cholesterol and heart disease: the final word

[casebro]

I do believe that Statins lower the heart attack rate via an anti-inflammatory effect. Here's some points:

> Aspirin (ASA) does 80% of the same thing, as shown in studies that looked at aspirin alone, ASA with statins, and Statins alone. ASA alone does 80% of what statins alone does, the combination is 20% better then statins alone.

> Other methods that lower cholesterol via other pathways "have not been shown to lower heart attack rates".

> There is another syndrome called "Allergic Angina" and "Allergic Infarction", seems allergy reactions can cause heart attacks (Duh! Heard of Anaphylactic Shock"?) It's treated with anti-histamines. This is enough to tie the inflammatory reaction to artery disease/ CRP for me.

> My own anecdotal history: Heart attack at age 49, three subsequent angioplasties (seven stents) by the age of 52. Go gluten free, next four years have been angioplasty free. Find hidden gluten, need a Nitrostat to relieve angina. So now I take an anti-histamine every day.

.Hmm, I do wonder if the metal phosphate 'sodium phosphate', which is added to much processed meat to make them moister, is the culprit behind the 'red meat' problem? Seems metal phosphates are related to histamines... It's in the pre-cooked deli chickens as well as many sausage/wiener products. Hmm, I started making my own sausage at about the time I went gluten-free...

> Oh well, just food for thought...

 

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

Actually, I don't really have much to say.
This fella misquotes data, cherry picks data and is one of the most dishonest posters I've read in some time. His misquote and dishonest graph where he manipulates the range to minimize the different from the Framingham data is really appalling.

What is truly telling is how he cherry picks the smaller and less well known studies with negative results but ignore the multiple huge studies with hundreds of thousands of patients with actual positive studies.

Why are you reading his nonsense instead of reading something publihsed in JAMA, BMJ, NEJM, Heart, Journal of Lipid Research etc?

Sounds scary, why would he lie? (I mean, he is not trying to sell an alternative AFAIK). In any case, if he is doing it, then his info is not only wrong but dangerous. That said, I do not know about this topics all I want to know if I should stop eating eggs and red meat... if I exercise regularly, keep a look at my weight, I can forget about religiously "controlling" cholesterol? Or should I take the time and read?

 

[Number Six]

There is no secret formula to nutrtion. It is very simple.


Eat fresh, real foods. Mostly plants (at least 5 a day). Lots of fiber. Don't eat a lot of red meat or processed foods.

Be active and exercize.

That's it. That's all there is too it. There is no need to worry about sugars, cholesterols, carbs, calories, sodium etc if you are eating a variety of plants and staying active and only eating red meat and processed food sometimes instead of all the time. Your diet is naturally balanced.

The words "real" (eat real foods") and "naturally" (Your diet is naturally balanced) sounds woo to me. Also, the claim that they must be "fresh" does too.

 

[paximperium]

Sounds scary, why would he lie? (I mean, he is not trying to sell an alternative AFAIK). In any case, if he is doing it, then his info is not only wrong but dangerous.

There is a strong if small anti-statin movement similar to the anti-vaxxer movement. It tends to claim that hypercholesterol is a made up problem by pharma to sell statins.

That said, I do not know about this topics all I want to know if I should stop eating eggs and red meat... if I exercise regularly, keep a look at my weight, I can forget about religiously "controlling" cholesterol? Or should I take the time and read?

Diet may decrease your cholesterol level if it is borderline but research has shown that the decrease is mild. Hypercholesterolemia is strongly genetic and strongly correlated with heart disease and strokes. Statins decrease cardiac risk but may be due to some other affect and not purely hypercholesterolemia. That's still being studied.

 

[Number Six]

Here's another thing I've wondered. There are the guidelines for how much of each nutrient we should get. These are our best estimates for "enough." But is there any benefit to getting more than enough? For Vitamin C at least, if you get too much you just pee it out. The extra amount doesn't benefit you. Does getting more than "enough" of other nutrients help you?

If you eat nothing but foods that are considered "healthy" then you're probably going to end up with more than enough of the nutrients. If the extra amount doesn't help then what's the point? If I still have 500 calories left to eat in my days allotment and I've gotten 100% of all the nutrients I need then why not spend that last 500 calories on a Big Mac? (Of course, that only takes the good stuff into account...the objection that the Big Mac will contain bad stuff that the healthy foods won't contain is a separate question...which brings up the more complicated subject of, how much bad stuff can you eat before it starts affecting you negatively?)

 

[Schrodinger's Cat]

I'd disagree on the bolded part. A fresh vegetarian diet has very little sodium in it. Exercise in hot weather makes you lose a lot of electrolytes, especially sodium.

