By Dr. Joseph Mercola | June 9, 2022
Via Aletho News
The lecturer in the featured video, Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., produced the 2014 Australian Catalyst documentary, “Heart of the Matter: Dietary Villains,” which exposed the cholesterol/saturated fat myths behind the statin fad and the financial links which lurk underneath.
The documentary was so thorough that vested interests actually convinced ABC TV to rescind the two-part series.1 The Australian Heart Foundation, the three largest statin makers (Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Merck Sharp & Dohme) and Medicines Australia, Australia’s drug lobby group, complained2 and got the documentary expunged from ABC TV.
Cholesterol and saturated fat have been the villains of heart disease for the past four decades, despite the many studies showing neither has an adverse effect on heart health.
The entire food industry shifted away from saturated fat and cholesterol, ostensibly to improve public health, and the medical industry has massively promoted the use of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs for the same reason. Despite all of that, the rate of heart disease deaths continues to be high.3 That really should tell us something.
Statins Are a Colossal Waste of Money
Since the release of Demasi’s documentary, the evidence against the cholesterol theory and statins has only grown. As noted in an August 4, 2020, op-ed by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, a general practitioner with the British National Health Service:4
“New research shows that the most widely prescribed type of drug in the history of medicine is a waste of money. One major study found that the more ‘bad’ cholesterol was lowered, the greater the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost every other medical condition has been shoved onto the sidelines. However, in the UK last year, heart attacks and strokes (CVD) killed well over 100,000 people — which is at least twice as many as have died from COVID-19.
CVD will kill just as many this year, which makes it significantly more important than COVID-19, even if no one is paying much attention to it right now.”
According to a scientific review5 published online August 4, 2020, in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, lowering LDL is not going to lower your risk of heart disease and stroke. “Decades of research has failed to show any consistent benefit for this approach,” the authors note.
Since the commercialization of statin drugs in the late ’80s (lovastatin being the first one, gaining approval in 19876), total sales have reached nearly $1 trillion.7,8 Lipitor — which is just one of several brand name statin drugs — was named the most profitable drug in the history of medicine.9,10 Yet these drugs have done nothing to derail the rising trend of heart disease.
Lowering Cholesterol Does Not Show a Beneficial Impact
According to a press release announcing the BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine review, the analysis found that:11
“… over three quarters of all the trials reported no positive impact on the risk of death and nearly half reported no positive impact on risk of future cardiovascular disease.
And the amount of LDL cholesterol reduction achieved didn’t correspond to the size of the resulting benefits, with even very small changes in LDL cholesterol sometimes associated with larger reductions in risk of death or cardiovascular ‘events,’ and vice versa. Thirteen of the clinical trials met the LDL cholesterol reduction target, but only one reported a positive impact on risk of death …”
In their paper,12 the study authors argue that since dozens of randomized controlled trials looking at LDL-cholesterol reduction “have failed to demonstrate a consistent benefit, we should question the validity of this theory.”
They also cite the Minnesota Coronary Experiment,13 a double-blind randomized controlled trial involving 9,423 subjects that sought to determine whether replacing saturated fat with omega-6 rich vegetable oil (corn oil and margarine) would reduce the death rate from heart disease by lowering cholesterol.
It didn’t. Mortality and cardiovascular events increased even though total cholesterol was lowered by 13.8%. For each 30 mg/dL reduction in serum cholesterol, the death risk rose by 22%. In conclusion, the Evidence-Based Medicine study authors note that:14
“In most fields of science the existence of contradictory evidence usually leads to a paradigm shift or modification of the theory in question, but in this case the contradictory evidence has been largely ignored, simply because it doesn’t fit the prevailing paradigm.”
Deception Through Statistics
If lowering cholesterol doesn’t reduce mortality or cardiovascular events, there’s little reason to use them, considering they come with a long list of adverse side effects. Sure, there are studies claiming to show benefit, but many involve misleading plays on statistics.
One common statistic used to promote statins is that they lower your risk of heart attack by about 36%.15 This statistic is derived from a 2008 study16 in the European Heart Journal. One of the authors on this study is Rory Collins, who heads up the CTT Collaboration (Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ Collaboration), a group of doctors and scientists who analyze study data17 and report their findings to regulators and policymakers.
Table 4 in this study shows the rate of heart attack in the placebo group was 3.1% while the statin group’s rate was 2% — a 36% reduction in relative risk. However, the absolute risk reduction — the actual difference between the two groups, i.e., 3.1% minus 2% — is only 1.1%, which really isn’t very impressive.
In other words, in the real world, if you take a statin, your chance of a heart attack is only 1.1% lower than if you’re not taking it. At the end of the day, what really matters is what your risk of death is the absolute risk. The study, however, only stresses the relative risk (36%), not the absolute risk (1.1%).
As noted in the review18 “How Statistical Deception Created the Appearance That Statins Are Safe and Effective in Primary and Secondary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease,” it’s very easy to confuse and mislead people with relative risks.
Statins Sabotage Your Health
A stunning review of statin trials published in 2015 found that in primary prevention trials, the median postponement of death in those taking statins was a mere 3.2 days [what Mercola doesn’t mention is that this statistic is believed to result from statins’ anti-inflammatory effects – 20+ years of research suggest that arterial plaques are caused by inflammation, not cholesterol buildup – see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5986484/%5D. While potentially extending life span by 3.2 days, those taking statins are also at increased risk for:
- Diabetes (if taken for more than two years, your risk for diabetes triples)
- Dementia, neurodegenerative diseases and psychiatric problems such as depression, anxiety and aggression
- Musculoskeletal disorders
- Osteoporosis
- Cataracts
- Heart disease
- Liver damage
- Immune system suppression
[…]
The Most Revolutionary Act 