‘Deception in Cholesterol Research: Separating Truth from Profitable Fiction’
That's a pretty bold title, but it's the one used in the presentation below by David Diamond, Ph.D., a neuroscientist who became an expert in cholesterol because of his personal experience being diagnosed with extremely high triglycerides in his blood due to a genetic predisposition.
After several years during which he exercised vigorously and carefully followed the U.S. dietary guidelines, he found himself with even higher triglycerides and lower HDL-cholesterol (the so-called "good" cholesterol), and he was also 30 pounds overweight.
That's when his doctor recommended that he take a statin, because diet and exercise hadn't worked for him.
Dr. Diamond was open to this, but as he says in the video he figured that since he had a Ph.D. in Biology the least he could do is read about what a triglyceride is and what he should do about it.
As he started reading scientific papers about the physiology of triglycerides and came to the realization that it was the bread, potatoes and sugar he was eating that had been driving up his triglycerides.
He was struck with "this epiphany that I had been given the wrong information." The few papers he had read became a few thousand papers, and he became an expert on cholesterol research, and particularly the research related to drugs used to lower LDL cholesterol levels.
After recounting some history of how dietary guidelines were put in place in the 1970s and 1980s despite the lack of supporting evidence from randomized controlled trials, Dr. Diamond reviews several studies that showed an inverse relationship between cholesterol levels and mortality.
In other words, higher cholesterol levels made the patients less likely to die sooner.
Dr. Diamond then turns to the deceptive presentation of data on statins, which has led to hundreds of billions of dollars in pharmaceutical profits with little health benefit.
Here's just one example, from the trial that led to approval of Lipitor.
For study subjects who took a placebo or sugar pill, 97% did not have a heart attack or fatal heart disease.
Among those who took Lipitor, 98.1% didn't have one of these bad outcomes.
So the difference between the groups was 1.1%.
How did a 1.1% difference become 36% in the marketing?
This slide shows how they did it.
If 100 people took Lipitor, about 98 would not have a heart attack or die.
If 100 people did nothing (took a placebo), 97 would not have a heart attack or die.
Most people would say that's a 1% difference. And that's what it is in absolute terms.
But by using relative calculations, 1.1 is 36% of 3, and so Lipitor was marketed as reducing risk of heart attack by 36%.
This is a compelling presentation, and I hope you'll take time to watch it.
For more educational health topics check out HELPcare learning modules.
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