From Riccardo Baschetti
Padua, Italy
David Grimes’s claims about cholesterol (Letters, 14 September, p 51), are
both scientifically wrong and socially dangerous—because they may lead
people to eat ad libitum, thereby increasing their risk of coronary
heart disease.
He claims that “dietary manipulation is of no benefit” in lowering
cholesterol. This sounds grotesque in view of the evidence that, for example,
“one heterozygote showed a drop of serum cholesterol level from 426 to 248
mg/dl, with strict adherence to a low-fat diet without drugs” (Journal of
the American Medical Association, vol 255, p 219).
He criticises the “very powerful paradigm that coronary heart disease is due
to `misbehaviour’—due to the way in which we live our lives, what we eat
and whether we smoke, and so on”. Such a “paradigm”, however, is evidently
correct, because coronary angiography has shown that: “Comprehensive lifestyle
changes may be able to bring about regression of even severe coronary
atherosclerosis after only one year, without use of lipid-lowering drugs”
(The Lancet, vol 336, p 129).
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