Mainstream doctors and Big Pharma are constantly pushing people to lower their cholesterol -- especially LDL. They say lower cholesterol is good and high cholesterol causes heart attacks and strokes. They try to get people on statins to lower cholesterol. Lipitor (a statin) is the biggest selling Big Pharma drug of all time.
But ... they are WRONG about cholesterol.
Most "studies" about cholesterol are just questionnaires, such as "How much meat did you eat last month?" or "how many vegetables do you eat on an average day?"
These are GARBAGE "studies" because people can't remember what they ate -- at least, not to any specificity. And some fudge because they want to appear to be doing "healthy" things.
Additionally, people who eat at fast food restaurants tend to be less health-conscious and also less healthy. "Researchers" will claim that if they eat a Big Mac often, then they are eating meat and that is why they are unhealthy. BUT, they ignore the bun (loaded with anti-nutrients and gluten), the many chemicals in the "special sauce," the "cheese" that is derived from petrochemicals, the french fries that are cheap potatoes fried in seed oils, and the "extra large Coke" loaded with sugar (remember the old, "Supersize me?").
But, they say ... it must be the meat ... pfft.
Turns out, there was a great cholesterol study that was kept hidden from the public.
From 1968-1973, researchers ran the "Minnesota Coronary Experiment."
Scientifically, this was an excellently-designed study because the researchers were able to control what the participants ate and what they did not eat, how much, etc.
There were over 9,000 people in the study. All were either confined in mental hospitals or in a nursing home. So, the researchers could know what they were eating.
They gave half of the "subjects" food with saturated fat (milk, cheese, beef, etc.), and the other half low or no saturated fat (corn oil, vegetable oils, etc.)
The researchers wanted to prove that a diet high in saturated fat was harmful to health.
But oops!
They got the OPPOSITE result.
The higher the saturated fat in the diet, the FEWER deaths occured.
This study never made the scientific journals back then -- possibly because the journals were run by people who were anti-saturated fat and didn't want to publish it.
Dr. Frantz was the head of the research team. He died and his son found the papers for the study several years later. He released it -- more than 40 years after it had been done.
The story was published in the New York Times (of all rags!) -- 10 years ago. I never heard about this until now.
Here are some excerpts form the article:
A four-decades-old study — recently discovered in a dusty basement — has raised new questions about longstanding dietary advice and the perils of saturated fat in the American diet.
The research, known as the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, was a major controlled clinical trial conducted from 1968 to 1973, which studied the diets of more than 9,000 people at state mental hospitals and a nursing home.
During the study, which was paid for by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and led by Dr. Ivan Frantz Jr. of the University of Minnesota Medical School, researchers were able to tightly regulate the diets of the institutionalized study subjects. Half of those subjects were fed meals rich in saturated fats from milk, cheese and beef. The remaining group ate a diet in which much of the saturated fat was removed and replaced with corn oil, an unsaturated fat that is common in many processed foods today. The study was intended to show that removing saturated fat from people’s diets and replacing it with polyunsaturated fat from vegetable oils would protect them against heart disease and lower their mortality.
So what was the result? Despite being one of the largest controlled clinical dietary trials of its kind ever conducted, the data were never fully analyzed.
Several years ago, Christopher E. Ramsden, a medical investigator at the National Institutes of Health, learned about the long-overlooked study. Intrigued, he contacted the University of Minnesota in hopes of reviewing the unpublished data. Dr. Frantz, who died in 2009, had been a prominent scientist at the university, where he studied the link between saturated fat and heart disease. One of his closest colleagues was Ancel Keys, an influential scientist whose research in the 1950s helped establish saturated fat as public health enemy No. 1, prompting the federal government to recommend low-fat diets to the entire nation.
The results were a surprise. Participants who ate a diet low in saturated fat and enriched with corn oil reduced their cholesterol by an average of 14 percent, compared with a change of just 1 percent in the control group. But the low-saturated fat diet did not reduce mortality. In fact, the study found that the greater the drop in cholesterol, the higher the risk of death during the trial.
The findings run counter to conventional dietary recommendations that advise a diet low in saturated fat to decrease heart risk. Current dietary guidelines call for Americans to replace saturated fat, which tends to raise cholesterol, with vegetable oils and other polyunsaturated fats, which lower cholesterol.
The younger Dr. Frantz said his father was probably startled by what seemed to be no benefit in replacing saturated fat with vegetable oil.
