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I am trying to make sense of the following study, which a Facebook friend says "proves" that women with higher cholesterol live longer. (If you, Dr. McDougall or someone else has already addressed this study, please direct me to the link, as I can't find any. Thanks.)

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 1767.x/pdf

While waiting for Jeff to answer.

The Norwegian study used mmols/liter and the US uses mg/dl as the units of measurement. It appears that the cut off for the low cholesterol in the study was 5. Converted to the US number this would be about 195. The highest mortality was at numbers below 5 and above 7. Seven would be 273. So according to the Norwegian study, people with cholesterol between 195 and 273 had lower mortality rates than those above or below these numbers.

In this country, 195 would not be considered low. Just lower than the average maybe. Esselstyn and others would say that numbers below 150 were predictive of better health and less risk for heart disease. We have all heard that the lower the cholesterol, the less chance for cardiac disease. Yet that is not true generally for numbers above 150. So someone with a 180 cholesterol might be happy and feel safe because his number is not 230 but evidently the 180 is not protective.

In older people, a lower cholesterol could mean that they are harboring some illness which would cause lower cholesterol. Not that they die because they have lower cholesterol.

I would be interested in Jeff interpreting the charts. It looks to me like proportionately there were more deaths among those between 5 and 7 mmoles/L

Didn't it also say in the study that they did not account for statins? It seems to me if this were true then the onus is on statins and not on low numbers from a healthful diet.

Didi

Someone who can interpret statistical evidence looked at this and said that at first sight, the results look statistically marginal or insignificant. The error bars are bigger than the trends. Perhaps you can tell this to your friend.

He referred me to the Japanese Lipid Trial which has more significant results. What I found there is that in Japan there has been a decline in mortality but an increase in acute myocardial infarction. I do not know how to interpret this but it seems that the situation could be pretty much as it is in this country--modern medicine is good at preventing death from heart attacks but not in preventing heart attacks themselves (possibly in the case of overeating and bad diets.)

While reading, I also discovered that eating meat and fat actually reduced the rate of stroke. Before you get excited about this--the Japanese have very high rates of hemorrhagic strokes (possibly due to the very high salt content of their diets)and eating the SAD actually stiffens the arteries thus decreasing the risk of this particular kind of stroke. As a matter of fact, Fuhrman says if you are on his diet, you had better keep the salt level in your diet very low because it could result in this type of stroke.

On another post with a question about cholesterol, Jeff says that in some cases harboring some sort of illness could be the reason for low cholesterol. Healthy people in traditional cultures who eat their traditional plant based diets have low cholesterol numbers and are heart healthy. In people on the western diet, very low cholesterol numbers could be a sign that some illness is involved that causes low cholesterol.

The statistics guy seemed to think that that the Japanese Lipid Study which showed that people with lower cholesterol numbers and very high cholesterol numbers had higher mortality rates than those in between said this study seemed to be better done.

In the light of the excellent results in improving health of Esselstyn, McDougall, Pritikin, Fuhrman, Barnard etc. I will stick to a plant based (and for me lower salt) diet.

Didi

The study does not "prove" anything as it is only a analysis of the data from an epidemiological study. Such studies can not and never will "prove" anything. They only raise questions and show associations, or lack of them. In this one, which is only one attempt at analyzing the data, suggests that the associations between cholesterol and mortality, have some questions to them. As mentioned, there are other issues on why that may be including pre existence of other diseases, etc.

Also, cholesterol is only one risk factor and in and of itself, does not prove anything.

See here

viewtopic.php?f=22&t=21177&p=201762&hilit=jeff+cholesterol+association+150+heart#p201762

In Health
Jeff