cardiovascular disease

Omega-3 supplements have little effect on cardiovascular health (updated)

There are a lot of claims that omega-3 supplements help cardiovascular help, but recent powerful systematic reviews show that they don’t.

Coffee is linked to reduced cardiovascular disease and mortality

A new peer-reviewed paper indicates that coffee may be linked to reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality.

Statins protect your cardiovascular health — systematic reviews

Statins have been controversial and are used by alternative medicine (not medicine) lovers as an example of all kinds of malfeasance from Big Pharma. However, real studies show quite the opposite — they protect cardiovascular health and reduce the risk of death.

I know I’ll get nasty comments (see Note 1) claiming everything that I am a Big Pharma shill or I don’t know anything about anything. But I’ve got the evidence, so those kinds of attacks mean nothing.

So let’s take a look at the best systematic reviews and try to put to rest the nonsensical dismissal of the claim that statins prevent cardiovascular events, including death.

COVID causes “substantial” long-term cardiovascular risks — get the vaccine

A new study that includes nearly 12 million patients have found that COVID-19 causes severe long-term cardiovascular risks. This is convincing evidence that everyone who can get vaccinated should get vaccinated or boosted.

Let’s take a look at the study and find out what it says about COVID-19 and cardiovascular disease.

Vitamin D supplements – evidence for clinical effectiveness and safety

The claims about the usefulness of vitamin D supplements are all over the internet. And they seem trendy, as most pseudoscientific claims are these days.

The purpose of this article is to review some of the old and new information about vitamin D supplements. It’s about scientific articles that either support or refute a claim, that’s it. It’s not about what we believe or we do not believe, it’s about evidence.

I don’t think vitamin D is worthless. It is an important micronutrient for human health, and if there’s a chronic deficiency, supplementation may be medically necessary.

On the other hand, proponents of megadoses of vitamins, called megavitamin therapy or orthomolecular medicine (pseudoscientific terms to sound like they are based on real science), seems to work on the unscientific belief that if a little helps, a whole boatload will help a lot more. Most of these ideas have been debunked and are considered quackery and fads.

I wanted to take a look at the science of vitamin D supplements while examining its actual benefits to health compared to the possible dangers of excess supplementation.

Measles infections prevent heart disease – an anti-vaccine trope

Here we go again, another anti-vaccine trope based on one paper without adequate scientific criticism of the said paper. What is this trope? Mumps and measles infections prevent heart disease and stroke. Let me jump right to the conclusion – wrong.

Although I’ve seen this story before, like most zombie tropes in the anti-vaccine world, this one has come back from the dead. In the pseudoscientific website, Health Impact News, the author writes:

By my calculations, natural infection with the measles and mumps will prevent millions of heart attacks and strokes. Why is this information not all over the TV and internet? I will tell you why. Because mainstream media is in bed with Big Pharma who pay their bills. The politicians are slaves to their corporate masters. Our children should be exposed to every virus and bacteria for which a vaccine exists.

The author’s shrill claim is based on a 2015 article published in the lower impact factor journal, Atherosclerosis. The authors concluded that “measles and mumps, especially in case of both infections, were associated with lower risks of mortality from atherosclerotic CVD (cardiovascular disease).”

Now, it’s time to turn a critical and skeptical eye towards that article.Read More »Measles infections prevent heart disease – an anti-vaccine trope

Fried food increases cardiovascular mortality risk – sorry KFC

As part of my ongoing series of articles that review interesting new studies, this week, I’m going to look at a new study that shows that fried food may be linked to increased risks of death from cardiovascular disease.

Now, some of you may be scratching your head and saying, “I’m sorry ye old feathered dinosaur, but tell me something I don’t know.” That’s the thing about science, we may think we know that eating a bucket of fried chicken or fish and chips is “bad” for you, but we can’t be sure until we have published studies that give us statistically powerful results.

Despite the beliefs by nearly everyone, including physicians, that fried food is directly linked to cardiovascular disease, studies have been inconclusive in establishing that link. A recent large prospective cohort study in Europe showed no link between fried food and coronary heart disease. The link between fried food and anything is hardly settled science, despite the conventional wisdom.

And since nearly 25-36% of Americans consume fast food, which presumably includes a lot of fried food, researchers wanted to reduce as many confounders as possible by narrowing the study group to women of a certain age.

