A conversation with Dr Malcolm Kendrick that will make your cardiologist’s head explode (metaphorically speaking—we don’t want any actual endothelial damage)
There are trillions of dollars and pounds being made pushing the whole cholesterol thing and it’s all based upon a fraudulent premise. Keys actually proved his own theory wrong he did a RCT on patients in Minnesota mental institutions where he had complete control of their diets. Replaced the saturated fats with corn oil. Lowered their cholesterol and increased the number who died of cardiovascular events. So what did the good scientists do? Yep he hide the data. After he died the raw data was found and analyzed and published but by then it was too late the lie has too much money behind it now.
I went to America in 2000 and was shocked by the obesity I saw around me. In a restaurant in Chicago a whole family sat near me, each person with a plate piled high with scoops of ice cream. Is it the corn oil? The sugar lobby? It reminded me of that scene in CAPTAIN FANTASTIC where Vigo Mortensen, whose character lives ‘naturally’ with his kids and allows them only home grown food - sheltered from the world of MacDonalds etc - and takes them briefly into suburban America, where they sit and stare at members of the public and, shocked, ask their father what’s wrong with all these fat people? I made a film a long time ago called The Heart Attack Machine, and I interviewed 2 scientists who advised the Australian Heart Foundation and they had done a study that showed eating large amounts of cholesterol made no difference to the subjects blood cholesterol levels. Yet they still insisted that eating saturated fats was the major cause of heart disease. Not sugar!
It is sugar that's to blame. I used to eat the standard American diet (SAD), but once I realized that it is not saturated fat nor LDL that is the culprit, I cut out almost all sugar and started on a low-carb, high-fat diet. My LDL is elevated, but it's fine. I will never return to those old days. Before cutting way back on sugar, I could not get my blood pressure lowered. Now, the systolic is in the low 120's. I do not trust the medical - Big Pharma industry.
Stephen I also have doubts that sugar is the demon. Sugar consumption has reduced dramatically over the years, probably due to the efforts of health education driven by the WHO, but cardiovascular disease has not reduced.
The overall carb consumption hasn’t reduced a great deal due to the efforts of vested interest groups like the corn industry that lobbies governments in the US. Corn starch and oils are an almost universal ingredient in packaged foods. It’s not just sugar beet and cane growers. The success of the keto diet (and the 5:2 diet) which contain high fat/low carb elements is a testament to this, as is the science of how the pancreas creates fat in the body in response to blood sugar levels. Sure fat is bad for cardiovascular health but not dietary fat. It’s the fat the pancreas is stimulated to make by blood sugar that clog our arteries.
Oh dear. I’m sorry I don’t have time to address every point you’ve made here.
I’ll just deal with one, because it’s a common piece of misinformation in the “wellness” industry that has caused a lot of harm. And that’s in relation to the keto diet.
There is zero robust evidence that the keto diet has any additional health benefits above calorie reduction.
On the contrary, its extreme treatment of carbohydrates has several minor, severe, and long-term health risks.
So while a keto diet may present an intriguing way to cut energy consumption, its associated health risks make it a flawed strategy for weight loss and it can’t be recommended for any significant duration.
Keto is not a health strategy.
In particular keto is contraindicated for people with some mood disorders because of the havoc created when important hormone pathways are disrupted due to reduced carbohydrate consumption.
Sugar has a well established effect in the diet. It causes the pancreas, via insulin, to manufacture fats like cholesterol and triglycerides, and also to retain them, thereby depositing them inside the arteries, leading to clotting and so strokes and heart disease. The fats we eat don’t have this effect. That’s why the Keto (aka Atkins) diet is so effective.
But when Time Magazine published its Front Cover photo of butter, a decade or so ago, trying to demolish the myths about eating fatty food, I thought there would be a revolution. But the sugar lobby fought back.
Stephen the data doesn’t lie. Sugar consumption has decreased markedly, but cardiovascular disease has not decreased.
