Cholesterol |

With over 25 percent of American adults over age 40 currently taking statin drugs to lower cholesterol, it’s clear to see that these medications are capable of yielding astronomical profits for Big Pharma. In 2019 alone, for example, Lipitor (atorvastatin) generated a stunning $2 billion dollars in revenue for its manufacturer, Pfizer.

While statin medications are lavishly endorsed and prescribed by Western medicine, natural health experts have long cautioned of toxic side effects – and clinical research exists to back them up. Let’s take a look at ten unwanted adverse effects from statin drugs, along with some nutrients that can help manage cholesterol naturally.

Cholesterol: Villain or hero?
Most conventionally-trained physicians believe that a specific type of cholesterol known as LDL is a primary risk factor for heart disease, the leading cause of mortality in the United States. Statin drugs – which include fluvastatin, simvastatin, and pravastatin – are touted as lowering LDL cholesterol while raising levels of beneficial HDL cholesterol.

Undeniably, these medications can lower cholesterol drastically. But, at what price to the body?

Research has shown that cholesterol is essential to the proper functioning of cells – and is also converted into vital hormones such as estrogen and testosterone. An increasing number of integrative doctors maintain that LDL cholesterol is actually necessary for body function – and that heart disease is really triggered by unaddressed infections, a lack of physical activity, and, of course, a poor diet of processed foods and toxins.

In addition, too little cholesterol, they note, can be just as harmful as too much!

In fact, an eye-opening 2005 study from Columbia University found that people with the very lowest total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol levels were twice as likely to die within three years, compared to those with the highest levels.

Statin-induced muscle stress causes muscle pain, weakness, and fatigue
Muscle and joint pain are among the most common adverse effects reported by statin users. Sharp cramps, a nagging, aching sensation, persistent tenderness, muscle fatigue, and even tendonitis are all on the “menu” of possible effects.

Disturbingly, experts say that these adverse effects of statin drugs may be only partially reversible.

These muscle problems can progress to myositis (an inflammation of the muscles) and, in severe cases, to rhabdomyolysis -a potentially fatal condition that can cause severe inflammation, muscle damage, muscle cell death, and kidney failure.

Keep in mind, reports clearly indicate that statin drugs can cause toxic stress on the mitochondria, the “energy power stations” in the cells – thereby inhibiting the birth of new mitochondria. In addition, statin drugs can worsen symptoms of other muscle disorders such as myasthenia gravis and muscular dystrophy.

Double whammy: Statin drugs may promote muscle injury while reducing mitochondria after exercise
One of the physical benefits of exercise is to raise the quantity and function of the mitochondria. But statin use seems to cause mitochondria to decrease with exercise – meaning these drugs not only negate an important benefit of exercise, but actually reverse it.

And, being in optimal physical condition seems to offer no protection. Marathon runners and elite athletes have higher levels of muscle injury with statins compared to those not taking statins.

One study even showed that animals that exercised on statins had an astonishing 226 percent more muscle damage than those not receiving statins – a troubling finding by any standards.

Health ALERT: Statin drug “therapy” increases risk of type 2 diabetes
Statin drugs increase insulin in the blood, which can trigger insulin resistance and set the stage for type 2 diabetes. In a 2014 meta-analysis of 137,000 patients published in the British Medical Journal, researchers found a “moderately increased” risk of new-onset diabetes in patients given higher potency statins after cardiovascular events or procedures.

In the face of this powerful evidence, the FDA has been forced to acknowledge that statins can occasionally cause diabetes.

Warning: “Brain fog” ahead! Statin drugs can cause memory loss, impaired concentration, and mood changes
Not only can statin drugs cause pain and muscle damage, but they can harm something that is arguably even more important – our memories and cognitive abilities. In various studies, statin drugs have been associated with forgetfulness, impaired concentration, and diminished ability to remember words.

They can also cause disturbances in mood.

In 2008, Beatrice Golomb, M.D., Ph.D. – Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Diego – conducted a $5 million dollar statin drug study funded by the NIH. Dr. Golomb notes that a substantial 30 percent of statin drug users report experiencing mood changes including anxiety, irritability, and depression.

Statin drugs can promote obesity
Although the mechanism is unclear, statin drugs seem to lead to overeating and weight gain.

