Bad Cholesterol! Bad!

My cholesterol's a little high, and my LDL/HDL ratio is not good. Lately I've been consuming lots of oat bran muffins to remedy these alarming numbers. Last night I was whipping up another batch, when I realized we were out of eggs (whites only in the muffins, of course! Yolks down the drain!).

Listening to the radio on my way to the market to pick up a dozen, I heard Paul Kennedy of the CBC intone "This is Ideas."

Shouldn't that be "These Are Ideas?"

But that's beside the point. The topic of the show was diet and heart disease. According to the program, most of the science behind the whole saturated fat theory of heart disease is questionable at best and bogus at worst.

For example, about 50 years ago, some schmo took data from the World Health Organization, and found that in seven countries, the populations with the highest dietary fat consumption had the highest rate of heart disease. Convincing, no?

Trouble is, the WHO had data from twenty-two countries, and the other fifteen showed no such relation. The guy just tossed out the two-thirds of the evidence that didn't match the theory.

Going back even farther is the apparent father of the whole theory, some Russian in the early part of the twentieth century. This guy isolated cholesterol in the blood of rabbits to which he'd fed tons of fat. Then he fed them the stuff straight, and found that they ended up with arterial disease.

He apparently didn't think anything of the inconvenient fact that rabbits are vegetarians, and he was feeding them animal fat. He (or somebody else; I forget) tried it with some omnivore, and found that cholesterol didn't produce artery damage.

And the famous Framingham Heart Study apparently showed no link between dietary fat consumption and heart disease.

They went on and on and on about shady research and pseudo-scientific zealotry.

So I bought my eggs, went home, and finished making the muffins.

But while they were baking, I ate some Doritos.

Looks like...

My three-year-old (then two) was sitting on the pot about a month ago. After she did her business, she craned her neck around to observe the product of her efforts.

With just a hint of glee she exclaimed "That one looks like a crocodile!"