The Grand Carbohydrate-Cholesterol Switcheroo ~ Are We Repeating History?

In Deep Nutrition, one of the World's best health experts* Dr. Cate Shanahan writes this of cholesterol:

Genetic Experimentation—On You

You may have noticed the various cut-off levels over the years to identify people at “high risk” of a heart attack.  Years ago, if your total cholesterol was 300 or less, your doctor would have said you were fine. Soon, that number was lowered to 200.  Now people also watch their LDL, “safe” levels of which have been lowered from 200 to 160, to 130, to 100, and now 80.  Currently, the average person’s LDL level is still about what it’s always been, around 120–130. The controversial 2001 revision of the cholesterol guidelines means nearly half of the US population can now be labeled “high risk.”  And drug companies are raking it in.

She goes on to quote the former Medical Editor for NEJM stating that the reason this persists comes down to financial interests/conflicts.  To a considerable degree, I agree with Dr. Cate and her source on this one ... although I think the financial interests for the doctors are less about profit than liability, as well as the trend towards managing risk.  

One of the problems I run into as I debunk so-called "alternate hypotheses" is that I tend to come off on the side of the status quo ... by default, I suppose.  So I want to make it clear that I have never bought into the dietary cholesterol hypothesis.  In most, dietary cholesterol has little, if any, impact on fasting lipoproteins.  Having just listened to Jimmy's interview with Dr. Cate for his upcoming book Cholesterol Clarity, it seems an ongoing theme of the book will also be that total cholesterol levels are largely meaningless.  Again, I agree.   

However ... doctors have been measuring at least LDL and HDL for decades now, along with the somewhat misnomered "bad cholesterol" and "good cholesterol" designations.  I don't know of a single doctor who just does a TC test and puts someone on a statin.   I have always had high-ish (high normal to just above the cut-off) TC, but I've also always had a rather robust HDL number (60's-to-70's).  I do not have the numbers from that test back over a decade ago, but I did get the results in the mail in advance of the followup with the doctor.  They came with a standard printout generated by a computer and pointed out my LDL was a tad high.  I was prepared!  I planned to march into my doctor's office and declare myself just fine and how dare she suggest I might consider a statin.  Well, to my surprise her words were pretty much just that.  My other health markers were good (despite being quite overweight at the time) and she noted that my various ratios were great (yes, she looked!) and sent me on my way with an admonishment that I might want to lose some weight.  

Now, I'm sure there are those doctors who see the levels, gasp, and reach for the prescription pad.  But that hasn't been my experience and I'm willing to bet that it hasn't been most of yours either.  The unfortunate recent trending towards mandating drugs for insurance carriers is disturbing, but this will not be fought by bringing copies of mass media health rags to your doctor.   

Still, Shanahan makes a great point, and it is a point that has also been made concerning the "obesity epidemic".  No doubt Americans are getting heavier, but part of the problem is that the BMI thresholds have been scaled down.  Point being -- we've created arbitrary benchmarks by which perfectly normal people are all of a sudden sick or at risk for being so.

But the more conspiratorial amongst us are wont to believe there's a grand conspiracy between doctors and Big Pharma to rake in the bucks.  And when you can't make enough money off of the sick people, then test the crap out of the well ones and capitalize off of their fears with "risk assessments" and the magic pill you have for them that will allay their fears.    This may well have grains of truth to it, but as I put forth in Alternative Medical Ethics, this is not a tactic solely for the mainstream.  Indeed if you listen towards the end (~22 min or so for context) of this "bootleg audio" of Robb Wolf's Reno911 presentation at AHS13, you'll hear the Freudian slip that "it's much more profitable" to just go outside the establishment.  

But what of all of the bad advice based on bad science?  Sure, there are vestiges of "don't eat eggs" and "reduce saturated fat intake" around.  Need I remind folks that this is part and parcel of the Eaton/Konner/Cordain/Lindeberg paleo diet??!!  

But the renegades are not content to try to dispel myths and correct errors.  No.  They must find a new culprit.  First, it is that the fat doesn't cause obesity or high "cholesterol" it's the carbs.  In reality, however, carbohydrates, even fructose, are not significantly quantitatively converted to fats by the liver.  It is time for that "new" error or mistake to be corrected in the records.  Where lipids are to be dismissed as a "numbers game", blood glucose levels and the HbA1c have more than replaced them in that game, and sugar or starch as the demonized foods.    All of this is based on the misconception that carbohydrate content of the diet is what causes hyperglycemia. This is just wrong.  If one has a mild metabolic disruption, the symptoms can be managed with a low carb diet, but for those that LC works to reverse diabetes?  It's the weight loss that does the trick. 