One 12-year study published in JAMA Internal Medicine showed that statin users increased their calorie intake by 9 percent, their fat consumption by 14.1 percent, and their body mass index measurement by a hefty 1.3 – when compared to non-statin users.

It should be noted: two thirds of American adults are currently overweight or obese – a primary risk factor for heart disease.

Statins are associated with heightened cancer risk
In an extensive review of studies published in BMC Cancer, the authors reported that prolonged use of statins was associated with significantly increased risk of colorectal, bladder, and lung cancers.

And, the bad news just keeps on coming.

Medical authorities warn: Watch for liver inflammation and injury
Statin drugs raise the liver’s production of enzymes, which can cause liver damage and inflammation. In fact, the Mayo Clinic specifically warns statin users to be vigilant for signs of liver damage, such as jaundice (yellowing of the skin), dark-colored urine, and fatigue.

This is common sense, everything we consume must be filtered (processed) through the liver. Unfortunately, many people have no idea that they are harming their liver health.

Statins contribute to atherosclerosis
Ironically, there is some evidence that statin drugs may damage the very arteries they are supposed to protect!

In a study of 6,673 subjects published in Atherosclerosis, researchers found that statin drugs increased amounts of dangerous calcified plaque in coronary arteries – thereby raising risk of coronary heart disease.

Statin therapy causes nerve damage
Statin use is associated with higher incidence of nerve degeneration and pain.

Caution: Drugs for high cholesterol can reduce levels of antioxidants and essential nutrients
Finally, statin drugs can interfere with the production of disease-fighting molecules like glutathione – an important antioxidant that is strongly correlated with health and even longevity.

They also impair production of CoQ10, a vitamin-like antioxidant compound vital for heart health, normal blood pressure, and muscle function.

Statin drugs are also associated with reduced blood levels of alpha-tocopherol (a natural form of vitamin E) and beta-carotene, an antioxidant natural plant pigment.

Support heart health with natural supplements and proper diet
Many natural health practitioners strongly endorse CoQ10 supplementation for those taking statin drugs. Integrative healthcare providers may advise typical dosages of 100 mg to 300 mg a day, but (as always) check first with your own Naturopathic doctor.

For maximum benefit, your practitioner may advise combining CoQ10 with vitamin E and L-carnitine.

In addition, curcumin from turmeric – a potent antioxidant that helps muscle fiber repair – and creatine, a compound needed to build muscle, can also help support mitochondrial activity. You can boost dietary levels of creatine by eating grass-fed beef, wild-caught salmon, and cage-free organic chicken.

And, don’t forget the importance of proper nutrition for managing cholesterol levels.

Harvard Medical School advises avoiding trans fats, refined sugars, simple carbs, and alcohol – along with eating healthy amounts of oatmeal, beans, eggplant, okra, nuts, cold-water fatty fish, and pectin-rich fruits such as apples and strawberries.

Clearly, statin drugs come with a lot of harmful “baggage.” While you should never reduce or eliminate prescribed medications unless advised to do so by your physician, it might be time for you and your doctor to take a second look at statin drugs – and have an honest talk with your doctor about the risk to your health.

Stop in and see us at Whitaker’s Natural Market, pick up your heart healthy supplements, and schedule a consult with Dr Jocelin on how to improve your overall health!

Portions of this health tip are from NaturalHealth365.

The chemical war against cholesterol using statin drugs has been wrongly justified through statistical deception and the ongoing cover up of over 300 adverse health effects documented in the biomedical literature.

Better safe than sorry, right? This is the logic that defines the grasp that the pharmaceutical company has on our psyche. Perhaps your mother, father, brother, and boyfriend have been recommended cholesterol-lowering medication, just to help hedge their bets around a possible chest-clutching demise. In fact, recent guidelines have expanded the pool of potential statin medication recipients, so that there are very few of us who seem to be walking around with acceptable levels of artery clogging sludge.

But how is it that drug companies got a foothold? How have they convinced doctors that their patients need these medications, and need them now? They are banking (literally) on the fact that you haven’t brushed up on statistics in a while.

