Usain Bolt reveals the secret of his McSuccess: Fastest man alive ate 100 chicken McNuggets A DAY at Beijing Olympics

Looks like they can't be as bad for you as the wiseacres say

The fastest man alive has revealed the secret to his success: fast food.  Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt says he ate 100 McDonald's chicken McNuggets a day at the 2008 Olympics.

During his ten days in Beijing, he estimates he downed 1,000 McNuggets as he set three world records, earned three gold medals and dashed onto the world stage.

Bolt writes in his new book, Faster Than Lightning, that he found Chinese food 'odd,' so he bounded over to the nearest McDonald's and ordered his favorite food, the New York Post reports.

'At first I ate a box of 20 for lunch, then another for dinner. The next day I had two boxes for breakfast, one for lunch and then another couple in the evening. I even grabbed some fries and an apple pie to go with it,' Bolt says.

By that estimation, Bolt was consuming 4,700 calories, 295 grams of fat and 9,000 milligrams of sodium every day - and that's not counting dipping sauces.

Chicken nuggets have recently been the subject of scrutiny from nutritionists and food scientists.  A recent study by University of Mississippi researchers analyzed the components of chicken nuggets from two national fast food chains and found that each one was less than half chicken muscle meat.

Researchers found that the nuggets contained large amounts of bone, cartilage, fat, nerves and organ linings.

The researchers didn't name the fast food chains from which they bought the chicken nuggets in question.

In 2003, McDonald's came out with all white meat McNuggets after they were branded 'a McFrankenstein creation' by a federal judge.

U.S. chicken McNuggets came under scrutiny again in 2010 when it was revealed they contain butylhydroquinone, a petroleum-based preservative tertiary, and dimethylpolysiloxane, an anti-foaming agent also found in Silly Puddy. Experts say the chemicals are used in only trace amounts and are not harmful.

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Australia: The establishment stikes back at cholesterol skepticism

Far be it from me to suggest that they might be in the pocket of the drug companies

THE ABC's leading health expert has accused its flagship science program of putting cholesterol patients at risk of death, in an embarrassing internal feud at the national broadcaster.

Dr Norman Swan has joined leading medicos in criticising a controversial episode of the Catalyst program aired last month that questioned the role of cholesterol in heart disease and could result in patients halting use of cholesterol-lowering drugs.

"People will die as a result of the Catalyst program unless people understand at heart what the issues are," Dr Norman Swan told ABC radio.

Australian Medical Association president Dr Steve Hambleton said medicos were under siege from patients questioning their statin medicines after watching the two-part program.  "Every doctor is going through this," he said.

The cholesterol-lowering statins are the most prescribed medicines in the country and more than $1 billion is spent on them annually.

Dr Hambleton said if patients are prescribed the drugs according to national guidelines, they should stay on them because it will reduce their risk of death, a heart attack or stroke. But he admitted 70 per cent of people who take the drugs won't get any benefit.

Dr Lyn Weeks, the chief executive of the National Prescribing Service, said doctors would have to treat between 29 and 33 people with statins over five years to prevent one death from heart disease. But she said this was true of most medicines.

"People assume that all medicines work on everybody but they don't," she says. "The 30 per cent effect is good."

Critical of the Catalyst program's polarised view of cholesterol, she said it stifled an important debate on the grey areas of statin treatment.

There was strong evidence they prevented heart attacks, strokes and deaths in people who had already had a heart event, she said. She added, the evidence showed statins worked better at preventing deaths and heart attacks in men than in women.

There is not much evidence that it is beneficial to prescribe them to young people who have high cholesterol unless there was a family history of early death from heart disease.

And for people in their 80s who had few other heart disease risk factors, the side effects probably outweighed the benefits, she said.

About one in 10 patients who use the medicines suffer side effects, which can include crippling muscle pain.

A search of the database of the national medicines watchdog records reports that over 4000 patients suffered side effects to the three key statin drugs - atorvatstain, simvastatin and rosuvastatin.

The most common side effects were muscle pain and weakness and in 41 cases, death was reported as an outcome.

Last week, the chair of the Australian Advisory Committee on the Safety of Medicines, Professor Emily Banks asked the ABC to pull the follow-up program shown on Thursday.

The ABC ran a disclaimer at the start of Thursday's program saying: "The views expressed in this episode of Catalyst are not intended as medical advice. Please consult with your doctor regarding your medications."

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