The mechanisms of cardiovascular disease are better understood now, and we see that cholesterol levels are not the problem - the problem is micro clotting in the artery wall, which causes a healing response that ends up being problematic.
The lipids found in affected parts of the artery wall are not related to the person’s cholesterol levels.
So you can get people with FH and sky high levels of cholesterol, who live very long lives, but those with the rogue clotting gene far more likely to have a cardiac event.
I’m not saying sugar is a health food - obviously it’s not and for a number of reasons that I won’t go into here, it’s best to limit or moderate consumption.
But for the great majority of people, sugar is not Satan, and a bit of sweetness in the diet is not a problem.
The sugar consumption has declined markedly comment I’d like to see that data. Does it include all types of sugars? Does it include carbohydrates in the form of cereal for example? Please provide a link to that claim as I have doubts to its veracity.
Sugar consumption might have dropped but refined carbs now have many guises. Refined carbs have increased as fat content of packaged food was reduced in the decades of 'fat is bad'. Diabetes and metabolic syndrome have increased in this time frame. Ever hear of cereals and cookies? John Yudkin and Gary Taubes have written about their effects for a long time.
So sugar (granulated table sugar) may well have gone down, but if you eat packaged foods sugar is often disguised as other things. Maltose, dextrose, high fructose corn syrup. We are being conned…….. well not me coz I don’t eat that crap.
Good try. HFCS has also gone down dramatically. I couldn’t be bothered looking up the rest.
For most people, refined carbs are not the reason for increased rates of obesity. The main culprit is portion sizes. People are simply eating too much.
It's because you 'couldn't be bothered looking up the rest,' you come to an incorrect conclusion. Well done on just making stuff up. You keep just guessing if that works for you. I took your comment seriously and actually put in the work, researched it and wrote a response. I am sad you won't bother to read it but others will. https://theukcarnivore.substack.com/p/the-great-glucose-con-why-sugar-consumption?r=14wb5g
There comes a limit to the amount of false claims and rubbish studies that one has time to deal with. You rolled out a bunch of claims about increased consumption. I checked one of them. It was wildly, ridiculously, false. I’m not going to check the rest.
I'm dealing with this now. Non-diabetic, non-smoker, female, 62.
Once I convinced my new hcp that I wasn't on the verge of a thyroid storm (not a lot had changed in 10 years, and nothing about me presents as hyperthyroid), she pounced on my cholesterol. I nipped the statin convo in the bud, and left with a sheaf of dietary recommendations that looked dreary.
I find it interesting that many commenters want to discuss their knowledge about statins, and even argue about who is right or wrong, but nobody is pointing to the most damning part of all of this. The CCT data is proprietary. They refuse to let anyone else see the data that drives decisions about a critical health issue for about everyone in the world.
Excuse me? WTF is that?
The premise is absurd. If the data is sound, it should survive scrutiny. If it can't, it shouldn't survive, period. Basic logic. The data cannot be trusted and must be rejected en masse until it is released in full. Full disclosure is the only possible resolution here. Anything else is nonsense, or I've lost my mind (I haven't).
Ask me, I can't depend on a doctor who is misinformed, or a medical system that is owned by the corporations that profit from it! I refuse to cooperate with professionals who don't demand access to the data they use to guide their 'treatments'. This cuts across huge profit makers (markets is the industry term) like statins, psych drugs, and pain meds.
"All persons - but especially every health care professional - must reject all evidence they are denied independent access to". -- that was said by me today. You can quote me.
Medicine is a black box we must not peer into. This is the message I hear every time I see a healthcare professional. It isn't their fault. They themselves can't peer into the black box. That's proprietary, though we're talking about population-level health care. Do you hear me?
This is all bullcrap. Medicine is a business built for profit first, and foremost. It does not serve me; it has harmed me. I don't let that happen anymore, and I hope you don't either. My wellbeing is not anyone's business but my own, and will never be decided by secrets and information nobody but the few can access. Not in a million fucking years. Duh!
