Dr. Michael Eades

The subtitle of this post could just as easily have been: Feed your mitochondria right.

The two videos below pretty much tell the whole sad tale of doctors and nutrition.  Taken together, they confirm the widespread notion that doctors, in general, know very little about nutrition and seem to be proud to keep it that way.

This first video has made the rounds on the internet.  I?ve had it sent to me or recommended to me a dozen times, but I had never watched it until just a few days ago.  I was put off because of its length, which, at a little over 17 minutes, seems like an eternity in internet viewing time.  But I hope anyone reading this post doesn?t make the mistake I did and avoid watching because of the length.  It is a spectacular talk given by Dr. Terry Wahls, a female physician who was struck down by a relentlessly progressive neurodegenerative disorder.  She describes how she was able to restore her health by revamping her diet in in a way designed to properly feed her mitochondria.*  The transformation is almost unbelievable, especially considering the disease she was battling.  If you haven?t already seen this video – watch it.  I guarantee you?ll be glad you did.  And while you watch, pay careful attention to what her diet doesn?t contain much of.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After you?ve seen the above video, take a look at the one below.  It is a little over 2 minutes long and was developed to give doctors – who, for the most part, don?t give a flip about diet – advice they can pass along to their obese or overweight patients.  Watching the longer video above first will give you more context to better appreciate the one below and show you just how lame mainstream medicine can be.

This video came from Medscape, a subscription service for doctors to keep them abreast of all the latest and greatest news and updates from the world of mainstream medicine.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pitiful, isn?t it?

Links:

The Medscape article containing this video.  (Although Medscape is a free subscription service for physicians, non-physicians can sign up as well.  For free.  Register if you would like to see the article, which is nothing more than a transcript of the video above.)  It is amazing to me that an online newsletter designed for physicians would regurgitate dietary information from a newsweekly and pass it off as serious medical information.  Especially in such a condescending and patronizing way.  The whole thing is infuriating.

The list of the 22 nutritional ?experts? who came up with the dietary rankings mentioned.

The US News and World Report article that inspired the video.

Power, Sex and Suicide  A pretty thorough book on mitochondrial function that is accessible to the non-scientist.  I read this book 6 or 8 years ago and learned a fair amount about mitochondrial DNA.  I had been interested in the issue of mitochondrial rehab for a while, and this book filled in some, but not all, of the blanks.  A good place to start if your interested.

Why Are Cells Powered by Proton Gradients?  Full text of a paper written by Nick Lane, the author of the above book, discussing how mitochondria work by creating an energy gradient across the inner membrane.  Accessible to non scientists.

Source of photo of mitochondria at top of post.

* Mitochondria are the little sausage-shaped organelles inside the cells that convert the energy stored in food to ATP, the energy currency of the body. I think the idea of correctly feeding mitochondria is an important one.  If your mitochondria don?t work well, you don?t work well.  I?ve got a couple of posts in the works on this subject of just what does keep the mitochondria fit and what happens when they become unfit.  And what it takes to rehab them if broken.  Based on my own pretty extensive review of the scientific literature over the past few years coupled with my clinical experience, I have a few minor quibbles with Dr. Wahls? notions of what constitutes a perfect diet for the mitochondria, but I?ve got to say that her results speak for themselves.  I just think her diet could be even better with a little judicious tweaking.

In the Jan 9, 2012 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine in the Online First section an article appeared showing that women studied as part of the Women’s Health Initiative who were on statin drugs during the study developed diabetes at greater rates than those who were not on these drugs.  According to the statistical analysis of the authors, being on a statin increased the relative risk of developing diabetes by 48 percent!

These were observational studies and, as such, can’t be used to determine causality.  But they are interesting nonetheless because according to one of the authors there have been other clinical trials showing the same thing.  One of the authors of the study, Dr. JoAnn Manson, Professor of Medicine and Harvard Medical School commented on the findings of this study and what they mean to doctors who put patients on statins.  Dr. Manson’s commentary was provided by Medscape, a site for physicians to go to learn about the latest in medical wizardry.  The site requires registration, but if you are interested, you are allowed to register even if you aren’t a physician.

I decided that instead of commenting on Dr. Manson’s video after the fact, I would do it in real time right on the video.  This is my first effort at anything like this, so you can let me know what you think of it.  If you find it enjoyable and/or helpful, please drop a note in the comments, and I may be inspired to try it again.

