
Professor Sir Rory Collins was interviewed on the BBC Radio "Today" programme and on television on 9th September 2016. He was heard extolling the great benefits of taking statin drugs and he even recommended that everyone over the age of 45 should be taking them. He also advised the avoidance of saturated fats; advice that many in the medical profession now agree was totally wrong. Collins also played down the unpleasant and in some cases, dangerous side effects that a large number of statin patients have experienced.
![]() According to medical journalist Jerome Burne, it appears that Collins has a vested interest as he is Head of the Oxford based statin research unit, the CTT (Cholesterol Treatment Trialists Collaboration) which receives funding in excess of £268 million (as at 2014) from the drug companies, of which £217 million came from Merck, one of the principle producers of statin drugs.
The Lancet published a Heart Protection study in 2002 where 36 per cent of screened patients were excluded before the trial even began. This had the potential to screen out many patients who may have suffered from adverse effects from simvastatin, including muscle symptoms. Professor Collins was the principal investigator. https://jeromeburne.com/2014/08/07/confessions-of-the-great-statinator-how-sir-rory-collins-told-all-about-his-commercial-funding/ DRUG COMPANIES CONTROL TEST RESULTS (Extract from the article on this website entitled STATINS) Dr.Marcia Angell, one time Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, writes, ‘It used to be that drug companies simply gave grants to academic medical centres for the use of their clinical researchers to do a study and that was it. It was at arm’s length. The researcher did a study and he or she published the results, whatever those results would be. Now, it’s very, very different. The drug companies increasingly design the studies. They keep the data. They don’t even let the researchers see the data. They analyse the data, they decide whether they are going to even publish the data at the end of it. They sign contracts with researchers and with academic medical centres saying that they don’t get to publish their work unless they get permission from the drug company. So, you can see that the distortion starts even before publication. It starts in determining what’s going to be published and what isn’t going to be published. This is no longer arm’s length. It’s treating the researchers and the academic medical centres as though they were hired guns or technicians or something. They just do the work. And the drug company will decide what the data show, what the conclusions are and whether it will even be published.’ |
DIRE MISTAKE TO LOWER CONSUMPTION OF SATURATED FAT
The Public Health Collaboration, (PHC) is a non-profit organisation that is dedicated to informing and implementing healthy decisions. It states: "One of the most worrying aspects of the advice to lower fat consumption, and specifically saturated fat, was an analysis published in Open Heart in February 2015 which looked at the evidence available in 1983 when the UK were first told to restrict fat concluded that "Dietary recommendations were introduced for 220 million US and 56 million UK citizens by 1983, in the absence of supporting evidence from randomised controlled trials. In retrospect, there was never any strong evidence to recommend reducing total and saturated fat consumption and in the 30 years since the deteriorating health of the UK population, suggests such advice may have been a dire mistake, however well-intentioned. Quite possibly if the UK had been advised to go for foods in their natural form instead of unnaturally man-made low-fat foods for the past 30 years then there would not be such high rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, nor the associated social and financial costs they incur." In the light of this scientific evidence the Public Health Collaboration suggests that the UK stops recommending the avoidance of foods because of saturated fat content in order to focus on the consumption of food in its natural form, however much saturated fat it contains.’ POSSIBLE LINK WITH MENTAL HEALTH ? It is generally acknowledged that some 80% of the human brain is made up of saturated fat, so it is hardly surprising that since the erroneous advice to the public to drastically reduce or even avoid saturated fats in the diet, there has been a huge increase in the number of people diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in recent years. |