RE: Vegetarians have 15% chance of developing heart disease compared to 50% chance for meat eaters
Vegetarians and carnivores have the same all cause mortality. If you are bound and determined to not die from heart disease, then vegetarianism is great. But be aware -- you are then accepting a greater likelihood of dying from something else.
Research says that vitality in old age is inversely correlated to cholesterol. The lower your cholesterol, the less active and strong you are and the higher likelihood you will have of dementia and mental illness.
Solitary focus on heart health, as if that's all there is, is part of what is wrong with medicine today. Information ends up in these silos, just like happened to the intelligence community prior to 9/11 and before going into Iraq, and the whole system ends up listening to recommendations that are constructed from a very narrow point of view without being balanced by counter-factuals from other specialists.
Cardiologists just tell us about heart disease -- but they don't know anything about the effect of low cholesterol on the immune or nervous system. And then breathless headlines about low cholesterol reducing heart attacks gets extrapolated to everyone when it shouldn't be.
Great comment.
I know the best way to experience illness, for myself, is to follow the 'heart healthy grain, low fat, and low salt' diet. I tried it, it gave me cancers, two of them.
This idea of treating everyone as the average verges on cult like monomania. It reduces to 'meat bad', 'grain good', and no distinction is made among the types of things that might be bad for some people, and not for others, or the methods of their production.
It turns out that cholesterol is not the culprit after all. The cholesterol is there to remove calcification that is misplaced as a result of vitamin deficiencies. These are due to our depleted cropland, as a result of poor farming practices. This is but a small piece of the puzzle, but it's a start.
The body does create it's own cholesterol. You don't have to eat it. There is HDL and LDL generally, and LDL is the sort which is bad. Specifically apob is better than even LDL as a biomarker.
There has been tests to see how low is too low for LDL and so far the only side effect of very low LDL is depression. My own opinion for my own health goals, I like to keep my LDL under 60, and sometimes under 50. I also track the ratios which are more important.
Ideally you cannot reduce all risks but you can know what you're more vulnerable to by genes and adapt. If you know you're more likely to die of heart disease than something else then you would want to adapt your diet accordingly. If you know you're vulnerable to diabetes, then you might not want to eat too much processed sugar. If you know you're vulnerable to suicide then you might have to worry about the depression side effect of low LDL. We are all different.
References
Yes. But medicine has not caught up with this paradigm nuance yet. They are still operating in the industrial revolution mode, where the process is to determine the "best practice" and then apply it to everyone in a blanket way.