WHY IS 5.2 (200) A 'HEALTHY' CHOLESTEROL LEVEL?

[Guest guest]

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/enig_chol.html

 

The enclosed three paragraphs, which I wrote last week for the Weston

A Price Foundation website to add to the " Oiling of America " article

tells how the 200 mg/dl cutoff for serum cholesterol was decided back in

1984.

 

Mary Enig, PhD

 

Gary Taubes, a staff writer for Science wrote an article called " The

Soft Science of Dietary Fat " for the 30 March 2001 issue of Science. He

had reviewed all the available information on the demonization of

dietary fat and the cholesterol issues and listened to the tapes of the

1984 Cholesterol Consensus Conference. He presented the graph which

showed quite clearly that serum cholesterol levels of 200 mg/dl to 240

mg/dl were definitely in the normal cholesterol range for which there

was no increased risk of heart mortality in males and even above 240

mg/dl there was a decrease in risk for women.

 

But what Gary Taubes didn't know was that there was a political decision

being made on the floor of the NIH (Building 10) Mazur Auditorium that

day in December 1984. The decision would allow the National Heart Lung

and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to have yet another even more extensive

long-term " trial " to work on. The NHLBI could not get more money from

Congress for more large trials such as the MRFIT or LRC and they were

developing the National Cholesterol Education Program. With the cutoff

number at the lower end of the normal range (200 mg/dl), they could

include all of the healthy normal citizens in the range that would need

treatment with diet, and since the diet would never work to permanently

lower those normal levels (eg, 200 mg/dl to 240 or 260 mg/dl) to below

200 mg/dl, they could recommend that all these people should go onto

cholesterol-lowering medications.

 

The three men who were heading the NHLBI (Cleeman, Lenfant, and Rifkin)

were standing together in the Mazur Auditorium just before the

Cholesterol Consensus Conference began. They were discussing the cutoff

level of serum cholesterol to put into the consensus report. One said to

the other two, " but we can't have the cutoff at 240 [mg/dl]; it has to

be at 200 [mg/dl] or we won't have enough people to test. " Several of us

from the University of Maryland Department of Chemistry Lipids Research

Group were standing directly behind them and within clear earshot. We

looked at each other and of course were not surprised when the final

numbers came out. This small chat did not get onto the tapes that Taubes

reviewed.