The showing of “The Cholesterol Code” film has been rescheduled due to logistical reasons. It is now slated to be shown on Monday, May 18th, at the AMC 11 in Dartmouth, MA.
I’m on the record as stating that cholesterol is not even close to the most important risk factor for cardiac disease, that the benefits of statins are small for most people, and that there are much more important things than cholesterol to focus on for overall health. This puts me a bit at odds with the “mainstream medical establishment,” and somewhat in league with the contrarians and “cholesterol sceptics.” On the flip side, I’m also on record as stating that this doesn’t mean cholesterol doesn’t matter at all, and that I believe statins do in fact have a role to play for select patients. Which puts me in conflict a bit with the above mentioned cholesterol sceptics. To quote the late, great Gerry Rafferty: “Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”
I started writing this weeks’ blog post about a recent article I saw in the online magazine Vox regarding the safety and benefits of statins (the most commonly used type of medication for cholesterol lowering). However, once I started writing I realized that I needed to make a major digression to explain the concept of “Number Needed to Treat”, which in turn doesn’t fully make sense until one understands the concepts of relative versus absolute risk. So I will instead make this weeks’ entry another in my series on how to read and interpret the medical literature and defer my thoughts on the Vox article to a future post.
Crohn’s disease, in case you aren’t familiar, is a type of “Inflammatory bowel disease,” in which an autoimmune process causes severe inflammation throughout the digestive tract, leading to abdominal pain, bloody stools, malabsorption of nutrients, and other serious and sometimes life-threatening complications. Like many autoimmune diseases, it has become more common over the past few decades, which strongly suggests (since our genetics have not, as a species, changed during that same time period) that environmental triggers such as pollutants, changes to our gut microbiome, stress, and poor diet likely play a role in its development.
This new study, conducted by a group of doctors in Canada, bolsters this idea. After all, if changes in the way we live can cause Crohn’s disease, then it follows that changes in the way we live should also help to alleviate it.
