CHOLESTEROL LEVELS .So many different opinions*****

They start prescribing statins to patients with mild dementia as often they have had unoticed TIA's that showed when they had a brain scan. 

That's scary:  if it were me I'd rather just go out with a stroke than have dementia anyway, but I guess I won't have that choice because I'll have dementia so I won't even be asked

Not if you or a family member recognise the symptoms early and get a diagnosis. GP's are now being encouraged with cash and early treatment slows it down.    

I read a book recently 'The Cholesterol Con' by a Dr Kendrick. It certainly makes you question everything what we have been led to believe re cholesterol, diets and heart attacks.

Couldn't agree more, Its an excellent read.

Dr K also has a blog which you might find useful

It's not one of those publications with lots of capital letters and exclamation marks and which ends up trying to sell you an alternative to statins, is it?

I've seen a couple of those and they don't convince me of anything other than that the writer is after profit, not passing on fully researched information.

Just checking before I try & locate the book, I've been conned before by this sort of thing

Sadly people affected by statins lose faith in the medical profession and then believe others out to prey and profit from them . 

NO it just wants people to know the facts and actually names PROPER studies/ research.

Not necessarily, but I have lost faith in the statin manufacturers

They do the rersearch and make them but it is the doctors who precribe them.

As I have said here before my GP says of a cardiologist at a local hospital that he would put statins in the water supply if he could.

But he doesn't have that power, does he?   Fortunately, I might add .....  I'm sure the drug companies would put all sors of things in the water if they were allowed to.

My understanding is that there are two types of cholesterol:  whether or not we label one of them as bad is another issue.

I find your third paragraph quite irrelevant:  the human race has survived with all sorts of medical problems and in the past life expectancy was very much lower than it is now.  Whether that's because cholesterol wasn't tested who knows?    It may well be that the health problems caused by high cholesterol don't show up until after the age at which our ancestors died.

Not aguing for statins, far from it, I stopped taking them a while ago, but your argument isn't convincing:  it's a bit like the people how say more people die of cancer now than in the past or more people get dementia:  yeah, because we live longer!

Certainly we need some level of cholesterol to survive, the type and healthy level is the issue and of course, the routine prescribing of it for people who don't have what's regarded as high cholesterol.

Hi J

What health problems are caused by high cholesterol?

Heart attacks and strokes according to most mainstream research - I'd suggest you google this, it's quite complicated and there are different opinions.

Some research now suggests there's no connection between high cholesterol and cardio-vascular problems.

 

Hi Jude

So does it or doesn't it. You appear to be hedging your bets,so to speak, however, I have been doing my own research for 15 yrs, and have found no conclusive proof that cholesterol is a risk to my health.

Quite the opposite in fact.

The year 2000 WHO report makes a good starting point.

Followed up by reading the works of Drs Atkins and Kendrick.

Suggest you DYOR though because I am not an expert.

I don't know and neither does anyone else!   That's not hedging my bets, that's being honest.   I won't take statins OR non statin cholesterol lowering medication because I experienced the same negative effects, but I've continued eating lots of fruit & vegies, exercising daily and I've never eaten a high fat diet anyway.    I do have 3 tsp most days in my porridge of Psyllium Husk and my cholesterol has come down slightly, to about what would've been regarded as a safe level decades back.

WARNING:  anyone using Psyllium Husk be careful not to ever eat it DRY as it expands on contact with moisture and if it does so in your throat or gullet you may choke - fatally ........

I haven't read Kendrick but the Atkins Diet has been totally discredited in my view.

I was responding to your question but you seem to have already made up your mind.     

Hi Jude

As you deduce, yes i have made up my mind and i find it interesting that individuals who claim not to have researched this subject matter can dis just about every opinion presented here and, i might add, not only make contradictory statements but use a style of puctuation that they themselves frown upon.  ;-)

Regards

Dr Atkins:

Dr Robert Atkins - whose diet is followed by three million Britons - had a serious heart disease and was a clinically obese 18-and-a-half stone when he died, a report revealed yesterday.

