Better Than Statins

Statins are finally getting the criticism they deserve. Fixated on cholesterol numbers, the party line has been to push statins on everyone. Like most fixations, that bias is narrow-minded, ill-informed and just plain unhealthy. When we think more carefully and critically, common sense is in agreement with science that shows we can do better than statins. Statins do a lot more than just lowering cholesterol. Some of that, like reducing vascular inflammation, is good, and might even be the source of much of the benefit of statins. Many other effects of statins are very undesirable. Ignore the concerns about liver, muscle, eye and brain damage sometimes caused by statins. The way that statin drugs work is by blocking your body’s ability to create hormones and CoQ10. Ironically CoQ10 is essential to the heart, as well as other important bodily functions. Many of the reported adverse effects of statins appear to be the consequence of statins blocking the formation of CoQ10. Of course, all of those other hormones, including sex hormones and vitamin D, are kind of important as well. Statins also certainly raise the risk of diabetes. Diabetes is itself an important contributor to heart disease. A new study has found that the biological pathway whereby statins cause diabetes, is the same pathway that lowers cholesterol. In other words, there is no way to separate these impacts. Statins must increase the risk of diabetes to lower cholesterol. It is extremely important for you to understand that heart disease is not just about cholesterol. Cholesterol levels don’t predict deaths from heart disease very well. There is correlation, but cholesterol is less important than other factors. Many people die of heart attacks, despite having normal cholesterol. My father was told his cholesterol level was normal 6 months before he died at age 47 of a heart attack. At autopsy, his heart also showed evidence of a prior heart attack, one that he never knew he had. There is now no doubt about it. Statins give some people diabetes and make some people gain weight. Neither is good if the goal is to prevent heart disease. If you really care about being healthy and want to reduce your risk of heart disease, stop obsessing about your cholesterol levels. Exercise, healthy diet, avoiding nasty chemicals (including cigarettes) and being calm, are the effective steps to reduce heart disease. The “side effects” of these essential health habits, the accidental consequences, will be to make you healthier, stronger and probably happier. That is better than...

Heart Disease Myths

Everybody knows how to prevent heart disease. Not really. Everybody just thinks they know. In truth, just about everybody is pretty much wrong. OK, admittedly the parts about exercising, shunning cigarettes and not getting too stressed are clear to us all. Those of you with sharp eyes have noticed that I did not mention diet or medication. Eating well is crucial but “eating well” is probably different from what you think it is. As far as medication, most everyone thinks that lowering your cholesterol with medication, probably a statin drug like LIPITOR, is effective and necessary for many of us, including those don’t like taking medications. Some TO-BE-DETERMINED statin drug was one element of the “polypill”, an almost magical drug mix formulated to prevent most of our major long-term health risks. Many in medicine advocated the polypill. Some were skeptical of such an aggressive medicinal approach to health care. We’ve seen this before. More should have been skeptical, and not just about the medications. Conventional dietary recommendations are almost as suspect. Lets back up and examine our assumptions about heart disease. Eating Well First, let’s look at that “eating well” piece of the puzzle. The official “healthy heart” diet is pretty straight forward? Limit your fats. They are bad for you, especially saturated fat. Fats make you fat and that’s not good. Margarine is better than butter because it doesn’t have all that saturated fat. Eat more breads, especially whole grains. I am not going to comment on the avoid salt and eggs recommendations right now, other than to say they are also wrong. Eating fatty food is supposed to be bad because it bumps up your cholesterol. “Cholesterol is bad if not downright evil. Your cholesterol is high, you are going to die of a heart attack or stroke. We have to get it down, right NOW.” This advice about diet, cholesterol, eating more grains and medicating away heart disease is wrong. Worse still is that this misguided advice led us astray for decades, wasting an awful lot of well-intentioned effort on the part of patients, and inevitably costing lives. How could this have come to pass? The core, the heart of our mistaken approach, is pretty simple to identify. Some authorities made bad assumptions and, as often happens, most of us trusted the experts and fell neatly into line behind them. Instead of marching off into a golden sunset, it was over the cliff. When we actually got round to asking the right questions carefully and conducting...