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« A Brand for the Ages | Main | What Will Last? »

December 06, 2007

Food, Fat, and Health Linkage

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* Alt-health guru Andrew Weil thinks that Gary Taubes has made a major contribution with his book "Good Calories, Bad Calories."

* Say hello to "In Search of the Perfect Human Diet," the documentary film. Donate -- er, become an investor -- here.

* A few clips from Tom Naughton's Taubesian film "FatHead, the Movie": Learn to boo and hiss at The McGovern Report, and especially at Ancel Keys. Tom himself somehow managed to eat nothing but fast food for four weeks and lose weight.

* What if saturated fat is actually good for you?

* What if there isn't any correlation at all between cholesterol levels and heart disease?

* Michael ("Protein Power") Eades blogs, very generously, here. Jimmy Moore -- low-carb-diet enthusiast extraordinaire -- blogs here. (Jimmy has lost -- and kept off -- 180 pounds by following a low-carb diet.) The Weston A. Price Foundation is here. "Paleo Diet" guru Loren Cordain has a website here. I wrote enthusiastically about Nina Planck's book "Real Food" here. Nina's website is here.

* Jimmy Moore interviews Gary Taubes. Here's a CBC audio interview with Taubes. Here's a WNYC audio interview with him. (Scroll down a bit.)

Best,

Michael

UPDATE: Thanks to Dave Lull for sending along links to some talks given by Malcolm Kendrick (author of "The Great Cholesterol Con"): Cholesterol; Familial Hypercholesterolaemia; Statins; What Causes Heart Disease?; CVD Populations and Stress.

For Spiked-Online, Kendrick explains his view of what's wrong with the cholesterol hypothesis. For one small thing: "Cholesterol in the diet has no effect on cholesterol levels in the bloodstream." For another: "No clinical trial on reducing saturated fat intake has ever shown a reduction in heart disease. Some have shown the exact opposite." For a third: "It is worth highlighting a critically important -- remarkably unheralded -- fact: After the age of 50, the lower your cholesterol level is, the lower your life expectancy."

posted by Michael at December 6, 2007




Comments

Jesus Christ! The cholesterol stuff is driving me mad.

I'm going to a new doctor and I want to see what he's got to say about Lipitor.

The worst part of this is that statins may actually do harm. I have no family history of heart disease, but I do have a family history of Alzheimer's. Opponents of handing out statins suggest that high cholesterol levels help to prevent Alzheimer's.

Posted by: Shouting Thomas on December 6, 2007 11:14 PM



* Alt-health guru Andrew Weil thinks that Gary Taubes has made a major contribution with his book "Good Calories, Bad Calories."

Weil is a complete nut. Taubes has cherry-picked research and some of the scientists he quoted are mad at him.

I say this as someone who wants to believe Taubes and is already inclined to think that low-fat diets aren't particularly helpful.

Posted by: JewishAtheist on December 7, 2007 10:19 AM



The decline of Art doesn't matter too much - I can still enjoy the old stuff. The decline of Science is a big deal, and the great cons of epidemiology are among its worst cases.

Posted by: dearieme on December 8, 2007 4:55 PM



The problem with statin drugs is that they inhibit your body's production of Co-enzyme Q, which is necessary for management of the free-radicals produced by the mitochondria. The fact that statin drugs exist and that MDs prescribe them tells you that MDs do not know anything about medicine.

All of the heart disease, cholesterol, high blood pressure stuff comes from the framingham study, which was done in the 50's and 60's. The problem with this study is that the resulting source data was never published ("summary" information was published at the time) and that it took 8 years of litigation based on the Freedom of Information Act to get the source data made available to the public. Once the source data was publically available, the medical journals refused to publish it.

Much of what we call modern medicine is fraudulent.

Posted by: kurt9 on December 8, 2007 5:23 PM






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