotics have less atherosclerosis, and other evidence that shows that high-phytoestrogen diets reduce artery plaque formation. Diets high in vitamine C and E, red-meat fish, yoghurt, green tea, red wine, and many other foods have been reported to reduce the risk of heart disease.

The problem is that people fixate on one or two reports, and then base their diets on them instead of studying and then working out what works best for each individual.