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

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.

Exercising your way to health or death?

Forty years ago, your parents or grandparents would have told you that exercise was bad for you. It wears out your joints and puts unnecessary strain on your body. Currently the CDC suggests 300 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic activity each week plus weight training for "greater health benefits." That's three hundred minutes of you wearing your body out every week. And if you do more than that, they say "you'll gain even more health benefits."

Now, do you think they have specific data on this? Of course not. But they'll tell you it's a good idea anyway, and in fact tout it as a way to prevent heart disease. Wait for it though, because I found this, written for heart month, from the newspaper the Asheville Citizen-Times and I found it amusing in it's glorious contradiction:

"A key contributor to heart disease is lack of exercise — again, a factor that seems to affect busy women as they juggle jobs, kids, homes and community work and fail to make time for their own good health, Palmer said. And obesity is a critical factor, because “the more you weigh, the harder your heart has to work to give your body nutrients,” she said." [emphasis mine]

So, their first premise is that if you work your heart harder (by exercise) that you'll be healthier, but if your heart has to work harder because you're overweight or obese, that's bad. Can we say cognitive dissonance? Of course, being obese is associated with heart disease, but the primary reason for CHD isn't because your heart has to work harder, it's probably inflammation. However, I doubt having your heart work harder, either via strenuous exercise or by being obese, is very good for it.

I'm not saying that some activity isn't good, especially walking, but these people are advocating that an already busy person, who is not sitting at home watching television all day, should try to fit exercising into their already busy schedule. And that just creates more stress because they think it's a character flaw that they've gained weight and blame it on not getting to the gym. I think that makes about as much sense as telling a diabetic they should eat more fruit. Oh, wait. They do that too.

I tried to find some studies to either backup what they're saying or refute it, but it doesn't seem like any have really been done, at least with exercise alone. I would imagine to find out if exercise were beneficial, that you would take two very large groups of healthy men and women and have one group exercise and the other not. Then you'd find out if one group lived longer than the other. Most of the studies I've seen however, are in patients who already have CHD, are part of Statin drug trials, or part of a diet trial. There is no controlling for variables, they test multiple things at once, and that is not science. It's quackery is what it is.

There are multiple possibilities for why exercise could be beneficial, or not. One might be if carbohydrates cause heart disease by creating inflammation, and if you consume carbohydrates and exercise, you may burn off the carbohydrates before they can have an effect on your tissues, if you're a person who can burn them off. Most people who are obese have a problem metabolizing carbohydrates, so this probably wouldn't work for them. Or maybe if you never eat carbohydrates, you would have no need to exercise very much, and you would still live just as long as someone who ate carbohydrates and exercised. These are things that could be tested.

We should know so much more by now about what it is that is killing us, but we don't, and we won't. The food industry benefits from people eating their processed, expensive junk food and the pharmaceutical companies reap the benefits of people winding up on maintenance medication from such diets. To a lesser extent the fitness industry benefits from this too, as people try in vain to exercise to lose the weight they gain (exercise makes you hungry) by eating the "recommended diet". And the newspapers? They benefit by advertising dollars from the previous three industries to push what they want to be said.