Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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68 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you have been prescribed statins, you owe it your body to read this book, 23 Feb 2007
For the newly diagnosed patients with raised cholesterol, who have been prescribed Statin therapy, this book will explain simply, and with great humour, why you ought not to take statins. It explores (and debunks) the current medical gold standards which have been based on rather poor science, since the first major study (Framingham, Mass) was carried out, ostensibly to determine the effects of cholesterol on heart disease. The long-term statin taker could also benefit from reading this book.
You will be surprised at the twists and turns that the medical profession, in conjunction with the large pharmaceutical companies, has taken to preserve the illusion that high cholesterol is a predictor of heart disease. The most startling evidence is that low cholesterol levels are a robust predictor of the risk of dying prematurely.
Dr Kendrick is to be applauded for writing about a complex subject, in terms that any layperson could easily follow. He explains medical jargon simply and summarises each chapter in plain English. If your own personal medical practitioner is banging on about your elevated cholesterol levels and the risks you run of dying from coronary artery disease, you now have the means to prevent yourself being bullied into accepting statin medication.
Information is power and knowledge is the means by which you can wield that power. You deserve the opportunity to take control of your own health... which is far better than letting a drug company decide how you will live your life. The book is very reasonably priced and it does not attempt to sell anything to the reader nor do you have to sign up to any cult.
This book truly deserves to be a best-seller and there should be a copy of it on every medical practitioner's desk.
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61 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A tribute to proper science, 6 Feb 2007
Despite monumental efforts, cardiovascular disease is still the leading cause of disability and death in many countries. The Great Cholesterol Con by the British physician Dr Malcolm Kendrick will be a very discomforting piece of literature for many of his colleagues. For in this groundbreaking work, Dr Kendrick shows painfully clearly that the medical establishment has been chasing the wrong enemy for over four decades, while the real villain has been staring them right into their faces.
In the first chapters, Dr Kendrick uses plain textbook biochemistry to show that there is no such thing as a `cholesterol level', that there is no thinkable way for the bogyman LDL to cause arterial plaque, that the idea that the `good' HDL could reverse plaques by breaking out incorporated LDL is a perfect example of magic thinking and that the ingestion of saturated fat can not have any influence at all on the amount of any lipoprotein floating around in the blood stream. He presents statistics from the WHO ("Not the pop band, but the World Health Organisation") that show that countries with the lowest saturated fat intake invariably have a much higher cardiovascular heart disease mortality than the countries with the highest saturated fat intake.
After describing in detail why statin therapy probably does more harm than good in the general population, Dr Kendrick explains the observation that people with inherited super high LDL levels (familial hypercholesteraemia or FH) indeed do have a substantially increased risk of dying of cardiovascular disease. In the land of FH, children aged ten die of massive heart attacks (although others live happily to be 104...) Even to those who clearly understand that the cholesterol hypothesis must be utter bonkers, made up in the minds of the worlds most gifted fairyologists, this has always been a hard nut to crack. To many doctors, the excess pathology in the FH population is the kind of Aha experience that overrules all the contradicting evidence. Children aged five get massive heart attacks, aha! Astatinate, astatinate! Aha!
To speak with Dr Kendrick: "And Aha to you too!" Once again, it's not what it looks like. Actually, it's a hell of a lot more complicated than so. To begin with, many individuals with FH not only have elevated levels of harmless LDL, they also have higher levels of lipoprotein a, most often called Lp(a). This is ordinary LDL, with a slightly different protein coat. Lp(a) - which is never measured in ordinary cholesterol tests - is the only cholesterol containing vehicle that actually is atherogenic. Extremely so. It is a potent clotting factor. Once incorporated in clots, it makes them as robust as concrete, keeping them out of reach for natural clot dissolving agents. Secondly, many hypercholesteraemiacs (but not all of them) suffer from a whole range of other clotting abnormalities. These people should be identified and subsequently treated for their life threatening clotting disorders, not for their elevated LDL levels.
