Authorities like Dr. Dwight Lundell, Dr. Peter Attia, Gary Taubes, Dr. Ronald Krauss, and other doctors and journals cited above subscribe, in some fashion, to an alternative idea about the relationship between cholesterol and health that could be called “the benign cholesterol hypothesis.” What if these non-mainstream critics are right?

The implications are at once diverse and alarming:

• Is it possible that our collective fears over cholesterol levels – particularly LDL levels – have sent the whole medical establishment down a dubious pathway?
• Have modern dietary recommendations — enshrined most famously by the USDA’s Food Guide Pyramid — driven people to consume diets that are predisposing a substantial portion of the population to developing cardiovascular disease and dangerous amounts of small, gritty, sand-like VLDL particles?
• How can the average consumer — who lacks any background in science, medicine, nutrition, cardiology or lipidology — even begin to form an opinion about which authorities to trust and which to dismiss?
• Even if the advocates of the idea that “cholesterol is good (or at least benign)” are correct, their work simply begs deeper questions: what do we really know about how cardiovascular disease develops? What methods (dietary, pharmaceutical and otherwise) are really the most effective at preventing it and treating it?
• If the advocates of the “benevolent cholesterol hypothesis” are right — that is, if dietary cholesterol and fat do not cause heart disease — then what should the medical establishment do? Perhaps more research needs to focus on dietary causes of inflammation in the arteries or dietary causes of increased VLDL levels.
• What are the implications on a broader level for the medical community? What does the failure of the malevolent cholesterol hypothesis say about our research institutions and about preventative medicine in general?
• If a low fat, high carbohydrate, high vegetable oil diet is actually unhealthy for many people, as educated experts like Dr. Lundell and Gary Taubes argue, then what are people suppose to eat? What medications should they take and not take?

These are all profound questions. This short blog series obviously cannot address them in any detail. However, they speak to the scope and scale of the Lipitor disaster. Furthermore, they highlight the interconnectedness of modern medical concerns.

More and more research suggests that seemingly unrelated diseases — such as hypertension, end-stage renal disease, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, liver disease, stroke, dementia and cancer — have much more in common, at least in terms of dietary factors on their etiology, than most people appreciate.

For instance, a patient who develops insulin resistance stands at an elevated risk for developing all the aforementioned diseases. In addition, dietary and lifestyle factors appear to have a major role in the development, progression and potential treatment options for all those diseases. Finally, it is possible to find examples of many societies (both traditional and ancestral) in which all the above diseases are exceptionally uncommon. At the very least, this suggests that something about our modern diet/lifestyle is putting our health at risk in diverse ways.

Do you need insight into a potential Lipitor case? Call the Davis & Crump team now at 800-277-0300.