The Usual Questions with No Answers

It was great fun at Mushnik Manor last night for a dinner of poached salmon, sugar snaps, potatoes and pie. Just the ticket for the Plots who are about to fly off to BBQ Land.

Speaking of pie and bbq, Plot was reading yesterday about cholesterol. As always there are two schools about your bad cholesterol (LDL) and your good cholesterol (HDL). One school says you must lower LDL dramatically by taking statin drugs, which you must remain on for the rest of your life. The other school says LDL levels have almost nothing to do with heart attacks and that the harm the statins cause are far worse than the meaningless lowering of LDL levels.

As always, who do you believe?

As always, the holistic folk line up against anything the drug companies offer, and the traditional folks laugh at the holisticer-than-thous.

Everybody knows the drug companies inflate their claims and pay off the regulators. Everybody also knows the counter-culture types will have you taking infusions of  megadoses of Vitamin Stupid just because somebody wrote on the internet that it helped their sister's friend's cousin.

Cholesterol-lowering medicines are the most highly prescribed medicines in America -- 24,000,000 doses are prescribed annually. What does that tell you?

It tells traditionalists that the stuff works.

It tells holistics that it's all advertising hype.

Traditionalists believe cholesterol is bad.

Holistics believe cholesterol is the body's natural anti-inflammatory and if your levels are high it means your body is functioning correctly.

And everybody says moderation in diet and plenty of exercise are the best bet to control practically all forms of anything bad in the body. Seems like the obvious place to start.

But what if you do that already?