Then what is it that really causes this dreaded `killer of the Western world'? Well, a huge part of the cause is in our brain, or more precisely, in our nervous system. Perceived stress - especially the prolonged stress brought on by social dislocation, lack of control, insufficient reward - disrupts the HPA-axis: an intricate and highly complicated set of hormonal feed back loops that allows us to properly deal with life's challenges. By constantly pushing the HPA-axis over the edge, we are effectively giving ourselves various degrees of `Cushing's Disease,' a malady characterised by chronic overproduction of the stress hormone cortisol. Cushing's Disease, invariably ruins the cardiovascular system. This is well documented. The sub clinical form - which is induced by such apparently unrelated stressors as smoking, cocaine or steroid abuse, discrimination and spinal cord injury - is no less dangerous. Kendrick explains exactly how this works. His model also for the first time explains the distribution of cardiovascular heart disease in time and place. Why did the Fins once have the world's highest heart disease mortality? Did anybody know that Finland endured the greatest forced relocation in the recent European history?
Once you have read the first lines, you will read the whole book, probably right on the spot. It is extremely information dense, so it definitely helps that Malcolm Kendrick is one of the better writers of our time, gifted with an ultra dry Scottish wit. I challenge everybody in the field - cardiologists, GP's, lipid researchers, health insurers, nutritionists and journalists - to carefully read this book and shoot at its flaws.
I expect a deafening silence. It requires a great deal of courage to admit that one plus one is two, when you have always maintained it is three.
Melchior Meijer
Medical reporter
The Netherlands
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37 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Commonsense and logic demolishes crazy outdated theory - and entertaining too!, 14 Mar 2007
A great combination of logical thinking and a ready wit.
If you are interested in health and medical issues, if you are 'middle-aged' and starting to wonder whether you should worry about your 'cholesterol level', if you, yourself or a relative or friend is taking statins or even if the title just makes you curious - then you should buy this book.
Throughout the book is written in language easy for the layperson to understand and - unusually for a science book - a genuinely entertaining read as Kendrick has a gift for the comic turn of phrase. The only flaw is - in common with many, many publications today - an apparent lack of copy-editing leading to some distracting typos - but don't let this put you off.
The book starts with a clear, easy to understand explanation of the biochemistry behind 'cholesterol'. The reader learns about fats, about cholesterol itself, how it is made and what it does in the body and the fact that nobody really has a 'cholesterol level'. From this book you will learn the true meaning of those ubiquitous terms 'good cholesterol' and 'bad cholesterol' (and you will learn that they are actually not cholesterol at all!). Once you learn what 'LDL', 'HDL' and the rest of the crew actually are and do in the body you will begin to wonder how any sane person could believe in the 'cholesterol causes heart disease hypothesis' at all. Read on!
Kendrick then goes on to explore the rise and rise of the cholesterol/diet-heart hypothesis: that a high-fat diet causes a high cholesterol level and that this then causes heart disease. He shows through numerous examples from the medical literature how this theory has been effectively disproved again and again. For those of us who thought science was supposed to proceed as follows: put forward hypothesis, attempt to disprove hypothesis, if data arrives contradicting hypothesis, discard it and try again, it is truly astounding to learn that medical researchers have not conducted themselves this way at all. Instead the cholesterol/diet-heart hypothesis is propped up by inventing a specific excuse for each of the 'paradoxes' which contradict it and thus ought to demolish it outright.
He also explains how the so-called wonder drugs statins far from 'proving' the truth of the cholesterol/diet-heart hypothesis actually operate by other mechanisms. It is very entertaining yet also disturbing to read how researchers can end up stating the equivalent of 'we must assume that black is white' in an attempt (presumably) to obfuscate what their data actually shows.
Kendrick does not leave it there. He does have an alternative explanation for the cause of heart disease and he presents this in the final part of the book. Once again, it is convincingly presented and it is shown how results readily available in the medical literature support this theory. Unfortunately, this theory does not lend itself to a quick-fix pill and therein may lie the explanation of why it is mostly ignored.
[...]
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