5. Cholesterol Drugs - Statins

Too lose fat and weight you must burn fat. Your stored calories (fat) doesn't just vaporize - you burn it.

Most of us Americans are very inefficient at burning fat - but is burning efficiency the only issue?

Can you explain the following based on all you have been told about "cholesterol?"

From the Livestrong website: "While weight loss is an effective tool at lowering cholesterol, it may temporarily raise cholesterol, although this effect is not permanent."

https://www.livestrong.com/article/500114-can-losing-weight-raise-your-cholesterol-temporarily/

The Truth: Most of what is stated about cholesterol in the Livestrong article is completely wrong. They are just regurgitating 50 year dogma, and that dogma has led America to have the highest healthcare costs - by far - and one of the shortest lifespans of the 36 most developed nations on the planet (source OECD). A bad deal!

LDL and HDL are "lipoproteins." Translation: LDL and HDL are taxi cabs that shuttle fats and fat soluble substances - critical ones - through our water-based blood stream. Oil and water doesn't mix so, for our tissues to get fats, our bodies have this beautiful transport mechanism. You can look upon HDL and LDL as soap that moves the "grease" (fats). However the "grease" (fats), LDL and HDL moving through out bodies are essential to life - we use them! This grease includes:

Vitamin A. Vitamin D, Vitamins K, Vitamin E, EPA and DHA - the brain healthy omega-3 fatty acids (and heart healthy too), Cholesterol, other fats, and....

Triglycerides (moved for either fat storage or fat consumption)

Summary: You cannot burn fat (and lose weight) if you don't have LDL to transport fat - in this case triglycerides - to the cells capable of burning them.

The Proof: Hundreds of research papers and articles indicating that lowering cholesterol with statin (and other "cholesterol") drugs cause diabetes.

How do these "bad" drugs cause diabetes? See the mechanism above. It's really quite simple. If you are at the airport waiting for a taxi, but it does come - you don't get home. This is what happens with the burning of fats. If the fats cannot be "taxied" to cells - in LDL - they cannot be burned.

Diabetes is a human-made term for severe insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is the medically correct name for diabetes. Most of us have some degree of insulin resistance but are not yet diabetic - it's a sliding scale (a continuum).

Glucose dependence is another way to look at diabetes. On statin drugs, it's difficult to burn fats so you are MORE glucose dependent, thus your body craves carbs and sugars much more compared to someone who can burn fat. As you respond to your cravings, you frequently "spike" your insulin. This process, repeated over-and-over again, makes you MORE INSULIN RESISTANT = diabetic.

Why more hunger? Insulin resistance forces your body to bring extra sugar (glucose) into your blood stream. You get the extra sugar by responding to your body's signal to eat. You must eat more, thus be hungry more often, because you have to supply more sugars to compensate for the Insulin resistance - or inability of insulin to "push" sugar into a cell that needs fuel - compared to someone who is more insulin sensitive.

The statin and cholesterol drugs make our bad American eating habit WORSE by exacerbating insulin resistance.

Summary: Statin drugs reduce your body's ability to feed your cells with fats. This makes you more sugar/carb dependent which leads to insulin resistance. This sets up a viscous cycle of dependance upon carbs/sugars and ever increasing insulin resistance and hunger.

If statin drugs truly saved lives then the risk of becoming diabetic would be worth it - possibly. But read this from Harvard Medical School's own internal publication called "Frontiers in Medicine." Here is the key quote from the article titled "Questioning Statins":

Considering that statins don’t seem to confer the ultimate health benefit—longer life—some clinicians question whether lowering cholesterol is as important as everyone has been led to believe. “If you decrease your chance of having heart attacks, you’d think you would live longer,” Redberg says. “But that doesn’t turn out to be true. So what is the benefit of taking this pill for the rest of your life?”

http://protomag.com/articles/statins-change-of-heart

Point to Ponder: Why did Harvard published this in 2011? You might look at when most of the Statin drugs came "off patent" for the answer.

Take pills thoughtfully to get or stay well - and I cannot find a thoughtful reason to take a Statin.