On a non-vegetarian but "healthy" diet, without watching salt intake, I was getting less than 500 mg of sodium a day. Needless to say, in summer, that resulted in hyponatremia. Not fun.

I'd suggest watching salt intake and deliberately adding salt if necessary in hot weather.

excellent point. I am just such a salt lover that I put salt on everything. I tend to forget that other people don't do the same. Also, I wrote my post with meat eaters in mind. I myself am a vegetarian, but not for health reasons, I just love animals too much to eat them.

 

[Schrodinger's Cat]

The words "real" (eat real foods") and "naturally" (Your diet is naturally balanced) sounds woo to me. Also, the claim that they must be "fresh" does too.

I work at one of the top cancer hospitals in the world (the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, which is a Harvard hospital). Dana Farber, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association...basically every major mainstream medical establishment in the country has as one of its biggest recommendations to limit your processed food intake, and eat a mostly plant based diet. By real foods I mean not processed goods. Eating less processed foods decreases your risk of cancer, heart disease, and a host of other illnesses.

Processed foods main objective is taste, not nutrition. They also are loaded with sodium, sugar, and other additives that just do not exist naturally.

To be frank, as a health care worker, I would be pretty disturbed if you honestly thought that eating a mostly plant based, balanced diet of non processed foods is woo. But maybe you simply didn't understand what I meant by "real foods" in my post, in which case I hope this one explains it. If it's just a matter of you not understanding what I was getting at, and if you're still looking for clarification, please let me know. I'm not talking about eating a vegan diet of seaweed here. I'm talking about not living off of ho hos, Lucky Charms, and Kraft Mac & Cheese. And about making sure you eat more plants than anything else.

Okay, yes, obviously processed foods are "real" in that they exist. I just call them real foods because that's the term we use to refer to them at my work. But I shouldn't assume that people here necessarily use the same term and would know what I mean by it, so sorry for being vague.

As for fresh foods. Produce can lose nutrients the longer it is past it's harvest. Vitamin C is especially vulnerable to deterioration post harvest. Fresh foods are generally better because they have not had the chance to degrade. But it's not like the produce being fresh or not has nearly as much of an impact of just eating mostly plants and not a lot of processed foods.


tubbabubba though, clearly did know what I was talking about

I've always wondered, what's magical about "plants" and "real foods" that make them so amazing?

It has nothing to do with magic. And as a health care worker at a REAL hosptial, I take it as a personal insult (though I know you didn't mean it that way) that you compare me to a naturopath when what I am saying is what is said by any mainstream medical association.

I work in an industry in which we are constantly having to fight off woos that are railing against us because of vaccines, chemotherapy, etc.

You know who we expect to have our backs, tubbabubba? The skeptics. That's who. Did you even bother going to the American Medical Associations website to research this before you dismissed it as magic? See what they have to say on the subject? Because they have article after article extolling the virtues of plants and discussing the problems with processed foods.

From the AMA website, example:

Healthy diets are rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and low in unhealthy fats, sodium, and added sugars

I realize a lot of "processed foods" are just corn starch with color and season

This. This right there. What you said yourself. Processed foods (not all of them of course, but on average) are filled with unnecessary additives, enormous amounts of sugars, fats, etc. ESPECIALLY sodium. Also, nutrients are lost in foods depending on how you prepare them. For instance, steaming vegetables is the best way to make sure they retain the most nutrients (other than eating them raw). If you prepare your vegetables and fruits yourself, you can make sure to prepare them in a way that is the most nutritious. With processed foods, you have no idea how the ingredients were prepared. Typically, the manner in which ingredients in processed food are prepared are ways in which a great deal of nutrients are lost, while unhealthy additives like fats, sodiums, and sugars are added.

Also, one thing I've always wondered - What the hell is so bad about red meat?

It's just a matter of not eating too much of it. It is like white bread, or ice cream. It's not like eating these things are bad for you so long as you don't eat too much of them, and so long as you aren't eating more of these kinds of things than plants.


Here is the AMA website:

http://www.ama-assn.org/

Here is the government's web page on Nutrition:

http://www.nutrition.gov/nal_display/index.php?info_center=11&tax_level=1

The American Heart Associations Nutrition page:

http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Getti...ng/Healthy-Cooking_UCM_001183_SubHomePage.jsp

American Cancer society:

http://www.cancer.org/

The American Diabetes Society

http://www.diabetes.org/

All of these websites discuss, in far greater detail, the advantages of plants and the problems with processed foods.