Still, some time more recently, the diagnostic guidelines for "pre-diabetes" were lowered from a fasting blood glucose level of 110 mg/dL to 100 mg/dL (6.1 to 5.6 mmol/L).  This seemingly minor downward adjustment, however, ensnares a rather large proportion of the population -- the tailing bar that red arrow is pointing to on the distribution from this study.   The dots are actual frequency of deaths from all cause.    Importantly:

Lowest observed death rates centered on FBG** of 99mg/dL

If they centered on 99, then half of that group is above 99 mg/dL or "prediabetic". This is the data that prompted this quote from Ron "we are all diabetic" Rosedale (more in this blog post):

It is important to realize that this answer is no; there is no safe intake of sugar, nor a threshold level of blood sugar below which no harm will come, and I will shortly devote a fair amount of time to show this. 

The crux of the ‘safe starches’ argument is that no harm will come of this and it is, in fact, healthy. It is acknowledged that blood glucose will elevate after eating ‘safe starches’, but will generally stay below 140 mg/dl that Jaminet says is perfectly safe. Is it?? The science writing (below) is on the wall and the answer is…clearly no.

As well, there is no lacking for "there is no biological need for dietary carbohydrate" mantras in the low carb community.  Some, like Rosedale and Gedgaudas are fairly adamant that any dietary carb is unhealthy.  This is more extreme than the lipophobes, as even the USDA guidelines only call for limiting saturated fats to 10% of dietary intake (again, right around the amount used in the clinical trials of the "paleolithic diet").   

Perhaps one day as time permits, I'll flesh this post out some more, but at the moment it does not.  So I'll simply state that many of the same games are played with the HbA1c diagnostic.  Yes, risk and mortalities etc. track quite well when things go awry -- e.g. untreated, frank diabetes.  But we see similar trends here.  Within "normal" ranges there is high variability and little to no evidence that reducing this has any positive impact on health.  Indeed we see the same J curve where on the very low end you have increased risks again.  

Rationalizations in the LC-paleosphere aside -- that "physiological insulin resistance" is not the same as that bad kind,  and perhaps even protective should you find yourself cornered in a dark hallway at an obesity conference by Robert Lustig and jabbed with a bolus of insulin -- "prediabetes" is cause for immediate concern!  Jimmy Moore has written a whole book now to convince himself that his nightmarish lipid levels are nothing to worry about and he's perfectly healthy.  And yet his FBG is flirting with officially prediabetic and even eating almost zero carb didn't fix that.  So Jimmy is taking berberine supplements, which might as well be taking metformin, to control his blood sugar.   

Why?  

Is there not even a little bit of skepticism about the profiteering in the diabetes realm?  Seriously.  It seems the AARP is just about ready to hand out glucometers in place of membership certificates.  Have you seen all the commercials?   The conversion rates from prediabetes to diabetes is rather small.  So why is the low carb community contributing to mass hysteria over glucose levels, encouraging use of diabetes supplies (often expensive) by non-diabetics, and aiding and abetting the diabetes establishment?    At the very least, there is a big market for these alternate "practitioners" to profit off of fear mongering off glucophobes they've created with their hyperbole and flat out bad science.

Of course the medical establishment is excoriated for recommending the "wrong diet" (stupid diabetes doctors and their 8 Cokes a day dietary recommendations ...) and pushing drugs and insulin on actual diabetics.  But the community is filled with diabetics for whom diet alone has not brought their glucose metabolism back to normal (and I suspect many of these have the sort of potentially cautionary lipid profiles the Jimmy Moores will tell you not to worry about).  I get the impression that metformin is considered OK for these folks because you don't want your limbs to fall off and to go blind.  (And no I'm not making light of REAL complications from REAL diabetes ... that is serious and you should consult a REAL doctor for care in treating it.)

The parallels are there.  Are we repeating history here?  Seems like it.

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* Title bestowed by Jimmy Moore, 2013.
** I left the FBG acronym because it's commonly used.  However both the study cited and the ADA guidelines are for fasting plasma glucose.