A widely reported and blogged about study conducted by the National Institutes of Health, published Monday in the American Medical Association’s Archives of Internal Medicine, found that among over a half million followed from 1995 to 2005, those who reported eating the most meat were more likely to die than those who reported eating the …
Do Blockages In Coronary Arteries Really Cause Heart Attacks?
Last weekend I was invited to speak at the Freedom Law School’s 2009 Health and Freedom Conference, which was an interesting mix of nutrition and politics, the latter portion largely devoted to opposition to the income tax, opposition to the Federal Reserve, and alternative theories about what happened on September 11, 2001. I don’t agree …
Wherefore Art Thy Protection, O HDL?
Hey everyone! It’s great to be back. I got way behind with things after slipping and falling and dislocating my shoulder at the end of January, but I hope to be back to blogging regularly now. Many of you may remember the drug torcetrapib, aimed at increasing HDL-cholesterol. It failed miserably, and killed a lot …
The Rockfeller Foundation’s Molecular Vision of Life — How the Aims of Eugenics, Social Control, and Human Engineering Shaped Molecular Biology and 20th Century Science
A Review of Lily E. Kay’s The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology (Oxford University Press, 1993) January 16, 2009 Reviewed by Chris Masterjohn Is the molecular biology we have inherited from the twentieth century merely a product of the scientific method, an inevitable set of conclusions spawned …
The Total-to-HDL Cholesterol Ratio — What Does It Mean?
Someone recently forwarded to me two references that a high-level New Zealand professor had used to support recommendations against saturated fat and coconut oil. The references did not support the conclusion at all, but they did provide some interesting insight about the importance of the total-to-HDL cholesterol ratio and its dietary implications. Both of the …
JUPITER Trial Emphasizes the Role of Oxidative Degeneration in Atherosclerosis
by Chris Masterjohn The most recent widely publicized trial using the cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, the JUPITER trial, has been enthusiastically hailed as a justification for the expansion of these expensive drugs from people with high cholesterol levels to those who have low-grade inflammation but normal cholesterol. The study hardly justifies this enthusiasm. It does, however, …