The “lipid hypothesis” has been a guiding principle in cardiovascular medicine for almost 100 years. Its premise is that eating saturated fats and cholesterol will increase both your blood cholesterol and rate of heart disease or atherosclerosis.
There is mounting evidence today that this whole scientific paradigm may not be as clear cut as it was once thought to be and may even be wrong. Despite the overabundance of literature about atherosclerosis, none has ever conclusively shown a direct correlation with diet, blood cholesterol levels, and Coronary heart disease (CHD).
In a recent article* by Marion Volk he states, “The lipid hypothesis of atherosclerosis is based on several invalidated premises, including fallacious national mortality statistics, biased age and subject selection, and methodological inaccuracies.” This is a bold statement considering the billions of dollars that have been spent in the past 25 years to prove the connection between diet and CHD.
Another issue to address is that millions of Americans are on cholesterol-lowering medications known as “statins.” This class of drug is the highest grossing medical drug in history in terms of sales, and yet is not without side-effects, some of which are lethal. Moreover, extensive research has now shown that the beneficial effects of the statins are not even related to its lowering of cholesterol levels. It now appears that the statins regulate our immune system away from attacking our blood vessels and may even act as a powerful vitamin D analogue that may activate the vitamin D receptor.
So if there’s no real evidence that we really know the cause of CHD and our medications have little effect on atherosclerosis, what really causes CHD?
Stay tuned for more!
*PMID #- 18072819