I say it again. You cannot trust a healthcare system built on secret information. This secrecy and corporate control are the enemy of every person who interacts with the system at any level. Every single one of us, professionals especially. End the criminality secrecy obscures. That's the challenge.
Restore sanity and science to healthcare. Nothing matters more. Full disclosure of all evidence or zero compliance is the hill I'll die on. And I won't pay some assholes to do it for me, which is what we have now.
I didn’t see your glaringly obvious point, until I did. And yes, your rationale is flawless. “I can’t wait to get me a nice fat statin scrip because it will actually have effects on me that are medically useful, and I can see that in the information provided.” Certain individuals may very well say exactly that when they understand what they’re getting into, and why. Most won’t.
This is good. It can help some people, whether that’s through pleiotropic effects (a big help) or LDL lowering (probably counter-productive), and the data will tell us who those candidates are. They can then decide individually.
Now the fun part, based on an independent read of their dumb info: 1 in ~225 people currently taking a statin will benefit. The other 224 people can go exercise and eat appropriately and never take a statin their lives, and never have a cardiovascular event. In other words, the global market for statins would disappear like a snowman on a blistering June sidewalk.
Re: Familial Hypercholesterolemia (FH), please note the headline that appeared in my daily news thread this morning:
"Screen all kids between 2 and 10 for high cholesterol, Pediatric society recommends"
I read the article. They're insane. They want to give statins to eight year old children who meet the reference value for FH. This is Canada (by the way). My personal take is that the 'society' that uttered such inanities (everyone who is behind this depravity) is in profound need of an urgent and irreversible lobotomy, so they might never harm a child again. This is the article, read it and weep:
When my doctor told me my LDL was a bit high, I responded that LDL is necessary to repair our artery walls and that we need fat for the brain, which is made up of, primarily, fat. Her response to that was, “I wish I had more time to do research”.
My high school teacher in chemistry/biology, this was in the mid-1970s, didn't believe the going doctrine about reducing cholesterol in food, so she measured her blood cholesterol. It was normal.
Then she ate 2 extra eggs, very high on cholesterol, each day for several months. When she measured her blood cholesterol again, it hadn't changed a bit.
She was in her upper 50th, so she was well into the age where cholesterol was thought to be dangerous.
When she told the class of her findings, she told us to not accept studies right off, but question them always.
At university I had (totally) a year of statistics. I used to tell my friends, "Give me any data and tell me what you want it to show, and I'll prove you're correct."
Exactly.. and the nutritional studies they do are set up in a way that they can NEVER show a causation. And as Mark explained and Keys showed us; just cherry-pick the data and make any claim you want.
Last year, my doctor wanted to run routine bloodwork. As I’ve never had any (I’m 61 and been metabolically ok as far as I know), I agreed. Everything was fine, but he was concerned my LDL was a bit high and he wanted to talk about statins. To his dismay, I declined. Prior to reading this article, I was already aware of the statin controversy.
I was a teenager when the war on fat went nuts. My mom, trying to do the right thing, stopped preparing eggs, whole milk, butter, red meat, you name it. I ended up gaining weight like crazy. Desperately, I calorie restricted and I still got fatter. I’ve been fighting my weight my whole life. Figured I just got bad genes. I decided in my 40s to give keto a try. What did I have to lose? Giving up pizza, Chinese food and my beloved bagels was hard.
At the time I started, I was at 205 pounds. Within six months, I dropped to 145. Never counted a calorie or turned into an exercise fanatic. I moved and started a total house renovation. Didn’t have a real kitchen for almost a year. Carbs crept back in and so did the weight. Going back to keto again. I’m not someone who beats people over the head with diet dogma. We’re all human, but we’re all different. It definitely works for me.
The doctor just redid my blood work again last week, I’m curious to see if I get the statin push again.