May I ask why you dismissed this as "magical" and akin to "naturopaths" when you clearly have never researched the subject? You didn't even bothering googling "nutrition," because if you had gone to any mainstream medical associations page after googling that, you would have found this information.

Though frankly, this shouldn't be stuff you need to seek out yourself. Nutrition has gotten to enough of a crisis point in America that basic nutrition education should be taught in schools, IMHO. Also, this really is something I personally feel doctors should go over with their patients. Many specialists do, but I think this should be something more PCPs should be going over with their patients.

I know this post probably sounds pretty defensive, but you have to understand where I'm coming from. I work with some of the best doctors in the entire world in one of the most prestigious hospitals in the world. We are non profit. We have saved enormous amounts of lives. Yet I have seen myself and the people I work with been called Nazis and monsters and I don't know what else by so many alternative medicine pushing cultists (on boards or in magazines or in blogs like the Huffington Post) for the kind of work I'm involved in (i.e. modern, conventional medicine). I have so much contempt for these people that you comparing my hospital's guidelines to those of a naturopath is simply one of the worst things you could say to me. Naturopaths are the kinds of people who spread horrible, vicious, and deadly lies about health care and the work we do.

But it's not like you knew my back ground or meant it that way.

 

[bethgsd]

I've always wondered, what's magical about "plants" and "real foods" that make them so amazing?

I realize a lot of "processed foods" are just corn starch with color and season, but whenever people start talking about the wonders of "natural, fresh, real plants" I always hear an echo similar to what naturopaths say; Medication chemicals are bad, eat herbs instead!

Also, one thing I've always wondered - What the hell is so bad about red meat?

When cattle are grass raised the meat is much lower in fat. In the feed lot system with lots and lots of corn there is more fat in the meat. I don't know what other objection there would be from the health stand point.

I did a weight management program last year and started eating more meat. The idea was to eat 5 small meals a day that had protein and fiber in each meal and to minimize the carbs that cause an insulin spike. That and cardio and strength training at least 3 times a week. My weight has stayed down, so far, and my fasting blood glucose, LDL, etc numbers are vastly improved.

 

[Dancing David]

The first time my mother talked about "white carbs", "brown carbs" and "green carbs", it souned woo, it isn't

The more processed a food the less fiber it has, the more likely it is to pack a carbo punch. So eating processed white bread is leass healthy than whole grain rice or vegetable matter. (If you are supposed to watch your carbohydrates)

 

[casebro]

My own defintion of 'real foods' is the stuff gramma cooked with in 1924. Meat, fish, dairy, veggies, grains. No additives, thickeners, emulsifiers, yadda yadda.

 

[Schrodinger's Cat]

My own defintion of 'real foods' is the stuff gramma cooked with in 1924. Meat, fish, dairy, veggies, grains. No additives, thickeners, emulsifiers, yadda yadda.

Casebro, that is actually a very common way our doctors describe it to patients. "Real food is stuff your mother/grandmother" (depending on the patient's age) cooked with.

 

[casebro]

Lately I looked into salt a bit. Seems that between 10-30% of old folks in facilities have hypo-natremia. What peaked my curiosity was having some chips at a party. Good stuff. Read the one pound bag. 7% of the rda per ounce. So eating the whole bag would only give me a 12% overload. Geeze, no way I eat that much salt in a week on my "no processed foods diet". And when I work, I sweat like a pig. I get so thirsty I drink water until I gurgle, and reach for more, before I realize I am thirsty for salt. 1/2t in the next glass of water finally cures me (pun intended).

No effect on my hypertension, or possibly a lowering. But I sure do feel better since I've been buying Kettle Chips, and being more liberal with the salt box in the kitchen.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

I work at one of the top cancer hospitals in the world (the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, which is a Harvard hospital). Dana Farber, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association...basically every major mainstream medical establishment in the country has as one of its biggest recommendations to limit your processed food intake, and eat a mostly plant based diet. By real foods I mean not processed goods. Eating less processed foods decreases your risk of cancer, heart disease, and a host of other illnesses.

Processed foods main objective is taste, not nutrition. They also are loaded with sodium, sugar, and other additives that just do not exist naturally.

To be frank, as a health care worker, I would be pretty disturbed if you honestly thought that eating a mostly plant based, balanced diet of non processed foods is woo. But maybe you simply didn't understand what I meant by "real foods" in my post, in which case I hope this one explains it. If it's just a matter of you not understanding what I was getting at, and if you're still looking for clarification, please let me know. I'm not talking about eating a vegan diet of seaweed here. I'm talking about not living off of ho hos, Lucky Charms, and Kraft Mac & Cheese. And about making sure you eat more plants than anything else.

