Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Mary Enig Read Free Book Online Page B

is the finding that in women, high cholesterol levels—even as high as 1,000 mg/dl—are not a risk factor for heart disease. In fact, for women low cholesterol is more dangerous than high cholesterol. This was the conclusion of a workshop that looked at every study involving cholesterol and women, held at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and published in the journal Circulation in 1992.
    For example, a 1989 Parisian study published in The Lancet found that those who live the longest are old women with very high cholesterol levels. Women with very low levels had a death rate over five times higher!
    And more recently, in the British Medical Journal, 2003, researchers at the University of British Columbia concluded that statin drugs, which lower cholesterol, offer no benefit to women for preventing heart disease.

    Canada: No Link
    Although there is a very slight association between high cholesterol and greater risk of heart disease among American men, this connection doesn’t exist for Canadian men. This was the finding of the Quebec Cardiovacsular Study, published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology in 1990. Researchers studied almost 5,000 healthy middle-aged men for 12 years. They explained away their results by claiming that more than 12 years were necessary to see the harmful effects of high cholesterol levels—even though the Framingham results showed clearly that this was not the case.

    Russia: Low Cholesterol = Increased Risk
    A study carried out by a research team from the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences in St. Petersburg and published in the journal Circulation , 1993, found that it was low levels of LDL (the “bad” cholesterol that we’re always told to keep as low as possible) that were associated with increased risk of heart disease. Nor was this higher risk the result of lower levels of HDL (the “good” cholesterol), for the people with low LDL were the ones with the highest HDL levels.

    The U.S. Government and LDL
    We’ve described just a few of the medical studies reporting evidence that contradicts the lipid hypothesis. Yet Diet and Health, an official review of the research published by the National Research Council in 1990, asserts that LDL is the most important risk factor for heart disease, and in support of this statement, cites studies whose results do not, in fact, prove the relation between cholesterol and heart disease at all.
    For example, Diet and Health cites a 1977 report from Framingham as evidence that high levels of LDL are dangerous. But one conclusion of this study is actually that “LDL-cholesterol…is a marginal risk factor” for people over 50. In fact, Framingham investigators found that women over 70 had a greater risk of heart disease if their LDL was low.

    The Latest Research
    The research cited in official government documents dates back to the early 1970s. What can more recent research tell us?
     
    The Honolulu Heart Program A report published in The Lancet , 2001, as part of the Honolulu Heart Program, an ongoing study, looked at lowering cholesterol in the elderly. Researchers compared changes in cholesterol concentrations over 20 years with mortality from all causes. The results completely contradict the lipid hypothesis. Said the researchers, “Our data accords with previous findings of increased mortality in elderly people with low serum cholesterol, and show that…the earlier that patients start to have lower cholesterol concentrations, the greater the risk of death…” That is, when people maintain low levels of cholesterol in their blood over a long period of time—for example, by eating the kind of low-fat diet that government agencies recommend—their risk of death from all causes will increase.
    No Benefit from Cholesterol-Lowering Drugs Studies carried out during the last 15 years have focused on the effects of cholesterol-lowering drugs. An analysis of 44 trials involving almost 10,000 patients was published in the American