"They must really be desperate to come out with this one."
“They must really be desperate to come out with this one.”
That’s the opening line of an e-mail sent to me by HSI Panelist Allan Spreen, M.D., in response to this past Monday’s e-Alert “Guidelines? Good Grief!” (2/26/07) about the new American Heart Association guidelines for heart disease prevention in women.
Dr. Spreen adds: “The original Framingham report (gold standard even among the big shots) showed that CV risk started back UP if serum total cholesterol got below 160.”
As I’ve noted in previous e-Alerts, the Framingham study is the longest, most expensive, and largest sample-size heart disease study in history. And as Dr. Spreen has also previously noted, the Director of the Framingham Study – William Castelli, M.D., published this astonishing quote in the July 1992 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine: “At Framingham, we found that the people who ate the most saturated fat, the most cholesterol and the most calories weighed the least, were more physically active and had the lowest serum cholesterol levels.”
Dr. Spreen again: “After all the polyunsaturated fat hype and hoopla, and all the saturated fat fear and loathing for the last 10 years, that quote is a shocking eye-opener. If nothing else, you at least know not to blindly accept everything modern medicine has to tell you.”
