Health news for the week

[kevm14]

The first item caught my eye. Cholesterol intake may have little to do with the amount of blood cholesterol. Yup.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cholesterol ... YHF4eb9d17

I like the part where I already kind of suspected this was the case. And I'm not even a doctor. But to be perfectly clear, saturated fat consumption is still bad.

The second item is car-related but I decided to put it here. For some people, both items could be considered "good news."

http://blog.caranddriver.com/marijuana- ... htsa-says/

The main takeaway: When factoring age, sex, and race, there was no “significant increased risk of crash involvement” due to marijuana use.

Excluding those demographics, NHTSA said stoners had a 25-percent higher risk of crashing but at the same time attributed that increase to a greater representation of younger, predominantly male drivers who already top actuarial spreadsheets for loss and damages

Blood alcohol on the other hand, is still quite damaging to your driving abilities and leads directly to greater chance of an accident.

These are fun talking points because one substance is legal and the rules are pretty standardized (and has pretty significant health effects) and the other seems to cause debate after debate but at least in terms of driving, is orders of magnitude less dangerous.

[kevm14]

A good comment from a Verge article on the cholesterol thing: http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/9/800397 ... ad-science

There is good science that suggests that high cholesterol is a symptom, not a cause, of heart disease. A complicating symptom, to be sure, but that is not the same as a root cause. Cholesterol is the body’s response to inflammation in the vascular system. The cause of that inflammation is the cause of heart disease — not the response. That would be like saying too many police in a high crime neighborhood cause crime.

And what causes the inflammation? One pretty good theory is high blood sugar from simple carbohydrates.