On 9/6/2013 2:10 PM, Brian Swale wrote:
> Moose wrote about what I wrote
>> .........
> Michael C. Johnston seems to have just taken a broad-based look at the
> range of diet books without going into important science.
Agreed. I only linked to it because it is such a good summary of the range of
firmly held, 'correct' ideas about diet.
In the world of nutrition science, the main difference seems to be that the
professionals don't have best selling books.
I like the video I linked to in part because Christopher Gardner does not take
himself too seriously as some sort of
expert who knows all the answers.
> I watched about 20% of the video
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo
> ie, 16 minutes of the total 1 hour 16 minutes, and it seemed that what he is
> on about is obesity and weight-loss.
Impatience ... It's at minute 23 that he starts showing the effects of the
different diets on cardiovascular blood
chemistry risk factors. From then on, it's a mixture of stuff about losing
weight and the effect of diet on health and
well being. Only an hour long, before a question period. You forced me to watch
it again - but I'm not sorry.
If you watch the whole thing, I expect you will find it hard to support a high
carb diet for the majority of people.
That is what you proposed in your post, and one of the things in it with which
I disagree. Gardner is too smart to
explore the possibility in public, but there is the possibility that high carb
diets, as recommended by the
medical/nutritional establishment, have contributed to the large increase in
incidence of diabetes. Can't likely be
proven, but the differences in response to a high carb diet by people with
different insulin responses, near the end of
the video, is suggestive.
> Those are irrelevant to what interests me, which is the total obliteration of
> the leading cause of premature death in the Western World; vascular
> disease, caused by atherosclerosis and arterosclerosis. Currently,
> somewhere around 35% of premature deaths are cause by heart attacks
> and strokes, and nearly all are preventable; BUT most of the health advisers
> seem to think these are not avoidable. Through knowledge of biochemistry
> relating to artery health, these premature deaths ARE avoidable, and if a
> person has arterial disease already, this can be reversed.
The problem is that there are many conflicting opinions about how to
stop/reverse the course of the disease. Many are
from important authorities who simply disagree.
> Please look at this 10 minute video; the voice is that of Dr Joe Prendergast.
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDqLcblMyIY
Well, that was a fairly slick piece of promotion, almost completely lacking in
anything substantive. I am not quite the
uninformed tyro you might assume. When Dr. Myer Friedman was recruiting
subjects for a 10 year study of cardiovascular
disease, he showed us what was then the most famous slide in cardiology, the
first slide showing a ruptured plaque and
the resulting clot that had killed the patient.
As the video says, up until an assistant of Dr. Friedman's found it, everyone
assumed that plaque buildup eventually
slowed blood flow to dangerous levels. What no one knew until then was the
actual cause of the acute infarction. It
doesn't really go with a very slow restriction, but no one had a cause of the
sudden event.
So I've known about one of the great revelations of the video for well over 20
years. I did qualify for that study,
which required NO evidence whatsoever of CV disease. I still had no signs at
the end of my participation ten years later.
Dr. Friedman had followed up on his famous book, "Type A Behavior and Your
Heart" by conducting a series of increasingly
ambitious studies of the effect of time urgency and unwarranted, chronic anger
on the course of CV disease.
His immediate prior, five year, study tracked the lives of two groups of people
who had just had a first heart attack.
It was stopped early, based on ethical grounds. The results were so
statistically strong that it was considered
unethical not to offer the results to the control group, who were dying off
much faster.
At that time, his protocol, which is entirely based on behavior modification,
was the single, most effective treatment
for reducing subsequent mortality of survivors of first heart attacks.
The study I was lucky enough to be a treatment subject in was a ten year study
of people between the ages of 45 and 65
at the beginning who had no detectable CVD. It was going well, i.e. my group
was having fewer heart attacks and dying
off more slowly, (we got periodic progress reports) when statins came on the
scene.
It wasn't that they were more effective, or even whether they were effective at
all. The problem was that the sample
size wasn't large enough to statistically separate any effect from statins from
the effects of the research protocol. So
the study was never published. Unfortunate, as I believe it would be a major
treatment had the study been publishable.
More info here. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxMopJ_eb3c>
Research starting in 1840 has shown endlessly that morbidity and mortality are
closely linked with social status. The
facts aren't in doubt. The question was always what the actual physiological
causes behind this are. Research carried
out by Robert Sapolsky on the metabolisms of apes in Africa shows the vast
difference between dominant males and
submissive males, and its health effects/implications. Friedman's research and
theory is similar, in that it posits
metabolic and physiologic effects of long term chronic, as opposed to
occasional acute, 'fight or flight' bodily
chemistry, as caused by certain common behavior patterns
I bring all this up to point out that not all prominent, expert investigators
of CVD believe that the chemical magic
bullet approach is even a useful path. And not all research points that way.
As Chuck has pointed out, using the Nobel Prize for discovering the messenger
effect of nitric oxide in such a way as to
seem as though it is also an endorsement of the L-A treatment is unethical, to
my mind. It isn't stated directly, but
clearly implied, in the video. And didn't Dr. Prendergast later drop that
treatment, over concerns about side effects?
Was this video made before that? If not, it's simply blatant misrepresentation
today.
As to the claim of making no referrals to hospitals, I believe that is either
another misrepresentation, as presented in
the video, in neglecting to say it's only no CV related referrals, or a good
reason to pull his license to practice
medicine. My mother had diabetes, and I was her primary support through her
final years. Her primary care physician was
an endocrinologist, very highly regarded, and he sent her to the hospital
several times, none CV related. Diabetes,
especially in the elderly, is a serious disease, with many effects/symptoms, a
number of which may require
hospitalization. People, especially the elderly, not uncommonly require
hospital treatment for other causes, as well.
He is either a liar, in the video, or an incompetent physician, if he has
treated thousands of patients without a single
hospital referral in 15 years.
All of that aside, I believe, as someone with more than usual lay knowledge,
that the causes of CVD are too varied,
complex and interactive to be fully understood to date. I also strongly suspect
that ingestion of large amounts of a
single chemical is not likely to be a simple cure for everybody, or even a
majority.
There is also the problem of placebo effect and Physician effects. The promise
of cure from a treatment and the effect
of physician personality, especially empathy and compassion and/or an aura of
authority, on clinical outcomes is quite
powerful, and one of the reasons for double blind studies, rather than
anecdotal evidence, which is what the video story
is, at bottom.
Sorry if this rains on your parade, but I believe my knowledge and experience
make my opinions in the matter the equal
of yours. I doubt that Dr Prendergast is a huckster, per se, but it seems to me
that the video puts him in that light.
A. Skeptical Moose
--
What if the Hokey Pokey *IS* what it's all about?
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|