Consider your cholesterol normal, no matter what

As I’ve said in an earlier post, I refuse to have my cholesterol checked. As far as I’m concerned, all this worry about cholesterol is nonsense. Our livers manufacture cholesterol for a reason: cholesterol is essential to life. It constitutes half the dry weight of your cerebral cortex; it’s essential for producing many important hormones, including testosterone and estrogen; it is used as the raw material in tissue repair; it is an important component of cell membranes; it’s used for the production of vitamin d; it facilitates mineral metabolism, serotonin uptake in the brain, and regulation of blood sugar levels…and on and on.

Like much else in the natural world, the range of cholesterol values follow a normal distribution curve—a bell curve. This is a fundamental and widely used concept of statistical analysis. For example, if you measured the height of the population within a country you would find that a small number of people are very short; most people are average; a small number are very tall. The short, tall, and average-sized people are all normal. The same is true for cholesterol. Some of us naturally have low cholesterol and some naturally have high cholesterol and most of us are somewhere in between. All are normal, but most fall in the 200-250 milligrams per deciliter of blood (mine, if I recall, was 240 thirteen years ago, the last time it was checked).

People who have heart disease and people who do not have heart disease fall within this same range. That is, their cholesterol has no bearing on whether or not they have heart disease, as proven by the Framingham Study, one of the largest studies ever done on cholesterol. Other studies have confirmed this fact.

Nevertheless, the threshold for what is considered high cholesterol has been progressively lowered, each time without scientific evidence to support the lowering of the threshold. Of course, each time the threshold is lowered, millions more people become eligible for cholesterol-lowering medications—massively increasing the market size for the drugs and increasing the profits for pharmaceutical companies. 

I say, leave your cholesterol alone. Don’t mess with Mother Nature!

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

The Hunger Winter with an obesity twist

In 1944, the Nazi army occupied Holland and restricted the food supply to the western part of that country, cutting the daily diet of its inhabitants to 750 calories a day or less. A typical day’s worth of food might consist of a couple of slices of bread, a turnip, and one or two small potatoes. About 20,000 people died before the Allied troops liberated the region in May 1945. (Audrey Hepburn was a survivor of that event. She was 16.)

Because of the clear beginning and ending dates as well as the excellent record-keeping in the Netherlands, epidemiologists have been able to follow the long-term effects of the famine (called the Hongerwinter.) Among other things, they looked at how starvation affects the outcome of pregnancy.

As you can imagine, a diet that provides only 450 to 750 calories per day is very hard on a developing fetus. All the infants were affected, but the effects differed, depending on when they were conceived relative to the starvation period. The point I’m making today supports my ongoing defense of fat people: Those children whose mothers had been malnourished early in pregnancy had higher obesity rates than normal. 

Something had happened to their development in the womb that affected them decades later. That effect, it is now understood, has to do with epigenetics: chemical modifications to our genetic material that change the way genes are switched on or off but don’t alter the genes themselves. In this case, to radically oversimplify, the “hold on to that fat” gene was switched on and stayed on. Not only that, the effect was passed on: the grandchildren of the malnourished women also have problems with obesity.

None of my children are obese or even overweight. Maybe it’s because I routinely gained 40 pounds with each one. I was the fat one.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Bottled water foolishness

Those of you who read my blogs or know me are aware that I am strongly opposed to buying drinking water. I think you should drink tap water. (Note to my relatives in Flint: if your pipes have not been fixed, you may be excused.) I have written one post about this, called “Hydration foolishness”—which I encourage you to read—but am now adding more ammunition:

• On average, it takes 2,000 times as much energy to bottle water, transport it, and refrigerate it than getting it from your tap. What’s more, global plastic consumption rose from 5.5 million tons in 1950 (when everyone got their water from a tap) to around 100 million tons in 2009. 
• About half the people in US drink water from a bottle—either occasionally or as their main source. Nearly 50 billion plastic bottles of water were sold in the US last year!
• Drinking bottled water is a waste of your money. If you bought a single-serving bottle every day (about $1 apiece in New York), you'd spend about $365. But if you were to refill a single-serving plastic bottle of water (16.9 ounces) in New York City every day for a year, it would cost you only 63 cents.
• Just under a third of those billions of bottles sold in the US is recycled.
• About eight million metric tons end up in the ocean every year. That’s on top of the 110 million metric tons of plastic already there. (About half of this comes from China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.)

So get your water from the tap! The bottled water you are drinking may be coming from a tap anyway, since 25% of the water sold in the US comes from a municipal source (and half the leading bottled water brands get their water from my drought-stricken state of California).

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

The latest on prostate cancer

If you’re a guy and a biopsy shows you have early prostate cancer, it’s tough to know what to do. That’s because the cancer could be either the kind that grows so slowly it never amounts to anything and you’ll die with it; or the cancer could progress and you could die of it. Early on, there’s no way to distinguish between the two types. If you opt for surgery—which perhaps was unnecessary—it is likely to leave you impotent and incontinent. With radiation, you’ll have bowel problems and also impotence (usually not permanent).

A new study tried to help with that decision. Researchers divided 1,643 men with a diagnosis of early prostate cancer into three groups: a third had surgery, a third had radiation, and a third had active monitoring. Active monitoring involves regular exams of the prostate, periodic biopsies, and PSA tests that may indicate the disease is worsening.

Of the monitored group, 33 of them had the cancer spread to distant parts of their bodies. But it also spread in 13 who had surgery and 16 who had radiation. As time went on, more and more of the monitored patients wound up having treatment, but not all those actually needed it. In fact, 80 percent of them had shown no signs of progression. Apparently they (or their doctors) lost their nerve.

Overall, researchers found no difference in death rates between men who had surgery or radiation and those who were actively monitored and who were treated only if the cancer progressed. Also, death rates were low: only about one percent of patients died ten years after the diagnosis.

As far as I’m concerned, the takeaway from this study is that you’re better off with the active monitoring. If it looks like the disease is progressing, you can have surgery or radiation. On the other hand, you could be among the group with the slow growing cancer who will never need treatment—and thus not have to deal with the side effects.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.