MYTH: High cholesterol is the cause of heart disease.
FACT: Cholesterol is a fairly insignificant player in heart disease.
MYTH: High cholesterol is a good predictor of heart attacks.
FACT: High cholesterol is a lousy predictor of heart attacks. Half the people admitted to hospitals with heart disease have normal cholesterol, and plenty of people with elevated cholesterol have perfectly healthy hearts.
MYTH: Lowering cholesterol with statin drugs will prolong your life.
FACT: There is no data showing statins have any impact on longevity.
MYTH: Statin drugs are perfectly safe.
FACT: Statin drugs have significant side effects, including loss of memory and libido, muscle pain and fatigue, and approximately 65 percent of doctors don't report those side effects, according to a 2007 study.
MYTH: Statin drugs are appropriate for men, women, children and the elderly.
FACT: The only group in which statins have been shown to have even a modest effect is in middle-aged men who've already had a heart attack. If you're not in that group, you've got no business on a statin drug.
MYTH: Saturated fat is dangerous.
FACT: Saturated fat is mostly neutral and may even have some health benefits. A recent peer-reviewed study has shown no association between saturated fat and heart disease.
MYTH: The higher your cholesterol, the shorter your lifespan.
FACT: In the Framingham Study, the people who actually lived the longest had the highest cholesterol.
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George Mann M D., Associate Professor of Bio-Chemistry at Vanderbilt University College of Medicine and a participating researcher in the Framingham Heart Study was one of the doubters of the benefit of the low cholesterol. The diet-heart idea is the “greatest scam” in the history of medicine, he said. “Researchers have held repeated press conferences bragging about cataclysmic breakthroughs which the study directors ‘claim shows that lowering cholesterol lowers the frequency of coronary disease. They have manipulated the data to reach the wrong conclusions”.Dr. Mann also declared that NIH managers“used Madison Avenue hype to sell this failed trial in the same way that the media people would sell an underarm deodorant”.
In 1992, forty-four years after the Framingham Study began, study director William Castelli, M.D.wrote in an editorial to the Archives of Internal Medicine. “In the Framingham Study, the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the person’s serum cholesterol...we found that people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, weighed the least, and were the most physically active”.
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Dr. John Yudkin, M.D., pointed out that there was a better and truer relationship between sugar consumption and heart disease. “There is a sizeable minority -of which I am one-that believes coronary disease is not largely due to fat in the die t”. Three decades later, Dr. George Mann arrived at the same conclusion and assembled a distinguished group of scientists and doctors to study the evidence that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, a concept he later called “the greatest health scam of the century”. Sugar is a far greater danger to your heart than fat ever was or will be. Most medical experts have tried and convicted the wrong culprit. Fat was innocent all the time. It’s sugar that’s the true culprit of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and many cancers.