Articles - Ronald Modra´s Legacy

Cholesterol

(According to Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, MD. PHD.)

Book Review by RMR

Not only is this a myth, deliberately designed to mislead us, but it has allowed the drug industry to make a fortune from cholesterol lowering drugs. Foods which only aggravated the situation and if anything promoted bad health, are now also able to proliferate the market, causing confusion everywhere.

Framingham is a small town near Boston, Massachusetts. Since the early 1950´s a large number of Framingham citizens has taken part in a study surveying all factors that may or may not play a role in the development of Atherosclerosis and heart disease. The citizens have had their cholesterol measured frequently. (1) Referred to as the MRFIT
Study or Framingham Study.

After 5 years the researchers made an observation that became one of the cornerstones for establishing the diet-heart disease and cholesterol idea. The margarine industry received a gigantic lift off from this study. They divided the participants into 3 groups. One with low cholesterol readings, one with medium levels and the third with high levels. It was observed that in the high level group more people died from a heart attack than in the other 2 groups.

So they announced that a high level of cholesterol predicted a greater risk of heart attack. A massive propaganda machine swung into action and across the globe it was blared. High cholesterol is a risk factor for Covance’s heart disease.

Then the games began. For it was obviously a necessity of some great cause that cholesterol was to become a villain and we now have discovered why. To get the result they wanted the 3 groups participants were divided into 10 groups of equal size so they could manipulate the results. The first tenth were of the lowest cholesterol readings and the final tenth were of the most extreme highest readings. (2)
By doing it this way the result was that 4 times more men died of heart attacks in the tenth group than in the first group. Many of these in the tenth group were people with a chronic cholesterol disease, often hereditary who make too much cholesterol. It is known that many of those in this tenth group belong to a known disease group called “Familial Hyper-Cholesterolemia” and they often have this disease in early life. It is not caused by diet. All of these sufferers were in the tenth group.

Four times as many men dying in this tenth segment allowed them to advertise that the risk of dying from a heart attack with cholesterol over 265, was over 400% higher than if your cholesterol was below 170. That was where those figures came from. (They divided 1.3 by 0.3 to get a convenient result - see below)

Note that we were comparing people with an inborn metabolic disease in the tenth group with normal people in the 9 other groups. Dr. Uffe Ravnskov estimates that up to 10% of this group had this cholesterol disease so just how did it affect the research figures.
We need to know the total number who died from heart attack in the entire investigation. There were over 360.000 men investigated and 2.258 or 0,6% died. 99,4% die from heart attack, that´s 357.742, but only 0,3% died in the lowest segment.
1,3% of those with the highest-cholesterol died including the “Familial Hyper-Cholesterolemia”. That means 98,7% did not die of heart attack. So now we have 3 real figures.

HIGH AVERAGE LOW
1,3 % 0,6% 0,3%

Among those with the lowest readings of cholesterol 99,7% did not die of heart attacks. So we have the highest cholesterol with 98,7% survival (including the diseased).

99,4% overall did not have a heart attack during this investigation. Remember that the researchers blasted the figure of 400% or more to all corners of the earth, actually they said. People with high cholesterol are 413% more likely to have a heart attack. This was a perfect example of how the pharmaceutical industry reaches its agenda. There are more ways than one that statistics can be manipulated to create the illusion of a big margin when in fact there is an infinitesimal small margin. Allowing for the fact that the highest segment of the 10 groups included a large number of metabolically incapacitated individuals, a factor that was hidden, we have to now realize that an incredibly big expensive investigation was falsified deliberately. Nobody either public or doctors who were to become the sales team for cholesterol lowering drugs ever became aware until very recently 50 years later that this highly publicized event was part of a marketing stunt for drugs and special light foods of low nutritional value.

Building the drug and foodless food industry was well thought out, well financed plan, built on nothing more than false science and manipulation of people. We are so trusting, but after the Vioxx and Statins scare and many more that are now happening it would be wise that we use quite a large amount of skepticism when viewing areas that have no real effective controls over them.
In every city every day we dump tons of chemicals to medicate your food and water. You are so trusting. I sometimes wonder if even one person notices, chuckle!

Lowest Tenth 0,3 divided into
highest tenth 1,3 = 413%

MRFIT CHOLESTEROL STUDY SAID TO BE AN EXACT DATABASE BUT IT WASN´T
Much of the data presented in this massive MRFIT report was carelessly presented in spite of being advertised as an exact report and using big names to give it the look of a respectable exercise. Professor Lars Werko, then the director of Swedish Council of Technology Assessment in Health Care, an independent governmental agency known for its integrity, found 34 papers reporting the relationship between serum cholesterol and mortality.

He noticed that they were all very similar. The question arose, was it really necessary to publish all those identical reports on the same subject and trial. Have the editors judged it on original scientific value and want them all published? Or is it to get a status result for all the research groups who authored these manuscripts on the cholesterol diet issue and is it to get prestige into the reports even when science is missing or shoddy. The data was extremely repetitive, but even worse it was inconsistent and highly questionable. When the National Institute of Health is involved or their name is being used, also National Heart and Blood Institute, etc, it is always hoped that people will not look at the quality of the report!

THE PEOPLE WILL NEVER GUESS ANYTHING IS WRONG
The number of participants reported varied by 45.000 from 316.000 to 361.000. Professor Werko was also critical of the studies reporting how many had died and why! It was, unlikely that all 361.000 were tracked or could have been tracked after 6 to 12 years.

How the causes of death had been established was not reported but it must be that most of the reported causes were based on death certificates written by their general practitioners. Not only is the information from death certificates highly unreliable but in these investigations up to 20% were actually missing.

I DON´T SEE ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT
During the initial screening it came to light that one of the participating centers had falsified its data to increase the number of participants in the trial, possibly to obtain more financial support from the national Institutes of Health (NIH). This embarrassing matter received too little attention in reports and the study authors forgot to mention that this type of problem is not so rare that it could not have happened in other centers as well. All discussion of the issue of quality control was carefully avoided, wrote Professor Werko. In his opinion the authors were more interested in the mathematical treatment of large figures than in the quality of the numbers or how they are obtained.
In spite of all these irregularities and much more, the MRFIT or Framingham Study is still referred to as the most exact database ever compiled. If it is and that is not entirely out of the question God help us.

Refs: Pages 51-52, The cholesterol myths Uffe Ravnskov
Werko L., Analysis of the MRFIT screeners: a methodological study. Journal of Internal Medicine, 237, 507-518, 1995.