Condescending E-mail From A ‘Doc’ Says LDL Particle Size Is Irrelevant

Filed under: Health — jimmy @ 12:47 pm

One of the risks that I willingly take blogging about health as someone who has not been trained in either medicine or nutrition is the fact that there are a whole lot of people who are much more intelligent than I am about the subjects I write about. It’s just a fact of life that I’ve lived with since day one of my blog more than three years ago. And it doesn’t bother me a bit that I don’t have all the answers.

The purpose of my blog is for me to share about my experiences livin’ la vida low-carb and to hopefully provide some interesting topics for discussion that will enable my readers as well as myself the chance to learn something about their own health that they probably didn’t know before. One thing I’ve found since I started blogging in the health arena is that even the doctors and medical researchers don’t always know as much as we think they do. There’s a reason they call it “practicing” medicine.

With that said, I recently received a rather challenging e-mail from someone purporting to be a “Doc” according to their e-mail address who wanted to take me to task over the assertions I made in this blog post about my latest cholesterol numbers and specifically the particle size of my LDL as well as my hard-hitting column about the death of the late NBC “Meet The Press” anchorman Tim Russert. It seems the good “Doc” took great exception to my belief that the HDL/triglyceride ratio is a better indicator of heart disease risk than LDL or total cholesterol and that having large LDL particle size is protective against a cardiovascular event.

In a very condescending tone in his e-mail, “Doc” proceeded to berate my gross ignorance of some rather “basic” health concepts that I apparently haven’t fully grasped yet. Get a load of what this guy had to write to me along with a reasoned and professional response from a well-known low-carb researcher who challenged everything that “Doc” asserted in his rant by clicking here.