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Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital, Mesa, AZ. His private practice, Cardiac Care Center, was in Mesa, AZ. In 25 years as a heart surgeon he has performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries, and he created quite a stir at the end of last week when he printed an article saying that medicine is wrong. Reducing cholesterol and reducing fat in your diet actually has the opposite effect.

His words, “Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin(cholesterol reducing) medications and despite the fact that we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.”

He concludes, “The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine.”

Enough about that. I’d suggest that any of you who are health conscious or doubt what I am telling you Google the entire 1600 word report. He goes on to say that red meat, things like butter, and colorful vegetables and fruits are good.

My point is this: Just because the mainstream media says something, doesn’t make it so. Remember when eggs were the spawn of the devil? All of a sudden, they aren’t. Caffeine at one time was deplorable, now they are finding it is a good thing.

Now I’m pretty sure if I ate red meat and butter, three times a day, 365 days a year it probably wouldn’t be all that good for me. And I’m not saying that there aren’t foods that are worse for you than others. But for me, the absolute worst thing for my health (and my blood pressure) is a whole bunch of “learned” scholarly types telling me what I should or shouldn’t eat.

The real danger in the food realm (or any other realm) is someone who appoints themselves as the end all of that subject. Then they throw together a bogus statistic or two, or interpret real statistics any way they want, and you have people telling me not to eat eggs.

And yes, I’ve read all the obesity statistics. One I read said that one third of U.S. adults (35.7%) and 17% of U.S. children ages 2-19 were obese. Until recently I was part of that group. What changed for me had nothing to do with intervention by “experts” telling me what I could or couldn’t eat. In fact, I almost want to do the opposite when some know-it-all tells me what is and isn’t good for me. The reason I moved from the “obese” to the “overweight” category is simple-I decided I wanted to.

And I think that, perhaps, is the point of this whole venting. Nothing changes until the individual decides he wants to change something. So print whatever data you want. Tell me what you think I should believe. But don’t penalize, legislate, or tax the choices I make. And most of all, don’t tell me you’re the “expert” on my life.

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