DOES HIGH CHOLESTEROL CAUSE HEART DISEASE?
Cholesterol does not cause heart disease and trying to reduce it with statin drugs is a waste of time, an international group of experts has claimed.
A review of research involving nearly 70,000 people found there was no link between what has traditionally been considered “bad” LDL cholesterol and the premature deaths of over 60-year-olds from cardiovascular disease.
Published in the BMJ Open journal, the new study found that 92 percent of people with a high cholesterol level lived longer. (BMJ Open. Published online June 12 2016)
The authors have called for a re-evaluation of the guidelines for the prevention of cardiovascular disease and atherosclerosis, a hardening and narrowing of the arteries, because “the benefits from statin treatment have been exaggerated”.
High cholesterol is commonly caused by an unhealthy acidic lifestyle and diet, and eating high levels of processed fat in particular, as well as smoking.
It is carried in the blood attached to proteins called lipoproteins and has been traditionally linked to cardiovascular diseases such as coronary heart disease, stroke, peripheral arterial disease and aortic disease.
Co-author of the study Dr Malcolm Kendrick, an intermediate care GP, acknowledged the findings would cause controversy but defended them as “robust” and “thoroughly reviewed”. “What we found in our detailed systematic review was that older people with high LDL (low-density lipoprotein) levels, the so-called “bad” cholesterol, lived longer and had less heart disease.”
Vascular and endovascular surgery expert Professor Sherif Sultan from the University of Ireland, who also worked on the study, said cholesterol is one of the “most vital” molecules in the body and prevents infection, cancer, muscle pain and other conditions in elderly people. He also stated, “lowering cholesterol with medications is a total waste of time and money”.
“Lowering cholesterol with medications for primary cardiovascular prevention in those aged over 60 is a total waste of time and resources, whereas altering your lifestyle is the single most important way to achieve a good quality of life,” he said.
Lead author Dr Uffe Ravnskov, a former associate professor of renal medicine at Lund University in Sweden, said there was “no reason” to lower high-LDL-cholesterol.
Heart Disease and Cholesterol
The graph below shows the famous 10 year Framingham correlation study between cholesterol and coronary heart disease, published in the Lancet in 1986, that big Pharma relies on and sold to the American public at large.
The problem though, as you see in the next graph, after 20 years the correlation shows that high cholesterol saves lives and low cholesterol is a risk factor for heart disease!
Everyone in modern society has heard about cholesterol, and how bad it is. Most do not understand why it exists, and simply see it as a menace that must be eliminated as quickly as possible. This misunderstanding is exactly what the pharmaceutical complex promotes, because it allows them to perpetually treat high cholesterol with drugs like Lipitor. These drugs are prescribed for the remainder of a patient’s lifetime, and when he/she eventually dies of a “thought attack”, family and friends will believe that the disaster was inevitable from “high cholesterol”. The death will not be attributed to other health factors or to the drugs themselves, but to the “high cholesterol”; even though there are no known deaths from cholesterol in human history. It is all very convenient for the drug companies, so long as we do not examine what is up the other sleeve.
I am reminded of restless leg syndrome, whereby the dis-ease was ‘discovered’ immediately after the pharmaceutical for it was patented, as a reason to sell us this useless pharmaceutical drug. Now, restless leg syndrome has been upgraded to a new “disease”. The cause of restless leg syndrome is also the cause of heart disease – retained metabolic and/or dietary acids in the connective and fatty tissues leading to inflammation, induration, ulceration, degeneration and finally death.
“Before 1920, coronary heart disease was rare in America — so rare that when a young internist named Paul Dudley White introduced the German Electrocardiograph to his colleagues at Harvard University, they advised him to concentrate on a more profitable branch of medicine. The new machine revealed the presence of arterial blockages, thus permitting early diagnosis of coronary heart disease. But in those days, clogged arteries were a medical rarity, and White had to search for patients who could benefit from his new technology. During the next forty years, however, the incidence of coronary heart disease rose dramatically, so much so that by the mid 1950’s, heart disease was the leading cause of death among Americans.”
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