Seth's Blog

If LDL cholesterol level predicts heart disease then persons with low LDL should be better off than persons with high LDL. Here is what some Norwegian doctors did:

They simply selected sequential patients with LDL cholesterol scores below 2.7mmol/l. . . . They ignored all people with LDL concentrations from 2.7 to 4.5mmol/l but did enroll all people with an LDL >4.5mmol . . .  So they then had two groups of people, those at catastrophic risk of LDL-blocked-arteries and those with [very] little LDL . . . They did the scheduled angiography and checked how many patients had >70% blockage of at least two coronary arteries in each group.

Guess what: LDL cholesterol doesn’t matter. They recruited 47 patients with low LDL-C, of whom 21 had significant CAD. They got 46 high LDL-C patients, of whom 24 turned out to have CAD.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

How bad is LDL cholesterol?

On Christmas Eve I wrote there was a lot to be learned from the web comments on newspaper articles and the like that anyone can post. My point was how wonderful this was. Now the New York Times has added a feature that allows the most popular comments to rise to the top (you “show” Readers’ Recommendations) as I hoped. For example. Way to go!

You can also find comments that the “editors” (the sub-sub editors?) recommend (show Editors’ Selections). They tend to be long and querulous. I don’t think I’ll be using that feature much but it is good to have it for when I want long and querulous.

Still no comments allowed on The New Yorker website.

Health Month.
Thanks to JR Minkel.

At the Fancy Food Show, five or six booths sold probiotic foods, usually yogurt. At each booth I asked what they could tell me about the health effects of probiotics. Mostly the question seemed to annoy them — especially the employees hired for the event.

But at the Oixos booth — Oixos is a Greek yogurt made by Stonyfield Farm, an organic dairy in New Hampshire — Amy Plourde, a graphic designer at Stonyfield, told me that for a long time she was “always sick” with sinus infections, colds, and even mononucleosis. During that time, she ate yogurt once/week. When she started working at Stonyfield she began to eat yogurt once/day (6 oz. at breakfast) and her health got much better. Stonyfield yogurt has relatively high amounts of live bacteria. Their website has a list of scientific papers about yogurt and the immune system.

My take is that our immune systems need a steady stream of foreign pathogens (e.g., bacteria) and pieces of pathogens (e.g., bacterial cell walls) to stay “awake”. When your immune system is working properly you fight off all sorts of bacteria and viruses without noticing. When your immune system isn’t working properly it overreacts (allergies) and takes too long to react (infectious diseases). Weston Price found twelve communities eating traditional diets whose health was excellent. Their diets varied tremendously but one thing they had in common was daily consumption of fermented foods, including cheese, kefir, sauerkraut, and fermented fish. This supports Amy’s story right down to the dosage. If you don’t eat fermented foods, you might use hookworms, which excrete a steady stream of foreign substances into the blood. (Thanks, Tom.) Hookworms definitely reduce allergy symptoms; I don’t think anyone has asked if they reduce colds and other infections.

The hygiene hypothesis.

Pistachio saffron milk. A just-released product from Ajmera Innovations. Sort of a step up from pomegranate soda and a dozen other high-end drinks, just as pomegranate soda was a step up from Coke and Sprite.