Dramatically more heart protection than statins....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 10-20-2015

This may be the most important but least known set of information in disease prevention.

1.  Because statins do NOT address the most effective methods to prevent heart disease or deaths from heart disease, the protection they give is small from heart attacks – and close to zero from deaths from heart attacks.  Worse, they have several negative side effects including several that harm your heart. 

(We’ve been posting on this for some time and one of the two triggers for this post is even more information on heart harmful statin effects.)

2. Surprisingly, by addressing the causes of heart disease and the factors that have proven to reduce the death rate from heart disease, it is quite possible to come close to eliminating the risk from heart disease.

a) If someone who set several fires a day in their house went to the fire department to find out how to deal with the fire damage and prevent it, you’d wonder about their sanity.

Similarly THE most effective way to avoid heart disease and deaths from it is to STOP eating and drinking heart attack starters!

The key issue is that people simply don’t know that so many of the foods and drinks that taste good, are inexpensive, and have a long shelf life are actually heart attack starters as effective as applying a match to a pile of gasoline soaked wood chips.

Heart disease and the heart attacks and strokes it causes are caused by oxidized or sugared (glycated), small particle LDL.  This burrows into the artery walls and is very inflammatory which triggers the body to apply emergency patches that then grow and harden and gradually block circulation. 

Large particle HDL acts like the cleaning crew and removes cholesterol and ships it off for beneficial uses.

So to prevent heart disease, the goal is to have lots of HDL and hardly any small particle LDL.

Triglycerides are a direct marker for small particle LDL and HDL removes them, so the ratio of HDL to triglycerides is a very good marker for how much heart disease is being created at the time of the two measurements.

This means that any food or drink that causes very high triglycerides is heart attack starter.  And the best way to prevent heart disease and deaths from it is not to take a weak drug; but to simply drop your intake of those foods and drinks to zero or close to it.

Would you like a very fast way to prevent a heart attack?

One of the two I know of is to stop eating the worst of these heart attack starters. 

One of the worst is wheat foods.  Many Americans still have several servings a day of wheat foods little knowing how dangerous they are long term.

Many other grains are very nearly as bad.

So, what happens when you remove them from your diet?  Within a few weeks, your HDL goes up and your triglycerides drop – and the process of heart disease creation stops or slows down.

Dr William Davis said this in his Wheat Belly Total Health book:  “Over time this can result in spectacular rises in HDL; a change from 39 to 80 would not be at all uncommon. (Personally my HDL value rose from 27 to 97….)”

(Reading that quote was the second prompt for this post.)

Can you get better or faster protection than just stopping all wheat and cutting way back on or stopping all other grains? Yes!

You can stop all the other things that also boost triglycerides that much!

*Those include free fructose from high fructose corn syrup, agave nectar, fruit juices and fruit juice concentrates used as sweeteners.  They include eating more regular sugar than 2 to 5% of total calories. 

(This can cause a huge drop in triglycerides since many Americans eat 15% of their calories as free fructose and another 10% as regular sugar.  So dropping this to 0% and 5% is a big change!

Note that because this drops their caloric intake by 20% without reducing their protein intake or other real foods, this drop in sugars can cause and has caused a 20% drop in bodyweight from the extra fat that is no longer being fed.)

*Hydrogenated and inexpensive oils have a long shelf life.  So they are still in hundreds of foods.  But eating ANY amount of them daily causes the amount of them to build up in your body to quite high levels because it takes your body a few weeks to get rid of hydrogenated oils you eat in any one day.

Unfortunately, hydrogenated oils cause small particle LDL directly by actual test.  So in people who eat them, this shows up as high triglycerides and low HDL.

*Tobacco smoke causes the same build up of plaque as eating these foods with every single exposure to it.

So yet another way to stop causing yourself to get heart disease is to not smoke and make a very strong effort to avoid second hand smoke.

b) What is the second way to fast heart attack prevention besides stopping all these avoidable causes?

What if in just a few days, you could keep your body from being trigger happy about applying extra patches to the inflamed blood vessels caused by those other causes before or now?

What if you could force your triglycerides down and your HDL up another way in just a few days?

There are ways you can enhance the effect.  But boosting omega 3 oils by taking the omega 3 oil DHA, getting both DHA and EPA in omega 3 supplements and by eating wild caught fish high in omega 3 oils at least twice a week – if you begin all three -- have caused very large increases in HDL and drops in triglycerides within a few days.  This also reduces the excess inflammation that causes the trigger happy, excessive patching effect.

Similarly, taking curcumin with black pepper twice a day reduces the excess inflammation that causes the trigger happy, excessive patching effect.  AND, by reducing LDL cholesterol also, it apparently reduces small particle LDL too.

Conclusion:  By taking these two steps, stopping the causes of heart disease and enhancing the positive effects, you can slash your risk of heart disease to near zero.

Does failing to do these two steps and taking the weak statin drugs come close to matching that heart disease reduction?  No. And, it’s not even close.