The 72-year-old died after hitting his head when he slipped on an icy New York street. The  Wall Street Journal revealed that a confidential report on his death by the New York Medical Examiner had been leaked to them by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which opposes the Atkins diet.

It showed, said the Journal, that before his death the 6ft tall diet guru had suffered a heart attack, congestive heart failure and hypertension.

 

Who are you talking about?  If you mean me, say so

Hi Jude

yes I was

Hi Derek

Reminds me of the late former GP, the senior partner in a local surgery who smoked himself to an early grave well before the age of 70 but provided his patients with an excellent service while in practice.

With him, as was the case with Atkins, it was do as i say, not as i do

Regards

Very different  to making millions from books which promoted an extremely unhealthy diet which millions of gullible people believed to the detriment of their own health.

Your comment would be a valid analogy if the old GP you're talking about had advocated heavy smoking to his patients as a healthy practice!

 

Would not be allowed now but back in the 1960's we had a diminutive white haired Scottish doctor who was reputed to be 90. In those pre appointment days of packed standing room only waiting rooms he always called in mothers with children first and then old people. After that it was Whos's next. 

He sat behind his desk puffing on a huge pipe. One day I asked him the secret of his longevity. After a couple more puffs he replied, moderation in all things and an excess of Whisky. I wondered if it was the excess of Whisky that was the reason for his even older wife driving him on his rounds.

I once had to call him out on a Saturday. Before going he picked up my paper open at the racing page. He quickly put a mark against three horses and said, Back them, they will make you feel better. I didn't and felt worse by evening after they had all won. They don't make them like Doctor Gibson now. 

  

Have you seen the old pre and post war adverts for cigarettes fronted by a smoking doctor?  Craven A are good for your throat was a British one.  The American ones were more blatant. Strange when even during WWI soldiers referred to cigarettes as 'coffin nails'.

But surely smoking calms peoples nerves and keeps them in the main slim by reducing their appetite:-) The Cat Walk Models are all usually smokers.

How often do you see Kate Moss without a cigarette?

Are you seriously suggesting smoking has advantages????!!!!  You shouldl take a look at the COPD forum, to which I belong, because I'm going to die a slow and horrible death  because of smoking and so are millions of others worldwide.  Do you work for the tobacco industry?

While you're at it, check out the working conditions of the child slave workers where most tobacco is grown, who are raped if they don't meet their quota's.

It's a total myth that it calms your nerves, in fact it's a stimulant and the calming effect is the alleviation of the withdrawal symptoms from not having had a fag for a while. 

Oh yeah and those catwalk models all look so healthy, don't they, with their anorexic vacant faces and stick like bodies ..... Kate Moss is a role model???

Strange choice between being skinny and "calm" and dying of COPD, cardio vascular disease  or all the cancers smoking causes.

I can't believe the moderators let your post appear on a health forum

I've read that up to the late 1930's some doctors used to recommend smoking to TB patients because tobacco being a cough suppressant, it stopped their coughing.

I'm also old enough to remember when smoking was allowed in hospital wards and doctors' waiting rooms had ashtrays - hard to believe now, isn't it?  It wasn't even banned in supermarkets or other shops for a long time

I can only assume that my humour is lost on you!!! Did you not note my :-)

 

The services always kept the troops well supplied with cigarettes and the NAAFI sold them at less than retail prices. Queen Alexandra famously gave every soldier a box of cigarettes one Chrstmas during WWI.

In one

If you Google: "doctors in cigarette adverts" you get some great stuff. More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette. Was it Lucky Strikes are better for you as they are toasted.

