Scientist Questions Benefits of Low Fat Diets

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Scientist Questions Benefits of Low Fat Diets

By Sally Fallon

http://www.mercola.com/2002/mar/27/low_fat_diets.htm

Epidemiological studies do not support the notion that diets high in animal

fats cause heart disease. For instance, mortality from coronary heart

disease in southern India was found to be seven times higher than in the

north and people in the south died on average 8 years earlier, despite the

fact that people in the north ate 19 times more fat (mostly animal fat) and

also smoked much more.

In addition, the Masai people (Kenya) probably have the highest intake of

animal fat in the world, but studies have shown that abnormalities on

electrocardiography were far less frequent than in Americans and raised

atherosclerotic lesions were rare.

In 33 countries, an increased intake of animal fat was followed by an

increased coronary morality in 30 time periods, but in 23 other time

periods an increased fat intake was followed by a decreased mortality.

Meticulous investigations of the food consumption in 21 studies including

more than 150,000 participants, with and without coronary heart disease,

did not find a correlation of dietary fat consumption in accordance with

the current view.

More importantly is that systematic reviews of the various trials on the

connection between fat intake and heart disease contradict any link. Not a

single death has been prevented by diet in these trials. Researchers

claiming the validity of the diet-heart idea do so by excluding negative

trial results from their analyses.

British Medical Journal, January 26, 2002;324:238

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DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT:

Dr. Ravnskov is the author of numerous critical articles published in major

medical journals. He is also the author of The Cholesterol Myths Exposing

the Fallacy that Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease which

elaborates on the lack of connection between diet, blood cholesterol levels

and heart disease and questions the widespread use of cholesterol-lowering

drugs. In 1999, he received the Skrabanek Award, given by Trinity College

of Dublin, Ireland for original contributions in the field of medical

skepticism.

One Amazon reviewer wrote the following about Dr. Ravnskov's book:

With courage and care Dr. Ravnskov exposes the lack of experimental

evidence for the diet-heart theory, which claims that eating less fat and

cholesterol will prevent atheroslcerosis (hardening of the arteries) and

myocardial infarctions (heart attacks). By examining original peer-reviewed

literature, the author finds no support for the diet-heart theory.

He gives examples of scientific fraud among efforts to support the theory,

including the deliberate selective omission of data points, and the

deliberate assignment of subjects in a clinical trial to treatment or to

control groups by physicians with the subject's medical records in hand. He

shows how the abstract or conclusions of a number of papers are at odds

with the actual data in the papers. He demonstrates how the use of one

statistical method in preference to another can give a false impression

that there is an effect, where there is, in fact, none.

He shows how the reporting of differences in fatality rates by per cent

reduction (say, a 50% reduction in relative risk) is actually misleading

when the actual death rates are quite small in both the treatment and

control groups of subjects in diet or drug studies.

For example, a treatment that changes the absolute survival rate over a

multi-year period from 99.0% to 99.5% represents a 50% reduction in

relative risk, from 1% to 0.5% absolute. This is often described in papers

as a 50% reduction in death rate. However, when the difference is barely

significant statistically, as was often the case, Ravnskov points out that

there is no real reason to recommend adoption of the treatment, especially

if there are serious side-effects.

" The truth, were it known, would send pharmaceutical stocks plunging. In

most studies, the increased risk is present only above a level of

cholesterol that includes just a small percentage of the total population.

[These are the approximately 1% of people with a genetic defect called

familial hypercholesteremia.]

And women can stop worrying immediately because high cholesterol is not a

risk factor for the female sex. Few comments have been made on this

peculiar fact in all the vast literature on cholesterol. When it is

mentioned at all, it is said that female sex hormones protect against heart

attacks. "

" In fact, it seems more dangerous for women to have low cholesterol than

high. Dr. Bernard Forette and a team of French researchers from Paris found

that old women with very high cholesterol live the longest. The death rate

was more than 5 times higher for women who had very low cholesterol. In

their report, the French doctors warned against cholesterol lowering in

elderly women. But they could as well have warned against cholesterol

lowering in any woman, or, to be more precise, in anyone at all. "

Dr. Ravnskov went on to show that higher levels of high-density-lipoprotein

(HDL, " good " cholesterol) are not protective against CHD, and that lower

levels of low-density-lipoprotein (LDL, " bad " cholesterol) are not

beneficial, although the expected associations of each with CHD are present.

Here again, conclusions at odds with the researchers own data were

presented. Intimations that there are " many " or " definitive " studies in

reports and papers were shown to be false by showing that citations often

led to other reviews, each trusting the last, and ending at very few

original studies.

" High-fat foods raise blood cholesterol. " Dr. Ancel Keys was one of the

main proponents of this myth. In a paper published in 1958, Keys showed a

graph of the per cent calories from fat in the food of various countries

vs. the mean serum cholesterol levels. The data points fell on a straight

line, showing an excellent correlation.

Dr. Ravnskov added data points from a number of countries deliberately

ignored by Dr. Keys. These fall nowhere near the line. Furthermore, CHD

death rates among subjects in Finland, Greece and Yugoslavia with similar

serum cholesterol levels varied 5-fold depending on which area of the

country they lived in!

Four studies in the US, one in the UK, one in Israel and one in Finland

failed to show any correlation between diet and serum cholesterol levels.

" Numerous studies have shown that in people who eat a normal Western diet,

the effect on blood cholesterol of eating 2 or 3 extra eggs per day over a

long period of time can hardly be measured... "

Ravnskov presents the results of a number of trials of statin drugs in

which total death rates are slightly lower than those of the controls. In

an early trial of lovastatin (EXCEL) on 8,000 subjects the absolute death

rate from all causes after just 1 year was 0.5% vs. 0.2% in the placebo group.

Kilmer S. McCully, Ph. D., M. D., in technical papers and a book: " The

Heart Revolution: the Extraordinary Discovery that Finally Laid the

Cholesterol Myth to Rest " , Harper Perennial, 2000, wrote: " But no study

anywhere has ever proven that lowering the amount of cholesterol in the

diet reduces the risk of heart disease. And lowering cholesterol through

drugs won't prevent arteries from hardening if homocysteine is high. "

McCully is the discoverer of the fact that the undesirable amino acid

called homocysteine is an actual cause of atherosclerosis and CHD.

Based on Ravnskov's meticulous analyses as well as the considerable support

for his stance shown by others who have also studied the cholesterol data,

this book is recommended without reservation.

Physicians and other health professionals as well as anyone threatened with

cholesterol-lowering treatments would be enlightened, and better able to

resist worthless treatments. Health insurers might reconsider compensation

for frequent (or any) clinical assays for cholesterol or triglycerides, let

alone expensive treatments to lower cholesterol levels that reduce quality

of life without prolonging it significantly.

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