What's your ACTUAL risk of heart disease?

[TheAwfulToad]

MikePollard recently posted a video on the LCHF forum that really deserves a wider audience, especially since we've had a lot of posts recently from people worried about their cholesterol.

youtu.be/t8njzjSIybk(Not working as expected?)

It's possibly not the best video on the subject, but it's describing a test called a Coronary Artery Calcification scan, which is apparently now widely available in Ireland. It is a direct measurement of the state of your arteries, whereas cholesterol measurements are (at best) a crude estimate. In fact if you take away nothing else from this video, the important part is around 15:00, where the presenter points out the actual correlations between the common risk-factor measurements and the observed state of a subject's arteries:

Total cholesterol: no correlation

LDL-C: no correlation

HDL-C: no correlation

Triglycerides: modest correlation

HbA1c: no correlation

None of this is actually news. It's been known for several years that these tests are very poor predictors of impending heart disease, although TG/HDL is accepted as a somewhat-useful metric (or at least the best we've got).

So one has to ask: why is the NHS still wasting time and money on tests that convey no useful information, when a far superior alternative exists? Why, when it's apparently available at a modest 250-euro cost in Ireland, is it not being rolled out in the UK? More importantly, why is the government still pushing full steam ahead with its cholesterol-reduction crusade, when cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease?

If your doctor tells you that you have "high cholesterol" and are therefore at risk of heart disease, ask him for a CAC scan before he doses you up on statins. It's essentially a CT scan, so should not be undertaken for no good reason: however, if you are contemplating a life-threatening illness, that's probably a good reason.

If enough people start asking for a CAC scan, we might make some progress. In the meantime, you may be encouraged to know that reducing your heart disease risk is really quite simple, as Ivor Cummins points out at the end: stop eating rubbish, and eat real food. No drugs required.

[cheritorrox]

He's really interesting - but after 1hr 18 min of interview I decided to go back another day for his actual stuff