Cholesterol and Statins – Which One is Good, Which One is Bad?

Written by Joel Smalley on November 8, 2023. Posted in Current News

A good friend told me she’s off to the hospital this afternoon to have her cholesterol checked on the insistence of her partner

Knowing me as she does, she asked my opinion on the matter.

I said that, although I am not qualified in any way to give her advice, I had inevitably done a little bit of research on the subject, which I would share.

I went straight to this article by A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR who is qualified in these matters.

Unfortunately (but also inevitably) his “Twitter-friendly” summary on Medium has been (permanently) censored! A clear indication nowadays that it contains information that is in your best interests (because it’s not in the interests of Big Pharma who sponsor the mainstream media outlets).

So, I put this summary of the article together for her instead. Something to read in the waiting room and information to pose questions to her doctor! I wonder how they would do?!

What causes heart disease?

In the 1960s and 1970s, a debate emerged over what caused heart disease. On one side, John Yudkin argued that the sugar being added to our food by the processed food industry was the chief culprit.

On the other side, Ancel Keys (who attacked Yudkin’s work) argued that it was due to saturated fat and cholesterol.

Keys won, Yudkin’s work was largely dismissed, and the demonization of saturated fat and cholesterol became nutritional dogma.

It gradually became recognized that Ancel Keys did not accurately report the data he used to substantiate his arguments. Fifty years after the initial debate, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world published internal sugar industry documents.

They showed the sugar industry had used bribes to make scientists place the blame for heart disease on fat so Yudkin’s work would not threaten the sugar industry.

It is now generally accepted that Yudkin was entirely right and had we listened to him, an immense amount of suffering could have been prevented.

Despite this, the cholesterol hypothesis of heart disease persists (despite very little evidence supporting it and a significant amount refuting it), and we still provide diabetics with disastrous dietary advice (eat carbs and no fats) that originated from the work of Keys.

Note: although sugar (and fructose) is one of the primary causes of heart disease, other primary causes, such as smoking and lead exposure, also exist. Additionally, research has actually shown cholesterol greatly increases longevity. To quote one article from the Lancet:

During 10 years of follow-up from Dec 1, 1986, to Oct 1, 1996, a total of 642 participants died. Each 1 mmol/L increase in total cholesterol corresponded to a 15 percent decrease in mortality (risk ratio 0–85 [95 percent Cl 0·79–0·91]).

Cholesterol

Cholesterol has a few different essential functions in the body. These include:

• It is the precursor to hormones throughout the body.
• The brain’s synapses (which, amongst other things form memories) require cholesterol to function. Since cholesterol is too big to enter the brain, glial cells (support cells of the nervous system) synthesize it within the brain. Statins, unfortunately, inhibit glial cell production of cholesterol.

Statin marketing

For decades, researchers have looked for ways to lower cholesterol levels reliably. Statins were the first drugs which could reliably do this and once discovered, the cholesterol hypothesis took off, and reasons for more and more urgency for lowering cholesterol levels were created.

This has gone to the point prominent doctors have called for statins to be added to the water supply, a degree of fanaticism not that different from what we saw from many of the advocates for mass COVID vaccination.

Since the rationale for statin usage is based on a lie, the benefits of statins are almost non-existent. Similarly, since cholesterol is essential for life, many issues result from eliminating it. Nonetheless, statin sales are now over 15 billion dollars a year, and hundreds of millions of people have been placed on them.

As time has gone forward, a great deal of effort has been made to transform the practice of medicine from doctors independently utilizing their best judgment on how to treat patients to doctors following treatment algorithms that committees of experts create.

This arrangement creates a creative way to skirt the law since these committees do not require a legislative process to be enacted.

Given the importance of these “guidelines”, it should then raise the question of why they always seem to arrive at conclusions that favor industry. As you might imagine, the formula is quite simple —almost everyone who ends up on those committees coincidently also takes money from those who are financially invested in the outcomes of their guidelines.

In the case of statins, a relatively simple pattern has emerged. “Research” keeps appearing that suggests more people need to be placed on statins. The experts on the guideline panels then conclude that even more people need to be given statins, and clinical practice guidelines are published requiring this, which doctors are sanctioned for failing to follow.

