Cardiovascular Disease 87
The late Dr. G. E. Barnes reaffi rmed Virchow’s conclusions. He exam-
ined fi fty thousand autopsies of people who died in Europe during
World War II when saturated fats like meat and butter were scarce.
These autopsies showed advanced hardening of the arteries in spite of
the low-cholesterol diet in individuals who had died too young to have
heart attacks. Legions of statistics show similar results, among them
the fourteen-year Framingham, Massachusetts, study, which found
that one-half of the individuals in the study who died of heart attacks
had normal cholesterol levels.^4 This indicates that there is no defi nitive
link between moderately high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.Infl ammation and Heart Disease
Another condition related to heart disease is infl ammation of the inside
walls of the veins and arteries. This connection, unlike the cholesterol
connection, has been established in many studies. One such study, pub-
lished in the November 2002 issue of the New England Journal of Medi-
cine, found that men whose arteries have been infl amed for several years
are three times more likely to have heart attacks and two times more
likely to have strokes as individuals whose arteries are not infl amed.^5
Researchers point to a body chemical called C-reactive protein (CRP)
as the infl ammatory agent, and medications are now prescribed that
lower blood CRP levels.
Studies that came out in 2008 found that people with high CRP
levels (although low in LDL cholesterol) who took statins (drugs that
inhibit the synthesis of cholesterol) had fewer heart attacks. As a result
of these fi ndings, it was taken for granted that elevated CRP was a cause
of heart attacks. The puzzling results of a new study on the infl amma-
tory effects of CRP muddy the issue. Conducted by JAMA in 2009 on
more than one hundred thousand subjects,^6 the study revealed that dif-
ferent people produce different amounts of CRP, yet those who make
more CRP don’t have more heart attacks than those who make less of
it. For such people, taking drug medications to lower their CRP levels
is not necessary and may even be dangerous.
The fact is that those whose elevated CRP levels are the result of
infl amed arteries are far more likely than people with genetically ele-
vated CRP levels to have heart attacks. Thus, a high level of CRP doesn’t