The concern of cholesterol is one of the primary ones people show toward the heavily animal-based diet, that is the consequence of applying the Mosaic Method.
Now, in my view, proponents of animal-based diets don’t do the topic of cholesterol justice. I mostly just see it hand-waved away and attacked as a naïve belief in the establishment. I think that’s a serious shortcoming, not least because there’s solid evidence that cholesterol is life-prolonging and mortality-suppressive.
So today, for anyone out there new or old to animal-based diets and versed in scientific literature or not, I’ll break down results from one review on the topic of saturated fats and cholesterol.
To paint the picture for this post, I’ll be writing about the recent reanalysis of recovered data from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment. Researchers on the Minnesota Coronary Experiment had wilfully withheld data from their experiments and published results based on curtailed data, which thus fit the narrative of their sponsors. This much is obvious. The experiment ran from 1968 to 1973, but the withheld data has been recovered only in recent years.
This gave the fallacious diet-heart hypothesis, which the experiment was supposed to prove, enough time to fester and be accepted as dogma by the wider medical community. This diet-heart hypothesis is the basis for recommendations, which aim to lower the consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol and therewith the consumption of animal-derived food stuffs.
To properly appreciate the scale of this sham practiced by the researchers of the original study, the recent reanalysis by Ramsden et al. used completed analyses from the documents withheld from publication by the original researchers. These already completed analyses contained a randomised cohort of 9423 women and men between the ages of 20 and 97. And yes, you read that correctly. The original researchers hid that data after analysis. This can bear forward no other conclusion, than that they did it on purpose and out of malice, for the results didn’t match the results their sponsors wanted.
What were the results you ask?
Firstly: Higher serum cholesterol (i. e. amount of cholesterol in the blood, this includes both HDL and LDL, HDL usually understood as harmless and LDL as harmful) was associated clearly with lower all-cause mortality. The higher a patient's cholesterol was, the longer they lived.
That’s the exact opposite of the diet-heart hypothesis’s prediction.
Secondly: Patients were split into two groups: test vs. control. The control group was fed about a third of the amount of linoleic acid (a fatty acid often considered to be 'heart-healthy') fed to the test group and was fed about twice as much saturated fat than the test group. The diet-heart hypothesis would hence predict, that the control group lived significantly shorter. The facts, however, are, that the patients in the control group outlived the patients in the test group.
Again, this is the exact opposite of the prediction arising from the diet-heart hypothesis.
A higher blood cholesterol meant less death.
A higher intake of saturated fat meant less death.
A lower intake of linoleic acid meant less death.
Whilst these findings are remarkable, do remember, that they are correlative, not causative or mechanistic. Correlation is an indicator, not proof. Nonetheless, the publication by Ramsden et al. shows that the original publication about saturated fat being bad for health was maliciously false.
I think the fact, that the original researchers hid these findings is exceedingly troubling. It indeed shows the rampant corruption abound in the medical field.
Keep sceptical.
God bless,
Merlin
Ramsden, C.E., Zamora, D., Majchrzak-Hong, S.F., Faurot, K., Broste, S.K., Frantz, R.P., Davis, J.M., Ringel, A., Suchindran, C.M., and Hibbeln, J.R. (2016). Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968-73). The BMJ 353. 10.1136/bmj.i1246.