It turns out that a common sleight of hand in the medical literature is the popularization of claims around “relative risk reduction” which can make an effect appear meaningful, when the “absolute risk reduction” reveals its insignificance. In this way, 100 people are treated with statin medications to offer 1 person benefit, and the change from a 2% to a 1% heart attack rate is billed a 50% reduction rather than a 1% improvement, which is what it actually is.

Perhaps this would still qualify as better safe than sorry if these medications weren’t some of the most toxic chemicals willfully ingested, with at least 300 adverse health effects evident in the published literature so far, with at least 28 distinct modes of toxicity, including:
Muscle damage (myotoxicity): proven by 80 studies.
Nerve damage (neurotoxicity): proven by 54 studies.
Liver damage (hepatoxocity): proven by 32 studies.
Endocrine disruption: proven by 16 studies.
Cancer-promoting: proven by 9 studies.
Diabetes-promoting: proven by 8 studies.
Cardiovascular-damaging: proven by 15 studies.
Birth defect causing (teratogenic): proven by 11 studies.

Beyond the known fact that statin drugs deplete the body of two essential nutrients: coenzyme Q10 and selenium, they are also highly myotoxic and neurotoxic. Because the heart is one of the most nerve-saturated muscles in the human body, these two modes of toxicity combined represent a ‘perfect storm’ of cardiotoxicity – a highly ironic fact considering statin drugs are promoted as having ‘life-saving’ cardioprotective properties.

A powerful expert review by Diamond and Ravnskov decimates any plausible indication for these cholesterol-lowering agents, giving full consideration to the above mentioned side effects.

They plainly state:
“Overall, our goal in this review is to explain how the war on cholesterol has been fought by advocates that have used statistical deception to create the appearance that statins are wonder drugs, when the reality is that their trivial benefit is more than offset by their adverse effects.”

The Cholesterol Meme

It’s tempting to look the number one killer of Americans in the eye, and say, “WHO did this? Who is responsible?” It is also consistent with American perceptions of health and wellness to demonize a natural and vital part of our physiology rather than look at lifestyle factors including government subsidies of inflammatory food products.

Not only is low cholesterol a problem, but it puts an individual at risk for viral infection, cancer, and mental illness because of the vital role that lipids play in cell membrane integrity, hormone production, and immunity.

A broadly toxic xenobiotic chemical, statin medications have only been demonstrated to be of slight benefit by statistical manipulation.

For example, Diamond and Raynskov elucidate that:

The JUPITER trial of Crestor vs placebo resulted in increased fatal heart attacks in the treatment group which were obscured by combing fatal and nonfatal infarctions.

In the ASCOT trial which was used to generate PR copy boasting Lipitor’s 36% reduction of heart attack risk, the figure was arrived at through use of relative risk reduction from 3 to 2%.

The HPS study has a 26% drop out rate prior to the beginning of the trial (which also demonstrated a 1% improvement with treatment), so that those with significant side effects were functionally excluded from the study.

While no study has ever shown any association between the degree of cholesterol lowering and beneficial outcomes described in terms of absolute risk reduction (likely because they would be perceived as insignificant), the adverse effects are not only always presented in these terms, but are also minimized through the technique of splitting common side effects up into multiple different categories to minimize the apparent incidence.

These side effects are real and common and include “increased rates of cancer, cataracts, diabetes, cognitive impairment, and musculoskeletal disorders”. Their paper focuses on three primary adverse effects, all of which are likely to land you in the “sorry to have thought I would be better safe than sorry” category.

Cancer
In at least four trials, statistically significant increases in cancer incidence was found, and handily dismissed by all authors as insignificant because they claimed “no known potential biological basis” is known. This may be because the authors are still thinking of cancer as a genetic time bomb that has nothing to do with mitochondrial dysfunction, loss of lipid integrity, or environmental exposures.

With statistically significant increases in cancer incidence and deaths, in some trials, the minimal cardiovascular benefit is far eclipsed by the cancer mortality. In one of the only long-term trials, there was a doubling of the incidence of ductal and lobular breast cancer in women taking statins for more than ten years. One of many reasons that women should never be treated with these medications.

Myopathy
As one of the more well-known side effects of statins, muscle breakdown and associated pain, or myopathy has also been obscured in the literature. Despite an incidence up to 40% in the first months of treatment, researchers only catalogue patients who had muscular symptoms in addition to elevations in a blood measure called creatine kinase (CK) at ten times normal for two measures (not 9.9, not 8, and not one measure).