I read recently that Keys admitted that his original theory was plain wrong - in the 1990’s. Pity UK GPs, almost en masse, continue to take the money but may just not have accepted the jabs themselves….
Your cardiologists head might not explode. 6 or so years ago in the USA the main cardiology organization sent out a press release saying there is no link between cholesterol and heart disease.
Do you have a link to that? I'm in the rural US and every doctor here wants to put everyone over 35 on statins, and I'm just a "difficult patient" for refusing established Standard of Care.
That sounds like a confusion between dietary cholesterol and blood LDL cholesterol. The AHA’s 2019 advisory was about dietary cholesterol — original here: AHA advisory, with the related AHA release here: AHA release. It did not say there is no link between blood cholesterol and heart disease. In the same period, ACC/AHA guidance was still recommending statins for high LDL and elevated ASCVD risk: ACC/AHA prevention guidance. So this looks much more like a misunderstanding of a narrower dietary claim than a real reversal.
So unless there was some other specific press release, this looks much more like a misunderstanding of a narrower claim about dietary cholesterol than an actual statement that cholesterol has no link to heart disease.
My doctor in France wanted to put me on statins as I have sky high cholesterol, so I sent him a long email with the work of Michel de Lorgeril (France’s Kendrick) and he was both amazed and delighted. He said nobody had ever taken the time to do that for him before.
If you get the book The Clot Thickens, he cites to many resources. He also has a book A Statin Nation, but I haven't read that one. I assume it's also well-referenced.
There are trillions of dollars and pounds being made pushing the whole cholesterol thing and it’s all based upon a fraudulent premise. Keys actually proved his own theory wrong he did a RCT on patients in Minnesota mental institutions where he had complete control of their diets. Replaced the saturated fats with corn oil. Lowered their cholesterol and increased the number who died of cardiovascular events. So what did the good scientists do? Yep he hide the data. After he died the raw data was found and analyzed and published but by then it was too late the lie has too much money behind it now.
I went to America in 2000 and was shocked by the obesity I saw around me. In a restaurant in Chicago a whole family sat near me, each person with a plate piled high with scoops of ice cream. Is it the corn oil? The sugar lobby? It reminded me of that scene in CAPTAIN FANTASTIC where Vigo Mortensen, whose character lives ‘naturally’ with his kids and allows them only home grown food - sheltered from the world of MacDonalds etc - and takes them briefly into suburban America, where they sit and stare at members of the public and, shocked, ask their father what’s wrong with all these fat people? I made a film a long time ago called The Heart Attack Machine, and I interviewed 2 scientists who advised the Australian Heart Foundation and they had done a study that showed eating large amounts of cholesterol made no difference to the subjects blood cholesterol levels. Yet they still insisted that eating saturated fats was the major cause of heart disease. Not sugar!
Thank you Stephen for sharing your thoughts
It is sugar that's to blame. I used to eat the standard American diet (SAD), but once I realized that it is not saturated fat nor LDL that is the culprit, I cut out almost all sugar and started on a low-carb, high-fat diet. My LDL is elevated, but it's fine. I will never return to those old days. Before cutting way back on sugar, I could not get my blood pressure lowered. Now, the systolic is in the low 120's. I do not trust the medical - Big Pharma industry.
Stephen I also have doubts that sugar is the demon. Sugar consumption has reduced dramatically over the years, probably due to the efforts of health education driven by the WHO, but cardiovascular disease has not reduced.
The overall carb consumption hasn’t reduced a great deal due to the efforts of vested interest groups like the corn industry that lobbies governments in the US. Corn starch and oils are an almost universal ingredient in packaged foods. It’s not just sugar beet and cane growers. The success of the keto diet (and the 5:2 diet) which contain high fat/low carb elements is a testament to this, as is the science of how the pancreas creates fat in the body in response to blood sugar levels. Sure fat is bad for cardiovascular health but not dietary fat. It’s the fat the pancreas is stimulated to make by blood sugar that clog our arteries.