Okay, yes, obviously processed foods are "real" in that they exist. I just call them real foods because that's the term we use to refer to them at my work. But I shouldn't assume that people here necessarily use the same term and would know what I mean by it, so sorry for being vague.

As for fresh foods. Produce can lose nutrients the longer it is past it's harvest. Vitamin C is especially vulnerable to deterioration post harvest. Fresh foods are generally better because they have not had the chance to degrade. But it's not like the produce being fresh or not has nearly as much of an impact of just eating mostly plants and not a lot of processed foods.


tubbabubba though, clearly did know what I was talking about



It has nothing to do with magic. And as a health care worker at a REAL hosptial, I take it as a personal insult (though I know you didn't mean it that way) that you compare me to a naturopath when what I am saying is what is said by any mainstream medical association.

I work in an industry in which we are constantly having to fight off woos that are railing against us because of vaccines, chemotherapy, etc.

You know who we expect to have our backs, tubbabubba? The skeptics. That's who. Did you even bother going to the American Medical Associations website to research this before you dismissed it as magic? See what they have to say on the subject? Because they have article after article extolling the virtues of plants and discussing the problems with processed foods.

From the AMA website, example:








This. This right there. What you said yourself. Processed foods (not all of them of course, but on average) are filled with unnecessary additives, enormous amounts of sugars, fats, etc. ESPECIALLY sodium. Also, nutrients are lost in foods depending on how you prepare them. For instance, steaming vegetables is the best way to make sure they retain the most nutrients (other than eating them raw). If you prepare your vegetables and fruits yourself, you can make sure to prepare them in a way that is the most nutritious. With processed foods, you have no idea how the ingredients were prepared. Typically, the manner in which ingredients in processed food are prepared are ways in which a great deal of nutrients are lost, while unhealthy additives like fats, sodiums, and sugars are added.



It's just a matter of not eating too much of it. It is like white bread, or ice cream. It's not like eating these things are bad for you so long as you don't eat too much of them, and so long as you aren't eating more of these kinds of things than plants.


Here is the AMA website:

http://www.ama-assn.org/

Here is the government's web page on Nutrition:

http://www.nutrition.gov/nal_display/index.php?info_center=11&tax_level=1

The American Heart Associations Nutrition page:

http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Getti...ng/Healthy-Cooking_UCM_001183_SubHomePage.jsp

American Cancer society:

http://www.cancer.org/

The American Diabetes Society

http://www.diabetes.org/

All of these websites discuss, in far greater detail, the advantages of plants and the problems with processed foods.

May I ask why you dismissed this as "magical" and akin to "naturopaths" when you clearly have never researched the subject? You didn't even bothering googling "nutrition," because if you had gone to any mainstream medical associations page after googling that, you would have found this information.

Though frankly, this shouldn't be stuff you need to seek out yourself. Nutrition has gotten to enough of a crisis point in America that basic nutrition education should be taught in schools, IMHO. Also, this really is something I personally feel doctors should go over with their patients. Many specialists do, but I think this should be something more PCPs should be going over with their patients.

I know this post probably sounds pretty defensive, but you have to understand where I'm coming from. I work with some of the best doctors in the entire world in one of the most prestigious hospitals in the world. We are non profit. We have saved enormous amounts of lives. Yet I have seen myself and the people I work with been called Nazis and monsters and I don't know what else by so many alternative medicine pushing cultists (on boards or in magazines or in blogs like the Huffington Post) for the kind of work I'm involved in (i.e. modern, conventional medicine). I have so much contempt for these people that you comparing my hospital's guidelines to those of a naturopath is simply one of the worst things you could say to me. Naturopaths are the kinds of people who spread horrible, vicious, and deadly lies about health care and the work we do.

But it's not like you knew my back ground or meant it that way.

No reason to be belittling. If by "processed foods" you mean "stuff from the fast food joint", then I think we can agree. But in the end, what matters is the nutritients you get, not where they come from.

 

[Number Six]

I work at one of the top cancer hospitals in the world (the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, which is a Harvard hospital). Dana Farber, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association...basically every major mainstream medical establishment in the country has as one of its biggest recommendations to limit your processed food intake, and eat a mostly plant based diet. By real foods I mean not processed goods. Eating less processed foods decreases your risk of cancer, heart disease, and a host of other illnesses.

Processed foods main objective is taste, not nutrition. They also are loaded with sodium, sugar, and other additives that just do not exist naturally.

