A fortnight ago I wrote about how the role of cholesterol in heart disease was being challenged. There was also a challenge to the widespread prescribing of statin medications. And to cap it off we saw a near hysterical reaction of some health authorities to this. The...
One can tell a lot about how solid a scientific opinion is by the response to questioning. Genuine science is never settled. It is constantly questioning assumptions as new knowledge emerges. Dogma rejects questioning and seeks to harass those who dare pose questions....
There is nothing I like more than finding out that something that has been widely believed for decades is wrong. The cholesterol myth fits the pattern of so many items in my blog: it sounds good, it superficially makes sense, and there is a biologically plausible...
For the last 40 years or so we have been told that the best diet for reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease (heart attacks and stroke) is a low fat diet. This idea is so strongly ingrained in health thinking that even questioning it is met with derision and...
One of the reasons that public health messages struggle to get through is that they are presented as very black and white, a bit like in George Orwell’s Animal Farm -“four legs good – two legs bad”. Yet with virtually all matters of health it is not that simple....
