The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It

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The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It

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(21 reviews)

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0 of 1 found this review helpful:

Lets be reasonable, 2008-06-30
So it turns out that Big pharma, and your doctor are conspiring to worsen your health so that they can make money.

Can I ask How???

If big pharma is fabricating research about cholesterol to convince doctors to prescribe statins to improve your health...how are they in conspiracy??

Do you really think that all the drugs are bad and you are better off with natural remedies...then let me ask you this ....do you think if any of these natural remedies was as wonderful as it is claimed to be, do you really think that a drug company would not snatch it and sell it to you as a pharma grade expensive product and make a fortune out of it.

Let me enlighten you:

if you read the book for entertainment ..I can see that

but if you read it for info and even worse if you believed it...then you are saying that all these legitimate people and organization such as the American heart association, American college of physicians are conspiring against you....as you would have concluded here from reading this book by somebody who claims he knows (why would you believe that he is trying to help you)

It is hard to come up with great medical discoveries but it is very easy to fabricate some cure it all sell on the internet miracle cure and get rich doing it

So who do you really think is after your money????conspiring against you????

3 of 12 found this review helpful:

Make up your own mind whether to take statins rather than follow either bias view, 2008-04-08
Choose whether to take statins for yourself rather than let the bias in this book do it for you (which I would say is worse than the pharmaceutical companies)
All you conspiracy theorists should bear in mind that Kendrick is more than a GP, he also works for a pharmaceutical company. If I was really paranoid I'd be thinking that this big anti-cholesterol push is driven by the drug companies because simvastatin is off patent and theres no money in statins any more. Just so they can lay the framework for next big lipid drug!!

Heres a summary of the most important if not all the data

CHOLESTEROL TREATMENT TRIALISTS COLLABORATION META-ANALYSIS OF ALL THE DATA. LANCET 2005:366:1267

Secondary prevention (if you've already got some form of vascular disease):Number needed to treat:21 over 5 years to prevent one vascular event.

Primary Prevention (if no established cardiovascular disease), in high risk patients: Number needed to treat of 40 over 5 years to prevent one event

FURTHER METANALYSIS OF THE PRIMARY PREVENTION TRIALS LANCET 2007:369:168. They found for patients with no pre-existing cardiovascular disease
1.No evidence of reduction in total mortality
2.Overall cardiovascular events reduced with statins (NNT OF 67 over 5 years)
3.Analysis suggests benefit is only seen in high risk men aged 30-69 (NNT 50)
4.Women did not seem to benefit, nor anyone over the age of 69

BINGO - Take some personal responsibility, make up your own mind and stop expecting the doctor to agree with you about cholesterol. If you get side effects ask yourself if the benefits listed above are worth it.

You've also got to ask yourself why Kendrick the self proclaimed expert hasn't published any research on the subject describing his enlightening theories. Surely if its important enough and his theories have validity they would be published in a peer reviewed journal? No? I wonder why not ?

5 of 7 found this review helpful:

Could be a lot better , 2008-03-28
At first glance this book seems very well researched and written, and essential reading for anyone taking statins or concerned about cholesterol levels.

Dr Kendrick criticises research into the saturated fat - cholesterol - heart disease link, on the basis that most of the researchers involved in this field had set out to prove this link rather than studying it objectively. The author then seems to apply similarly biased thinking to try to prove his own theory that stress is the primary cause of heart disease.

Dr Kendrick is right to point out that a number of countries with high saturated fat consumption and low incidence of heart disease have been conveniently ignored by those trying to prove the diet-heart hypothesis. The author makes no attempt however to find other explanations for this. A lot of research is being carried out into homocysteine which is a non-essential amino acid that has been found to be very irritating to the outer lining of the arterial wall. Homocysteine is produced when there is insufficient folic acid, B12 and B6 in the body to convert methionine (found abundantly in animal meats) into cysteine, which can be excreted by the kidneys. Interestingly, populations with high saturated fat intake and low incidence of CHD all seem to have high consumption of these B vitamins in their diets, as well as Omega 3 fatty acids which are known to be cardio protective. Has this been conveniently ignored by Dr Kendrick because is doesn't fit his stress-heart hypothesis?

