SCOTT GRUNDY’S BEEF

HEALTH Out of left field it came, he says, or maybe out of the ozone, and hit him in the head. An article in the September issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine, titled “The Cholesterol Myth,” accused DR. SCOTT GRUNDY, a cholesterol researcher at The UT Southwestern Medical Center, of being involved in a nationwide conspiracy by the government and the medical community to trick Americans into thinking that dietary cholesterol is harmful. The article says the government spent years and millions of dollars on experiments to prove the evils of cholesterol, only to wind up with results that were “not statistically significant.” Writer Thomas J. Moore accuses some leading heart doctors (including Grundy) of massaging the data because they didn’t want to admit they were wrong-and so they could continue to reap grants from government and from drug companies.

But Grundy says it just ain’t so. He says Moore seized on the two or three weakest experiments on the relationship between high cholesterol and heart disease, while selectively ignoring much stronger data. Grundy says that he and most of his colleagues agree that “a high level of blood cholesterol is as bad as high blood pressure and smoking” for hearts. And furthermore, Grundy complains that Moore didn’t even bother to interview him. “He’s not a very good investigative reporter,” Grundy says.

“I don’t know how he had the audacity to get involved in such an interpretation,” Grundy says of Moore. “If I were told to put together such a study, it would take me years. I wouldn’t know what to do, It amazes me that he’s willing to go out on a limb like that.”

Grundy says the American Heart Association’s cholesterol crusade has suffered a setback at the hands of the Atlantic. ’’We have just recently begun to feel like people are becoming concerned about their cholesterol level when it comes to the health of their hearts,” he says. “Now it’s going to be harder for us.”