Eggs will kill ya dead!

Today I happened to catch on the local news a story about how eggs are going to kill ya! They're going to kill ya dead, just like cigarette smoking! I just had to go find this study. Luckily the school I teach at subscribes to the journal it was in.

I have some huge problems with this study. The first is, it's not a random clinical trial. They only surveyed (yeah, nice waste of money) people coming to a vascular prevention clinic. Uh, is it just me, or do you think that people who are unhealthy, sick, and/or have a family history of illness are the most likely to go to a clinic like that?

Looking at Table 1 in the study, mean Triglycerides are high and so is BMI. So a lot of the participants are overweight. I wonder if there are any normal, healthy people in this survey? There's also a few diabetics thrown in for good measure. I didn't see where they controlled for that. But wait, because it gets better.

Table 1, click for larger version

Looking at Table 2, I almost fell out of my chair. From laughing. The people who ate the least eggs, <50 in "egg years", were the youngest. Their ages were 55.70 +/- 17.03 at first visit, so some of them were as young as 38.67 years. Now as the egg consumption goes up, so do the ages.  The people who ate the most eggs were much older. Their ages were 69.77 +/-11.38 at first visit. The youngest in the high consumption group was 58.39. That seems like some underhanded chicanery if you ask me!

Table 2, click for larger version

Of course the older people are going to have more instances of heart disease and thicker arteries too because of their age. They even state that in the article, that the older people have more plaque. Oh, but wait! The study says they "adjusted" for age. Why instead of poking around with numbers, actually study the same age groups? Or would that be because there wouldn't be any correlation? (Never mind causation.)

One could easily draw the conclusion that eggs have nothing to do with the thickness of the plaque, but with age. I could just as easily draw the conclusion that as you get older you eat more eggs. That's valid right? Or maybe the more eggs you eat, the older you get. Maybe if you never eat eggs you'll never get old? I'm screwed in that case!

It's interesting that they say that there were 2831 patients with data on egg yolk consumption, but only 1231 were used for various reasons. I'm sure those reasons were all good right, like not anything to do with throwing out data we didn't like, right? Right?

Also of interest, is that they found that fasting cholesterol, BMI, Triglycerides, HDL cholesterol and LDL cholesterol were not significant predictors of the thickness of plaque. Just egg yolks! 


In my humble opinion, considering that the sample was unbalanced, not random in the least and that more than half of the data they had access to was thrown out, that this amounts to someone with an agenda, with an axe to grind. Because if you really wanted to help people, and you really wanted to find out what was causing heart disease, you wouldn't have such poor research methods. However, if what you really want is to push an agenda, you won't care about data or ethics or anything else. You won't care if you kill people, so long as yours is the voice that is heard, so long as yours is the message that is received. Because diet is a religion to quite a few people out there, on all sides.

Just so you know, I'm my own experiment in this case. I eat at least three eggs almost every day. If I drop dead of heart disease, well, we won't know if it was the eggs that caused it, or my propensity for fountain diet cokes :P

The Cholesterol Lie: They'll never let it go

If you've read anything by Uffe Ravnskov, you'll know that cholesterol does not cause heart disease. So, when I read this article this evening, I thought, they'll never let it go will they?

Fat Alone, Not Where It Sits, May Be Key to Heart Problems

"That challenges the widely adopted notion that not all obesity is alike, with so-called apple-shaped people, who carry fat mainly in their midsections, facing a bigger risk for heart problems than those whose excess fat is carried on the hips or elsewhere.

Not so, say the researchers behind the new study. When it comes to obesity and heart disease, no excess fat is good fat, regardless of where it ends up, their analysis has found.

"Society has accepted the idea that if you carry more weight around the middle, your risk of heart disease is higher," said Dr. Emanuele Di Angelantonio, the study's co-author and a lecturer in medical screening at the University of Cambridge in England. "But actually this study shows that it doesn't matter where your fat is located. If you're overweight you're at risk, full stop."...

They also found that tracking a person's blood pressure and cholesterol levels, as well as monitoring their history of diabetes, appeared to be best way to assess heart disease risk. When such indicators were readily available, they noted, adding in BMI and waist measurement information did not improve risk diagnosis..."

So, basically they do mention that diabetes is a risk factor for heart disease. What causes diabetes? Elevated blood sugar over a prolonged period of time that causes insulin resistance. What causes elevated blood sugar? Eating carbohydrates. Bleeding simple, and yet they're like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. Forget testing for cholesterol. It's irrelevant! Test for blood glucose levels instead. That would give a better idea of whether someone is healthy or not.

If you are overweight, then you probably have elevated blood sugar and/or are insulin resistant. In fact, I'm not sure that it's possible to be overweight and NOT be insulin resistant. Hence why being obese is associated with cardiovascular disease, because every time your blood sugar is elevated, you are damaging your internal organs. Yes, you read that right. Every time you drink a Coca-Cola, every time you eat a piece of chocolate cake, you are DAMAGING YOUR INTERNAL ORGANS. In fact, even if you are not overweight and even if your insulin works well and it brings your blood sugar down quickly, it is probably never quick enough to completely avoid the damage that is done. Add this up over days and years, and you have cardiovascular disease. Not to mention all the other disease of civilization, like cancer. If you damage your cells repeatedly, they repair or regenerate themselves. If your cells are required to do this frequently, the cells regenerate quickly, leading to high cell turnover, leading eventually to a cell that doesn't regenerate in the right way, which leads to cancer.

