The Cholesterol Con

Flawed "science" fingers a phony culprit for cardiovascular disease. As an obligatory disclaimer: I have degrees in science, but am not a doctor. Despite impressions, nothing I offer is medical advice

Atlanta, GA

November 17, 2024

Source: Rx List

“It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know that just ain’t so.”

Mark Twain 

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."

Leo Tolstoy

“Heart disease has nothing to do with eating saturated fat, nor does it have anything to do with cholesterol in the bloodstream.”

Dr Malcom Kendrick

Among the lazy assumptions of recent years is that “Science” is “Truth.” 

But science isn’t truth. It’s a quest for truth.

Or, rather, it’s a search for error…an ongoing effort to uncover contradiction and find flaws.

Science seeks a single sunrise in the west. It need find only one failure for a hypothesis to be falsified, and for the scientific method to have done its job.

Disguised Statisticians

As Richard Feynman said, and as we were repeatedly reminded the last several years,

“It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period."

Yet modern practitioners of “the Science” would view an occidental dawn not as a falsification, but as a “paradox”… a “breakthrough case”…an exception that proves their predetermined rule.

The last few years proved that many “scientists” are little more than disguised statisticians or suborned charlatans. They’re paid by the State to defend a preconceived canon, with “research” lending credence to a lucrative cause.

From their government perch or university nest, too many of them molest numbers to craft a conclusion…and hide inconvenient results they don’t want others to see. Like Court economists or Regime historians, they’re captured lackeys of a corrupt caste.

For more than a century, government has used “science” as a lever to impose its rule. But it’s mostly a sham.

As when OSHA claimed credit for reducing workplace injuries, or the Civil Rights Act was lauded for reducing discrimination, improvements were already well underway before the State took action and claimed credit (as Thomas Sowell showed, years of positive trajectories in workplace safety and black advancement actually began to decelerate after these laws were passed).

The Main Driver of Longer Life

Scientific advancement was no different. Government had little to do with it. Historically, most worthwhile innovation came from inventors and entrepreneurs experimenting in the workshop or succeeding in the market.

Scientists in a lab are often skeptical or dismissive of new ideas (as, to some degree, they should be). They usually adopt (and accept praise for) discoveries only after industrial practitioners prove they work. Once scientists see the train on the track, they grab a shovel and pretend they supplied the coal.

Most modern medical advances came not from men in white coats mixing chemicals or staring into microscopes, but from diggers, drillers, and engineers harnessing hydrocarbons to deliver electricity, enhance sanitation, and enable innovation that thwarts illness and lengthens lives.

These advances also enabled improved remedies and better surgical techniques. The coal, oil, gas, and uranium our rulers disparage are the reasons infant mortality, infectious disease, and climate-related deaths have plummeted over the last century.

Improved hygiene was the primary driver of reduced disease. Certain vaccines and medical advances played a part. But they couldn’t have occurred without the hydrocarbon energy many who rule us want to eradicate.

Grift and Graft

Unfortunately, these pests infest our sustenance too.

Recently, over a glass of high altitude Argentine Malbec, I read that the U.S. government is set to revise its “recommendations” on how much we should drink. As always, the “guidelines” will get more restrictive.

After their destructive dietary recommendations and recent covid carnage, you’d think our “public health” hacks would exchange their white coats for sackcloth and find remote monasteries to seek penance. Instead, they keep anointing each other with holy oil, while excommunicating dissidents who doubt their dogma.

Not that some people shouldn’t drink less. Maybe they should. Who am I to say? Who is anyone, aside from personal acquaintances of presumed alcoholics? Certainly not the US government.

Like mist on iron, that engrossing entity corrodes anything it touches. As it should remain removed from education or religion, the State should stay separate from science.

State-funded “Science”…whether “climate”,  medicine, nutrition, or economics…is thoroughly compromised and incurably corrupt. Indeed, most of it isn’t science at all. It’s politics…that is to say, grift and graft.

Which makes sense. It’s almost entirely funded by government agencies (or their corporate sponsors) that only compensate conclusions corroborating an a priori “consensus.” With few exceptions, only research that validates the preferred perspective will be financed or published.

Government support of Big Farm, Food, and Pharma (and vice versa) makes this obvious. But so does its opposition to little farms, alternative medicine, or the ongoing assault on regional ranchers.

Why would they do this? What benefit do they derive from assaulting local suppliers of beneficial food? And why conscript a phony “scientific consensus” to enforce their restrictions?

“A Control-Freak Thing”

As Dr Malcolm Kendrick aptly put it:

“Medical scientists (an oxymoron if ever there was one), have a long and distinguished history of grabbing entirely the wrong end of the stick, closing their eyes tightly shut, holding on grimly and refusing to listen to anybody else.”

In recent decades, this seems inarguable. But the propensity for the medical profession to be wildly wrong has a long lineage. Kendrick continues:

“The list of stupid, damaging and plain wrong things that doctors have been taught over the years makes rather depressing reading. It has certainly depressed me from time to time. We can all be wrong. Even me. But for some reason, the medical hierarchy is exceptionally reluctant to admit their mistakes. I think it's a control-freak thing.”

