The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It - Softcover

Kendrick, Kendrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844546101 ISBN 13: 9781844546107

Publisher: John Blake Publishing Ltd, 2008

Synopsis

Statins are the so-called wonder drugs widely prescribed to lower blood cholesterol levels and claim to offer unparalleled protection against heart disease. Believed to be completely safe and capable of preventing a whole series of other conditions, they are the most profitable drug in the history of medicine. In this groundbreaking book, GP Malcolm Kendrick exposes the truth behind the hype, revealing: high cholesterol levels don't cause heart disease; a high-fat diet - saturated or otherwise - does not affect blood cholesterol levels; and, the protection provided by statins is so small as to be not worth bothering about for most men and all women.Statins have many more side affects than has been admitted and their advocates should be treated with scepticism due to their links with the drugs' manufacturers.Kendrick lambastes a powerful pharmaceutical industry and unquestioning medical profession, who, he claims, perpetuate the madcap concepts of 'good' and 'bad' cholesterol and cholesterol levels to convince millions of people to spend billions of pounds on statins, thus creating an atmosphere of stress and anxiety - the real cause of fatal heart disease.With clarity and wit, "The Great Cholesterol Con" debunks our assumptions on what constitutes a healthy lifestyle and diet. It is the invaluable guide for anyone who thought there was a miracle cure for heart disease, an appeal to common sense and a controversial and fascinating breakthrough that will set dynamite under the whole area.

About this title

About the Author

A practising GP, and author of the bestselling The Great Cholesterol Con. Dr Kendrick's blog (Drmalcolmkenrdrick.org) has around seven thousand followers and has been viewed 2.3million times.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Great Cholesterol Con

The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and how to Avoid it

By Malcolm Kendrick

John Blake Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 2007 Dr Malcolm Kendrick
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84454-610-7

Contents

Title page, 
Introduction, 
1 What is heart disease, anyway?, 
2 What is cholesterol, anyway? (And what's a fat?), 
3 You cannot have a cholesterol level, 
4 What are statins and how do they work?, 
5 The rise and rise of the cholesterol hypothesis, 
6 Eat whatever you like (Diet has nothing to do with heart disease), 
7 A raised cholesterol/LDL level does not cause heart disease, 
8 Statins and heart disease, 
9 What causes heart disease?, 
10 The stress hypothesis – does it fit the facts?, 
11 Other forms of stress, 
12 Glossary, 
Footnotes, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS HEART DISEASE, ANYWAY?

The main underlying theme of this book is heart disease – what causes it and what doesn't. But the term 'heart disease' is virtually meaningless. A pedant would say that heart disease is a 'disease of the heart', but there are hundreds of them, most with complex names – myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular hypertrophy, Woff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, to name but four.

However, the big daddy, the one that kills most people, is not truly a disease of the heart at all. It is a disease of the arteries that supply blood to the heart, and is usually called atherosclerosis. 'Athero', or 'atheroma', describes the build up of grey-white/fatty gunk in the artery walls. These thickenings are sometimes called atheromatous plaques, or just plaques. 'Sclerosis' means general thickening and hardening. One of the other confusing elements when reading about heart disease is the amount of jargon. AKA medical terminology.

Atheromatous plaques come in many different varieties. The American Heart Association even has a grading system from one to five, and then further subsections into type 5(i) and 5(ii) ... and probably type 4(B), subsection (ii) paragraph 6. You get the picture.

Plaques are generally thought to progress from an initial 'fatty streak', as found in the arteries of most ten-year-olds, which gradually becomes bigger and thicker. Eventually, the plaques can reach the point where they actually calcify, turning arteries into stiff, almost bonelike tubes. The process of turning from a fatty streak into a calcified plaque is supposed to take years and years, although no one knows for sure how long things take because no one has ever hung around to watch an individual plaque going through its lifecycle (not in a human being, at least). The general assumption seems to be that it all takes decades.

Having said this, it is not the mature, stiff, calcified plaque that is the problem; it is an intermediate stage, the so-called 'unstable' plaque. At some point during their (allegedly) slow development, plaques turn into something that looks like a cyst lurking within the artery wall; a thin capsule surrounding a semi-liquid centre full of goo. This goo is made of all sorts of stuff. Fats, dead white cells, broken down bits of blood clot etc.

The great danger with this type of plaque is that the thin wall surrounding the goo bursts, or breaks down. This 'goo exposure' sends a hugely powerful message to the blood-clotting system, and results in a blood clot (also called a thrombus) forming over the burst plaque. If the blood clot is big enough then it completely blocks the blood supply to whatever organ that particular artery was supplying:

If that orga

Edition details

• Publisher: John Blake Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844546101
• ISBN 13: 9781844546107
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288