You’ll notice my repeated assertions that statins don’t provide any benefits.  What I’m talking about is the fact that statins have never been shown to decrease all-cause mortality. (See the first sentence in the Lipitor product insert above.)   In other words, if you take a statin, you gain no increase in life expectancy.  If I, myself, am evaluating a drug that I might have to take, I would certainly want to make sure it didn’t simply replace one risk factor for another.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note: The comments on this video made by me are my opinions based on my reading of the medical literature.  They are no substitute for consultation with your own physician, and should in no way be construed as medical advice.  The decision to start, continue or discontinue any drug regimen is a serious one and should be a decision made after careful discussion with your own physician.

As I mentioned in the video above, I just read a book by a cardiologist practicing the California who has dived deeply into the scientific evidence and feels the same way about the lipid hypothesis as I do.  And about statin drugs.  And this a real cardiologist.  Ernest N. Curtis, M.D. has written The Cholesterol Delusion, a book that takes a different approach to dismantling the lipid hypothesis than The Great Cholesterol Con, but is just as effective.  If you’re still in the camp that worries about cholesterol, you may take solace from the information in this terrific book.  If you need to persuade a friend or loved one, this is the book.

If you enjoy the way I sometimes dissect studies on this blog, you will love Dr. Curtis’s book because that’s what he does.  He dismembers the studies that the lipophobes rely on to maintain their fantasy that cholesterol really does cause heart disease.

Take for example the Lipid Research Clinics Coronary Primary Prevention Trial (LRCCPPT), the authors of which made the oft repeated claim that each 1 percent reduction in cholesterol gives a 2 percent reduction in cardiac risk.  Dr. Curtis eviscerates this study and describes how the authors dishonestly spun their experiment’s end result, which was essentially meaningless, in such a way that it has become one of the mainstays in the argument for cholesterol lowering.

During the study, 7 percent of the subjects on a cholesterol-lowering drug died while 8.6 percent of those on placebo died.  Dr. Curtis describes how this minuscule difference can be converted into a relative risk difference of 19 percent, which is what the authors were crowing about.  But that number isn’t nearly as important as the absolute risk, which is the difference between the 8.6 and 7, or 1.6 percent.  So those subjects on the drug (which is not without side effects and costs if the subjects had been paying for it themselves) ended up with a 1.6 percent lower absolute risk than those who didn’t take the drug.

But that’s not the end of the story.  Was the 1.6 percent difference even statistically significant?  Here’s where things get interesting.

How significant is the difference between 7.0% and 8.6%? Common sense tells us that this difference is of no practical significance.  But what about the more esoteric criterion of statistical significance?  According to the pretrial protocol, which called for a level of certainty with p<0.01, it didn’t even come close.  If one applies the more lenient criterion of p<0.05, it still fails the test when the typical two-tailed test is employed.

If one applies the p<0.05 criterion and uses the less rigorous one-tailed test, however, this difference barely qualifies as statistically significant.  This is, in fact, what the investigators did.  In one of the most flagrantly dishonest acts ever seen in a major medical study, the authors apparently changed the criteria for significance after reviewing the data.

The is absolutely shameful behavior way beyond the pale.  When researchers design a study, they set on the front end the statistical parameters by which the outcome of their experiment is to be measured.  They do this at the start so there can be no fudging at the end when the results are in.  Everyone agrees to the standards and off they go to do the study, and the outcome either reaches the level of statistical significance by the predetermined measure or not.  In this case, the standards were set, but when they weren’t reached, the standards were reduced once and then again before the results barely were able to claim statistical significance.  Shameful indeed.  And this is one of the major studies, quoted daily, showing that a reduction in cholesterol brings about a reduction in heart disease.  Jesus wept.

Why didn’t other scientists say anything about this.  One did and wrote  a withering critique in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but the journal kept it under wraps for a year before publishing.  By that time, the LRCCPPT had gotten so much coverage and the cholesterol-lowering-prevents-heart-disease mantra had swept the nation, so everyone pretty much ignored the grousing of a scientist who saw the emperor without any clothes. (You can’t tell much from the abstract I linked to, but Dr. Curtis reprints some of the juicier parts.)

This study isn’t the only one with warts all over it nor the only one routinely misinterpreted.   But it’s not surprising given the vast amount of money at stake in the business of reducing cholesterol by drug therapy whether that cholesterol reduction is important or not.

After you read Dr. Curtis’s book you will become as big a skeptic as I am of medical studies and regard them all with a jaundiced eye.