In fact, a 2006 study in the Journal of Pathology found that statin therapy induces ultrastructural damage in skeletal muscle in patients without myalgia,” indicating that statin-associated muscle damage may be a universal, albeit mostly subclinical problem for the millions put on them.

Central Nervous System Dysfunction
Linked to suicide in men, depression including postpartum, and cognitive dysfunction, low cholesterol is not a desirable goal for the average psychiatric patient, aka half of the American population.

It turns out that 25% of the total amount of cholesterol found in the human body is localized in the brain, most of it in the myelin sheath that coats and insulates the nerves:
“It has been estimated that up to 70% of the brain cholesterol is associated with myelin. Because up to half of the white matter may be composed of myelin, it is unsurprising that the brain is the most cholesterol-rich organ in the body. The concentration of cholesterol in the brain, and particularly in myelin, is consistent with an essential function related to its membrane properties. “

The cell membrane, specifically, is highly vulnerable to damage by statins:
“The cell membrane is an 8 nanometer thick pearly gate where information, nutrients, and cellular messengers are trafficked through protein gates supported of phospholipids and their polyunsaturated fatty acids. Cholesterol and saturated fat provide essential rigidity in balance with other membrane components. Without them, the membrane becomes a porous, dysfunctional swinging gate. In a self-preservational effort, cholesterol supports production of bile acids, integral to the breakdown and absorption of consumed essential dietary fats.”

By extension, behavioral and cognitive adverse effects may be the manifestation of this fat-based interference. Diamond and Ravnskov state:

“A low serum cholesterol level has also been found to serve as a biological marker of major depression and suicidal behavior, whereas high cholesterol is protective. In a study by Davison and Kaplan, the incidence of suicidal idealization among adults with mood disorders was more than 2.5-times greater in those taking statins. Moreover, several studies have shown that low cholesterol is associated with lower cognition and Alzheimer’s disease and that high cholesterol is protective.”

A review article called Neuropsychiatric Adverse Events Associated with Statins: Epidemiology, Pathophysiology, Prevention and Management discusses the state of the literature around the intersection between mental health and cholesterol control. Despite generally dismissing a strong signal for concerning psychiatric adverse events, the article seems to conclude the following:

Severe irritability, homicidal impulses, threats, road rage, depression and violence, paranoia, alienation, and antisocial behavior; cognitive and memory impairments; sleep disturbance; and sexual dysfunction have all been reported in case series and national registries of those taking statin medications. Sound like the laundry list of rapidly spoken side effects at the end of a drug commercial? To anyone with a history of or current psychiatric symptoms, the role of these now ubiquitous medications should be considered.

The signal for lipophilic statins – simvastatin and atorvastatin – was stronger which makes mechanistic sense since these medications penetrate the brain and brain cholesterol deficiency has been implicated in bipolar, major depression, and schizophrenia.

Of course, none of these findings nor their suppression should be surprising because there is no pharmaceutical free lunch, and because Americans are so accustomed to interfacing with human health through the lens of a one pill-one ill model. We are yanking on that spider web and expecting only one thread to pull out. This perspective would be less disturbing if it didn’t serve as the foundation for medical practice, determined by boards such as the American College of Cardiology and The American Heart Association, the majority of whom have extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry. An industry that has paid out 19.2 billion dollars for civil and criminal charges in the last 5 years alone.

So, according to Sayer Ji, who is founder of Green Med Info, a reviewer at the International Journal of Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine, Co-founder and CEO of Systome Biomed, Vice Chairman of the Board of the National Health Federation, Steering Committee Member of the Global Non-GMO Foundation, the next time you hear of a doctor recommending a cholesterol-lowering intervention, tell him you’ll take that 1% risk and spare yourself cancer, cognitive dysfunction, myopathy, and diabetes. And then go have a 3 egg omelet WITH the yolks.

Still concerned about cholesterol? Then check out our Cholesterol Support by Wiley’s Finest which features fish oil and Plant Sterol Esters to naturally balance your cholesterol levels without all the harmful side effects of statins.

Tag: Cholesterol

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