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A comment on Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk?.

Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by npsimons on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @03:13PM (#8725371)
I was afraid this would be one of those pieces that the morbidly obese would cite to say that "preventive medicine" in the form of exercise or just weight loss in general is dangerous, but it's actually a fairly good piece. The statin screening especially hit home for me as I've been threatened with being put on statins myself. I just love how the screening calculator was most likely written by the drug companies (no conflict of interest there) and didn't take into account physical activity level, diet, or even weight! Like the article's author, I would steadfastly refuse to be put on a medication that did very little to decrease my susceptibility to a disease, while hampering more natural ways to prevent the disease (ie, less exercise due to muscle pain from statins).
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Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by debacle on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @03:36PM (#8725538)
The statin stuff is just bad science. Statins don't have the effect on cholesterol that they are purported to have. They are the product of a time when we still thought that the fat you eat makes you fat. We're beyond that point, but statins are absolutely huge in terms of money.
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Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by gmarx on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @04:49PM (#8726037)
Look at the literature and try to find convincing evidence that high cholesterol causes heart disease. I've never seen it. They keep looking for new fractions of cholesterol that will finally show significance but they never question their Bayesian prior assumption. Many drugs lower cholesterol and show now reduction in mortality. Statins (last I read) were alone in this. The logical conclusion is that statins do not achieve this effect through cholesterol reduction.
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Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by IndianAstronaut on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @05:46PM (#8726380)
This makes me wonder if eggs should be considered a health food instead of a health hazard. Anecdotal, but if I eat 4 eggs(~300) calories, I am full for the same period of time as eating ~600-1000 calories of something else.

But considering the saturated fat and cholesterol in eggs, they have been considered harmful. Are they?

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Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by Evgeny on Wednesday December 10, 2014 @08:37AM (#8729052)
But considering the saturated fat and cholesterol in eggs, they have been considered harmful. Are they?

No, they are not. There's plenty written on both sides of the argument, though.

Just today came across a surprisingly well-referenced article on nutrition myths. It covers cholesterol, saturated fat and eggs (in top position) among others.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-11-most-destructive-nutri...

Here is another well-referenced source

http://examine.com/faq/are-eggs-healthy.html

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by mindcrime on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @10:24PM (#8727522)
But considering the saturated fat and cholesterol in eggs, they have been considered harmful. Are they?

Good question. The author of Living Low Carb[1] argues that it's not "saturated fat" in general that's bad for you, but rather more specifically "trans-saturated fat", or saturated fat consumed along with simple carbs (sugar, etc). He also argues that most dietary cholesterol passes through your system unprocessed, and that serum cholesterol is largely driven by cholesterol manufactured by your liver.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Living-Low-Carb-Controlled-Carbohydrat...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by gmarx on Thursday December 11, 2014 @01:51PM (#8736420)
yep. Manufactured by your liver, on purpose. Cholesterol is necessary for animals to live. It comprises,for example (if memory serves) about 50% of animal cell membrane.

It's bizarre that people have been convinced this stuff is deadly poison.

Same thing for sodium chloride

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Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by tiglionabbit on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @05:28PM (#8726287)
Yeah. I find it weird to see that [Cochrane shows statins prevent heart disease](http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004816/VASC_statins-for-the-...), despite the whole cholesterol debacle. It would be nice if we understood this situation better.

We know now that only some types of LDL are dangerous, but how often are people given an LDL particle count?

According to Michael Pollan, the whole Fat/Cholesterol thing started when the government found some weak evidence that beef is bad for you, but they blamed it on cholesterol so as not to single out a particular industry. But is beef even bad for you? Or is it something in how hamburger meat is processed? Or what?

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Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by DanBC on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @04:33PM (#8725930)
We are absolutely not beyond the point of "the fat you eat makes you fat". We might be beyond the point of "the cholesterol you eat is the cholesterol that kills you", but these are very different things.
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Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by tiglionabbit on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @05:20PM (#8726233)
Who is We? The general public, your doctor, modern scientists?
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Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by nielsbot on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @03:42PM (#8725574)
This is interesting--I'd love to read more about it. Can you link some sources? (I'm not being snarky)
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Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by ZeroBugBounce on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @04:27PM (#8725897)
For context of anyone reading, the second link (mercola.com) has a ton of nonsense anti vaccination articles on it. That's enough for me to wholesale write off anything else the blogger/site might be commenting on, science-wise.
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Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by debacle on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @05:01PM (#8726129)
Mercola has a lot of stupid shit on it, but I found no fault in the article (except for a bit of woohoo on energy psychology).

It was the only good non-industry source I could find on the Jupiter study.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is Preventive Medicine Its Own Health Risk? by hga on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @05:34PM (#8726325)
Well, to a certain degree the Jupiter study indicts itself, at least at brief glance. It uses a surrogate endpoint, not actual disease or mortality. As I understand it, large dose niacin used to promoted as good for your heart based on more iffy lipid surrogates, but when a real study was done, it turned out to increase mortality. Oops.

And while I'm not so influenced by "the drug company paid for it!" bit, Crestor's situation is special, it was introduced when earlier well studied statins had gone generic (or nearly so). It had to muscle its way in, so to speak. So I view it with extra jaundice in my eye (tempered by the fact that it's brand name, so you know you're going to get the real stuff at the right dose, and in my recent study of statins it's clear that bad side effects are very strongly correlated with inadvertent overdosing).

Anyway, if an iffy source says something, as long as you can track down what it claims to be quoting then you shouldn't dismiss it out of hand. Given that it's peppered with links to PubMed....

I myself am looking at statins (for primary prevention, pushed by my doctors with some justice) with a jaundiced eye, based on how far their target is from actual cholesterol production. They interfere with a lot more than that.

[ Parent | on HN ]