Oh dear. I’m sorry I don’t have time to address every point you’ve made here.
I’ll just deal with one, because it’s a common piece of misinformation in the “wellness” industry that has caused a lot of harm. And that’s in relation to the keto diet.
There is zero robust evidence that the keto diet has any additional health benefits above calorie reduction.
On the contrary, its extreme treatment of carbohydrates has several minor, severe, and long-term health risks.
So while a keto diet may present an intriguing way to cut energy consumption, its associated health risks make it a flawed strategy for weight loss and it can’t be recommended for any significant duration.
Keto is not a health strategy.
In particular keto is contraindicated for people with some mood disorders because of the havoc created when important hormone pathways are disrupted due to reduced carbohydrate consumption.
There is NO evidence when it comes to nutrition because the studies done can only show a correlation, not a causation.
So vitamin C is no good for scurvy?
Sugar has a well established effect in the diet. It causes the pancreas, via insulin, to manufacture fats like cholesterol and triglycerides, and also to retain them, thereby depositing them inside the arteries, leading to clotting and so strokes and heart disease. The fats we eat don’t have this effect. That’s why the Keto (aka Atkins) diet is so effective.
But when Time Magazine published its Front Cover photo of butter, a decade or so ago, trying to demolish the myths about eating fatty food, I thought there would be a revolution. But the sugar lobby fought back.
Stephen the data doesn’t lie. Sugar consumption has decreased markedly, but cardiovascular disease has not decreased.
The mechanisms of cardiovascular disease are better understood now, and we see that cholesterol levels are not the problem - the problem is micro clotting in the artery wall, which causes a healing response that ends up being problematic.
The lipids found in affected parts of the artery wall are not related to the person’s cholesterol levels.
So you can get people with FH and sky high levels of cholesterol, who live very long lives, but those with the rogue clotting gene far more likely to have a cardiac event.
I’m not saying sugar is a health food - obviously it’s not and for a number of reasons that I won’t go into here, it’s best to limit or moderate consumption.
But for the great majority of people, sugar is not Satan, and a bit of sweetness in the diet is not a problem.
The sugar consumption has declined markedly comment I’d like to see that data. Does it include all types of sugars? Does it include carbohydrates in the form of cereal for example? Please provide a link to that claim as I have doubts to its veracity.
Source: USDA Economic Research Service, CDC NHANES surveys. Prepared by Stephan J Guyenet.
This data is not controversial.
Sugar consumption might have dropped but refined carbs now have many guises. Refined carbs have increased as fat content of packaged food was reduced in the decades of 'fat is bad'. Diabetes and metabolic syndrome have increased in this time frame. Ever hear of cereals and cookies? John Yudkin and Gary Taubes have written about their effects for a long time.
So sugar (granulated table sugar) may well have gone down, but if you eat packaged foods sugar is often disguised as other things. Maltose, dextrose, high fructose corn syrup. We are being conned…….. well not me coz I don’t eat that crap.
Good try. HFCS has also gone down dramatically. I couldn’t be bothered looking up the rest.
For most people, refined carbs are not the reason for increased rates of obesity. The main culprit is portion sizes. People are simply eating too much.
It's because you 'couldn't be bothered looking up the rest,' you come to an incorrect conclusion. Well done on just making stuff up. You keep just guessing if that works for you. I took your comment seriously and actually put in the work, researched it and wrote a response. I am sad you won't bother to read it but others will. https://theukcarnivore.substack.com/p/the-great-glucose-con-why-sugar-consumption?r=14wb5g
There comes a limit to the amount of false claims and rubbish studies that one has time to deal with. You rolled out a bunch of claims about increased consumption. I checked one of them. It was wildly, ridiculously, false. I’m not going to check the rest.
I'm dealing with this now. Non-diabetic, non-smoker, female, 62.
