Cholesterol Lie Q & A

Dear Dr. Jonny,

Following your suggestion, I just finished reading "The Great Cholesterol Lie"! What an eye-opener.

But I recently read in the mainstream media about a study called the JUPITER Study that showed the benefit of statin drugs even for people with normal cholesterol! How can this be?

Well, I can certainly see why my reader was confused. So let's try to sort it out.

In the JUPITER study, people with normal cholesterol were given statin drugs. But these people didn't just have normal cholesterol- they also had elevated levels of a blood protein called C-reactive Protein (CRP).

When this group of people took statin drugs (specifically Crestor), their risk factors did indeed improve.

The question is, "Why?"

Here's the answer- and it's not nearly as confusing as the results might seem at first.

Statin drugs are mildly anti-inflammatory. I believe- and I'm quite sure Dr. Lundell would agree with me- that any good that statin drugs do is solely because of their ability to reduce inflammation. In the JUPITER Study, statins lowered CRP, which is- guess what- a measure of systemic inflammation!

And here's what backfired for the pharmaceutical company. This study confirmed the fact that cholesterol is largely irrelevant. The patients in the JUPITER Study were at risk not because their cholesterol was high (it wasn't) but because they had high levels of inflammation.

The statin drug lowered their inflammation, and any lowering of inflammation improves risk factors for heart disease, not to mention overall health. Let's not forget those nasty side effects of painful muscle cramping and recent studies that show extreme cognitive dysfunction from statins.

Wouldn't an aspirin be better? And better yet, Omega-3?

Statins are the "Frankenstein" medication of our time. And Dr. Lundell exposes the reasons why in his excellent book.

The bottom line is that Inflammation is a very, very serious thing—it's a silent killer.

Cholesterol is not. My advice? Take Omega-3 fish oil, the most anti-inflammatory compound on the planet and one that has exactly zero side effects. With fish oil available, why in the world would someone choose a statin as their anti-inflammatory drug of choice?

The simple steps to begin healing your heart outlined in Dr. Lundell's book, "The Great Cholesterol Lie" will absolutely astonish you.

Go here now and silence that deadly killer - inflammation.

25 Year Heart Surgeon Reveals The Statin Scam

Guest article by Dr. Dwight Lundell:

Television ads featuring artificial heart inventor Dr. Robert Jarvik (who never practiced medicine) claims that Lipitor will lower heart attack risk by 36%.

Now, who wouldn't want that? Let's look at the fine print...

"in a large clinical study 3% of people taking a placebo had a heart attack and 2% of those taking Lipitor had a heart attack."

Let's do the math...

• For every 100 people in the trial that lasted 3 l/2 years, 3 people on the placebo and 2 people on Lipitor had heart attacks. That is one less heart attack for every 100 people.
• In other words, 100 people had to take Lipitor for 3 l/2 years
• to prevent one heart attack.
• What this really means is, 99 out of 100 people taking Lipitor received no benefit.

There is a little known statistic, "Number Needed To Treat," (NNT) defined as the number of patients who need to be treated in order to prevent one bad outcome. In the case of Lipitor, 100 patients needed to be treated for 3 l/2 years to possibly eliminate one heart attack.

Let's compare that number to today's antibiotic treatment to eradicate ulcer causing H. pylori stomach bacteria. The Number Needed To Treat H. pylori is 1:1. That means if you give the antibiotic to 11 people, 10 will be cured.

Several recent scientific papers peg the NNT for statin medications at 250. That means 249 of 250 would receive no benefit.

Dr. Jerome R. Hoffman, Professor of Clinical Medicine at UCLA asks:

"What if you put 250 people in a room and told them they would have to pay over $1,000 per year for a medicine they must take every day that might give them diarrhea and muscle pain and that 249 of those people would get no benefit, how many would take that?"

Very, very few.

Drug companies have a responsibility to their shareholders to make a profit. We need drug companies to develop new medicines; however, when they grossly overstate benefits and spend enormous dollars influencing physicians, it leads to potential corruption.

The National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) 2004 guidelines lowered the targets for cholesterol treatment and recommended more Americans take statins. The panel that issued the guidelines was comprised of 9 experts, 8 of which had ties to the drug industry.

Physicians who speak out take great risks as medicine and government agencies do not like criticism. For example, Dr. Henry C. Barry of the Michigan State University College of Medicine recently stated, "The NCEP guideline and process went awry."

