On this day after Thanksgiving is it good to be assured you don’t really need to worry about everything you ate. Hat Tip to Sandi at Vista On Current Events for the link to this excellent dissection of another scientific false truth.
The Great Cholesterol Myth: If you eat too much cholesterol, or saturated fat, your blood cholesterol will rise to dangerous levels. Excess cholesterol will then seep through your artery walls causing thickenings (plaques), which will eventually block blood flow in vital arteries, resulting in heart attacks and strokes....It ain’t true despite the multibillion dollar industry, uncritical mainstream media promotion and pop culture belief that eating the way our ancestors ate is unhealthy for us modern humans. The grant funded guru’s making their incomes telling the population to ignore what their grandmother’s knew about what to eat, are wrong.
In reality, cracks in the hypothesis appeared right from the very start. The first of these was the stark observation that cholesterol in the diet has no effect on cholesterol levels in the bloodstream: 'There's no connection whatsoever between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in blood. And we've known that all along. Cholesterol in the diet doesn't matter at all unless you happen to be a chicken or a rabbit.' Ancel Keys PhD, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota 1997.The problem for theory is that true science is defined by reproducible results.
In fact, no clinical trial on reducing saturated fat intake has ever shown a reduction in heart disease. Some have shown the exact opposite: 'As multiple interventions against risk factors for coronary heart disease in middle aged men at only moderate risk seem to have failed to reduce both morbidity and mortality such interventions become increasingly difficult to justify. This runs counter to the recommendations of many national and international advisory bodies which must now take the recent findings from Finland into consideration. Not to do so may be ethically unacceptable.' Professor Michael Oliver, British Medical Journal 1991Conventional knowledge is convincing, compelling, plausible and sometimes even elegant in explaining observations, but none of these aspects constitute proof of the solutions. Of course I may be wrong and the governments’ latest version of the Food Pyramid may be the correct authority on how and what to eat.
