One clue that the public health establishment was responding to COVID in bad faith was the “shock and awe” campaign of closures and lockdowns designed to scare the public into submission. Rule number one of the pandemic playbook until 2020 was that leaders should avoid frightening people and sowing panic.
I wonder if there’s a similar shock and awe strategy behind the way labs report annual blood test results. Just this morning, there was an explosion between me and my wife at the breakfast table when she got a notification that her cholesterol results were available. Laypeople, like my spouse, don’t understand their results in context. They see only that the lab has highlighted certain words and numbers in bright red, often flagged for good measure with a capital H. The typical person gets scared into making more appointments for doctors and tests, padding providers’ wallets along the way. I tried to explain calmly to my wife what her cholesterol results mean, but literally she just sees red.
What Quest and LabCorp conveniently leave out of their LIPID PANEL, STANDARD test results is that:
- The link between cholesterol and heart disease is a contentious subject based on bogus studies from 70 years ago.
- In 2016, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture stopped recommending that Americans limit dietary cholesterol. The dietary advisory commitees said that the research hasn’t shown that dietary cholesterol is bad for the heart or increases the amount of cholesterol in the body. (If you’re worried about serum cholesterol, cut sugar.)
- Studies show that the sweet spot for mortality is a total cholesterol between 220-240, even though the lab reference range is set at <200 mg/dl. My total cholesterol reported from my blood donation a week ago was 224.
- Of all the scores on the lipid panel, the ratio of triglycerides/HDL is the most important metric of metabolic health and heart disease risk (and it’s not included, you must calculate it by hand).
The labs also don’t disclose the ongoing manipulation of test ranges so that normal scores are considered high. In just the past 20 years, the reference range for “desirable” LDL cholesterol has shifted from <130 mg/dL to <100 mg/dL. These new guidelines, joint recommendations from the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA), were created so that your doctor has a justification to prescribe you statins:
The financial ties between large pharmaceutical companies and the AHA are numerous and very remunerative for the AHA, including huge donations from Abbott, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), Eli Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer. BMS, along with Merck and Pfizer, are national sponsors of the AHA’s Go Red For Women heart disease awareness campaign whose website tells patients, “If your doctor has placed you on statin therapy to reduce your cholesterol, you can rest easy — the benefits outweigh the risks.”
The AHA also gets significant funding from Big Food. Cholesterol hysteria is lucrative for all involved because the AHA lets corporations reclassify their processed crap — cereals, seed oils — as heart-healthy cholesterol-reducers. In the documentary Fat Fiction, investigative science journalist Nina Teicholz noted:
The American Heart Association cashed in on the low-fat craze. Food companies paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to feature this heart-healthy check-off symbol on a product. So this resulted in crazy things like the heart check off on Cocoa Crispies or on Honey Nut Cheerios or on all these foods that were super high in sugar — but as long as they were low in fat then it was considered healthy.
I’m not seeing where all this information is included with the lab results. I’d like to show my wife.