High Cholesterol Is Good For You!

Training Bodybuilding
21

[quote]jsbrook wrote:

Do you know why that was? It was because many of those people were so depressed that they were nearly catatonic. The SSRIs intially improved the depression enough for them to act on suicidal impulses. Today, people like that are closely monitored in the adjustment period, and most come out much better with subtantial relieve and suicidal ideations and urges pass. Things are not as simple as people would have you think. This is the same. It may be an interesting data point. But we don’t really know what it means or its implications yet.[/quote]

Um, yeah we do know the implications actually, increased risk of suicide when taking an SSRI. Your reasoning for why they increase risk isn’t bad, but it’s wrong.

SSRIs actually increase the suicide rate in some individuals because they induce a state of acute dysphoria, something like extreme anxiety, termed akathasia by psychiatrists. This state is not confined to depressed patients, there are cases of people who were prescribed the drug for weight loss, as well as healthy volunteers, who became suicidal within a few days of taking the drug. I know because I have read descriptions of it by prominent psychiatrists, as well as experiencing it myself.

In any case, the investigation of the possible dangers of these drugs did not follow the conventional methodology of science. They had anomalous data that suggested SSRIs could be dangerous which they chose to ignore for over a decade, to the detriment of public safety. It was an obvious abuse of science in an effort to maximize profits by the pharmaceutical industry, and that’s why I used it as an example.

22

[quote]Whisper9999 wrote:
fyi: According to this link, homocysteine is a much better predictor than cholesterol.

Forget Cholesterol - it's really not relevant - Health Supreme [/quote]

Damn thats some stupid shit.

Homocysteine is ONE marker of CVD, same as cholesterol, and a giant bunch of other shit

Being male is one risk factor for heart disease, but for the most part we cannot alter this risk factor without surgery (hehe) What we are after is risk factors that when altered, influence disease risk.

Like cholesterol, when lowered reduces CVD risk. (and Uffe Ravnskov is a fringe retard)

Unfortunately at this stage lowering homocysteine (folic acid, or combo folic acid + b12) seems to do to things, Jack and Shit.

However the current trials are really secondary prevention, rather than primary prevention, so its still an explorative area.

23

HDL good
LDL bad

If your cholesterol is elevated due to a high HDL count, no problem.

If it’s high due to an elevated LDL then that’s when the problems arise.

24

[quote]CaptainLogic wrote:
jsbrook wrote:

Do you know why that was? It was because many of those people were so depressed that they were nearly catatonic. The SSRIs intially improved the depression enough for them to act on suicidal impulses.

Today, people like that are closely monitored in the adjustment period, and most come out much better with subtantial relieve and suicidal ideations and urges pass. Things are not as simple as people would have you think. This is the same. It may be an interesting data point. But we don’t really know what it means or its implications yet.

Um, yeah we do know the implications actually, increased risk of suicide when taking an SSRI. Your reasoning for why they increase risk isn’t bad, but it’s wrong.

SSRIs actually increase the suicide rate in some individuals because they induce a state of acute dysphoria, something like extreme anxiety, termed akathasia by psychiatrists.

This state is not confined to depressed patients, there are cases of people who were prescribed the drug for weight loss, as well as healthy volunteers, who became suicidal within a few days of taking the drug. I know because I have read descriptions of it by prominent psychiatrists, as well as experiencing it myself.

In any case, the investigation of the possible dangers of these drugs did not follow the conventional methodology of science. They had anomalous data that suggested SSRIs could be dangerous which they chose to ignore for over a decade, to the detriment of public safety. It was an obvious abuse of science in an effort to maximize profits by the pharmaceutical industry, and that’s why I used it as an example.[/quote]

Captain Logic,

My compliments on an intelligient and thoughtful post. Oh, wait, it’s beneath your dignity to read something I’ve written. Sorry, ignore my response.

25

[quote]Headhunter wrote:
Captain Logic,

My compliments on an intelligient and thoughtful post. Oh, wait, it’s beneath your dignity to read something I’ve written. Sorry, ignore my response.

[/quote]

Haha, I just lied to make you feel bad actually.

Apologies for being such a dick on various other threads and I hope you continue feeling better on the new HRT.

26

[quote]cycomiko wrote:
Whisper9999 wrote:

Like cholesterol, when lowered reduces CVD risk. (and Uffe Ravnskov is a fringe retard)
[/quote]

Yes, but the point of several of the posts above is the following:

even if lowering cholesterol does slightly reduces CVD risk - and personally I don’t think it does any such thing in people who eat a decent diet - it raises mortality in other key areas. The research shows it’s a net wash or worse which challenges the whole lipid hypothesis.

Imo this is one of those interesting cases where the scientific community lags the actual research simply because a critical mass has been reached and noone likes to violate the inviolate - not even research scientists at times…

27

[quote]Whisper9999 wrote:
Mercola has a great article. He explains that the statins actually whack the body’s production of CoQ10! No wonder you become vulnerable to infection!