“When it turned out that it didn’t reduce risk, it was quite puzzling,” he said. “And since it was effective in lowering cholesterol, it was weird.”
Walter Willett, the chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called the research “irrelevant to current dietary recommendations” that emphasize replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat.
LOL!
To investigate whether the new findings were a fluke, Dr. Zamora and her colleagues analyzed four similar, rigorous trials that tested the effects of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid. Those, too, failed to show any reduction in mortality from heart disease.
“One would expect that the more you lowered cholesterol, the better the outcome,” Dr. Ramsden said. “But in this case the opposite association was found. The greater degree of cholesterol-lowering was associated with a higher, rather than a lower, risk of death.”
LOL, again!
Oh, there's more ...
In 2013, Dr. Ramsden and his colleagues published a controversial paper about a large clinical trial that had been carried out in Australia in the 1960s but had never been fully analyzed. The trial found that men who replaced saturated fat with omega-6-rich polyunsaturated fats lowered their cholesterol. But they were also more likely to die from a heart attack than a control group of men who ate more saturated fat.
Note: I highlighted Ancel Keys' name because he is the ASSHOLE who started this whole "saturated fat is bad" in the 1950's.
He did a fraudulent "study" where he claimed to look at 7 countries that showed that the more saturated fat in the diet, the higher the death rate from heart disease. But ... HE LIED. He actually looked at 22 countries, and cherry-picked the 7 to make his case.
He went on the 3 TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) in New York, so he was on ALL the TV stations that existed back in the 1950's. Everybody got the message he was pushing, but when other researchers of the time checked his analysis, they realized there were 22 countries, not 7 -- and there was NO CORRELATION when you looked at all 22.
He worked for the Rockefellers and was paid off BIG by the sugar companies to push his agenda -- the financial payoff having been discovered years later.
He worked at the University of Minnesota, which is why he was involved in this research, and my guess is he is the reason it was never published.
He was one of the biggest conmen in American history when it comes to the misunderstandings that Americans have had all these years as to what is healthy to eat and what is not.
If you want to learn more about what is healthy and the fraud that Ancel Keys pushed on the American people, here is a great lecture by David Diamond on the general subject: "How Bad Science and Big Business Created the Obesity Epidemic" --
Brain is made up cholesterol. I got into an argument with my doctor about it. I refuse to go on medicine and he didn't like that too much.
Stand your ground, fren. I’m right there with you.
Me too, i stayed off statins, flat refused to take them.
My doctor was pissed, said i'd get clogged arteries.
Then I found out about L-Lysine....
All good times from there.
My cholesterol is over 350, I have never had low cholesterol even on my 20's. Doctor is begging me to go on statins and I keep refusing. Once day I was jogging and was out of breath. The cardiologyst sent me to ER and told me I was having a heart attach due to my high cholesterol. I had an emergency Angiogram. Surprise, Surprise my arteries were clean, and my heart was perfectly fine. The cardiologyst could not believe how good my heart is. He told me go ahed keep doing wherever you are doing without taking Statins...LOL.
BTW. The reason why I was out of breath when jogging, was because I was starting getting the flu.
Ive been LDL 270 or there abouts my whole life. No problems here. Martial arts, exercise, marathons, hiking. L-lysine and vit c. No problems.
I also refused statins, and then I tried out the @Johntitor17 L-lysine and vitamin c method and it worked great.
100%
I told my PCP that I would sign any document relieving her of any responsibility for my early death due to high cholesterol because I was not going to take any statins. Well, they don't bug me about statins anymore. That was several years ago.
Ditto. I read "The Great Cholesterol Myth" by Dr. Steven Sinatra, which was a shocking revelation. I had a doctor insisting I take Lipitor. I told him no. He railed at me. I said,"So, what are you going to do? Shove it down my throat." Ever since, I have been working the plaque problem by seeking to reduce blood vessel inflammation. (I read: "Blaming cholesterol for plaque formation is like blaming fire departments for houses set afire.")
https://youtube.com/shorts/6mqhfXpPG8w?si=Q_i5AJ830fDWEkA9
Up to 70–80% of brain cholesterol is found in "myelin". Myelin is the insulating layer wrapped around nerve fibers in the central and peripheral nervous systems.
Your brain relies on cholesterol and myelin as essential components for structural integrity and function
Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's are all direct results of low brain cholesterol ; basically Type III diabetes.
My dad died with bad dementia/Alzheimer’s…was on statins for “high cholesterol “ for decades before.
Fucking criminal.
I also think that cholesterol, and especially HDL and LDL are completely misunderstood.
"HDL" stands for" high density lipoprotein," and LDL stands for "low density lipoprotein." There are also IDL's and UDL's that nobody talks about.
So ... what IS a "lipoprotein?"
It is not cholesterol -- at least, not exactly.
It is a carrier of fats and cholesterol in the blood. The fats and cholesterol "ride" on the HDL and LDL "trains" through the bloodstream, to be delivered to various cells in the body that need them (or don't want them).
Lipoproteins are made up of several molecules, including cholesterol, but they are there to transport the fats and cholesterol through the blood.
I think of HDL as "Heading to Da Liver" and LDL as "Leaving Da Liver."
IOW, HDL finds fats and cholesterol that are "excessive" in areas of the body where it is not needed (and/or not wanted) and carries them to the liver, where the liver repurposes them, as needed. The LDL then carries this newly-cleaned up fat and cholesterol away from the liver to the cells of the body that need it.
The lecture by David Diamond explains that atherosclerosis is caused by sugar, not saturated fat. Sugar breaks down into glucose, and some of those molecules create little tears in the blood vessels. These tears need to be repaired, so the liver sends cholesterol to the torn area to act like "spackle" in dry wall -- to fill in the tear. If this process happens continually over many years (due to eating a lot of sugar), this cholesterol "spackle" can build up and eventually break off causing a blood clot, leading to heart attack and stroke.
If LDL goes up, it means there is either (a) more cholesterol needed to be sent to various parts of the body, and/or (b) more cholesterol is available (due to dietary ingestion), which allows the body to build and repair. After all, EVERY cell in the body has a membrane, and it is made of cholesterol. Likewise, EVERY hormone in the body is made of cholesterol.
Women who go full vegan get little or no cholesterol in their diets, and often lose their period; men who do the same often become impotent.
But eat some saturated fat, and it all comes back.
Doctors have been taught a completely false paradigm of health -- and especially, nutrition -- and most will never take the time to research it for themselves.
They pass on their ignorance to their patients, so it is the blind leading the blind.
Result: More than half of all Americans are obese, and almost half are on at least one medication.
Good money for the Rockefellers and their criminal ilk.
The LMHR experiment proved this. These guys were on a ketogenic diet and had LDL over 200. Some as high as 600. (Mine was 455 on this diet) HDL was always high as well and Triglycerides very low. They suggest the higher ldl is required to ship fat used for fuel.
I've heard this before. And while I haven't done any investigation myself as to the validity of this claim, I neither believe it or disbelieve it at this point. However, it does raise some questions, at least for me.
If this is the case then it would seem like a bad idea to remove this "spackling", at least until the blood vessel has repaired itself.
Why wouldn't this work like a scab on an external flesh wound where the scab eventually falls off and the wound is healed, or healed enough not to need a covering.
I remember reading someone posting about carbon build up on a gun and mentioning that gun cleaning was unnecessary because the carbon build up is self limiting. Could the same thing be true for the cholesterol "spackling"?
Would the assumption be that the higher percentage of deaths in the non saturated fat group was due to heart issues due to these non-repaired tears in the blood vessels?
There's a guy who has posted on this site about clearing out the cholesterol in his father-in-law's arteries using Lysine and Vitamin C, I guess from some research that Dr. Pauling has done in the past. But maybe the cholesterol should not be removed, unless it gets removed naturally by the body like a scab.
The vitamin C repairs the damage.
The comedian Jerry Clower once said that you are born with cholesterol. My cholesterol has never been a major problem. My heart is one part that still works perfectly, even in my 70s. About 20 years ago, I needed to get my heart tested for recovery by walking fast on an inclined treadmill to see how fast my heart could drop back to normal pulse rate. I did exceptionally well.
I eat as much meat, eggs, and butter as I can. I also drink milk to keep my calcium level up. I quit caffeine 100%, as it causes my kidney numbers to drop.
I think I'm doing well for my age, and I hope to pass 100 like a number of others in my family.
Great for you, pal.
I pray to god that my relatives and I manage to age up to 100 too...
🥲
Was that a stress test or something different?
Stress test. I couldn't think what to call it at first, as it was a few years ago.