To be frank, as a health care worker, I would be pretty disturbed if you honestly thought that eating a mostly plant based, balanced diet of non processed foods is woo. But maybe you simply didn't understand what I meant by "real foods" in my post, in which case I hope this one explains it. If it's just a matter of you not understanding what I was getting at, and if you're still looking for clarification, please let me know. I'm not talking about eating a vegan diet of seaweed here. I'm talking about not living off of ho hos, Lucky Charms, and Kraft Mac & Cheese. And about making sure you eat more plants than anything else.

Okay, yes, obviously processed foods are "real" in that they exist. I just call them real foods because that's the term we use to refer to them at my work. But I shouldn't assume that people here necessarily use the same term and would know what I mean by it, so sorry for being vague.

A thing that you see in lots of discussions, especially political ones, is people defining terms such that their side is de facto good or right or whatever. That is what calling food you prefer by the name "real food." As you noted, all food is real. If you work in one of the top cancer hospitals in the world and the people that work there only give the status of "real" to certain foods than that worries me. You should start correcting them when they say that.

Also, whether something is natural doesn't determine whether it's good for you.

As far as I know the diet you advocate is good but you're using woo language to advocate it. The reason that diet is good isn't because the food in it is real nor is it because the food in it is natural. It's good because when humans consume it the effect on their body is good. That's all that matters.

 

[casebro]

No reason to be belittling. If by "processed foods" you mean "stuff from the fast food joint", then I think we can agree.

I can't agree. The ingredients in fast food are generally the same as in "Gramma's Real Food". Potatos, beef, bread... High fat maybe, but so was Gramma's diet.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

I can't agree. The ingredients in fast food are generally the same as in "Gramma's Real Food". Potatos, beef, bread... High fat maybe, but so was Gramma's diet.

No, trust me, they aren't. It's mostly colored starch.

 

[Pup]

No, trust me, they aren't. It's mostly colored starch.

Huh? Clearly it's not, unless you're using "mostly" and "starch" in unusual ways.

Let's take a classic fast food meal, a Big Mac and fries.

Ingredients of the Big Mac (click on "nutrition")

Ingredients of McDonald's fries (click on "nutrition")

How are those "mostly colored starch"?

Edited to add: Just realized that you could be meaning starch in the sense of "starch-containing foods" like potatoes, but I was going by post #20: "I realize a lot of 'processed foods' are just corn starch with color and season," to think that starch meant corn starch.

If we're comparing fast food to what grandma made, though, I'd say that grandma made just as much colored starch as in a fast food meal, in the sense of frying starchy potatoes golden brown or baking white flour.

 

[casebro]

No, trust me, they aren't. It's mostly colored starch.

Chicken nuggets maybe.

 

[waywardsister]

Re: cholesterol/heart disease, you may be interested in browsing the thincs dot org website (The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics, and not a woo site).

Also, it's not a perfect 'tell' for cardiovascular risk. LDL, for example, is difficult to measure directly, so most often your LDL is calculated using something called the Friedewald Equation: LDL = Total cholesterol – HDL – TGL/5 (triglycerides divided by 5)

If your trig. levels are very high or low (over 400 mg/dl, under 100mg/dl) then the equation doesn't hold... for most people it works pretty well though.

What you also don't find out is your LDL particle size, which is an important factor. Large, fluffy LDL is pretty benign, whereas small, dense LDL is a risk factor. (I am simplifying here bc I can't for the life of me find the references to back this up... sorry) High HDL and low triglycerides generally means your LDL, regardless of the number, is of the large particle size and therefore not a risk factor for heart disease. If you're concerned, you can get your LDL calculated directly and find out your particle size.

Triglyceride levels give you a much better indication, as do C-reactive protein levels... of course, keep in mind that this lipid hypothesis is still just that, a hypothesis.

To be frank, as a health care worker, I would be pretty disturbed if you honestly thought that eating a mostly plant based, balanced diet of non processed foods is woo.

I get what you mean... but it doesn't work as advertised. My mostly plant-based, balanced diet of non-processed foods got me overweight and unhealthy. Why? Because other things were going on as well that I didn't know about (gluten sensitivity, etc) The organizations you mention all spout the same dietary advice for everyone: lotsa healthy whole grains, veggies, fruit, lower saturated fat and more veg-based fats, etc etc. Not everyone is suited for such an eating regime. Some of us, in fact, get bloody sick on it.

Back to heart disease: there has been evidence that blood glucose levels play a much higher part in overall heart disease problems than cholesterol. Google this paper: Relation Between Blood Glucose and Coronary Mortality Over 33 Years in the Whitehall Study (it's at care dot diabetes journals dot org)

 

[Dancing David]

Welcome waywardsister to the Forum!

ETA:
Since you can't post links yet:
http://www.thincs.org/