Dr. Barry and 34 other experts sent a petition of protest to the National Institutes of Health saying the evidence was weak and the panel biased because of its ties to the drug industry. Dr. Rodney A. Hayward, Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical school said, "current evidence supports ignoring LDL cholesterol altogether."

In response to these statements The National Cholesterol Education Program stated strongly, "Dr. Hayward should be held accountable in a court of law for doing things to kill people."

We might expect this kind of harsh response from zealots and extremists but not from government agencies or scientists. If we spent just a fraction of the money we now do on cholesterol testing, cholesterol lowering drugs and doctors visits, on educating people about proper diet, exercise and weight loss, we'd be far healthier.

Dr. Lundell's New Book Backs What I've Been Saying About Cholesterol for Years!

The Great Cholesterol Lie Why Everything You Learned About Cholesterol Is A Lie, How It Began in 1948 And Why It Continues. Why Statin Medications Will Not Reduce Your Risk Of Heart Disease, And What Will. Extraordinary Simple Steps That Prevent And Reverse Heart Disease Without Medication. Learn More

Another Great Reason to Eat Egg Yolks

I know most of you are not pregnant, but there's a lesson in this that can be useful to you anyway- and of course if you know someone who is pregnant (or planning to be), pass it on!

New research suggests that what a woman eats during pregnancy may offer her offspring protection against breast cancer. Researchers at Boston University studied female rats whose mothers were given different amounts of choline, a nutrient found in eggs, during pregnancy. The rats were given either no choline, normal amounts of choline, or extra choline during pregnancy, and, after birth, their female offspring were treated with a chemical that causes breast cancer.

Whilst all of the female offspring went on to develop breast cancer, the results showed that offspring of the rats that had received extra choline during pregnancy had slow growing tumors whereas the offspring of rats that consumed no choline during pregnancy had fast growing tumors.

Furthermore, the slow growing tumors in the offspring of rats fed extra choline had a genetic pattern similar to those seen in breast cancers of women who are considered to have a good prognosis, whereas the genetic changes that occurred in the fast growing tumors were similar to those seen in women with very aggressive forms of breast cancer that are associated with a poor prognosis.

So what's the lesson?

Well, first of all, guess where choline is found? In the yolks of eggs. The very part that the idiot wing of the American Dietetic Association has been cautioning against, leading to the epidemic of "healthy" egg-white omlettes our low-fat friends are so fond of. I've been preaching that this is a bad idea for so long now that my voice is getting hoarse! Stop with the egg-white omlettes already! The good stuff is in the yolks (not that there's not good stuff in the whites as well, but nature put them together for a reason!)

And that's the lesson for all of us, not just those who are pregnant. Low-fat (or no-fat) versions of whole foods are rarely an improvement over the way they were "designed". Fat is not what we need to fear in the American diet (sugar is, but that's another story)

This research comes on the heels of recent studies by Jeff Volek, PhD, RD showing that eggs can also lower inflammation, a silent killer if there ever was one.

Choline is an undiscovered superstar in the nutrient galaxy, and is truly a "brain food". The best food source of choline is (unfortunately) beef liver, but the second best is a whole egg. Beef, cauliflower and navy beans also have some as well.

Choline is in the B-vitamin family. A single capsule of B-Supreme contains 200mg of choline, more than an entire egg. I also recommend the Choline Punch created by my good friend and colleague Dr. Al Sears.

Dumbest idea of the Week: "Fat-Free Living"

According to the USDA, which has never been exactly a "thought leader" when it comes to food and nutrition, January is Fat Free Living Month.

This is probably the worst idea the USDA has ever come up with, with the possible exception of the 1992 Food Pyramid.

Virtually every health professional now understands that fat is vital for our health. But since apparently the USDA did not get the memo, let's repeat some of the many ways fat is essential in our diet:

1. Fat is an important part of cell membranes.


2. Fat is our main source of energy.


3. Fat cushions our organs and tissues and protects them from injury.

And that's just the beginning. Without fat, major vitamins like vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E and vitamin K are not absorbed (which is why they're called the 'fat soluble' vitamins). Neither are important carotenoids- like the eye-protecting lutein and zeaxanthin. Even calcium needs some fat for maximum absorption!