Lots of other interesting stuff in there as well.

[/quote]

That’s only one damaging things that statins do!

28

[quote]vroom wrote:
It seems to me that there are confounding issues.

If so, cholesterol would obviously be a stand in or co-factor with something else.

Perhaps it is dangerous if you are sedentary. Perhaps it is increased in conjuction with consumption of something that does relate to increased risk. For example, perhaps refined carbohydrates in conjuction with high cholesterol would be more of a problem than high cholesterol alone.

Perhaps high cholesterol and obesity or sendentary living?

Ever since the Atkins fad, I’ve been a bit suspicious of the cholesterol and lipids claims out there. Hell, you can live off protein, fats and supplemental fiber alone, and if you are overweight you are likely to lose weight and have a “healthy” blood profile by doing so.

More study is certainly needed.[/quote]

Excellent post vroom!

Actually there is a great deal of evidence which demonstrates that people who are fit and train a minimum of three times per week can have high cholesterol with zero health problems.

It seems that the inflamation in the arteries which cause the cholesterol to stick is removed with as little as two hours of exercise per week!

But…drug companies can’t sell that.

Cholesterol in and of itself will not harm you. In fact as the article points out it is good for you for many reasons.

29

Zeb,

You deserve major props for posting this thread. Thank you!!!

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I think it’s always important to question “established beliefs” and to look critically at the data and how a conclussion was reached, but it is also important, when interpreting some studies, to have the background knowledge to be able to appropriately analyze the data and conclussions, i.e. to know what questions to ask and to have an eye for what looks suspicious. I certainly understand ZEB’s concerns regrading statins, particularly in his 80 year old father.

However, this paper misapplies statistics across patient populations in such a way and ignores significant data and studies to reinforce the authors own personal beliefs, which while interesting, do not convey they whole truth. There was a small book published years ago called “How to Lie with Statistics” by Darrell Huff. Read it and reread the paper.

31

[quote]thebigdogbarks wrote:
I think it’s always important to question “established beliefs” and to look critically at the data and how a conclussion was reached, but it is also important, when interpreting some studies, to have the background knowledge to be able to appropriately analyze the data and conclussions, i.e. to know what questions to ask and to have an eye for what looks suspicious. I certainly understand ZEB’s concerns regrading statins, particularly in his 80 year old father.

However, this paper misapplies statistics across patient populations in such a way and ignores significant data and studies to reinforce the authors own personal beliefs, which while interesting, do not convey they whole truth. There was a small book published years ago called “How to Lie with Statistics” by Darrell Huff. Read it and reread the paper. [/quote]

While I don’t doubt the veracity of your post, I don’t think the author is stretching the truth.

Please cite one study regarding the dangers of cholesterol that was not performed by a drug company, or by a paid affiliate!

32

Regarding medication:

If you removed all of the overweight; the alcoholics; the smokers; the junk food aholics (who are not always overwight) and the inactive, how much medication do you think would actually be needed?

My point is about 90% of all meds would be obsolete if people, at every age did the following:

  1. Kept their weight at a healthy level

  2. Ate only “natural” foods.

  3. Trained seriously four times per week.

My point is that just about every medication (there are exceptions) prescribed by doctors would not be needed if the doctor first had the balls to tell the patient to stop killing themselves with whatever bad habit that they are practicing.

Meds will never replace a healthy lifestyle, and that seems to be what the drug companies don’t want you to think about.

33

[quote]ZEB wrote:

Actually there is a great deal of evidence which demonstrates that people who are fit and train a minimum of three times per week can have high cholesterol with zero health problems.
[/quote]

I would be VERY interested in this. If you have any links/studies, please let me know. I’ve never read anythign on this…

34

Hypercholesterolemia is the health issue of the 21st century. It is actually an invented disease, a ?problem? that emerged when health professionals learned how to measure cholesterol levels in the blood. High cholesterol exhibits no outward signs?unlike other conditions of the blood, such as diabetes or anemia, diseases that manifest telltale symptoms like thirst or weakness?hypercholesterolemia requires the services of a physician to detect its presence. Many people who feel perfectly healthy suffer from high cholesterol?in fact, feeling good is actually a symptom of high cholesterol!

Doctors who treat this new disease must first convince their patients that they are sick and need to take one or more expensive drugs for the rest of their lives, drugs that require regular checkups and blood tests. But such doctors do not work in a vacuum?their efforts to convert healthy people into patients are bolstered by the full weight of the US government, the media and the medical establishment, agencies that have worked in concert to disseminate the cholesterol dogma and convince the population that high cholesterol is the forerunner of heart disease and possibly other diseases as well.

