Quote from killthesunshine:
Too many calories make you fat. BEEF is high in fat and calories. Saturated fat raises LDL. High LDL hardens the arteries.
You do the math
http://bacteriality.com/2008/01/26/cad/
Thereâs also no denying that cholesterol levels tend to rise in people with CAD. The question is why. Do cholesterol levels rise because of the fact that people are eating more of the substance, thus clogging their arteries? Or does cholesterol rise simply as a result of the disease process? Could it be that high cholesterol is simply a sign that a person is accumulating the L-form bacteria responsible for causing heart disease, just as low levels of the vitamin D metabolite 25-D in patients with most chronic diseases is not a sign of deficiency but rather an indication of L-form bacterial infection and immune dysfunction?
âWhether theyâre high or low, either our cholesterol levels directly increase mortality or theyâre the symptom of an underlying disorder that itself increases our risk of disease,â states Taubes. Although not enough research has been done on the subject at the moment to arrive at a definite answer, the results of numerous studies show that the latter may very well be the case.
Over the years, multiple large studies have shown that reducing cholesterol levels in patients at risk for CAD has little, if any, effect on mortality. In 2001, the Cochrane Collaboration published a systematic review that analyzed 27 of the most rigorous studies to test the ability of reduced or modified diets to prevent cardiovascular disease. Together the trials accounted for around 10,000 subjects followed for an average of three years each.
âThe review concluded that the diets, whether low fat or cholesterol lowering, had no effect on longevity and had no âsignificant effect on cardiovascular events.ââThe review concluded that the diets, whether low fat or cholesterol lowering, had no effect on longevity and had no âsignificant effect on cardiovascular events.â Five years later Cochrane published another review, which again examined multiple risk factors including lowering blood pressure and cholesterol in order to see if the substances affected heart disease and mortality. This time around they analyzed the results of 39 trials involving over 900,000 patients, and once again found that the âpooled effects suggest multiple risk factor intervention has no effect on mortality.â
Similarly, the results of the Framingham study, one of the largest studies on cardiovascular disease conducted to date, found that for both men and women over 50 years of age, life expectancy showed no association with cholesterol levels. The likelihood of suffering a fatal first heart attack was no less for those with a cholesterol level of 180 mg/dl than it was for those with 250. In fact, those Framingham residents whose cholesterol declined over the first 14 years of observation were more likely to die prematurely than those whose cholesterol remained the same or increased.
Then thereâs the MONitoring heart disease study or MONICA conduced by the World Health Organization in the 1970s which has been described as âfar and away the biggest international collaborative study of cardiovascular disease ever carried out.â By the late 1990s, MONICA had recorded 150,000 heart attacks and analyzed 180,000 risk factor records. The results? Heart disease mortality was declining worldwide but that decline was independent of cholesterol levels, blood pressure, or even smoking habits.
Many studies today continue to obtain the same results. Take. for example, a study conducted just a few months ago by researchers at the University of Oxford in Britain, whose study results indicated that lower cholesterol levels were not linked to reduced stroke deaths.[26] The team, which analyzed 61 previous studies involving almost 900,000 adults, conducted mostly in western Europe and North America, found no relationship between total cholesterol levels and risk of stroke death, especially at older ages and among people with higher blood pressures.
The article goes on the explain why statins remain effective against heart disease
(hint: it's not related to their ability to lower cholesterol)