Features
- Features:
- What Causes Heart Disease? Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig look at diet and environmental factors
- What Causes Heart Attacks?, Dr. Tom Cowan discusses a surprising new theory
- CoEnzyme Q10, John Williamson Cameron looks at CoQ10 for heart disease and related ailments
- Cholesterol, Friend or Foe? Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride on the folly of demonizing cholesterol
- The Benefits of High Cholesterol Uffe Ravanskov, MD, PhD, looks at the science
- The Dangers of Statin Drugs Fallon and Enig present the evidence
- Cholesterol and Stroke, Chris Masterjohn unravels the connection
- The Oiling of America How the phony cholesterol theory caused Americans to abandon nutritious whole foods
Departments
- President’s Message: A paradigm in disarray (see below)
- Letters: Letters to the Editor of Wise Traditions
- Caustic Commentary: Sally Fallon Morell and Mary Enig take on the Diet Dictocrats
- Know Your Fats: Mary Enig exposes the tragedy of cholesterol lowering and lowfat diets for children
- Soy Alert: Kaayla Daniel on soy and heart disease
President’s Message
This special reprint makes available articles on heart disease, cholesterol and cholesterol-lowering diets and drugs that have been published in Wise Traditions, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, since the Spring, 2001 issue.
The recent publication of results from the ENHANCE trial, which found no benefit from a drug combination that significantly lowered LDL-cholesterol but did not reduce plaque formation in the arteries nor confer a projected reduction in mortality, has received widespread attention in the media, including an article “Do Cholesterol Drugs Do Any Good?” in the January 17, 2008 issue of Business Week.
According to the article, many researchers now question the wisdom of prescribing cholesterol-lowering statin drugs to the general population—drugs the pharmaceutical industry believes should be taken by 40 million Americans. Growing doubt among the ranks of medical professionals has emerged with the accumulation of reports on serious side effects from cholesterol-lowering measures: muscle weakness, neuropathy, heart failure, memory loss, depression, fatigue, digestive disorders and cancer.
Results of the ENHANCE trial have led to the startling revelation that the studies on which the FDA based its approval of statin drugs looked only at surrogate outcomes, namely the lowering of LDL-cholesterol and raising of HDL-cholesterol, as a substitute for a clinically meaningful endpoint, namely the prevention of heart attacks. Up to this point, drugmakers have not had to show that statins actually save or extend the lives of patients.
What drugmakers have done for the past 30 years is create the impression that they do, often by exaggerating the benefits of their drugs using the parameter called “relative risk.” For example, a widely published advertisement for the statin drug Lipitor proclaims, “Lipitor reduces the risk of heart attack by 36 percent in patients with multiple risk factors for heart disease.” In the fi ne print, the reader learns that 3 percent of patients taking a placebo had a heart attack versus 2 percent of patients taking a Lipitor. The exaggerated fi gure of 36 percent is obtained by comparing the two numbers without reference to the sample size. You will read about other statistical tricks in this issue.
Researchers are also re-examining the promotion of soul-numbing lowfat diets. “Dietary fat recommendations. . . may have led to significant and harmful unintended consequences,” wrote the authors of a January 22, 2008 article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Official government guidelines have indeed misled Americans into abandoning nutritious whole foods such as butter, eggs and organ meats, foods universally recognized by traditional peoples as necessary for good health and optimal development of children.
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