Once I convinced my new hcp that I wasn't on the verge of a thyroid storm (not a lot had changed in 10 years, and nothing about me presents as hyperthyroid), she pounced on my cholesterol. I nipped the statin convo in the bud, and left with a sheaf of dietary recommendations that looked dreary.
And all this because I wanted to discuss hrt
This makes me irate.
I find it interesting that many commenters want to discuss their knowledge about statins, and even argue about who is right or wrong, but nobody is pointing to the most damning part of all of this. The CCT data is proprietary. They refuse to let anyone else see the data that drives decisions about a critical health issue for about everyone in the world.
Excuse me? WTF is that?
The premise is absurd. If the data is sound, it should survive scrutiny. If it can't, it shouldn't survive, period. Basic logic. The data cannot be trusted and must be rejected en masse until it is released in full. Full disclosure is the only possible resolution here. Anything else is nonsense, or I've lost my mind (I haven't).
Ask me, I can't depend on a doctor who is misinformed, or a medical system that is owned by the corporations that profit from it! I refuse to cooperate with professionals who don't demand access to the data they use to guide their 'treatments'. This cuts across huge profit makers (markets is the industry term) like statins, psych drugs, and pain meds.
"All persons - but especially every health care professional - must reject all evidence they are denied independent access to". -- that was said by me today. You can quote me.
Medicine is a black box we must not peer into. This is the message I hear every time I see a healthcare professional. It isn't their fault. They themselves can't peer into the black box. That's proprietary, though we're talking about population-level health care. Do you hear me?
This is all bullcrap. Medicine is a business built for profit first, and foremost. It does not serve me; it has harmed me. I don't let that happen anymore, and I hope you don't either. My wellbeing is not anyone's business but my own, and will never be decided by secrets and information nobody but the few can access. Not in a million fucking years. Duh!
I say it again. You cannot trust a healthcare system built on secret information. This secrecy and corporate control are the enemy of every person who interacts with the system at any level. Every single one of us, professionals especially. End the criminality secrecy obscures. That's the challenge.
Restore sanity and science to healthcare. Nothing matters more. Full disclosure of all evidence or zero compliance is the hill I'll die on. And I won't pay some assholes to do it for me, which is what we have now.
Additionally, if the CCT data is sound, it SELLS the product. Why would you not want to sell the product? See what I mean?
I didn’t see your glaringly obvious point, until I did. And yes, your rationale is flawless. “I can’t wait to get me a nice fat statin scrip because it will actually have effects on me that are medically useful, and I can see that in the information provided.” Certain individuals may very well say exactly that when they understand what they’re getting into, and why. Most won’t.
This is good. It can help some people, whether that’s through pleiotropic effects (a big help) or LDL lowering (probably counter-productive), and the data will tell us who those candidates are. They can then decide individually.
Now the fun part, based on an independent read of their dumb info: 1 in ~225 people currently taking a statin will benefit. The other 224 people can go exercise and eat appropriately and never take a statin their lives, and never have a cardiovascular event. In other words, the global market for statins would disappear like a snowman on a blistering June sidewalk.
Thanks for the nifty logic!
Re: Familial Hypercholesterolemia (FH), please note the headline that appeared in my daily news thread this morning:
"Screen all kids between 2 and 10 for high cholesterol, Pediatric society recommends"
I read the article. They're insane. They want to give statins to eight year old children who meet the reference value for FH. This is Canada (by the way). My personal take is that the 'society' that uttered such inanities (everyone who is behind this depravity) is in profound need of an urgent and irreversible lobotomy, so they might never harm a child again. This is the article, read it and weep:
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/article/screen-all-kids-between-2-and-10-for-high-cholesterol-pediatric-society-recommends/
Or read it and get informed. Your choice.
When my doctor told me my LDL was a bit high, I responded that LDL is necessary to repair our artery walls and that we need fat for the brain, which is made up of, primarily, fat. Her response to that was, “I wish I had more time to do research”.
