Statins, Cholesterol, and the Real Cause of Heart Disease

Frequently in science, fundamental facts are altered to create a profitable industry. Recently, I showed how this occurs with blood pressure: rather than causing arterial damage, high blood pressure is a response to arterial damage that ensures damaged arteries can still deliver blood to the tissues. In turn, rather than helping patients, aggressively lowering blood pressure can be quite harmful. In this article, I will look at the other half of the coin, statins, cholesterol, and heart disease—something that harms so many Americans, it was poignantly discussed by Comedian Jimmy Dore.

Cholesterol and Heart Disease

Frequently, when an industry harms many people, it will create a scapegoat to deflect blame. Once this happens, a variety of other sectors will jump on the bandwagon and create an unshakable societal dogma. For example, the health of a population (or if they are being poisoned by environmental toxins) determines how easily an infectious disease can sweep through a population and who is susceptible to it, but reframing infectious diseases as a “deficiency of vaccines” it both takes the (costly) onus off the industries to clean up the society and simultaneously allows them to get rich promoting the pharmaceutical products that “manage” each epidemic and the even larger epidemic of chronic diseases caused by those vaccines (discussed in detail here).

Note: the major decline in infectious illness credited to vaccines was actually the result of improved public sanitation; when the data are examined (e.g., for smallpox) those early vaccination campaigns made things worse, not better.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a debate emerged over the causes of heart disease. On one side, John Yudkin effectively 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. The Statin Disaster David Brownstein Best Price: $24.83 (as of 06:30 UTC - Details)

Note: leaders in the field of natural medicine have made a strong case that this spike came from the mass adoption of seed oils (which thanks to our unprecedented political climate is at last being discussed on the mainstream news). Likewise, some attribute this increase to the advent of water chlorination.

Ancel Keys won, Yudkin’s work was largely dismissed, and Keys became nutritional dogma. A large part of Key’s victory was based on his study of seven countries (Italy, Greece, Former Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Finland, America, and Japan), which showed that as saturated fat consumption increased, heart disease increased in a linear fashion.

However, this result was simply a product of the countries Keys chose (e.g., if Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Sweden had been chosen, the opposite correlation would have been found).

Fortunately, it’s gradually become recognized that Keys did not accurately report his data so he could “prove” his narrative. For example, recently an unpublished 56-month randomized study of 9,423 adults living in state mental hospitals or a nursing home (which made it possible to rigidly control their diets) that Keys directed was unearthed. It found that replacing half of one’s animal (saturated) fats with seed oil (e.g., corn oil) lowered their cholesterol, but for every 30 points it dropped, their risk of death increased by 22 percent (which roughly translates to each 1% drop in cholesterol raising the risk of death by 1%).

Note: another (unpublished) study from the 1970s (of 458 Australians), found that partially replacing dietary saturated fat with seed oils increased the risk of dying by 17.6%

Likewise, recently, 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. Remarkably, it is now generally accepted that Yudkin was right, but nonetheless, our medical guidelines are still largely based on Key’s work.

Likewise, the need to lower cholesterol to prevent heart disease is still a dogma within cardiology,^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5,6} despite things like this Lancet study which in 1986 showed:

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% decrease in mortality (risk ratio 0–85 [95% Cl 0·79–0·91]).

Statins Marketing

Once a drug is identified that can “beneficially” change a number, medical practice guidelines will inevitably shift to prioritizing treating that number in more and more people. For example, this is what happened with blood pressure:

Prior to statins, it was difficult to reliably lower cholesterol, but once they were introduced, research rapidly emerged arguing for a greater and greater need to lower cholesterol (and put more people on statins).

Note: in 2008-2009, 12% of Americans over 40 reported taking a statin, whereas in 2018-2019, that figure increased to 35%, and Americans now spend approximately 25 billion annually on statins.

