Diet or drugs for cholesterol-lowering?

The American Academy of Pediatrics caused a big stir by recommending the use of cholesterol-lowering drugs (statins) in kids, even though there have not been safety or efficacy studies of these drugs in children. I looked at the AAP position paper to get the details, hoping that they would recommend starting out with safe nutritional strategies before progressing to drugs. Well, yes and no. They do recommend dietary intervention, but just the same old low fat and low cholesterol diet that has been ineffective for adults and has driven them by the scores to statins.

The authors of the AAP position paper are not nutritional scientists, they are M.D.s. They need to be told of research by Chris Gardener at Stanford, Jenkins & Kendall in Toronto, and others, showing that there are much more effective means to lower cholesterol than the documented-ineffective “low-fat” diet. Through a variety of mechanisms, eating more plant foods (including fatty ones) can be quite effective at lowering cholesterol. With simple nutritional strategies, a client of mine lowered her LDL cholesterol from 164 to 123 in 3 weeks, and then to 106 in another 4 weeks. What will it take to get medical doctors to stick to medicine and to let more knowledgeable nutritional scientists make diet policy?