My high school teacher in chemistry/biology, this was in the mid-1970s, didn't believe the going doctrine about reducing cholesterol in food, so she measured her blood cholesterol. It was normal.
Then she ate 2 extra eggs, very high on cholesterol, each day for several months. When she measured her blood cholesterol again, it hadn't changed a bit.
She was in her upper 50th, so she was well into the age where cholesterol was thought to be dangerous.
When she told the class of her findings, she told us to not accept studies right off, but question them always.
At university I had (totally) a year of statistics. I used to tell my friends, "Give me any data and tell me what you want it to show, and I'll prove you're correct."
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" -- Mark Twain
Exactly.. and the nutritional studies they do are set up in a way that they can NEVER show a causation. And as Mark explained and Keys showed us; just cherry-pick the data and make any claim you want.
Last year, my doctor wanted to run routine bloodwork. As I’ve never had any (I’m 61 and been metabolically ok as far as I know), I agreed. Everything was fine, but he was concerned my LDL was a bit high and he wanted to talk about statins. To his dismay, I declined. Prior to reading this article, I was already aware of the statin controversy.
I was a teenager when the war on fat went nuts. My mom, trying to do the right thing, stopped preparing eggs, whole milk, butter, red meat, you name it. I ended up gaining weight like crazy. Desperately, I calorie restricted and I still got fatter. I’ve been fighting my weight my whole life. Figured I just got bad genes. I decided in my 40s to give keto a try. What did I have to lose? Giving up pizza, Chinese food and my beloved bagels was hard.
At the time I started, I was at 205 pounds. Within six months, I dropped to 145. Never counted a calorie or turned into an exercise fanatic. I moved and started a total house renovation. Didn’t have a real kitchen for almost a year. Carbs crept back in and so did the weight. Going back to keto again. I’m not someone who beats people over the head with diet dogma. We’re all human, but we’re all different. It definitely works for me.
The doctor just redid my blood work again last week, I’m curious to see if I get the statin push again.
Interesting!
🧠 What the article is getting right
There has been a shift in how cholesterol is understood:
LDL alone is not the whole story
Particle size, ApoB, and inflammation matter.
HDL isn’t a magic shield
High HDL doesn’t automatically protect you.
Inflammation plays a major role
Atherosclerosis is partly an inflammatory disease.
Diet science has evolved
Saturated fat ≠ automatically bad in all contexts.
Ultra-processed food is a bigger villain than eggs or butter alone.
👉 These are legitimate evolutions in science over the last 15–20 years.
🚩 Where the article goes off track
This is where your instinct about “defensiveness” is spot on.
1. “Everything you know is wrong” framing
Classic attention-grabber.
Science rarely flips 180°—it refines, not replaces.
Cholesterol still matters. Period.
2. Minimizing LDL too much
Strong evidence still shows:
Higher ApoB / LDL particle count → higher risk of heart disease
This is one of the most replicated findings in medicine.
👉 You don’t get decades of data overturned by a few newer interpretations.
3. Cherry-picking newer studies
The article leans on:
outliers
controversial takes
While downplaying:
large meta-analyses
long-term clinical trials
👉 That’s a red flag in any health piece.
4. “Doctors got it wrong” narrative
There were oversimplifications historically.
But:
It wasn’t incompetence
It was working with best available evidence at the time
This framing builds emotion more than truth.
🧬 What actually holds up today (balanced view)
Think of it like your Settler vs Explorer framework:
Old model (Settler):
LDL bad, HDL good → simple, structured, scalable
New model (Explorer):
Context matters:
ApoB
triglycerides
insulin resistance
inflammation
metabolic health
👉 The truth is not replacing the old—it’s layering on top of it
🥦 Where your instincts are strongest (and correct)
This part you’ve been consistent on—and the science backs you:
Diet patterns (Blue Zone style)
Whole foods
Fiber
Exercise
Low ultra-processed intake
👉 These matter more than obsessing over a single cholesterol number.
