Debate: Cholesterol is not an important risk factor for heart disease page

[AndreSA]

This debate happened in December, but I only came across it now. Thought I'd share it.

On the 6th December 2012, Faculty of Health Sciences' Department of Medicine and the Chronic Disease Initiative in Africa presented a Centenary Academic debate with the following Topic:

"Cholesterol is not an important risk factor for heart disease and current dietary recommendations do more harm than good"

The proponent of the statement - Prof Tim Noakes
The opponent of the statement - Dr Jacques E Rossouw

Faculty of Health Sciences / Health Sciences Faculty Centenary / Past events

There is a YouTube playlist with the debate on the above link.

There is a also a related news article here: Experts caution against Noakes diet: Health24: Heart "Experts caution against Noakes diet", an excerpt:

Rossouw warns, “Noakes maintains that diabetics do not have higher blood cholesterol levels than other people, that half of all heart attacks occur in people with normal blood cholesterol, that glucose is the single most important predictor of risk and a high-fat diet reverses almost all coronary risk factors. Except for a very few close followers, the scientific evidence is clear and he’s flying against it. There is now absolute proof that high blood cholesterol is causal in heart disease.”

[EagleRiverDee]

If it's true that 50% of people that have heart attacks have normal lipid profiles, then I would say the science may be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time- they used to swear the earth was flat, also.

What if it's caused by inflammation caused by sugar, food additives and grains (among other things), rather than cholesterol? I think that the science is starting to lean that way personally, although I don't expect that it will get a lot of press.

[Cryptocode]

Thank you for the links. I enjoyed the speeches.

1. The first speaker singled out people who have difficulty processing carbs as those who gain most from HFLC diets.
2. They both agreed that processed carbs and meats were very bad.
3. The second speaker claimed to show that HFLC diets were good for loosing weight but should not be sustained beyond that.

Point 2, agreed by both, seems the best take-away. DO NOT eat processed foods.

I find it interesting that no matter what theory is proposed, one can always find a local, separate community of healthy people that ate in the opposite fashion. This leads me to think that it's not really the food, any food, that is the problem, rather that it's the added chemicals and processing. Unfortunately it's not possible for us to use ourselves for such a test because it seems to be impossible to get away entirely from such additives. They're even in our water and soil.

[magicmerl]

With the 'expert' in question being the debate opposition?

[twa2w]

....

Noakes maintains...... that half of all heart attacks occur in people with normal blood cholesterol,”

This statement is meaningless by itself
If you have 100 people and 90 of them have normal cholesterol and 10 have high cholesterol, then if 5 people from each group have heart attacks (meaning 50% of people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol) then having high cholesterol would be a bad thing BUT...
If you have 100 people and 90 of them have high cholesterol and 10 have normal cholesterol, then if 5 people from each group have heart attacks then having high cholesterol would appear to be a good thing.
You need to know more information to determine if this statment makes sense
Does anyone know how many people in a certain age group (say 55 to 65) have high/normal/low cholesterol and how many of each group have heart attacks?? Likely makes sense to break it down by sex and also type of cholesterol but that would be asking too much.

[Forgotmylastusername]

I think cholesterol levels throughout life are more important indicator than their levels at the time of the heart attack.

[peril]

This statement is meaningless by itself
If you have 100 people and 90 of them have normal cholesterol and 10 have high cholesterol, then if 5 people from each group have heart attacks (meaning 50% of people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol) then having high cholesterol would be a bad thing BUT...
If you have 100 people and 90 of them have high cholesterol and 10 have normal cholesterol, then if 5 people from each group have heart attacks then having high cholesterol would appear to be a good thing.
You need to know more information to determine if this statment makes sense
Does anyone know how many people in a certain age group (say 55 to 65) have high/normal/low cholesterol and how many of each group have heart attacks?? Likely makes sense to break it down by sex and also type of cholesterol but that would be asking too much.

Data from the Get With The Guidelines study (see my sig) show that people presenting to hospital with coronary events had on average lower cholesterol levels that the community. I think we can say that lipid levels are in general a very poor marker of CVD and that all of the testing of them is just a waste of time and money and is counterproductive to general health because of the amount of statin prescriptions that result. The best marker of CVD that has arisen from large scale research (Interheart study) is the ApoB/ApoA1 ratio, but this is rarely checked