For nearly 20 years, doctors have said that taking a low dose of aspirin daily helps prevent heart attacks.
But wait a minute—now the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA) have reversed course.
Both announced on March 18th that if you have no history of heart attack, stroke, or cardiac surgeries, then taking aspirin daily poses a high risk to the thinning of your blood—a danger worse than experiencing a heart attack.
What is troubling is both these groups knew about this danger since October 2017.
While they released their long-term study, they failed to publicly announce it until a year and a half later.
The AHA cover story is that people within the last decade have been able to lower their risk of a heart attack in other ways.
The biggest change in America’s heart health has been the remarkable drop in smoking since the Surgeon General’s warning on the dangers of cigarettes.
Nearly 50% of all adults smoked in 1964, but it is down to less than 14% today.
Add that to the advances in medicine that are able to pick up risk factors with heart health sooner, as well as improved treatments, fewer people are dying of heart disease.
But what is of concern here is there may have been financial motives at work.
The American Heart Association gave its seal of approval only to Bayer, although the exact amount Bayer paid for it has not been made public.
In fact, the American Heart Association has made major deals with other companies and industries as well.
As far back as the 1960s, the sugar industry had begun paying various scientists to shift the focus on saturated fats, rather than sugar and insulin, as being the cause of cardiovascular disease.
A researcher discovered these long lost documents in 2016, which were released in a blockbuster report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Although researchers were studying America’s growing heart disease problem in the 1950s, most scientists were looking at Dr. Ancel Keys’ study, which suggested high cholesterol, mainly from meat and dairy, was the cause of heart disease.
Other scientists looked at the same data and said, “No, sugar is the cause of the problem.”
But because “Big Sugar” bought off the American Heart Association, Americans have been told to limit fats, not sugar.
And now 50 years later, the widespread consumption of sugar has created an epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Some speculate that the AHA’s opposition to high-fat diets such as Atkins and keto likely stem from the deals they made with Big Sugar years ago.
It calls into question the recommendations of health groups like the American Heart Association and the Food and Drug Administration that may be influenced financially by pharmaceutical and commercial food industries.
For now, it’s best to assume that science is never settled.