Big Pharma wasn't wrong, THEY WERE LYING!!!! They have done nothing but lie about everything. All Vax are bad, cholesterol isn't the problem, never has been. Kids don't need sixty or 70 shots. VAX does cause autism. The list is longer than i can type out this evening. But I will soon
The human brains needs colesterol to thrive. Also the whole removal or Trans fats is a scam as well.
The newest gimmick is Repatha, an injection that reduces the LDL-C. The amount of money that the company (Amgen) invests into hospitals/dr to push this crap is ridiculous, seriously, go look it up.
They are not wrong. Being wrong implies that they made a mistake. They didn't make a mistake.
THEY LIED.
Oyeh, and the NYTimes article is ten years old, and only now we are beginning to understand that carnivore-diet is not a cult, or a red-neck thing.
We were lied to, in the most destructive way.
Also they did not mention the associated cognitive decline that comes with prolonged lowered blood cholesterol. The brain is made from cholesterol/fat. The heart has cholesterol/fat deposits layered around it, to have an immediate supply of fuel to keep relentlessly pumping. In a survival situation, the body will try and keep the heart alive. If one has blood that is low in cholesterol, fat will be denied from the brain to support the heart.
So, you might not die of a heart attack, as the low-fat victims tended to do in the 9000 subject study, but if you do survive the hypothetical heart attack - well at least you'll go senile.
My grandfather survived a heart attack at age 90 because a friend of the family was with him. He was ok for a few years, but eventually got Alzheimer's/dementia and passed at age 95.
yes. I can relate.
They’re not wrong. They’re lying.
great post, docs ruined my mother trying to lower cholesterol when even in mainstream view her cholesterol “was normal” -some docs are simply “doctors evil”
Thank you. So glad I'm not alone on this. I too refuse statins. I'm old enough to remember nobody heard of Alzheimer's like they do now until doctors started pushing statins.
Excellent poast, thx
I’d also like to add that the corn oil back then wasn’t from GMO corn like it would be today. And I believe soy oil wasn’t even a thing then like it is now. Meaning, imo, the outcome would be even worse now with the unsaturated fats.
Doesn't cholesterol also increase your testosterone levels?!
Look up Ancel Keys. He was the one who started the fraud!
Bruce Lipton has been an advocate for the truth about cholesterol in his book, The Biology of Belief:
In a study, Theodore M. Hollister showed samples of blood from the specialized strain of rats he used to study human atherosclerosis, the hardening and narrowing of arteries that is the leading cause of death in the United States. These animals had so much cholesterol in their systems that their blood was milky white. Despite their apparently toxic level of cholesterol, these rats did not form endothelial cell plaque typical of atherosclerosis blood vessels. The secret... Ted added an over-the-counter antihistamine drug when he introduced the cholesterol because the antihistamines could override cholesterol's apparent role in atherosclerotic plaque formation, his work showed that the mere presence of the cholesterol was not the driving force behind a blood vessel's malfunction.
Since antihistamines protected the rats, this research suggested an alternative culprit: histamine. In recent mice studies, the genes for histamine synthesis were experimentally "knocked out." These genetically modified mice, unable to synthesize histamine, resisted the influence of stressor that led to inflammation and atherosclerosis in control mice. And the protective results observed in histamine-free mice were independent of serum cholesterol levels (Wang, etc al, 2011). The results of animal studies point to the role thay chronic stress plays in the creation of histamine and in the onset and exacerbation of atherosclerosis and promotion of cardiovascular disease. In direct contrast to the implied role of cholesterol in causing heart disease, cardiovascular pathology may instead primarily result from environmental stressors rather than genetic or biochemical dysfunction.
Though this research argues against the medical establishment's rush to judgment against cholesterol, that rush was fueled by the interests of the pharmaceutical industry. Of course, that's because the drug companies had come up with another one of their beloved magic bullets, this time in the form of statins. Statins are a class of drugs used to lower levels of cholesterol in the blood by inhibiting a liver enzyme responsible for producing 70 percent of the body's cholesterol. Statin drugs were originally intended for high-risk cardiac patients, but someone, likely in sales, came up with the idea that statins might be good for primary prevention to help those at risk of developing heart disease in the future as well.