You’ve been ahead of the curve there.
⚖️ Bottom line
Not BS, but overhyped and one-sided
It mixes:
real scientific updates ✅
with exaggerated conclusions ❌
Best takeaway:
Don’t ignore cholesterol
Don’t oversimplify it either
👉 The real signal today:
ApoB + inflammation + metabolic health > LDL alone. Best is to follow habits/lifesyle of 'BlueZone's
I read recently that Keys admitted that his original theory was plain wrong - in the 1990’s. Pity UK GPs, almost en masse, continue to take the money but may just not have accepted the jabs themselves….
Your cardiologists head might not explode. 6 or so years ago in the USA the main cardiology organization sent out a press release saying there is no link between cholesterol and heart disease.
Do you have a link to that? I'm in the rural US and every doctor here wants to put everyone over 35 on statins, and I'm just a "difficult patient" for refusing established Standard of Care.
That sounds like a confusion between dietary cholesterol and blood LDL cholesterol. The AHA’s 2019 advisory was about dietary cholesterol — original here: AHA advisory, with the related AHA release here: AHA release. It did not say there is no link between blood cholesterol and heart disease. In the same period, ACC/AHA guidance was still recommending statins for high LDL and elevated ASCVD risk: ACC/AHA prevention guidance. So this looks much more like a misunderstanding of a narrower dietary claim than a real reversal.
Do you have a link for that? I'm in Canada and we can be slow on the uptake...
Related AHA release:
https://professional.heart.org/en/science-news/dietary-cholesterol-and-cardiovascular-risk
And ACC/AHA guidance from the same period still recommended statins for people with very high LDL-C, diabetes, or elevated ASCVD risk:
https://www.acc.org/about-acc/press-releases/2019/03/17/09/49/acc-aha-guidance-for-preventing-heart-disease-stroke-released
So unless there was some other specific press release, this looks much more like a misunderstanding of a narrower claim about dietary cholesterol than an actual statement that cholesterol has no link to heart disease.
My doctor in France wanted to put me on statins as I have sky high cholesterol, so I sent him a long email with the work of Michel de Lorgeril (France’s Kendrick) and he was both amazed and delighted. He said nobody had ever taken the time to do that for him before.
Great article!! 👍🏻 Thanks for sharing.☺️
Saying "might be complete rubbish" is very wishy washy" and it makes it look like opinion rather overwhelming than scientific facts.
The thesis seems sound to me, but primary sources would be great! Hard to convince others with entrenched POVs without them.
If you get the book The Clot Thickens, he cites to many resources. He also has a book A Statin Nation, but I haven't read that one. I assume it's also well-referenced.
I just started reading it!
This critique identifies a real weakness in the old public narrative, but then swings too far in the other direction.
Atherosclerosis is not just “cholesterol clogging pipes.”
Endothelial injury, inflammation, thrombosis, smoking, diabetes, and hypertension all matter.
But none of that makes LDL non-causal.
The mainstream position is not LDL versus vascular injury. It is that both are involved:
LDL/ApoB retention helps drive plaque formation, while endothelial dysfunction and inflammation shape progression and rupture.
A few key problems here:
• Torcetrapib proves little about LDL itself — it was a flawed drug with off-target toxicity.
• Statins are not the only evidence — ezetimibe and PCSK9 inhibitors also reduce events.
• QRISK3 is a prediction model, not a mechanism test.
• “High LDL is protective in the elderly” is a weak observational argument, heavily exposed to reverse causation and frailty bias.
So yes, the simplistic “cholesterol clogs arteries” story is incomplete.
But “therefore LDL is basically not causal” is an overcorrection.
That is not a correction of dogma. It is just a different dogma.
https://substack.com/@loton1/note/c-225457675?r=4dyoiq