Did anyone happen to catch the news about the latest study on Cholesterol medications? In this study Vytorin was found to actually harm the study participants. The results were withheld from the public while the executives dumped stock. But there is more news about the whole cholesterol craze.

It turns out that Statins aren't all that hot for people outside a select few. In fact, their risks outweigh their benefits for most people. Further cholesterol may not be as big of risk factor (or a factor at all) as has been reported.

There's a great article in Businessweek that talks about the body of science behind the whole thing.

I have taken both Lipitor and Zocor over the past few years. I always wondered if all the cholestrol stuff was overblolwn. Now I'm really going to do some investigating.

Thanks for the heads up, the article was an eye openier.

My doctor put me on the cholestoral/blood pressure pill that I can't recall at the moment. I was spending so much money on my wife's cancer meds I dropped it. My BP never really went down too much, and I find that if train aerobically regularly my BP tends to stay lower.

O43

Here's another case of fraud or outright lying. This time on the part of the news media.

I'm sure everyone remembers the movie "Super Size Me", and how the diet was damaging his liver. Well a new paper details a study from Sweden where healthy subjects were feed a similar diet for 30 days along with no exercise. They too showed early signs of liver damage. The news media reported the study as shown in these examples:
CBS: "The study, published in the advance online edition of Gut, doesn't show which was more damaging - bingeing on fatty food or being
sedentary."
ABC News: "The extra fat is the big enchilada here..."
NHS (the UK's National Health Services) Choices: "The study does provide a further reason to avoid overeating (especially food high in saturated fat) if one is needed."
MedPage Today (a news service for Doctors) suggests: "Explain to interested patients that this small study suggested that overdoing it on high-fat foods, even during a short holiday period, for instance, and a failure to exercise can cause liver damage."

There's only one problem with those reports. They completely mis-represented the results. The study's own authors state: "It [the cause of the liver damage] was not the fat in the hamburgers, it was rather the sugar in the coke," he said.

The bottom line - the traditional news media cannot be trusted to give us correct and truthful information on health.