Heart Disease: How US Lobby Killed Coconut Oil, Promoted Soy and Statins

Cardiologists, pharma industry and US edible oil joined hands to become a deadly combination that didn’t allow the coconut oil industry to flourish and almost finished them without making any meaningful impact on heart disease.

If you had high cholesterol and high blood pressure you were recommended by cardiologists to take statins (Atorvastatin, Lovastatin, Simvastatin, Rosuvastatin etc). Statin drugs are quite costly and with continued medication it was also taking a toll on the health of patients.  They also recommended you take soybean oil or sunflower oil and avoid coconut oil. Soybean or sunflower oil is polyunsaturated fat while coconut oil is mono-unsaturated and harmful for the heart.

Dr M S Valiathan, renowned cardiac surgeon and founder director of Sree Chitra Institute of Medical Sciences in Trivandrum and also the author of critically acclaimed Charaka Samhita in his retirement years strongly supported coconut oil even when the entire cardiac specialists were against it.

Pharma and Soyoil lobby– a deadly combination
In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the US pharmaceutical industry and soyoil industry lobbied hard to promote statins on the medical side and soyoil on the nutritional side with great effect that coconut oil industry focussed on South Asian markets were adversely impacted. The volume of soybean oil and other polyunsaturated oil have shot up so much that they are now able to sell below Rs 100 per litre due to intense competition while coconut oil with double that price is finding fewer takers. The much better Virgin Coconut oil is also being edged out by cheaper Palmoil and polyunsaturated oil.

Despite all this advisory and promotion of cholesterol reduction drugs and polyunsaturated oils, the incidence of heart disease hasn’t come down at all. Our cardiologists lapped up what the pharma industry and soyoil lobby advocated and still continue to do so.

Now Dr Dwight Lundell, past chief of staff and chief of surgery at Banner Heart Hospital, Arizona, a cardiac surgeon with over 25 years of experience and having performed over 5000 open heart surgeries, has come out strongly against the conventional treatment strategies using statins and polyunsaturated oils.

He says the recent discovery that inflammation of artery wall is the cause of cardiac arrests and not high cholesterol should create a paradigm shift in treatment of heart disease worldwide. He says inflammation of arteries caused the cholesterol to build up as plaques which otherwise would have freely moved around the body.

Cholesterol is a waxy substance that our liver produces that aids in digestion and hormone production. It binds to our cell walls and nerves. We also get cholesterol from animal foods. While they serve functions in our body, a higher level of cholesterol was considered life threatening. Now Dr Dwight Lundell argues that high cholesterol in our artery walls is due to inflammation and lowering cholesterol levels due to medication will not help.

The prescription of low fat diet didn’t help because people started using processed food rich in carbohydrates, omega 6 fatty acids that is present in Soybean, Sunflower and Corn oil and also high sugar filled foods that caused damage to the arteries.

See this Ideapod link for full explanation: https://tinyurl.com/ydbemccj

Lobbyists Win, Patients Lose
The powerful American Soybean industry and pharma industry thrived through clever propaganda that killed Coconut oil as a marketable edible oil and boosted the prospects of anti-cholesterol drugs and polyunsaturated oils (soybean, corn, sunflower oil etc). The medical industry became a part of it knowingly or unknowingly and patients suffered or continue to suffer.

According to whistle blower Dr Dwight Dundell, the alternative to processed, sugar rich, polyunsaturated rich foods are vegetables and fruits and less cooked raw foods made at home.

Coconut oil supporters including Dr M S Valiathan and several agri-biotechnology scientists were over powered by the strong US lobby and their Indian counterparts with the result we followed the US model of heart disease management without ever questioning it.

But will the medical community take an initiative to reassess their treatment methodologies and advisories or will some consumer rights or medical rights movement take up the cause in the light of recent discoveries?
(Mail to sreekumsree@gmail.com for suggestions or comments)