As we learned during covid, this isn’t unusual. In fiat-funded “science”, anything that deviates from the a priori proclamation isn’t discarded, but becomes a “paradox”… what “the experts” might call a “breakthrough case.” 

Fraudulent “Experiment”

The cholesterol hypothesis has paradoxes all over the place. France, India, Russia, Native Americans, even aboriginal Australians, have heart disease. 

In some instances it correlates with cholesterol. In most it doesn’t. But the accepted story has been a great way to sell statins.

It’s rare to read a funny book about heart disease. But I suppose it’s possible when the hypothesis discussed is such a joke.

With welcome doses of condescending snark, Kendrick’s The Great Cholesterol Con ridicules and refutes the “cholesterol hypothesis” that’s prevailed since Ancel Keys conducted his “Seven Country Study.”

In this fraudulent “experiment”, Keys selected seven countries where heart disease correlated with saturated fat consumption. As Kendrick notes, he could’ve chosen seven different countries and reached the opposite conclusion. The correlation is random…which is to say, nonexistent.

Nutrition Pseudoscience

Keys had connections to tobacco companies and sellers of seed oil (perhaps the prime culprit of heart disease, cancer, and chronic ailments). He persuaded Proctor & Gamble to donate $1.8M (1950 dollars) to the American Heart Association, which compliantly claimed Crisco was a safe substitute for butter, lard, and other “lethal” fats. 

Keys convinced Dwight Eisenhower’s physician that the four-pack-a-day president’s 1955 heart attack was caused by saturated fat rather than smoking (as a tobacco company stooge, Keys hid the data that implicated cigarettes). He urged Harvard to adopt his weird ideas, from which came the nutrition pseudoscience that afflicts us today.

Keys’s “findings” informed the cataclysmic “food pyramid”. A blatant boondoggle for agricultural interests, this nutritional abomination extolled grains, exalted oils, excused sugars, disparaged dairy, denigrated eggs, vilified animal fats, praised plants, and maligned meat. 

By frightening people from healthy food in favor of processed sludge and industrial waste, the deranged ramblings of Ancel Keys have arguably killed more people than any miscreant this side of Karl Marx. 

Keys did for “public health” roughly what Keynes did for economics, or the Japanese to Nanking. It’s no coincidence that obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer all accelerated after Keys came along.

Cholesterol and Cardiovascular Disease

Much of this catastrophe was based on the “diet-heart hypothesis”, Keys’s unsubstantiated theory that cholesterol is a killer.

There’s no basis for attributing heart disease to high cholesterol, “bad” cholesterol, or diets hefty with red meat and eggs. The Framingham Study showed this years ago, as did others in Austria, Ireland, Sweden, and elsewhere. More than 90% of dietary cholesterol isn’t even absorbed by the body.

No studies show that high cholesterol causes heart disease. At best they show association, tho’ often tied by a slender thread. But plenty imply low cholesterol…and particularly low LDL…is linked to reduced life expectancy and higher all-cause mortality. 

There’s ample evidence high cholesterol helps prevent heart attack in older cohorts, and that it has no effect on female heart health at any age. If anything, increased cholesterol reduces risk of stroke.

The National Cholesterol Education Program under the NIH helps establish LDL guidelines, almost always revising them lower to capture millions more Americans in the “high cholesterol” net. The idea seems to be to set standards so low that everyone is “sick”, and must be treated.

Such shenanigans sound familiar. But is the most popular prescription sensible? 

Most studies on statins exclude total mortality data, which is the most important information and the easiest to measure. Maybe because that data undermines the sponsors of the study. To quote Kendrick in his book, Doctoring Data:

“The National Cholesterol Education Programme (NCEP) has been tasked by the National Institutes of Health to develop guidelines [everyone uses] for treating cholesterol levels. Excluding the chair (who was by law prohibited from having financial conflicts of interest), the other 8 members on average were on the payroll of 6 statin manufacturers.”

In short, statins can lower cholesterol. But they don’t affect total mortality (or, to the extent they do, it’s detrimental). Independent studies show statins have minimal impact prolonging male lives and none saving those of women. But they make those of the people who push them much cushier.

Statins rank among the most lucrative, and harmful, of all pharmaceuticals. Regardless the legitimate science about these over-prescribed pills, the Medical-complex has decided they’re “essential” to our health. As “A Midwestern Doctor” put it, “physicians who don’t push them are financially penalized. Patients who don’t take them are as well (through life insurance premiums).”

I’m not a medical doctor or a government scientist (which is itself a worthy credential). But I’m able to interpret data and read charts.

What they suggest is we shouldn’t reflexively toss pills at this problem. Instead, we’re better off ditching sugar and seed oil, and eating eggs and ribeye to our heart’s content.

Despite what we’ve been taught, it will be.

JD