How statins drive up health care costs and provide poor heart protection, part 3....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 7-6-2010

First we posted that statin drugs are not very effective in preventing heart disease and heart attacks since 100 people need to take them to prevent one heart attack and that they are not effective enough to be worth the very high dollar cost and significant harm that having so many people get from the side effects of statins.

We then point out that doctors would be far more effective in preventing heart disease if they had their patients turn off the direct causes of heart disease instead.

Our last two previous posts listed those 5 direct causes of heart disease and many of the ways to turn them off.

Here’s the list that the last two posts cover ways to turn them off.

After the list, we include other ways to get more protection that get from as good to much better results for heart attack and heart disease prevention than statin drugs.

The best known and most harmful of these are:

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.

If you turn off those five causes your heart and heart attack protection will increase and your chances of getting a heart attack or other cardiovascular disease problem will go down.

Your small particle LDL level will drop and your excess inflammation will tend to disappear.

That will be shown by having your HDL reading go up and your triglyceride level fall. Research has found this is a direct indicator that your small particle LDL level has gone down.

And, since part of your LDL is that bad kind, your total LDL will go down. For the same reason, your total cholesterol will get lower if it has been much over 200.

And, since you will be eating more fruits and vegetables that contain antioxidants and have your excess inflammation mostly disappear, your blood vessels will stay smooth and not order up the emergency patches that tend to turn into artery blocking plaque.

But since you may have built up some plaque before you turned off these causes or still have readings that are not yet good on these measures, are there ways to make that better besides turning off the causes?

Yes indeed there are. They are mostly safer or definitely safer than statins and they work as well and usually better than statins to protect your heart. They are also MUCH cheaper.

1. The Berkeley Heart Lab developed a way to check far more exact measures of heart attack risk and then grouped the people with similar profiles. When I scanned their website, I found something extremely interesting. As I remember it, all their profiles except one got more effective protection from taking the vitamin niacin than taking statins. To be fair, that one group seemed to do better with statins. But since statins tend to cost $1,000 a year and you might take them for 20 or 30 years plus pay for treatment for some of the side effects, it seems to me it might make sense to test first to see if you are in that one group that does somewhat better with statins since the test only costs about $700 and it could save you $20,000 to $30,000 with about a 90 % chance it will tell you that you can safely skip taking statins.

Meanwhile, other studies have found that niacin has such a powerful track record because it directly reverses the cause of heart disease by reducing your small particle LDL that causes heart disease. Further, the death rate of people taking niacin has been found to go down significantly. To me the two things seem connected.

Niacin does lower LDL cholesterol. But because it both increases HDL and lowers triglycerides, it does so by lowering the small particle LDL that actually causes heart disease!

There are two problems with niacin.

a) If you take even a moderately small amount such as the 300 mg dose I take after breakfast every day, if you take it on an empty stomach or after you have had a drink or two, you get a “flush” reaction that feels like a widespread case of instant sunburn. Your skin looks that color & feels noticeably warmer. Since this effect is not only harmless but may be a sign the niacin is doing its job and it goes away in 20 or 30 minutes, it’s not that bad. But if you take a lot more niacin than that or on an empty stomach, it can be a problem.

But there are several solutions. Don’t take more than 300 mg of niacin at a time unless your doctor says you are at severe risk unless you do so such as you are in the ER recovering from a heart attack. Try to always take it on a full stomach right after a full meal. And, if you need a bit more niacin than that since your HDL is still a bit low or your triglycerides are a bit too high or your LDL is too high, take 300 mg doses of “no flush” niacin, inositol hexaniacinate. I finally found a credible reference that actually measured how much real niacin this delivers which said that it tested out as the equivalent of 250 mg of niacin. The reason this delivers no flush is because it goes through the process of liberating the niacin so slowly it doesn’t get enough at any one time to cause the flush. I’ve found that taking the 300 mg of this with no food on a empty stomach or after a light meal is no problem with the flush.

So, I take both. The regular niacin after breakfast and the “no flush” version before breakfast and after dinner even if they are small meals. So, for my 1,050 mg a day of niacin received (300 + 3 X 250) each day, I only have the 300 after my large breakfast that tends to cause the flush a few days a month if that.

(I have found that the inexpensive Whole Foods brand in those strengths for niacin and “no flush” niacin both readily available and inexpensive.)

b) The second problem is a bit more of a concern. Like statin drugs, if you take more niacin than I do, well over 1,000 mg a day, or have liver problems or both, niacin can cause liver problems under those circumstances.

So, if you are going to take niacin, do as I did and have your doctor include a liver function test when you get your lipid panel tested. And, if you are going to take more than 1100 mg a day of niacin, be sure to get that test every 6 months or so.

b) The other key way to lower LDL cholesterol enough to compare with statins but in a MUCH safer way is to take sterol supplements. These were initially added to margarine and found to be effective. But margarine is a food that tends to cause heart disease. So pass on eating a margarine that has sterol supplements added and just take the supplements.

Beta sitosterol and saw palmetto both are sterols. And, sterols are found in nuts and vegetables which are foods that tend to be heart protective in part for that reason.

Natrol makes a beta sitosterol supplement they call “Cholesterol Balance” that I find effective by taking 3 a day. And, it costs less than $10 a month to take.

Again, I’m out of time to cover more things. But those two categories, niacin, and sterol supplements, between them lower total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol as well or better than statins; are far safer than statins, AND provide BETTER heart attack prevention for most people.