How statins drive up health care costs and provide poor heart protection....

Today's Post: Thursday, 7-1-2010

All some doctors know about preventing heart disease is to look at your total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol readings and to prescribe statin drugs to lower them if the total is over 240 or the LDL is over 160.

Then recently, a drug maker found that taking statin drugs lowered CRP inflammation if it was high. So, since such high inflammation does tend to cause or at least predict heart disease and heart attacks, they then suggested the large number of people with high CRP also take statins even if they did not have high LDL cholesterol.

But, a more recent study seems to have found that this practice did not cut death rates.

Statin drugs are relatively ineffective at both jobs, they cost money to take, and they have multiple side effects that often cost money to treat & that could have been avoided.

One study I read of said that if 100 people did not take statins 3 would get heart attacks in one group while if a matched group of 100 did take statins 2 would get heart attacks.

That does show some benefit. But all 100 had to take statins to prevent that one heart attack and about as many people as had heart attacks prevented in another study got cataracts who did not do so in the group that did not take statins.

Statins also often de-energize older people who take them and increase muscle aches and tend to weaken muscles. Unfortunately one of the muscles often weakened is the heart and heart failure results.

Nor is this all. Statins sometimes cause serious memory and cognitive problems in some people.

So to a large extent very nearly all the health care spending on having people take statin drugs increases costs with little benefit and causes suffering and problems and medical costs that were otherwise avoidable.

Does that mean that the current practice of having millions of people take statins and continuing to find more reasons to increase the number of people taking them drive up health care costs with very few benefits to justify doing so?

It certainly looks that way to me.

But if we now recommend against statin drugs for everyone other than victims of recent heart attacks, doesn’t that take away a tool from doctors who want to protect their patients from heart disease and heart attacks?

To a slight degree that does do that.

But what that ignores is this:

Doctors can have their patients turn off the direct causes of heart disease instead of taking this weak and problem-causing class of drugs.

And there are more effective and cheaper and safer methods to increase the protection of their patients than statins.

The good news is that you do NOT need to wait until your doctor is better educated to do those two things.

You can do them yourself once you know how.

Here are the most potent causes of heart disease. Learn to turn them off and you can protect your heart (and brain) dramatically better than you can by taking statin drugs.

1. Ingesting trans fats and other hydrogenated oils.

2. Eating lots of sugars and refined grains (&/or ingesting artificial sweeteners that boost your desire for those foods.)

3. NOT getting moderate physical activity and quite vigorous exercise every week.

4. Getting any exposure to tobacco smoke.

5. Having excessive inflammation from ingesting too many omega 6 oils & ingesting too little omega 3 oils without knowing the health harm that does and from failure to know and do the daily things that keep your gums healthy.

LDL is low density lipoprotein cholesterol. It’s the small particle kind that is literally small enough to go into the spaces between the molecules in your blood vessels which operates like a kind of sticky glue and gradually builds up causing cardiovascular disease. (The larger LDL particle tends to just roll along harmlessly like tumbleweeds. That’s one reason why just lowering LDL may not lower heart disease. The key is to lower the bad kind of LDL that actually causes the problem.)

Slash small particle LDL to very low levels and you stop creating heart disease in your blood vessels and might even cause some of the previous build up to leave.

Boost it to very high levels and your heart disease will get worse every day.

How can you tell if you have too much of this small particle LDL? Get a basic “lipid panel” blood test.

If your HDL is high and your triglycerides are low, you have little small particle LDL and are not getting heart disease much if at all.

BUT, if your HDL is below 50 or worse, below 40, you are at risk. If your triglycerides are over 150 you are at risk.

People who don’t know of this risk, how to prevent it, and who do those things often will have readings like HDL of 35 and triglycerides of 245 or worse. Statin drugs are a total waste of money for such people. They’d do better buying extra life and burial insurance – OR learning how to protect themselves instead. This is most unfortunate since more than half of all Americans today may have such readings.

1. A landmark experiment was done and found that ingesting trans fats and hydrogenated oils sharply increases this small particle LDL in your blood.

So, it’s a proven heart attack starter. Should you eat less of it to avoid heart disease? Nope. Eating as close to zero of this stuff as you can possibly manage is far more protective.

So, if you see cookies, even a kind you like, for sale at the grocery store and find they include partially hydrogenated oils as an ingredient, do NOT buy or eat any.

Make them at home with butter from grass fed cows, or mild extra virgin olive oil, or applesauce instead of oil --- OR eat strawberries or even a banana instead.

Always read labels and never buy or eat anything that contains hydrogenated oils or lists trans fats of more than zero. Eat no shortening; and eat butter from grass fed cows or use extra virgin olive oil and eat no margarine.

Given how incredibly much of this stuff is still in foods, this takes a bit of work. But completely avoiding hydrogenated oils in your food simply chops off one of the most common causes of heart disease.

2. Recent studies have found that eating lots of sugars and refined grains (&/or ingesting artificial sweeteners that boost your desire for those foods) sharply lowers HDL and very sharply increases triglycerides. (It also increases CRP inflammation.) The combination of lower HDL and much higher triglyceride readings means that eating this way sharply increases small particle LDL just like trans fats do.

Since sugar does taste good and these foods are often a majority of what many people eat and drink today, this one is a big challenge.

But the foods people evolved to eat are still available as substitutes and even have other health benefits. Vegetables and fresh fruit, raw unsalted nuts, and meat from animals and poultry fed their natural foods and wild caught fish are those foods. Some whole grains in moderation, very occasional sugar, & beans and lentils often also work.

Doing this one IS harder for many people. But if you don’t do it most of the time, taking statin drugs is a total waste of money.

3. Isn’t there a way to directly reduce small particle LDL? If there was, that would be very helpful in protecting your heart.

It seems there is indeed such a thing. Regular exercise even in short sessions that you gradually build up to doing quite vigorously does exactly that. It was also recently found that every year you keep doing such vigorous exercises regularly, your protection increases!

If you begin such regular exercise you can see this effect by having your HDL go up and your triglycerides go down.

(Of course that effect is much easier to see if you do the first two things also!)

I’m out of time today. So I’ll finish this post tomorrow.