In tandem, a cancel culture (reminiscent of what we saw with the COVID vaccines) has been created where anyone who challenges the use of Statins is immediately labeled as a “statin denier” accused of being a mass murderer, and effectively canceled. Here, dissident cardiologist Aseem Malhotra discusses the dirty parallels between these two industries with Joe Rogan:

As such, beyond doctors being forced to follow these guidelines, patients often are too. Ideological doctors will retaliate against patients who do not take statins (similar to how unvaccinated patients were reprehensibly denied essential medical care during COVID-19), employers sometimes require cholesterol numbers to meet a certain threshold for employment, and life insurance policies often penalize those with “unsafe” cholesterol numbers.

Statin Injuries

This status quo is inexcusable as statins have a very high rate of injury. For example, the existing studies find between a 5-30% rate of injuries,¹⁹ and Dr. Malhotra, having gone through all the existing evidence estimates that 20% of statin users are injured by them. Vaccines: Mythology, I... McCullough MD MPH, Pe... Check Amazon for Pricing.

Likewise, statins are well known for having a high percentage of patients discontinue the drugs due to their side effects (e.g., one large study found 44.7% of older adults discontinue the drugs within a year of starting them, while another large study of adults of all ages found 47% discontinued within a year).

Statins in turn, are linked to a large number of complications that have been well-characterized (e.g., mechanistically) and described throughout the medical literature.^1,2,3,4,5,6
One group of side effects are those perceived by the patient (which often make them want to stop using the medications). These include:

• A high incidence of muscle pain^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,}
• Fatigue especially with exertion and exercise^1,2,3
• Muscle inflammation (whose cause remains “unknown”)^1,2
• Autoimmune muscle damage^1,2,3,4
• Psychiatric and neurologic issues such as depression, confusion, aggression, and memory loss ^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,}
• Severe irritability¹
• Sleep Issues¹
• Musculoskeletal disorders and injuries^1,2
• Sudden (sensorineural) hearing loss¹
• Gastrointestinal distress¹

The other group are those not overtly noticed by the patient. These include:

• Type-2 diabetes^1,2,3,4,5 particularly in women^1, 2, 3
• Cancer^1,2,3,4
• Liver dysfunction and failure^1,2
• Cataracts^1,2
• ALS-like conditions and other central motor disorders (e.g., Parkinson’s disease and cerebellar ataxia)^1,2,3,4,5
• Lupus-like syndrome¹
• Susceptibility to herpes zoster (shingles)^1,2,3
• Interstitial cystitis¹
• Polymyalgia rheumatica¹
• Kidney injury^1, 2
• Renal failure¹

From the start, I noticed statin patients often reported numbness, muscle pain, or cognitive issues after starting these drugs, which resolved once they stopped. When this was brought up with their doctors, the response was often hostile, with doctors insisting statins couldn’t be the cause, (citing their own experience of never having seen this happen to a patient) or claiming the patient needed to continue the medication regardless to avoid a heart attack. Dissolving Illusions: ... Humphries, Dr. Suzanne Check Amazon for Pricing.

In turn, as the years went by, I saw increasingly elaborate excuses being created to protect the statins from an ever-increasing awareness of their dangers. For example, the nocebo effect (simply believing something you were exposed to was bad for you is enough to cause symptoms) was used by this this 2016 study to argue all injuries patients have after statins are simply due to a collective hysteria about them being toxic. While this is absurd (especially with patients who didn’t even know statins had adverse side effects) , the most shocking part was how many times I came across a doctor who had used that study to dismiss the symptoms they reported from statin use.

If you take this story and replace “statin” with COVID-19 vaccines, you will see it is essentially what everyone has experienced over the last four years (e.g., I lost count of how many times vaccine myocarditis was diagnosed as “anxiety”).

Note: two adverse event reporting systems exist for adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals, MedWatch and FAERS. Like VAERS, they suffer from severe underreporting (it is estimated only 1-10% of adverse events are reported to them), but nonetheless, thousands of (ignored) reports can be found there of the common injuries which result from statins.⁹³

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