In addition to doctors being forced to follow these guidelines, patients often are too. Doctors often retaliate against patients who do not take statins (similar to how many unvaccinated patients were denied essential medical care during COVID-19).

Statin gaslighting

Is it any wonder doctors, when hearing these patient complaints of tiredness, weakness, wobbly-kneed with burning pain and numbness, poor coordination and terrible memory, respond with a predictable, “You are over fifty now and have to expect these kinds of things.

I’ve made peace with the fact many useless drugs are on the market, and now I only focus my energy on protesting medications that harm patients.

Ever since the statins hit the market, colleagues and I began observing case after case of individuals who lost sensation in their body, developed muscle pains, or had cognitive decline set in once they started the statin, which immediately resolved once they stopped the statin.

Simultaneously, we also noticed that whenever we pointed this out to their doctor, the doctor would become extremely hostile, and then both insist that the statin could not be causing the symptom and that even if it was, the patient needed not to stop using it because otherwise they would get a heart attack and die.

The thing that finally really made me get how impressive the marketing for these drugs had been was the recurring battle I would have with relatives. In each case, I would take them off a statin and provide a strong argument with data supporting why they should not be on the drug.

At some point later, they would go to their doctor and inform them that their relative, who was a doctor, had taken them off the statin.

Their doctor (often a cardiologist), in turn, would tell my relative I was incredibly ignorant, insist they knew the data much better than I did, say I was endangering my relative’s health, and promptly restart the statin, to which my relative dutifully complied.

In many cases, I would provide the cardiologist with literature supporting my argument. In each case, they would make an excuse not to read it while simultaneously asserting they knew all the data and that I, not being a cardiologist, was unqualified to have an opinion on this subject.

This made me appreciate just how challenging a situation patients (without access to the resources my relatives had) were in.

Statin damage crisis

“Many statin victims say that abruptly, almost in the blink of an eye, they have become old people.”

Duane Graveline MD was started on a statin and soon after developed global amnesia (which is really scary). He decided to stop the statin and recovered.

When I suggested, on the basis of my 23 years as a family doctor, that perhaps my new medicine was the cause of my amnesia, the neurologist replied, almost scoffingly, that “Statins do not do that.” He and many other physicians and pharmacists were adamant that this does not occur.”

Because of this and other debilitating long-term complications (e.g., previously an extremely fit individual, he developed chronic exhaustion), Graveline became an expert on statin injuries and, in 2014, wrote The Statin Damage Crisis.

To my knowledge, it is the most detailed book that has been written on the harms of these drugs.

Statins work by inhibiting an easy-to-target enzyme that is necessary for the production of cholesterol. Unfortunately, doing that affects a variety of vital other physiologic processes, too, which most physicians have almost no knowledge of.

This biochemistry is important to understand because it explains most of the adverse effects of the statins.

A variety of cognitive effects such as amnesia, forgetfulness, confusion, disorientation, and increased senility, in turn, have frequently been observed with statins.

Their patient’s rapid descent into dementia after a statin is started is much too often written off by their doctor as senile brain changes or beginning Alzheimer’s when the real culprit is their statin drug.

Conclusion

For over ten years, I have asked holistically-minded physicians I meet what they consider the five most useless, harmful, and overprescribed drugs on the market. Without fail, statins always make their list.

Despite this, business continues as usual with statins (which have now been on the market for 35 years), and most doctors without an integrative background have almost no knowledge of anything within this article.

Like many other drug injuries, statin injuries are quite difficult to treat, and after realizing no conventional doctor could help him, Dr. Graveline turned to holistic medicine. Despite effectively being the “expert” on statin injury, he struggled greatly to find an option that could work and settled on a mix of mitochondrial supplements, which facilitated a very gradual improvement for him.

His experience is not unique, and as the vaccine injured have found, it is very challenging to find doctors who can treat pharmaceutical injuries. Consider for a moment the scale of the statin damage crisis, and the fact that decades later there is still almost no one treating it.

Since “cholesterol” is ultimately all about money and many statins are beginning to go off-patent to maintain the lucrative cholesterol market, even more dangerous (but patentable) methods are being looked at lower cholesterol.

Statins, like vaccines, fit remarkably well into the mythology of our culture, where it is believed health can result from taking pills rather than taking responsibility for one’s well-being.

See more here substack.com

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