Would Franklin have taken a statin if they had been available in the 1800s?

 

The Franklin expedition of 129 men perished in the Arctic, primarily of scurvy and related illnesses, in its entirety. I've been reading Stefansson's retrospective account and speculation written in the 1950s. This paragraph stuck out as a nice warning, still applicable to the lipid hypothesis today, which we see crumbling before out eyes. How many have died prematurely of medical dogma?

"We concede that Franklin had the excuses which many others have used; that medical men told him nothing about meat being preventive of scurvy, and that they told him instead about lime juice and lemon juice as preventatives and curatives. But we return to our point that a man who makes exploration a profession, as Franklin had done, has no business to sacrifice his men to the dogma of current therapeutics when he can divide the entire literature of his own craft into two chains of events; the expeditions which had a good deal of fresh food [meat] and little or no scurvy; and those which had little or no fresh food and much scurvy".

Fat vs sugar. PUFA vs saturates. Statin vs giving the finger to Keys for the buried Minnesota data.

Peter

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