Many of the episodes of Mad Men featured tobacco advertising in the 50' and 60's 

From an old Lucky Strike advert. "To keep a slender figure no one can deny reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet" 

Lucky Cigarette ad (source: SRITA)If the nearly ten billion dollars spent by the tobacco industry in 2008 to encourage Americans to smoke doesn’t shock you, perhaps the story the ads tell will. It is a story that has special relevance for young women and teenage girls and feminists of all ages. For nearly 100 years, cigarette companies have worked hard to attract female customers, and they have been effective. In 2008, 18.3 percent of women (that’s 21.1 million of them) smoked. Research by Stanford scholars Dr. Robert Jackler and Laurie Jackler presented at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research shows how tobacco companies have tailored their marketing campaigns to appeal to young women. Cigarette advertising has suggested that smoking will make women thinner, more self-confident and independent, and more fashionable, sophisticated, and cool. These tricks of the tobacco trade have remained surprisingly consistent despite changing beliefs about smoking and women’s rights.

How many like the Marlboro man in the adverts man died of lung cancer?

 

There was also the response to the Women's Liberation Movement in the 70's with the cigarette (can't remember which one it was) slogan of "You've come a long way baby".

Because of smoking restrictions and health education in western countries, the tobacco companies are targetting poorer countries and smoking rates and the inevitable illhealth rates are skyrocketing.

No I didn't see it and if I had, so what?  Some of us have better things to do than keep up with the latest internet shorthand

Atkins was a strong believer in fibre in the diet, ring any bells?

Yes there are risks to Atkins diet, mainly to the pockets of big pharma.

And not forgetting that he Atkins diet was so unhealthy it has been found to reverse T2 diabetes, which is a major risk for CVD.

And did you not read the post detailing what Atkins himself died of?  He was hardly original in recommending more fibre in the diet.  

Who did the research about reversing diabetes????

The tobacco used in poorer countries is usually of inferior quality and very cheap.. I used to try many of them when travelling in my long distant smoking days. 

Now the manufacturers are making electronic cigarettes.You've come a long waybaby was the Virginia Slims advert.

In the advert the image at the top is a photograph of a woman hanging laundry outside. The lower one is of an elegant woman smoking. The ad text reads: "Back then, every man gave his wife at least one day a week out of the house. You've come a long way, baby. Virginia Slims – Slimmer than the fat cigarettes men smoke."

My first two jobs were with tobacco companies. Back then we had cigarette shortages as the government imposed restrictions on imports from America that had to be paid for in Dollars. As a result a lot of tobacco came frome Greece, Turkey, Rhodesia and India. People queued up in the morning hoping to get the popular brands before they were sold out.

Hardly latest internet shorthand. Like David Cameron you probably don't know what LOL means. It came up during the Rebekah Brooks case.

Until my grandkids enlightened me I did think LOL meant Lots of Love.   I'll bet you can't read Pitman's shorthand?  I can still write & read it after learning it more than 50 years ago.   How boring if we all had identical skills, don't you think?

No but I can read the Form Book. Many Racing journalists still use shorthand.

Do they really?  I thought everyone except dinosaurs like me used technology to record everything these days!   I should add that I sometimes have difficulty reading it back if I don't do it straight away, but at my age that sometimes applies to my hand writing too!

I used to be able to do 120 wpm in shorthand and 90 typing - modern keyboards have totally wrecked my typing speed, especially those ditsy laptop ones

Atkins died from trauma to the brain resulting from a fall

As to the T2 research  - can't remember who did it but the info is out there, and in bucket loads. if you're interested that is, but if not, it will at least give you more info to troll us with :-)

 

Jude spoton

up to 90% blockage in LAD with Chlorestrol of 3.4-3.6. Where is the connection?

 

Hi F

I do not know health problems due  high cholesterol.

My own case....

I had 90% LAD blockage , at 3.4 cholesterol. This can't be considered as being High. Therefore I am a living example that there are factors other than cholesterol that causes the blockage.

I am 55-56 Kg at 5ft 5inch, a non smoker, non diabetic. very active. was going to gym everymoring at the time. Very active with diy and gardening, yet up to 90% blockage. The cause are more mysterious and not that easy to find for some like me.

Yet I am prescribed Atorvastatin. What for?

Hi Hirani

Statins such as Atorvastatin are now believed to have anti coagulant properties which is probably why they were prescribed for you.

Have you been tested for high blood cortisol levels?

Regards