Bit of fun on twitter this eve, with more knocking of the benefit relating to LCHF achieving higher HDL, lower Trig, better ratios. Some people insist that this benefit is ‘unproven by RCT’. Well of course there are no RCT’s – who the hell would pay for one that would prove 50 years of Low Fat BS incorrect, and pave the way to collapse drug revenues? But what if the drug trials supported our LCHF point of view, by showing that the good LCHF metrics matter a lot, such that the drug benefit collapses in the ‘naturally achieved’ peeps? Wouldn’t that be…….lovely? So here we go, I dug out some nuggets for your pleasure.
The Helsinki Heart Trial (using Gemfibrozil) had some fascinating results – in short, if you had a higher HDL (only >1.0 for God’s sake, not even our customary LCHF 1.6-1.8), or a lower Trig (<2.3 – really – are they guzzling bread all day or what?), or reasonable LDL/HDL ratios, the drug performance was well – kinda rubbish. This speaks profoundly. The interesting report below:
http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/85/1/37.long
And excerpt graphs below; imagine they did this analysis on other trials for other drugs? Would a house of cards, ahem, collapse? What if they broke out ultra low Fasting Insulin peeps, and looked at their results? Or low C-Peptide, low ProInsulin? Indeed – don’t think you’ll ever see that data. And one more thing – regardless of the ‘blinding’, you can bet that the drug arm peeps were getting some extra TLC in a lot of these trials, and the pre-selection of candidates will always attempt bias, so any marginal benefits seen can be dismissed out of hand. (Note: also included a snippit from the VA HIT Trial, and a choice Statin jobby – go Hi HDL, go LCHF !)