And that’s what we have from a new study published in January 2019. Let’s take a look at the study and discuss what it may mean.Read More »Fried food increases cardiovascular mortality risk – sorry KFC

Salt and cardiovascular health – not as evil as we once thought

If you are worried about your cardiovascular health, one of the things you want to avoid is salt. This was based on ancient research that seems to show even moderate salt intake could do all kinds of bad things for your cardiovascular system.

I was always skeptical of these claims because if you’ve got a healthy set of kidneys, the body has an amazing ability to regulate salt levels in the body. Of course, maybe there is some level of salt consumption that increases the blood pressure, cause retention of water, and other issues that lead to cardiovascular issues.

Recently, a very large prospective epidemiological study examined levels of salt consumption versus cardiovascular events. What did they find? Only high levels of salt consumption are linked to cardiovascular health.Read More »Salt and cardiovascular health – not as evil as we once thought

Supplements for cardiovascular diseases – more evidence that they don’t work

I have been skeptical of supplements for a long time – not because I have some predisposition against them. My skepticism results from the relative lack of any robust evidence that supplements have any positive effect on human health other than in unique situations of chronic diseases or malnutrition. In fact, most of the high-quality evidence about supplements show that it does not work. And a recently published review shows that using supplements for cardiovascular diseases are expensive and useless.

Since many readers fail to read what I wrote above, let me repeat myself for clarity. Supplements are not completely useless – of course, they are important for those who have chronic diseases or conditions may require supplements of some or many micronutrients. Someone who has had bariatric surgery or other types of serious gastrointestinal surgery may not be able to consume enough vitamins and minerals from food, and they will require multivitamins.

Also, some individuals may be malnourished, which doesn’t mean just not eating enough, but not eating some foods that have specific nutrients. For example, avoiding certain foods that contain vitamin C could put you at risk for a disease called scurvy, which can be deadly. There are several other diseases that result from missing key nutrients. However, in the modern developed world, these diseases are extremely rare because of the varied diet we have – and the availability of supplements to treat those diseases.

However, several points have got to be made. Just because vitamin C can treat scurvy doesn’t mean that more vitamin C makes your immune system suddenly powerful enough to destroy the common cold or flu or cure cancer. Vitamin D, although there are many cases of deficiency in many countries, is not a miracle supplement. It cannot cure or prevent cancer. It does not impart superpower abilities to your immune system.

The whole supplement industry has an overreliance on logical fallacies (like appeal to popular belief or appeal antiquity) or anecdotes (which aren’t data) to convince customers to buy their nonsense. They do this because they are not required to undergo gold-standard clinical trials to convince the FDA to approve their claims. Real pharmaceuticals, on the other hand, take 10-20 years of research and clinical trials before they are approved for use.

Big Supplement (yeah, it’s a huge industry, over US$100 billion annually, worldwide) also pushes the trope that if a little helps, a lot is better. This is not good science. The millions of years of human evolution (following up a billion years of immune system evolution) has led to a rather powerful immune system that is exceedingly complex and has always been able to do its job without the addition of supplements (unless early Homo sapiens had access to a GNC someplace).

But let’s take a look at supplements for cardiovascular diseases (stroke, heart attacks, and other cardiovascular conditions) – a new review shows us, once again, that there’s nothing there.Read More »Supplements for cardiovascular diseases – more evidence that they don’t work

Mediterranean diet and cardiovascular diseases study retracted – “aw nuts”

Although I think that most diets are bogus and healthy outcomes are not very well supported by scientific research, I have been a proponent of the so-called Mediterranean diet. It seems to have been linked to lower risks of cancer, cardiovascular disease, and some other chronic health conditions.

The claims of researchers who stated that the so-called Mediterranean diet, rich in plants, olive oil, fish, nuts, and other foods, was linked to lower risks of cardiovascular disease. It was a pivotal and robust cohort study, a powerful form of epidemiological study that sits near the top of the hierarchy of medical research, that influenced a lot of recommendations about the proper diet for people. The study was so powerful that I switched to that diet personally.

But lucky for the planet, science is self-correcting, and some aspects of the original study caused concerns, and the Mediterranean diet study was retracted and republished with corrections.

Does this mean that the Mediterranean diet was and is bogus? No, but let’s take a look at the whole story.Read More »Mediterranean diet and cardiovascular diseases study retracted – “aw nuts”