The author of this post is not a scientist, but rather a journalist with no scientific credentials, who has a long history of being a promoter and propagandist for the meat industry:
"Meat lobby peddles doubt to undermine dietary guidelines
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, updated every five years, never fails to cause a stir. For the current revision, released in February, a federally appointed scientific committee — after a two-year review of the latest research and numerous public hearings — has recommended (PDF) lowering consumption of red meat and processed meat.
Despite being fairly tepid, this advice set off a media firestorm, driven by a defensive meat industry and others who have been muddying the waters for some time on the role of meat in the diet. The meat lobby is taking full advantage of the current “debate.”
Adding to the confusion is Nina Teicholz, the best-selling author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet,” whose recent attempts to discredit the committee’s recommendations on meat have been published in The New York Times, alongside meat industry trade publications such as Beef Magazine and Cattle Network."
The field of nutrition is self-undermining given how frequently it's inverted its advice, and the prevalence of pseudo-scientific studies.
As COVID has shown, "scientists" are incredibly powerful in our society to the extent that they can shut down civilization overnight, force billions of people to take experimental substances, repeatedly lie to both population and politicians in order to generate compliance with no consequences, eliminate all criticism of themselves anywhere except individual blogs and all this with no accountability mechanisms whatsoever.
So, good for Nina? We need journalists investigating and undermining pseudo-scientists, just as it's widely recognized that a healthy democracy needs journalists to investigate and undermine corrupt/lying politicians.
We've reached the point where, if "substack" is in the URL and it's not a person who I am already familiar with, I ignore it completely. Maybe these bloggers are right, maybe they're not, but I don't have enough cycles to actually vet them all myself.
Nutrition research is complicated, but the odds of a nutrition blogger on substack unlocking some "secret" that won't eventually make it into more mainstream science publications seems relatively low to me.
It's not particularly rare. Even if prostate cancer will only kill a small percentage of men that have it, it's such a common cancer that it still ends up killing around 34,130 men a year in the US making it the second leading cause of cancer death in men in the US. Figures are similar for other countries.
We know that high cholesterol is a cause of heart disease rather than a mere correlation because people with genetic Hypercholesterolemia have a rate of heart disease 10-20x that of the general population, independent of other risk factors: https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2020/06/01...
By definition, Familial Hypercholesterolemia is a genetic defect of the receptor responsible for clearing cholesterol-containing droplets from the blood.
I understand that, but my point was that it's in principle possible that the exact effects of a particular genetic disease are hard to discover. Serum cholesterol is easy to measure, so it could be just the easiest to notice sign of a more complex metabolic modification induced by the specific genes. I doubt we are at a point where we can look at a gene and say exactly what it affects in the entire body.
That doesn't rebut my assertion or complaint at all, since you are referring to a specific type of genetic disorder.
The research in general on nutrition and hearth health is still mostly correlation. Definitely someone with a specific disorder could have a more obvious causal link with cholesterol and cardiac events, but I've read a bunch of different papers, many from respected institutions, and the conclusions usually are, IMHO (I studied physics), garbage.
No we actually understand the underlying mechanisms here, to a decent extent.
In case of people who have a high level LDL cholesterol, the phagocytes - the scavenger cells in blood consume more cholesterol particles in general. The result is cholesterol is more likely to stick to the walls of affected blood vessels.
This is one of the most thoroughly researched topics in medicine.
Does it mean high LDL will always result in a heart attack? No! Just like not every cigarette smoker dies of lung cancer.
The "thoroughness" of the research doesn't matter much when it's based upon a false assumption or two.
You describe one mechanism by which cholesterol could cause heart disease. As you say, there is lots of evidence that it happens -- in an unknown subset of the population, with defining characteristics that nobody's managed to figure out.
The science just isn't there. And the financial success of statins seems to really get in the way of people wanting to work it all out.
The molecular mechanism by which cholesterol causes heart disease is well understood, and atherosclerosis has been experimentally induced in every species of mammal ever studied by either feeding the animals a high cholesterol diet or knocking out genes related to LDL metabolism, and these results are consistent between hundreds of studies performed over the past 100 years. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4525717/
"Meat lobby peddles doubt to undermine dietary guidelines
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, updated every five years, never fails to cause a stir. For the current revision, released in February, a federally appointed scientific committee — after a two-year review of the latest research and numerous public hearings — has recommended (PDF) lowering consumption of red meat and processed meat.
Despite being fairly tepid, this advice set off a media firestorm, driven by a defensive meat industry and others who have been muddying the waters for some time on the role of meat in the diet. The meat lobby is taking full advantage of the current “debate.”
Adding to the confusion is Nina Teicholz, the best-selling author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet,” whose recent attempts to discredit the committee’s recommendations on meat have been published in The New York Times, alongside meat industry trade publications such as Beef Magazine and Cattle Network."
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/5/meat-lobby-pedd...