We need a healthy dose of lifestyle medicine I recently saw a woman in her early sixties who was terrified because her GP had told her that her cholesterol was high. “Congratulations,” I said. “That will probably help you live longer.” She left smiling. It is little wonder she had been scared. For decades, governments have issued “low fat” dietary advice, while consumption of sugars and refined carbohydrates has soared. The result has been twin epidemics of type 2 diabetes and obesity – and a bloated medical bill to match. The time has come for an urgent overhaul. There is no association between so-called “bad cholesterol” and cardiovascular disease in the over-60s. In fact, if you consider all causes of death, the trend is for fewer deaths the higher the cholesterol. One explanation is that cholesterol is involved in immune system protection against potentially fatal gastrointestinal and respiratory infections and possibly even cancer. _So while there is a risk of higher cholesterol in the development of cardiovascular disease, official insistence on lowering it by drug or diet as an end in itself has been entirely misplaced. As Dr John Abramson from the Harvard School of Public Health points out, cholesterol is one of the most vital molecules “and to think you can radically pull this out of the body and not have consequences is ridiculous. It’s such bad science.” _ When doctors have to make clinical decisions based upon biased information corrupted by commercial influence, we cannot claim to practice ethical medicine. It's pretty sad some of these long standing theories that have now been discredited, still have such a strong grip on advice by doctors. The problem is that prescribed medication to treat these "conditions" is worth billions of Dollars annually. Pharmaceutical companies are not going to just drop all that profit. Each of us needs to do our own research and discuss it with our… http://bit.ly/2b8KNI6
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