The JUPITER Study, frequently referenced in support of statin use, found that during the study period, there were 68 heart attacks in the placebo group and only 31 heart attacks in the group that took statins. So according to those numbers, statins produced an astonishing 58 percent reduction in relative risk. The results led the research group to advise thay statins were effective for primary prevention of heart attacks (Ridker 2008). On the surface was simply a manipulation of the data. It should be noted that the experimental and control study groups each had 8,901 participants. In real terms, the heart attack risk went from a very low 0.76 percent (68 put of 8,901) in the control group to 0.35 percent (31 out of 8,901) in the statin group. Statistically, the "protective" effect of statins provided for a 0.35 percent reduction over controls, which meant a real risk reduction of less than one half of one percent. The data indicate that for every 300 people taking expensive statin drugs, only one life might be saved. Follow-up studies reveal that the presumed preventive effects of cholesterol-lowering drugs have been considerably exaggerated. As a side note, AstraZenica, makers of the statin drugs used in the study, was the source of funding for the now discredited JUPITER Study (Lorgeril, etc al, 2010).
The use of statins in the primary prevention of heart disease has fueled sales, but it hasn't turned the tide in the war on cardiovascular disease. In fact, as with many wars waged lately, the cost is high and the results negligible. Though statins accounted for $29 billion in U.S. sales in 2013 alone, their war against cholesterol has barely had an impact on cardiovascular diseases. At best, statin drugs lower the actual risk of heart attack by around 0.3 percent, while at the same time producing side effects in 15 to 40 percent of those using the drug. Recent independent studies have shown that statin use for primary prevention has minimal or no value in reducing heart attacks and mortality (Sultan and Hynes, 2013).
Perhaps it's time to revise the conclusion that cholesterol is culpable for cardiovascular health issues and shift our attention to environmental stressors rather than genetic or biochemical dysfunctions.
In burn bags...yanno... probably
I remember as a kid observing the occilation every 6 weeks regarding eggs being good or bad & thinking to myself at the time, "boy... these people are lying aholes!"
It's a bit unnerving getting that first glimpse as a kid... and getting wise to it from there on out...then observing the constant fleecing of everyone and wondering, "Dude... how are you not seeing this for the bs it is right now???"
Then, "They Live" came out... and a piece of me was vindicated.
u/#catdance
Therapeutics don't make anywhere close to as much money as drugs that "manage symptoms" do. Why cure people when you can keep them on a subscription for the rest of their life via big pharma? There's a reason therapeutics company stocks are penny stocks.
And if you study the cholesterol standard you will find that the U.S. standard has changed over the years. There has been a lowering of the bar so that more folks have a cholesterol problem, with the solution being prescription drugs. Also the U.S. cholesterol "standard" has been different from the European "standard". What woke me up is that about 15 years ago I discovered (by accident) that I met the European "standard" but NOT the U.S. "standard". When I pointed this out to my doctor he dropped his insistence that I get on statins! There is no way I'd EVER get on statins! I'm 74 years old.....
There are also 2 types of LDL, forget the specifics but one LDL is to large to form plaques and the other is smaller and ‘might’ contribute to buildup. None of the general tests are set up for distinguishing between the 2 and are basically geared to sell statins.
No real sauce handy, but I think sugar scars up your walls and then bad (small) LDL builds up on the walls.
A video clip for you:
https://upload.disroot.org/r/oT6tN1bP#kR98tcIhOUUkSQdjTKy/Z4egMj5rWb38N1xzE99NPb4=https://upload.disroot.org/r/oT6tN1bP#kR98tcIhOUUkSQdjTKy/Z4egMj5rWb38N1xzE99NPb4=
Glad it finally made the news. I haven’t taken the cholesterol pills my Dr prescribed for me last year and all the years before that. Hope these people are right!
Yeah. 220 here but a hospital doc still prescribed statins, beta blockers and anticoagulants for arrhythmia. I didn't argue but I threw away the prescription. It turned out that I was lacking potassium AND a root canal was infected. I had it extracted. No more arrhythmia. I did all the research myself, of course. Doctors know nothing.
Docs today have no independence. They have to follow a certain "standard of care" or they could lose their job or even their medical license.
And we have to remember they don't really work for us - they work for the insurance companies.
You are one smart 🍪 cookie!
Here’s the study analysis: https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i1246
"Calling evil good and good evil" It's not hard to figure out. Whatever big Pharma and the media are pushing, the opposite is the way to go.
Follow the $$! The love of which is the "root" of all evil.
🤔😱
Are they wrong, or have they been deliberately misleading us all these years?