3.  What about reducing the death rate from heart disease?

The statistics I saw said that while taking statins caused a 3% drop in nonfatal heart attack, it produced zero reduction in the death rate from heart disease.

Did you know there is something that cuts the risk of deaths from heart disease by 24 % and another 19% from related deaths from strokes and the risk of dying from any cause even more because it also reduces deaths from cancer?

There is!  And, just on the death rate from heart disease it beats statins 24 to zero!

Clearly it works in part because it makes it so much easier to stop the things that cause heart disease.  But it also contains hundreds of protective micronutrients that enhance the effect.

To be fair, it is a bit challenging to do.  But the more you do, the better your protection.

A UK study showed all these effects in people who ate 6 or more servings of vegetables a day!

(Given that much exposure, it’s clear to me this works far better, is more health protective, and results in far less cancer, if all of the vegetables are organic only.)

4.  Meanwhile, compared to these two strategies, statins have a tiny, marginal effect on cutting heart disease risk.

So they are not a good choice for those reasons.

But in addition, statin have several side effects that are heart harmful!

a) One of the best strategies for heart health protection is to do both slow rep strength training at least two days a week and brief duration but intense interval or variable cardio each week the other days so that you do vigorous exercise even if for 10 to 30 minutes most days of every week.

Why?  For three reasons, your heart becomes fit too; it drops your level of small particle LDL directly which boosts your HDL and reduces your triglycerides; and it also slows aging!

Would you take a drug that not only prevented exercise from having this effect, it also tended to permanently damage your muscles the better you did these exercises?

What if it also depleted your energy and made you feel much older and actually aged you faster too?

By depleting the ubiquinol form that your body’s power source, the mitochondria, use and possibly in other ways, statin drugs often have these exact effects!

And, to the extent this effect damages your heart muscle it tends to cause heart failure, a truly horrid and fatal disease.

From just this one side effect, I think statin drugs should have a black box warning and hardly ever be used.

Maybe they can be used safely in this regard if people taking statins also take 300 mg a day of ubiquinol to overcome this effect.

But why not use the more effective methods for heart protection and just take the ubiquinol for its positive effects such as slowing aging which is heart protective?  Why take or pay for the statin drugs at all?

b) Type 2 diabetes causes glycated sugars in the blood that have sugar spikes that damage the inside of your blood vessels, the endothelium.  This causes gout and heart disease.

Depending on the study, statin drugs causes type 2 diabetes from 9 to 45% of the time.

Again, why use statin drugs at all, when other methods work far better to decrease heart attack risk and the risk of death from heart disease when they have this side effect?

c)  And, I just found out there are MORE heart harming effects from taking statin drugs in addition to the first two!

This article by Jenny Thompson of HIS is the second spark for this post:

It seems there is a third way that taking statins literally is more heart harmful than beneficial.  This one is new to me and even those of you who knew these first two things likely haven’t seen it yet either.

Here is her article:

“Dear Reader, 

You're not as old as you feel -- you're as old as your arteries say you are. 

Because arteries that are damaged, blocked and hardened with a buildup of plaque can cause all the diseases that go hand-in-hand with old age. 

I'm talking about high blood pressure, angina, arm and leg pain, kidney failure, and even deadly strokes and heart attacks. 

But what if you could actually reverse years of hardening in your arteries and stop these killer diseases in their tracks -- all without ever touching a prescription drug? 

Dutch researchers have proven it's possible. And it's all thanks to a powerful vitamin that most of us -- and even our doctors -- never think about. 

It's often called the "forgotten vitamin."

But if you want to do all you can to live a long healthy life, tie a string around your finger that will remind you to take K2. Especially if you want to keep your arteries elastic, smooth and protected from the ravages of plaque buildup. 

Now, K2 is no stranger to scientists. Numerous studies have shown that it can protect your bones and your brain. 

But what those Dutch researchers found should have knocked the socks off cardiologists around the world. 

They gave 250 post-menopausal women either a daily vitamin K2 supplement or a placebo for three years. And they found that K2 may be like a fountain of youth for your arteries. 

If K2 just kept your arteries from getting harder, that would be impressive enough. But the women who took it actually had more flexible and supple arteries by the end of the study. 

In other words, K2 didn't just stop deadly arterial disease in its tracks -- it actually put it in reverse gear. 

Hardening of the arteries isn't something that happens overnight. By the time we're in our 50s, it can have set the stage for serious heart issues in our senior years. 

And, believe it or not, the cholesterol-lowering statin drugs that the mainstream is handing out like candy -- supposedly to protect our hearts -- are making the problem worse. 

That's because one of the nastier side effects of statins such as Lipitor and Crestor is to starve your body of adequate supplies of vitamin K2. And when that happens, you've got the perfect storm that can fast-track the hardening of your arteries. 

That makes taking statins to save your heart about as logical as putting a plastic bag over your head to help you breathe.”