Who suffers from hypercholesterolemia? Peruse the medical literature of 25 or 30 years ago and you?ll get the following answer: any middle-aged man whose cholesterol is over 240 with other risk factors, such as smoking or overweight. After the Cholesterol Consensus Conference in 1984, the parameters changed; anyone (male or female) with cholesterol over 200 could receive the dreaded diagnosis and a prescription for pills. Recently that number has been moved down to 180. If you have had a heart attack, you get to take cholesterol-lowering medicines even if your cholesterol is already very low?after all, you have committed the sin of having a heart attack so your cholesterol must therefore be too high. The penance is a lifetime of cholesterol-lowering medications along with a boring lowfat diet. But why wait until you have a heart attack? Since we all labor under the stigma of original sin, we are all candidates for treatment. Current edicts stipulate cholesterol testing and treatment for young adults and even children.

from the article: http://www.westonaprice.org/moderndiseases/statin.html

35

The whole fucking story:

http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/oiling.html

This is a long read and quite incredible. Here’s the 1st paragraph:

Scientists of the period were grappling with a new threat to public health?a steep rise in heart disease. While turn-of-the-century mortality statistics are unreliable, they consistently indicate that heart disease caused no more than ten percent of all deaths, considerably less than infectious diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. By 1950, coronary heart disease, or CHD, was the leading source of mortality in the United States, causing more than 30% of all deaths. The greatest increase came under the rubric of myocardial infarction (MI)?a massive blood clot leading to obstruction of a coronary artery and consequent death to the heart muscle. MI was almost nonexistent in 1910 and caused no more than three thousand deaths per year in 1930. By 1960, there were at least 500,000 MI deaths per year in the US. What life-style changes had caused this increase?

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Also if this is true, it really makes me wonder why cholesterol usually drops significantly when people adopt a healthy lifestyle and start lifting, doing appropriate cario, and eating right, and other indicators of health (bodyfat, blood-pressure, etc…) improve. You would think the people with the healthiest diets and who are most fit by other measures would have high cholesterol. But that is rarely the case.

37

[quote]T-Rav wrote:
The whole fucking story:

http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/oiling.html

This is a long read and quite incredible. Here’s the 1st paragraph:

Scientists of the period were grappling with a new threat to public health?a steep rise in heart disease. While turn-of-the-century mortality statistics are unreliable, they consistently indicate that heart disease caused no more than ten percent of all deaths, considerably less than infectious diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. By 1950, coronary heart disease, or CHD, was the leading source of mortality in the United States, causing more than 30% of all deaths. The greatest increase came under the rubric of myocardial infarction (MI)?a massive blood clot leading to obstruction of a coronary artery and consequent death to the heart muscle. MI was almost nonexistent in 1910 and caused no more than three thousand deaths per year in 1930. By 1960, there were at least 500,000 MI deaths per year in the US. What life-style changes had caused this increase?

[/quote]

To a large degree wehave that answer. Increase in obesity, decrease in activity, increase in nutrionless processed foods. Besides, those people that were previously dying from pneumonia and tuberculosis were actually living long enough to get MI and other heart-related problems.

38

Maybe the issue/lesson is not that high cholesterol is good. But that lowering it through ARTICFICIAL means isn’t particularly beneficial.

39

[quote]buffalokilla wrote:
jsbrook wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
I remember reading an expose’ where a drug company CEO was reported to have said, “We’ve got the drug. Now let’s create a market for it.”

I think the culprit in heart disease and the like is vegetable oils. Our consumption of meat and butter has actually gone down in the past 100 years, but oils has shot through the roof.

I think tasty cakes and fried twinkies, white bread, and extra-value meals, and other foods not found in nature are the more likely culprits.

Ultra-refined, spoiled oils that are sold in supermarkets and used commercially are on the same level as tasty cakes and ho ho’s (which also contain them, but aside from that). They’re literally toxic. Udo Erasmus compared consuming refined oils to smoking in terms of health damage, and I don’t think that’s unfair from what I’ve read.

-Dan[/quote]

What are ultra-refined oils? You mean like hydrogenated oils? In that case I would agree.

40

[quote]jsbrook wrote:
Also if this is true, it really makes me wonder why cholesterol usually drops significantly when people adopt a healthy lifestyle and start lifting, doing appropriate cario, and eating right, and other indicators of health (bodyfat, blood-pressure, etc…) improve. You would think the people with the healthiest diets and who are most fit by other measures would have high cholesterol. But that is rarely the case.[/quote]

It has to do with far more than just fitness (while that is important).

The liver creates about 80% of all cholesterol found in the blood. You can avoid consuming saturated fat which creates cholesterol in your body and still have high cholesterol.

Why do some peoples liver make more cholesterol than others?

That is the $64,000 question. However, it does have something to do with health and health has quite a lot to do with how you live. But there is more to the picture, far more.