I work in the field of cardiac rehabilitation and it is an area where a multi-disciplinary approach is required. Diet, activity levels, smoking, pharmacology and stress are all major factors and trying to suggest that one factor is more important than the others is, in my opinion, completely wrong.

For a book written predominantly about stress and heart disease, the practical advice on reducing / dealing with stress is a disappointing page and a half postscript.

The book is very good at showing some of the misinformation that does exist about cholesterol and heart disease and explaining some of the problems with statins and some of the research that has been carried out by drug companies. If however, you are looking for a book to help improve the health of your heart, then this book on it's own is not comprehensive enough.

10 of 11 found this review helpful:

Another coffin nail for the fat/cholesterol theory of heart disease, 2008-01-19
It is remarkable that the fat-cholesterol hypothesis of heart disease gained such an established place in US medicine, culture, and popular consciousness, despite a lack of any -strong- evidence to support the theories (including that "bad cholesterol" causes heart disease) and despite sometimes stronger evidence against the theories. The emergence into broader understanding of insulin resistance around the year 2000 was a watershed in the demise of these two theories. I believe the last two months will be looked back on and viewed as the death of these hypotheses.
Perhaps most important, last week results were published that showed that a drug that lowered LDL ("bad") cholesterol not only did not prevent heart attacks, but may have increased them. The LDL went down, but not the heart attacks. This fairly well disproves the idea that even "bad" cholesterol is really that "bad" in the first place.
There has also been the appearance of two very well researched books on this topic:
Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes
The Great Cholesterol Con by Malcolm Kendrick (not the same title from Colpo)
Both are impeccable in their science, both show that the fat/cholesterol theory has been, well, frankly, fraudulent from a scientific point of view. Kendrick was lead author of the 14 Countries Study. He took WHO data on fat consumption and heart disease in a large group of countries. From these he selected the seven countries with the lowest fat consumption, and the seven with the highest fat consumption, and compared the rates of heart disease in the two groups. Every one of the countries with the lowest level of fat consumption had a higher rate of heart disease than any of the countries with the highest fat consumption. Do a double take? Read that again.
Taubes goes as far back as 1846 reviewing the science on the cause and cure of obesity (=carbohydrate consumption). He doesn't miss a stitch.
Both books describe in detail the scientific errors, and false thinking, that led to the acceptance of both hypotheses as if they were Laws, and "settled science" rather than controversial, from s true scientific point of view, from start to finish. Both make good case studies of the methods of good and bad science.
Now we are all going to have to do psychotherapy to treat our obsessive-compulsive fat/cholesterol delusional phobias. But will anyone REALLY stop buying 2% milk instead of whole, or discarding those luscious fatty skin from their chicken breast? I suggest everyone read these two books as part of their psychotherapeutic process.

3 of 3 found this review helpful:

An eye opener but tough to get through at times, 2008-01-14
The physiological information in this book is invaluable. I am convinced that stress is the root of many of the symptoms currently identified as "risk factors" for heart attacks and strokes. Since he is Scottish, and I am American, the use of the metric system makes it a bit confusing at times, but I just read along assuming that the numbers supported his claim. He spends much of the book refuting the most commonly held beliefs of the public and even most mainstream physicians and dieticians as to the causes, risk factors and links to heart attacks and strokes. He uses detailed study information to do so and I would have preferred a less detailed synopsis of each study, but I just skimmed a lot of those to get through. I read this because my husband's lipids just came in a little high, and I am now encouraging him to exercise, take Omega 3s, drink a few glasses of wine and limit his carb intake to lose a little weight. We are not cutting any saturated fats or worrying about his numbers any longer - just working to relax to limit the stress reaction. Worth the read. I'm planning to move on to a few other books written from the same perspective for reinforcement.

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