Customer Reviews

The Cholesterol Conspiracy

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If you are willing to question the conventional information presented in the mainstream press concerning diet, fat and cholesterol this is your book. If you've wondered how the currently recommended diet, high in carbohydrates, many of which are basically the least nutritionally dense foods out there, could possibly be right. If you have wondered how cholesterol, a necessary precursor to most of our bodies' hormones and a sustance that our own liver manufacters in amounts of upwards of 2000 mg. a day could possibly be bad, read this book. But be patient, it is quiet ponderous. Extensively footnoted, it takes all of the so called studies of the last 40 years and carefully analyzes the data, presenting a case which the American people have not heard, that is, that dietary cholesterol and saturated fat are not the cause of coronary heart disease and that basically the American Heart Association and others have literally misled the public. Please,if you are open minded read this book. The truth deserves to be heard.

If you ever wondered why, how, and with what data the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute and the American Heart Association came up with their bizarre recommendations to first increase polyunsaturated fat consumption, then limit polyunsaturated fat consumption, but above all limit your ingestion of whole traditional meat and dairy products and healthful non-oxidizing saturated fat, you are in for a treat. Specifically, the data and the published conclusions don't match! Follow the money and learn about the billions of dollars current and projected in the statin and cholesterol-testing industries. Review the study data yourself. Learn why and how study results were deliberately misrepresented--to regular MD's and the people--and not to the "insiders". Learn how the mysterious "risk" statistic is calculated--hint: it is neither "probability" nor "likelihood". Learn about the obvious industry conflicts-of-interest held by oft-quoted "scientists". Start enjoying butter, steak, eggs (yolk and all), and whole milk again and throw out margarine, liquid vegetable oil, other non-foods, and high-carb (starch) diets. Cholesterol is just a number. The all cause death rate is higher for people with low cholesterol. Don't take statins.

A detailed review of the available evidence on the link between dietary cholesterol and health quoting more than 2000 references. The position of the book is that dietary cholesterol and saturated fat is only very weakly associated with coronary artery disease and that lowering cholesterol has no consistently observed effect on life expectancy. This may be because certain other illnesses including some cancers appear more commonly in persons with low cholesterol and polyunsaturated fats. This position is cogently and convincingly argued. I would strongly recommend "Cholesterol Conspiracy" to anyone interested in the subject. The book is aimed at a non medical audience and is a summary of the authors longer and even more heavily referenced two volume "critical review" of the subject which is aimed at professionals working in the field.

Recommended in _Know_Your_Fats_ by Mary Enig, this book is making its way through the entire extended family. We never really believed cholesterol and saturated fats were bad for us, and we're thrilled to find scientific (read Enig's book!) and historical evidence for what we felt all along: The unintuitive, non-traditional, and largely unnatural nutrition recommendations we've been brainwashed with from the time we were preschoolers coloring pictures of the "Food Pyramid", are the result of shoddy science, distortion of research, and conspiracy between government and the food industry.