The good thing is, your cells will repair themselves if given a chance. The bad news? You can never go back to eating the way you did if you want to remain healthy. You have to ask yourself what is more important. The slice of chocolate cake or your health? Death is inevitable. Health is your choice.

Eat Meat to Cut Stroke, Heart Disease Risk

Well, that wasn't the headline, but it should have been. An article I read today said that foods rich in potassium may cut the risk of heart disease and stroke. For those of you who don't know, potassium is what carries the electrical signals from your brain to your heart. I know this because low potassium, and because of that, sinus arrhythmia, run in my family.

When I ate the standard American diet, I used to get irregular heartbeat all the time. It's very upsetting, and once I wound up in the emergency room because I thought something was seriously wrong with my heart. They had me hooked up to an EKG and took blood and informed me that my potassium was low. The doctor told me to eat a banana.

Well, that's BS really. Bananas don't have much potassium in them. Potatoes have more, but they're not good for you either.

You know what has a lot of potassium in it? Meat. An 8oz steak has 850mg of potassium or about 25% of your recommended daily intake. Since eating low carb and trying to keep my food paleo friendly, I haven't had any problems with my potassium level, no sinus arrhythmia. Another thing that might help besides an increased intake in potassium, is that without elevated glucose and therefore elevated insulin levels my body may use the potassium more efficiently. I read somewhere that insulin interferes with the uptake of Vitamin C, and that raised glucose levels do as well (though which it is, is difficult to untangle since increased glucose leads to increased insulin). It stands to reason that glucose/insulin may interfere with other biological function too.

Of course, the press can't tell you to eat more meat, because that flies in the face of what they're advocating, which is a vegetarian (or better yet vegan) diet devoid of essential fatty and amino acids. Why are they advocating it? One could speculate, but what difference would it make?

Health Writers

Who do they get to write these articles? Ninth grade high school drop-outs? I'd say so, except I believe that could be an insult to ninth grade high school drop outs.

The latest article I've come across that is as full of garbage as a neolithic midden, is one from the Miami Herald. I think that a monkey, yes just one monkey, in a room full of type writers could compose better literature than this crap.

"[Trans-fats] act as saturated fat once inside the body...

This expert recommends limiting the consumption of these industry-made foods and to treat the trans fat in them as saturated, equivalent to that of red meat that is so harmful to cardiovascular health...

Researchers at the University of Colorado say that 'it is important to read the nutritional information on all products, including foods marked free of trans fat, since some manufacturers are replacing trans fat with tropical oils from sources such as coconuts and palms, which are also rich in saturated fat.'"

First of all, I doubt seriously that trans fats act anything like saturated fat once in the body. I'm an artist, not a biochemist, but I ain't stupid. First of all, trans fat and saturated fat have different chemical bonds. Trans fats do have something in common with saturated fat, in that they have had hydrogen atoms added to their structure. However, their structure is not the same.

Also, whereas saturated fat is natural and your body has use for it, trans fat is man-made and it's "molecules have unnatural shapes that are not recognized by enzymes such as cyclooxygenase and lipoxygenase." Those enzymes are used in the metabolism of fat. Your body cannot metabolize it and it does cellular damage. To imply that saturated fat, something we have been eating for millions of years, causes damage is to declare that evolution and mother nature are idiots. To paraphrase what Tom Naughton said in Fat Head, mother nature is not a dunce! The writers of these articles may be dunces, but evolution is not.

And they go on to malign red meat, and even coconut oil! It's absolute drivel, with nothing to back it up, masquerading as truth. And unwitting people believe it, because they read it in a major newspaper.

Diet Coke causes...

... what? Or another reason why news articles on science in this country are so lackluster.

News organizations are all over the latest finding that diet coke will kill you! I'm not about to say that diet coke is good for you by any stretch of the imagination. However, what I want to know is, how much did the corn industry pay them to write this (from MSNBC):

"The increased likelihood of vascular events remained even after Gardener and her colleagues accounted for risk factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. Pointing the finger more squarely at diet drinks, the researchers found no increased risk among people who drank regular soda." [emphasis mine]

Regular soda is full of High Fructose Corn Syrup. We all know that sugar causes inflammation, which in turn probably causes most cardiovascular disease.

What I want to know is, why they take a survey of 2500 people as proof of anything. A survey shows nothing. You can't control for variables. In fact, there's no control for variables because it's not a clinical trial. In other words, this isn't science. However, it's touted as being "scientific." Maybe the people who drank diet coke were like I used to be, consuming copious amounts of pastries and candy. The pastries and candy have nothing to do with their consumption of diet coke, but may be the cause of their cardiovascular disease.

