Tag: cardiovascular disease
Why We Get Fat
Journalist Gary Taubes created a stir in 2007 with his impressive but daunting 640-page tome Good Calories, Bad Calories. Now he has written a shorter, more accessible book Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It to take his message to a wider audience. His basic thesis is that: The calories-in/calories-out model is wrong. Carbohydrates are the cause of obesity...
Red Meat: Is It Hazardous to Health?
Red meat consumption has been linked to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and several types of cancer (breast, colorectal, stomach, bladder, prostate, and lymphoma). There are plausible mechanisms: meat is a source of carcinogens, iron that may increase oxidative damage, and saturated fat. But correlation and plausibility are not enough to establish causation. Is red meat really dangerous? If so, how great is the...
Statins Are Better on JUPITER
Over 26 million Americans are taking statin drugs. Some people think they should be available over-the-counter without a prescription, and it has even been facetiously suggested that they should be added to our drinking water. The protective effect of statins in cardiovascular disease and in high-risk patients with high cholesterol levels is well established. But what about people with no heart disease...
Cholesterol Skeptics Strike Again
I’m really tired of arguing about cholesterol, but I feel obliged to stand up once more to defend science-based medicine from unfair calumny. Lewis Jones’s article “Cholesterol-shmesterol” in Skeptical Briefs (December 2007) included errors and misconceptions about cholesterol. It was a re-hash of the same kind of misinformation that is being spread by The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics (THINCS) and that...
The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics
There is an organization that calls itself The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics (THINCS). Its members “thinc” they are smarter than the average doctor. They “thinc” that cholesterol has nothing to do with cardiovascular disease and that we have been deluded into waging a “cholesterol campaign” for which the scientific evidence is non-existent. They say, “What we all oppose is that animal...