@trevmar Sorry, I'd forgotten about that ABC iView region limitation. Luckily sombody posted it elsewhere.

(BTW, Catalyst has been preparing this program since 2010. Catalyst don't actually do the scientific research themselves, although their scientists do the journalistic research. )

Also you can Download VODCAST here:

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/vodcast/

( actually, there's an MP4 link on the original transcript page!)

Just finished watching, looking forward to the next installment from ABC Catalyst which will hopefully come!

Oh and during it as I watched it I cooked up my dinner for tonight: frying fatty mince and eggs in butter. #delicious #healthy

Yes it does, but it is a good first baby step towards people getting rid of this modern day fat-phobia which have towards our food.

March 1, 2012 World Renown Heart Surgeon Speaks Out On What Really Causes Heart Disease

We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong.. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries,today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.

I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled “opinion makers.” Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.

The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.

It Is Not Working!

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.

The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.

Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.

Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.

Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes. Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended. It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.

Inflammation is not complicated -- it is quite simply your body's natural defence to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus. The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders. However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process,a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.

What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body? Well,smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully.

The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream dietthat is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels. Thisrepeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity.

Let me repeat that: The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine.

What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.

Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.

While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war. Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed withomega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.

How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?

Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.

What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.

While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator -- inflammation in their arteries.

Let’s get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6’s are essential -they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell -- they must be in the correct balance with omega-3’s.

If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation.

Today’s mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That’s a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today’s food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer’s disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.

There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.

There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation- causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them.

One tablespoon of corn oil contains 7,280 mg of omega-6; soybean contains 6,940 mg. Instead, use olive oil or butter from grass-fed beef.

Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labelled polyunsaturated. Forget the “science” that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.

The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.

What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.

Dr Maryanne Demasi:

"Unless you've already been diagnosed with heart disease, then taking a statin won't help you live longer. It may reduce your risk of a cardiovascular event, but it may also increase your risk of developing something else, like diabetes. Either way, taking a statin won't extend your life span."

Professor Beatrice Golomb-Statin researcher,Internal Medicine, University of California San Diego:

"I think they often intentionally hide those risks because there are often physician incentives that benefit the physician for having more patients on statins. So it pits physician self-interest against patient benefit. This particular woman contacted me, and she had left the practice that she was at because they insisted that at least... I believe it was 80% of her patients be on statins. This has actually been written up in media as something that is actually considered legal and acceptable. I can't see any way in which that's acceptable. "I'm literally the only researcher I know who studies this class of drugs who has a policy not to take money from industry."

Dr John Abramson - Harvard Medical School, Public School of Health:

"I think there is criminal activity that goes on. And I think when drug companies act in ways that misrepresent information that leads to harm, they ought to be held responsible, just like any other individual or organisation that conducts itself in a way that leads to harming other people."

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3881441.htm

First press responses to the ABC's stains-comdemning Part II are starting to come in from commercial media.

Consistent with seeking polemic in order to stimulate readership, the first articles' writers are against the ABC. But there are two other, good reasons why they'll do this:

• Ordinary journalists don't understand science. We can't write on the spur of the moment (I'm also a non-scientist trying to do a decent job of occasional science journalism), most of us can't interview a scientist, keeping up to speed while trying to break down their jargon for our own public. A TV show going to air at 8 pm gives us little time to phone a real scientist friend before the midnight deadline.. :-(

• The statins manufacturers advertise in the press. There is pressure on the part of executive editors to follow the money.

Michael Owen, THE AUSTRALIAN, November 01, 2013 12:00AM:

ABC program might cause people not to take their medication

HEALTH authorities are alarmed that ABC TV has ignored warnings not to air a second program containing controversial views on cholesterol that could result in deaths. ... The ABC did not return calls for comment last night.

(It was near midnight, after all. Michael Owen probably talked to the cleaner ar ABC's Gore Hill studios)

Strangely, Owen seems not to have sought real comment from the Advisory Committee on the Safety of Medicines either. He seems to extrapolate on their last comment last week, trying to guess what they'd have thought of the second Catalyst program. (Well I guess the Advisory Committee on the Safety of Medicines doesn't have night cleaners)...

Incidentally, Australians who'd like to report their own adverse reaction to statins directly to the Advisory Committee can do so HERE, preferably before the committee meets on November 8, 2013.

For any people deciding to stop taking statins: I'd say see your doctor. At the very least, do so under their guiudance and observation.

*My relation with my own GP is compromised: I was prescribed statins by another doctor in the same practice.

My own doctor described to me (by way of a hint), that the muscle and joint pain only subsided after about 3 weeks' withdrawal from the drug. (Exactly as described by the patient in the Catalyst documentary last night). So I'll see my doctor later but I feel like I've got my own go-ahead for now. November 1, 2013 will be noted as the date I ceased taking statins.*

@goanna: "For any people deciding to stop taking statins: I'd say see your doctor. At the very least, do so under their guidance and observation."

The problem is that "your doctor" is not competent to understand the complex issues involved in drug design, and adverse events (side effects). He/she may be more competent than you, but he is also more easily persuaded to 'toe the company line'. I gave a "Visiting Professor" talk to the US FDA in 2007 - describing the ways in which Statins (and other drugs) hit many targets in the human body as well as those the drug companies disclose - and even at the FDA the lack of understanding about how drugs really work was amazing. FDA only know what the drug companies tell them. Doctors have a far smaller knowledge, filtered through the distribution channels (which in the USA are the weekly visits from the drug company salesmen).

There is another destructive dynamic too. And that is that physicians feel quite desperate these days, especially when cardiovascular disease (CVD) or cancers are involved. They see their patients die. They know they have done all they could to help them, but there really are no fully-effective drugs in their arsenal right now. I have had Doctors say to me "But hang it all - I had to prescribe something for my patient - something which might help."

There are no easy answers. Thirty years ago PhRMA made a pact with the public - "put lots of money into research and when you grow old we will have the drugs ready for your needs." The money has been invested, and has produced essentially no results. The last really effective drug against disease was the polio vaccines (and I don't really want to get into the 'vaccine' topic right now). We have nothing to cure cancers, nothing to cure CVD, nothing even to deal with arthritis or fibromyalgia. It is a sad state of affairs, and one which will only begin to resolve itself if more journalists take the initiative to alert the public to the bleak future mankind faces on its current trajectory...

Activated charcoal is used to rapidly reduce cholesterol. It is also a detoxifier which eliminates not only toxic substances but nutritional substances as well, so it should be used only periodically.

http://flipper.diff.org/app/items/info/5514

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(86)90054-1/abstract

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Matcha Tea also reduces cholesterol and can be used daily:

http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART02050/Matcha-Tea.html?print=1

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19735169

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Mark Hyman, MD: 7 Tips to Fix Your Cholesterol Without Medication

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/lower-cholesterol-naturally_b_815393.html

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12 Foods That Lower Cholesterol Naturally

http://www.prevention.com/print/29848

My doctor also showed my Statin stats as generated according to the "numbers guy" the he often consults.

Search for some of Bandolier's articles at

http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/index.html

These numbers show that, statistically, waiting for your horse named "Statin" to prevent a "bad thing" would be akin to watching the Melbourne Cup, with its 20 horses, every day for a year, just waiting for a win.

@itimjim

Yes, the body requires cholesterol for various body functions* ( A lot of statin users can look emaciated), but most of these foods also help reduce excess fats and cholesterol in the bloodstream which may be a good thing.

* http://health.howstuffworks.com/diseases-conditions/cardiovascular/cholesterol/how-the-body-uses-cholesterol.htm