The only way to find out if a substance is harmful or not, is to do a double blind clinical trial, where you have everything identical in two groups of people (or lab rats) and assign one group the product they want to test (the variable) and the other a placebo (the control).

At least the LA times isn't on the fear mongering band wagon and pointed out that correlation doesn't equal causation. I think most of these news stories are simply to scare everyone into eating in whatever manner the government wants us to eat.

Exercise and take your medicine

This morning on a local morning show, KENS5 Great Day SA, they had a cardiologist on the show. He said that Cardiovascular Disease was preventable, I'm assuming he meant the non-genetic type, and listed the usual risk factors for it. A risk factor in their terminology means that it's "associated with" not that it causes it. Something that most people I don't think quite understand and the "experts" don't usually differentiate between.

Cholesterol was of course included, even though it seems it has little to do with cardiovascular disease. Cholesterol is vital for cell function, and acts to repair damage, which may be why it was erroneously thought to cause heart disease. The line of reasoning goes like this: There are house fires, and there are always firemen at house fires, therefore firemen cause house fires. That of course is ridiculous... unless you're in a sci-fi book, but I digress. So that means that just because Cholesterol is present doesn't mean that it has anything to do with the cause. Correlation is not causation.

The most important thing about cardiovascular disease that we now know, the thing they left out on Great Day SA of course, was inflammation. Inflammation is probably the cause of cardiovascular disease, and yet, they didn't even mention it. Eating a low-carb or paleo diet reduces inflammation. Of course, the day they tell people they ought to eat like that will be the day that the eighth circle of hell has frozen over and Dante has come back to life and is singing poems about homocysteine.

Anyway, what do you suppose they said on the show that you ought to do to prevent heart disease? "Exercise and take your medicine." Yes, folks, that's right. Be sure to take all of that expensive, profit inducing medication. I didn't catch the cardiologists' name, but I assume he's been listening to drug reps.

Statins: A real money maker

Since it's February and it's heart month, it's the time of year that the pharmaceutical companies start promoting you being on medication of dubious benefit with possible dangerous side effects for the rest of your life. (Statins are cholesterol lowering drugs, like Lipitor and Crestor). Do they have to pay for this advertising? Hell no. They get "journalists" to publish the advertisment-as-news-story.

The first news article I read today about the untreated "epidemic of high cholesterol" was based on a study by the World Health Organization that found that a lot of people in developing countries had high cholesterol and were therefore at risk of heart attacks. They then cited this statistic:

"Cardiovascular disease kills more than 17 million people every year and WHO says 80 percent of these deaths occur in developing countries."

To which my morbid and sarcastic mind thought, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. (attributed to Stalin) So, this means that not that many people die of cardiovascular disease in the world. 17 million divided by the population of planet earth, which is about 7 billion at the moment means that .002% of people in the entire world die of cardiovascular disease every year according to the statistic given anyway. And 80% are in developing countries? What else is killing people?

Probably cancer from trying to lower our cholesterol, and in the case of developing countries, infectious disease. But if the pharmaceutical companies don't scare people into thinking there's an epidemic, no one will want to take the medication they're hawking.

Another news article was complaining about the fact that so many Americans aren't getting treated for high cholesterol.

"In all, as many as two out of three Americans with high levels of bad cholesterol do not have their problem under control, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

That means only about 23 million of the 71 million adults with worrisome bad cholesterol levels keep it in check, perhaps because many don't eat wisely, exercise or take prescribed medications, experts said."

Never mind that diet and exercise have nothing to do with cholesterol, that it's genetic, and on top of that, has very little, if anything to do with cardiovascular disease!

What these articles are really decrying, is the fact that not *everyone* is on a statin. They want to put children on them from what I've heard. Another article says anyone over the age of 20 should have their cholesterol checked.

"There has been a national health objective known as Healthy People 2010 that seeks to make at least 80 percent of people age 20 and older aware of their cholesterol level. Unfortunately, this goal is not being met by every state in the nation."

My father-in-law is a pharmacist, and when he started out way back in the day, very few people were on maintenance medication. Those with high blood pressure and diabetes were about the only ones, and there weren't very many of them. Now he said, everyone's on maintenance medication for the rest of their lives, in an attempt to fix what our broken diet has caused. They wind up with side effects from the first medication and wind up on more medication to treat the side effects from the first!

If you're worried about cardiovascular disease, first you need to read either Gary Taubes book "Good Calories, Bad Calories" or "Why We Get Fat And What to Do About It." Then you need to read Dr. Uffe Ravnskov's books on fat and cholesterol. His first book is out of print, but his second two can be bought from Amazon. If you want more reading, check out books on homocysteine by Dr. Kilmer McCully, MD. They also have a website with information on why cholesterol is not important and why statins are dangerous to your health.

If you have family members that are on statins, they should probably wean themselves off of them. If you want to know why, read books on statin side effects and how they cause normal biological functions to cease, by Dr. Duane Graveline, MD.

**Do not go off of medication cold turkey. Consult a doctor, or better yet a pharmacist first. Pharmacists know more about medications than doctors.