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April 25, 2005
Risk Factors for Heart Disease Should Not Be Confused with Causes of Heart Disease
To get a handle on how your dietary fat, your blood cholesterol and your risk of heart disease may be related, it is important to recognize the difference between risk factors and causes. Risk factors do not necessarily cause disease. This is a crucial difference, one that has often tripped up researchers who study dietary fat and heart disease.
In some of the countries where heart attacks have been shown to be more common people eat more fat, but they also eat more protein and sugar, they smoke more cigarettes, and they buy more DVD players. Calories from fat tend to be more expensive than calories from other nutrients, so the intake of animal fat becomes statistically associated with deaths from heart disease in affluent countries. This information simply tells you that heart disease is more common in affluent countries, but it does not prove one thing causes the other.
The truth is that population studies never prove cause and effect. They are useful because population studies can flag important information that we can investigate further. Yet if you chose to ignore the need to prove cause beyond mere association, you could construct a graph that would show that heart attacks, strokes, hypertension, obesity and diabetes are all caused by television sets because there is a direct statistical correlation between the numbers of TV’s per household and the rate of these diseases!
When scientists collect and analyze data, they refer factors that tend to occur at the same time as the disease does as risk factors. This conventional naming is somewhat misleading because risk factors don’t necessarily convey risks but simply associations. As in the above example, owning multiple TV’s could be cited as a risk factor for heart attacks, even though owning a TV will not increase your risk of having a heart attack.
There are several hundred risk factors for heart disease, including smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, lack of exercise, stress, male sex, income, race, age, and baldness to name a few. To move beyond risk factors to determine the cause of cardiovascular disease, scientists must carefully design and conduct experiments to prove a direct cause-and-effect relationship. This research has been done, and it does not show a link between the amount of dietary fat and heart disease.
To read more about this topic order Al Sears MD’s The Doctor’s Heart Cure today.
Posted by james at 6:37 AM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2005
A Modern Fallacy: No One has Ever Proved That High Cholesterol Causes Heart Disease
For the last 50 years, most researchers exploring the causes of heart disease focused on the idea that cardiovascular disease is linked to fat in the diet. This occurred in part because of incomplete population studies that incorrectly compared the modern western diet to poor Third World diets rather than to the natural diet of our pre-agrarian ancestors. Simply put, this hypothesis holds that a high-fat diet causes high blood cholesterol. High blood cholesterol, in turn, causes atherosclerosis or buildup of plaque in the arteries. Finally, this blockage of the arteries results in a heart attack. This is what your doctor has been telling you, right?
This theory seemed reasonable, except that the underlying presumption that Americans eat a higher fat diet than the historical norm turned out to be contradicted by both the archeological record and evidence from many different surviving hunter-gatherers. But there’s another big problem: Even if we presume that we did eat too much fat, no one has ever proved that this causes high cholesterol or that high blood cholesterol causes heart disease. In fact, since the 1950s, truly objective scientific studies repeatedly demonstrate the fallacy of this approach.
To read more about this topic order Al Sears MD’s The Doctor’s Heart Cure today.
Posted by james at 6:11 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2005
Predictor of Heart Disease? Serum Cholesterol Is Innocent!
Your cholesterol blood level can tell you useful information about your health and fitness, but it is not the great predictor of heart disease that conventional medicine leads us to believe. In fact, these numbers make very poor crystal balls, as I learned from experience.
Years ago, I began inheriting a group of patients who “dropped out” with other doctors because they refused to lower their cholesterol levels. These cantankerous old men didn’t trust doctors and weren’t willing to change their lifestyles in ways that seemed to contradict their instincts. Over the years, I noticed that these rebels with high cholesterol rarely had heart problems.
Recently, the University Hospital in Switzerland announced that they did not find a statistically significant link between cholesterol and coronary artery disease. Clearly, cholesterol isn’t the ultimate heart attack warning it was made out to be.
When you look past your preconceived notions about health and examine the evidence, the facts are clear: Nearly 75 percent of people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol levels. Turns out, the maverick patients were right not to take everything their doctors said as gospel. We now know that total blood cholesterol levels are very poor predictors of heart attack or stroke. Still, most doctors continue to turn to conventional cholesterol screening as the best predictor of heart attacks.
To read more about this topic order Al Sears MD’s The Doctor’s Heart Cure today.
Posted by james at 6:32 AM | Comments (0)
April 4, 2005
Build Muscle Mass with Effective Interval Workouts
Your age doesn't have to dictate your level of fitness or your muscle mass. Sure, if you don't challenge your muscles they will shrink. Without effective exercise, you lose about 3 pounds of muscle every decade after age 30, but you can maintain 100 percent of your youthful muscle mass if you do the right exercises.
Why bother? Because healthy muscle is essential. Your muscle mass is intimately connected to your metabolism in many ways:
Muscle helps you fight fatigue, sexual dysfunction, chronic illness, sagging skin, and bone fractures.
Muscles help increase your metabolic rate, which leaves you less susceptible to fat gain.
Muscles provide energy by storing glycogen.
Conditioned muscles strengthen the immune system, decreasing your risk of developing disease.
Muscles help maintain glucose balance.
Muscle allows you to perform the activities of daily living. Loss of muscle is a major cause of nursing home institutionalization among elderly Americans.
Many people fail to appreciate the continuing need for muscle. If you believe that once you’ve reached your 60s, 70s or beyond muscle is no longer important, think again! An ongoing study known as the Evergreen Project is studying the effects of muscle on the aging process. The study includes men and women between the ages of 65 and 94. The researchers have already found that those participants with greater muscle mass have better mental function, fewer chronic illnesses, and live longer.
To read more about this topic order Al Sears MD’s The Doctor’s Heart Cure today.
Posted by james at 4:43 AM | Comments (0)