Dietary fat helps us to feel full and to feel fuller longer, thus decreasing the likelihood of cravings and overeating. Unlike carbohydrates, dietary fat has virtually no impact on the fat-storage hormone insulin. In fact, adding fat to a meal lowers the overall glycemic impact of the meal-- and low-glycemic diets have been linked with lower rates of cancer, diabetes, obesity and even Alzheimers. To make matters worse, any fat-free diet foods typically replace fat with carbohydrates, usually of the worst kind. Research has shown that this substitution has significant negative consequences for our health.

Dietary fat is the starting material from which we make all sorts of important chemicals in the body called eicosanoids which, among other things, help regulate clotting and inflammation.

One particular type of fat- omega-3 fatty acids from fish and flax- bears special mention. Omega-3 fats lower blood pressure, improve mood, and- possibly most important of all- lower inflammation. Inflammation is now recognized as a major component of every degenerative disease we know of including heart disease, metabolic syndrome, obesity, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimers. And omega-3 fatty acids are one of the most anti-inflammatory compounds on the planet.

The "Fat-Free" month is an idea whose time should never have come in the first place. It's time to say good-bye to such idiocy for good.

The Truth About the Recent Cholesterol Drug Study

Last week, the results of a new study on a cholesterol-lowering drug were released generating a ton of press attention. The study (the JUPITER study) made the front page of the NY Times, was featured on just about every television news show, and generally created a lot of buzz. Even if you weren't paying too much attention- and it was hard not to- you might have heard that the study showed that a cholesterol-lowering medication (Crestor) lowered the risk for heart disease by over 40% in people who did not have high cholesterol in the first place!

The Wall Street Journal was practically salivating in its predictions. "The findings could substantially broaden the market for statins, the world's best-selling class of medicines", they panted. "Morgan Stanley analysts predicted Crestor revenue could rise to as much as 8 billion and 18% of the global statin market in 2014".

OK let's take a look at what actually happened before we start putting statins in the water supply.

Approximately 17,000 participants were enrolled in the study, all at "prime heart attack age" (over 50 for men, over 60 for women). But none had either high cholesterol levels nor evidence of serious heart disease. By all traditional measures, they were a healthy men and women.

What they did have was elevated inflammation.

We know this because the researchers measured their blood levels for CRP (C-Reactive Protein) an excellent marker for inflammation in the body. For years and years I- and many other nutritionists and doctors- have been warning that inflammation is the real danger for heart disease and that cholesterol is a red herring. Inflammation is the silent killer. Inflammation is what we should be paying attention to. C-Reactive Protein is an important measure to know, even though most docs have scoffed at it and told us it's not that important. (Besides, they were too busy focusing on cholesterol.)

For years I've also been saying that any benefit that might be had by taking statin drugs has nothing to do with lowering cholesterol. But statin drugs have an interesting little "side effect": they happen to lower inflammation.

So here's this study when people with completely normal cholesterol (but elevated inflammation) benefit from a statin drug. Think they'd figure out that maybe cholesterol wasn't the issue in the first place?

Oh no. What you'll probably see is a movement to lower the "normal" cholesterol levels even further down so that even more people can be put on these drugs.

Which, by the way, are far from perfectly safe. Though the mainstream establishment downplays their side effects, most knowledgeable clinicians will tell you that side effects like muscle pain and fatigue are far more common than widely believed and that they see these side effects in about 15% of patients. And the drug costs $3.50 a day, if you care.

So what we have here is a study that showed a very very modest reduction in risk for heart disease, using a drug that accomplished that not by lowering cholesterol but by lowering inflammation. The benefit of the drug-- such as it was (and it was modest to say the least)--- clearly had nothing to do whatsoever with lowering cholesterol.

By the way, how can I say that the benefit was modest when it was reported as a whopping 44% reduction in risk?

Simple. Because the percentages don't tell the whole story.

The real numbers were as follows: In the non-treated group, about 14 in 1000 developed cardiovascular disease (in other words 1.4 percent of the group). In the treated group, only 8 in 1000 developed cardiovascular disease (.8 percent). Tiny numbers- but reducing 14 to 8 does produce a "44% reduction" (just as reducing 3-in-a-million to 2-in-a-million produces a 33% reduction!)

Inflammation truly is an important health issue, and anything that reduces inflammation should be paid attention to. The sad part of all this is that there are so many ways to reduce inflammation naturally without drugs. Fish oil is one of the most anti-inflammatory substances on the plant. So are the myriad of natural anti-inflammatories (like the quercetin found in apples and onions, and the hundreds of other flavonoids in the plant kingdom).

But of course none of those are 20 billion dollar-a-year businesses.