GibburtBook: The Great Cholesterol Con
A few minutes ago, I decided to put aside the book The Great Cholesterol Con by Malcolm Kendrick. Actually, I was given the Dutch translation (EAN 9789085711711) to read. Google will give you a long list of bookreviews and bloggers praising the book by “Dr. Kendrick,” but the website of THe International Cholesterol Sceptics (THINCS) lists him as an MbChB and an MRCGP, not as a PhD. I will assume that the bloggers and reviewers are the ones waving around the “dr.” erroneously. That personal pet peeve aside, any review or argument should not be ad hominem.
Mr. Kendrick makes quite a few interesting points (at least in the first six chapters) about the state of cholesterol research. He makes a case that we should really take the term “research” with a considerable grain of salt. A strong case, indeed. It seems what is “public knowledge” with regards to cholesterol today is propaganda from the Statin Mafia. Considering that a lot of popularly published food related research seems shifty at best, I did set out to read this book looking forward to reading some well founded arguments. Like I said, the book makes a point quite clear… and loudly so. It is very loud indeed.
It seems many people that have read this book find it a very attractive feature. Admittedly, for the first two or three chapters, it is fun to get this image of the author stamping his feet in fits of rage, turning tomato red and exceedingly more consumed with bloodlust. The problem I have with this book, however, is that it keeps on making the same point over and over and over and over. Adding evidence to a point you are making is usually a very good idea. Concluding after every piece of evidence that quod erat demonstrandum does get to be rather exhausting and it does not make for a very comfortable read. In other words, there is not so much a nicely built up single argument, but rather an endless string of variations of the same argument, all of them laden with sarcasm and a self-righteousness that would even impress the supporters of the cholesterol hypothesis that Kendrick so strongly opposes.
On that last note: Malcolm Kendrick does have a tendency to keep double standards in his argument to the extent that he actually starts polluting his otherwise well founded proofs with fallacies. Where support for the cholesterol hypothesis being published in The Lancet, The British Medical Journal or The New England Journal of Medicine is an outrageous disgrace, whereas an opponent of the hypothesis publishing in any of those journals is actually an argument for their testimony, i.e. argumentum ad verecundiam.
All in all, the argument made seems to be an important one and he seems to be on the side of the evidence. Read the book; maybe the sarcasm is more to your taste than it is to mine. The points made deserve to be. If you are like me, however, the points are sufficiently made about a third into book.
There’s generally quite an enormous gap between the amount of food “research” that makes it into mainstream media and the number of proper scientific studies on the topic.