David Diamond on cholesterol

cholesterol
ldl
(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #1

Continuing the discussion from I'm not stalling…I haven't even budged to start with (Haven't lost either pounds or inches!):

The dreaded topic of LDL came up in the other thread, and I have just been bingeing on David Diamond videos. Diamond is a neurophysiologist specializing in brain chemistry and the formation of memory. In particular, he studies ways to help veterans with PTSD.

Having been confronted with his risk for heart disease about ten years ago, he delved into the research promoting statins, and discovered that many of the studies are of poor quality, and some are even deceptive. He has a lecture examining those studies and showing the statistical shenanigans used to make the effect of statins seem more significant than it really is.

More to the point, he also has a lecture on LDL as a marker for heart disease risk, and I thought I would link to it in rebuttal to those who are convinced that LDL is important to worry about. He has an interesting theory about what the real cause of heart disease is (hint: it ain’t cholesterol!).


(I have replaced the old link with a better-quality version on YouTube.)
(Ron) #2

I have to wonder why we should trust past studies supporting the LDL dangers when the reason we are all here is because we have learned that past science has been so wrong about so many things that have damaged our bodies up until now? :thinking::face_with_raised_eyebrow:

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #3

I know, right? The original link to cholesterol and heart disease was a study done a century ago on rabbits, which are obligate herbivores and don’t tolerate cholesterol in the first place. And then of course Ancel Keys was sure that saturated fat causes heard disease, though he had to fudge the data on his original study to prove it, and no subsequent study—not even his own Minnesota Coronary Study—backed him up. And as if that weren’t enough, Stephen Phinney says it’s been known for years that over half the people with familial hyperdislipidemia never develop heart disease, so it obviously ain’t the cholesterol that is killing the rest!

More David Diamond:

(Adam Kirby) #4

Dave Feldman’s LDL challenge has yet to be answered. I’m surprised Peter Attia hasn’t stepped up here, he’s a smart guy and thinks LDL is a problem. Ok, let’s see a study that meets this criteria.

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(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #5

I’d love to get Diamond and Dr. Attia together, so I could listen to them talk about this.

BTW, am I the only person who finds it surprising that a neurophysiologist and a surgeon know more about nutrition than most nutritionists? :bacon:

(Keto Victory) #6

Amen x2!

#7

Thank you for posting this. Very interesting. Just had some labs and my Dr. isn’t happy with my cholesterol. She made me feel like I could drop dead at any minute.

(Alec) #8

It’s more likely that you’ll be dropping dead of the stress she just caused you. She’s stuck in old thinking and clearly isn’t keeping up.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #9

@Blue1 You might want to make your doctor watch the video in my OP. Around 24:00 or so, Diamond discusses familial hypercholesterolemia, people with a genetic predisposition to cholesterol levels that would probably make your doctor faint. About half of them live perfectly normal lives, with nary a sign of cardiovascular disease. The other half tend to die young of heart disease. Now the fact that half the people with this condition never develop heart disease and live to ripe old ages is proof that it is not cholesterol that is killing off their relatives. The is the conclusion of researchers who have studied this population, in research papers going back to the 1960’s.

Diamond’s explanation of what does the damage is that the half of the FH population that has cardiovascular disease and gets heart attacks is that they have genetic mutations that make their blood likelier to clot, and these clots are what cause the heart attacks and other problems.

#10

Hi Paul, can I ask, do you know if there are tests available that can differentiate those with disorders of blood clotting from those without in people with FH?

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #11

Not off hand. But you could send a sample off to one of those genetic sequencing services, such as 23andme, and even if that service can’t tell you what you want to know, my understanding from posts on these forums is that there are Web sites to which you can upload your genome for a fuller analysis.

A quick search on PubMed shows a few genes to look for. This one mentions differences in fribrinogen and factor VIII as being involved with heart disease in people with FH:

This study cites a prothrombin polymorphism as a risk factor:

This study rules out factor VII as a risk: