Cholesterol medicine, more particularly the statin drugs hype turned into THE BIGGEST SCAM IN MEDICAL HISTORY. They’ve been killing people in the name of the profit for decades.
Once you understand the vicious nature of the conspiracy, you’ll start second-guessing every word that comes out from the mouth of your family physician.
Tell a lie repeatedly and it will become the truth. Same is true for cholesterol.
General Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States of America, suffered a heart attack on September 24, 1955. Nobody could foresee the future implications of that event back when it happened.
Nevertheless, the President’s heart attack triggered one of the most elaborate, most persistent, most dangerous, and most profitable conspiracies against the humankind, orchestrated by the medical community and pharmaceutical companies.
It’s a mind-blowing example of how one unfounded assumption can evolve into a global multibillion-dollar enterprise that viciously exploits people’s trust in authorities.
When the news came out about Eisenhower’s condition, nation froze. Doctors couldn’t find the possible cause (even though the man spent 5 years in one of the bloodiest wars this species has ever waged and smoked like a damn chimney which should give them some clue).
It took 10 days for the Eisenhower to resume his duties in the White House.
When researchers started pulling out national data, they noticed a significant increase in heart attacks among middle-aged men. The numbers were off the charts and pretty soon the panic spread across the nation. There was nothing in the medical history of the victims that could indicate such severe condition.
Boston specialist, Dr. Paul Dudley, was the first medical expert who called for a rise in public awareness. But Dudley couldn’t see the cause for such a dramatic trend. Back then, PTSD and other fatal consequences of the extended exposure to the brutality and dangers of war engagement were unknown. And it was exactly that particular demographic that got the doctors worried. WWII veterans were dropping like flies from heart attacks and nobody knew why.
Then, after the extremely limited and biased research, Dr. Ancel Keys came up with one particular hypothesis that took roots in the academic community almost immediately.
This pathologist from Minnesota, who prescribed a low-calorie diet to Eisenhower during the president’s recovery process, started claiming that cardiovascular diseases are primarily caused by saturated fats. According to dr. Keys, the consummation of food with any content of saturated fats causes cholesterol to go up.
And then, he draws a simple conclusion: high levels of cholesterol are clogging arteries, causing the heart attack.
Nobody seemed worried about the fact that the blood serum level of cholesterol was the only thing doctors could measure back then while not being sure about its exact role in human metabolism.
It was the dawn of one of the most famous hypotheses about the #1 cause of heart attacks and every other cardiovascular disease – THE DIETARY CAUSE!
It was an assumption, based on nothing, in which almost the entire medical community believed.
Once they firmly believed in the alleged DIETARY CAUSE, they initiated the first serious research. Which is the opposite of how science is coming up with the conclusions. They are trained to disbelieve the claim until it becomes proven in several different ways.
Still, in case of the “DIETARY CAUSE,” they believed first and checked later.
7 Countries Cholesterol Study
Keys was eager to confirm his hypothesis as soon as possible.
After collecting sufficient funds, he initiated the international study that researched tens of thousands of people from 7 different countries.
The problem was: the study was focused on proving the thesis rather than trying to break it, which is a common practice.
Dr. Ancel Keys manipulated with the data, deliberately excluding those that didn’t back up his thesis, consequently pushing Europe and North America in a war against cholesterol.
For instance, the data from France simply didn’t make any sense to Keys and to all of those who believed in his theory. French people had the highest level of cholesterol, yet had the lowest number of heart attacks. So Keys simply removed the data from France when he was making that famous chart where he showed how Americans have the highest levels of cholesterol.
However, it was that same chart that triggered suspicion at some scientists, because two analysts, who reviewed both the chart and the study, warned about the entirely wrong presentation of collected data.
Keys wasn’t happy about their accusations but he was determined not to let them get in his way.
But that was just the beginning of Keys’ war against the opposition.
McCully’s research on Cholesterol
In 1969, Dr. Kilmer McCully published an article with the results of his research on why the plaque collects on arteries. He got intrigued by the numerous cases of infants who suffered fatal heart attacks due to inability to store vitamin B. As a result, their bodies were producing high amounts of homocysteine.
While examining the bodies, he found something extraordinary: changes in the arteries at the deceased infants that were common for very old people!
It didn’t take long for Dr. McCully to connect increased levels of homocysteine with unusual plaque deposits inside the infants’ arteries. So he started testing his theory on rabbits. He would inject homocysteine in their blood and after 2-3 weeks, the plaque would form on the inside of the test subject’s arteries.
Dr. McCully’s conclusion was simple: homocysteine is causing primary deposits of the plaque, while depositions of cholesterol crystals and fats on already formed lesions are secondary.
Guess what happened next.
Dr. McCully got relocated to the basement of the Bullfinch building that was built in 1811 while being informed that he has to renew his grant because they cannot support his salary anymore.
And then came the Framingham cholesterol Study
In 1972, scientists managed to isolate two types of cholesterol for the first time ever. They named them based on a difference in their density. So one was named HDL (high-density) and the other LDL (low-density).
While they were trying to make sense of their roles in metabolism, Framingham Study revealed something ominous for supporters of dr. Keys’ theory.
Scientists deliberately chose the town of Framingham because its residents weren’t that active.
After examining the data, they confirmed the following connections with cardiovascular diseases:
- Smoking
- Hypertension
- Sedentary way of life
They weren’t, however, able to find a single connection between high cholesterol and heart attacks.
But Keys wouldn’t let go. Perhaps because the food industry quickly realized the potential and tagged along with his largely assumed thesis? Their interests simply matched.
Pretty soon, the medical community came up with the “Good” and the “Bad” cholesterols, where, according to their reasoning, the “good” one, or HDL is reducing the levels of the “bad” one, or LDL.
Which was nonsense on its own because this is how it works in our organisms:
- The liver is where 80% of cholesterol is being made and processed. Its role in metabolism is beyond important, specifically because LDL and HDL are the body’s transportation service.
- When a specific cell sends a signal (cellular communication), the liver immediately dispatches the package consisting of triglycerides (TG), cholesterol (CH) and vitamins A, D, E, K. It’s a supply truck heading to the cell in demand. And that “supply truck” is, in fact, the LDL molecule.
- When an LDL molecule arrives at its destination with the supplies, the cell activates receptors and lets the truck in.
- In the same time, that same cell is getting rid of the damaged or otherwise unneeded or unwanted elements. It does that by loading all the crap on a garbage truck we know as the HDL molecule.
- HDL, loaded with trash, is heading back to the liver where everything will be recycled, one way or another.
Ergo, the reason why they came up with the whole concept of HDL being a “good” cholesterol in a perpetual fight against the body’s ultimate villain – LDL. It’s the everlasting fight between good and evil, going on in our bodies 24/7.
And the only possible way to aid the HDL in its mission, is to “watch what you eat.”
Maybe this image shows those underlying roles of LDL and HDL better:
And then, when they get your blood works, they simply say, “Well, your blood serum cholesterol levels are high. We need to put you on drugs.” Just like that.
A simple metabolic fact. The esential one. And yet, because of a jumpy conclusion, made in desperation to solve the emerging problem, that fact got distorted and turned into a problem.
But don’t worry. It gets worse. A lot worse.
You see, that simple error in reasoning will lead scientists in a completely wrong direction; the consequences of which are already starting to show – worldwide.
Is it the “dietary problem”?
Dr. George Mann, an expert on heart diseases said that “Diet has nothing to do with heart disease.” And he found the simple way to prove it.
He points in his studies on Masai tribe in Africa whose diet consists of:
- Beef
- Milk
- Cow’s blood
Which makes their cholesterol levels extremely high. Traditionally.
So, if high levels of blood serum cholesterol are that dangerous for the human heart, how come Masai tribe people are not dropping dead or popping pills?
It’s clear that something is wrong with the generally accepted dogma about cholesterols and diets. Otherwise, Masai wouldn’t be dancing around as they do, every day.
When asked why there are no studies or proofs that go in that direction, Dr. Mann answered, “There are no studies or proofs simply because we spent all of our money, time, and manpower trying to prove the bad habit hypothesis.”
Due to his frequent appearance in media, secretary of the institute called him one day, warning him that if he continues to oppose Dr. Ancel Keys, his research grants will be revoked.
Dr. Mann didn’t have to wait for long to see it happened.
But years before Dr. Mann ended up in a crosshair of Dr. Ancel Keys’ sniper rifle, one other scientist came up with an entirely different villain for such a radical increase of heart diseases and diabetes.
In the 60s of the last century, John Yudkin, a British physiologist, became concerned about the possible connection between dietary sugars and heart diseases. He openly spoke about that, attracting the unwanted attention of media and public.
Yudkin, while researching the medical history, realized that the increase of heart diseases corresponds with the introduction of sugars at indigenous people. As the sugar consumption was increasing worldwide, so did the heart diseases.
Naturally, in 1964, the sugar industry became concerned about the possible consequences if that link becomes globally accepted. As a response, they launched the countermeasures, using renowned scientific institutions and popular media, after being warned by John Hickson, a vice president of the Sugar Research Foundation, about the necessity to make an action plan.
In 1965, New York Herald Tribune, in its Sunday edition, published the article over the entire page that was questioning the grounds of the cholesterol hypothesis while arguing in a favor of sugar as the major cause. In other words, they were supporting Yudkin’s claim while challenging Keys’.
Sugar industry immediately approved funding for famous PROJECT 226. It was a commissioned review from behalf of Harvard researchers who were ordered to collect all results that connect sugars with heart diseases and attack each and every with brutal criticism.
It was done to prevent policy makers to acknowledge the sugar connection.
To finally convince the medical community in the cholesterol theory, NIH launches an extremely narrow study in 1977. They picked 3,800 middle-aged men with very high serum cholesterol and put them on high doses of CHOLESTIRAMIN and low-cholesterol diet.
Who would guess that the serum cholesterol levels would be low after such a procedure, right?
As logical as it may seem, this short, narrow study served as the ground to publish a global, national conclusion: “The entire nation will benefit from cholesterol reduction – from a 2-year-old boy to 100 years old granny.”
It marked the beginning of the national educational program about the risks connected with cholesterol. People bought it because the recommendations were coming from the authority.
The world was certain that heart attack is most likely to strike the one with the high level of serum cholesterol. Simple as that.
The entire scientific community immediately went on a mission to find the cure to fight the menace identified as cholesterol.
Only 3 years later, one Japanese scientist discovered a compound capable of lowering the serum LDL. It was the onset of statin-based drugs. And this is where things get really ugly.
Deadly assumption
Statins are becoming the most prescribed drugs in the 2000´s in the US. And the reason for their popularity is obvious. The results of the preliminary tests were simply mind-blowing. There was a 30% reduction of risk in high-risk patients who already suffered the heart attack. The medical community was amazed and immediately “bought.”
Nobody wanted to believe that fellow scientists (researchers) would deliberately screw the global community or be so wrong in their analysis. Which made even the biggest skeptics of the cholesterol hypothesis to prescribe the drug even to their closest ones. We all inherently want to believe people – authorities in particular.
Yet, the fact remains that those same researches couldn’t replicate the results of those initial studies! Only, nobody seemed concerned about that. And why would they be when there is now a drug that they can simply prescribe to their heart patients and save their lives.
Statin business quickly grew into tens of billions of dollars market.
Nobody dared to challenge the effects because 97% of all researchers were funded by drug companies. Since they literally owned the data, they used researches as a marketing tool.
Until 2004 and VIOXX scandal when it became clear to anyone that pharma and scientists are deceiving the public by overemphasizing the positive effects of the drugs while hiding the toxic ones.
The scandal also brought one old study back to life. In 1999, French heart specialist, Dr. Michel DeLongeril, published a fairly simple conclusion after examining the habits of the indigenous people of the Mediterranean. The data showed how the Mediterranean is the region with an extremely low number of heart attacks. People up to 75 years of age have 8 times fewer attacks than Finns and 4 times less that Scotts.
What was peculiar was their diet. It just didn’t make any sense if we consider high cholesterol and fat-rich diets to be #1 cause for cardiovascular diseases. Spaniards, Italians, French – all eat cholesterol-rich food, yet no heart attacks.
Their diet, among everything else, in high degree consists of:
- Olive oil, rich in cholesterol content
- Smoked and dried produces, rich in saturated fats and salts
- Cheese, another fat-rich food
So how come it isn’t killing them?
Dr. DeLongeril made a simple conclusion, after reviewing all the evidence: “Olive oil, beet oil + antioxidants from fruit, vegetables, and red wine protect people.”
High cholesterol had nothing to do with heart diseases and Mediterraneans, along with Masai people were proving that.
However, his conclusions saw little to none attention. The world continued to chase the ghost.
In 2005, a year after the entire VIOXX disaster, new rules made clear that all previous studies on the effects of statin-based drugs were flawed. But nobody changed the guidelines written back in 2001 that almost tripled the number of Americans to be prescribed with statins.
9 out of 14 doctors who wrote the guidelines had financial ties with drug companies. Thanks to their guidelines, the number of Americans to be prescribed with statins went from 13 to 36 million over the course of one, single night. And most of those 23 million for whom statins became a recommended form of treatment, based on those same guidelines, did not yet have heart diseases.
In comparison, in 1985, a normal (accepted) level of cholesterol was 3 grams per liter of blood serum. It’s now under 2 grams, which exponentially increases the number of people with elevated blood serum cholesterol, making it the simplest possible way to make a shit load of money on oblivious and easy-to-deceive general population!
Cholesterol remained the primary cause of heart attack mostly due to its crystallization on the surface of the plaque commonly found in arteries in older people. It didn’t really matter that we already had several hard evidence that collection of cholesterol on stenosis is the consequence of previous calcification caused by increased levels of homocysteine, and not the cause itself.
The number of prescribed statins was rising.
In 2004, British Medical Journal, a prestige med magazine, published the chart showing the standardized admission ratio for myocardial infarction compared with the number of prescribed statins with data range from 1996 to 2003.
Admission of patients who suffered heart attacks remained the same. Around 100 admissions per 1000 population from 1996 to 2003. However, back in 1996, there were only 20 prescriptions per 1000 population.
The trend of admissions stays the same over that entire period, but the number of prescriptions simply exploded, reaching 370 per 1000 population just 7 years later.
The obvious question emerges: if statins would be so efficient in the prevention of heart attacks, the line showing the number of admissions per 1000 population should inevitably go down, crossing the line of prescriptions in the center of the chart. YET, WE DON’T SEE THAT!
STATIN, the silent killer.
One retired professor, with multiple departments at the university, and IQ of over 180, walked in a ballroom. His alumni were celebrating 50 years of graduation.
A year before, he was diagnosed with the progressive form of Alzheimer’s disease, by two different academic institutions.
And now he wore a small note on his chest with the clearly stated information that he is suffering from Alzheimer’s, so that nobody would wonder why he doesn’t recognize a person or why is he repeating the same sentences.
But one day, his wife decided to stop his simvastatin treatment. She got worried about possible side effects of the drug and became pretty sure that her husband’s dementia was caused by that same drug and not a natural degradation of the brain matter and neuronal network, as doctors were trying to convince her.
Shortly after he stopped using the drug, he signed in for a trial in treating Alzheimer’s in the third institution.
After they re-assessed his status, they told his wife that he doesn’t even have dementia, let alone the Alzheimer’s disease.
It took 2 years for him to fully recover from the adverse effect of statin-based drugs. Once again, he could read and memorize three different newspapers each day, as he used to do.
Why did this happen?
For over 2 million years, human liver is secreting these two cholesterols. So after two million years of evolution, why all of the sudden we have the “good” and the “bad” cholesterol?
If we lower the levels to “protect” the heart, we are automatically inflicting damage to other, vitally important metabolic processes that are most likely connected with cancers and other autoimmune diseases. In other words, we save man’s heart, but then kill him with liver cancer.
Liver secrets these two cholesterols because we need BOTH of them!
The question is what lowers or increases the levels of HDL and LDL? Because, it would be good to have an optimal number of waste trucks, while at the same time not having a rolling stock of inactive supply trucks.
The solution just couldn’t be simpler:
- HDL goes up when we are active.
- LDL goes up when we are inactive.
In last, let’s say, 10,000 years, men were very active, unlike now when we are spending much of our time – sitting.
But our ancestor wasn’t protected by high levels of HDL alone. He was just less prone to diseases due to higher physical activity, which kept the necessary balance. In other words, when we sit a lot, we don’t use LDL so it collects. In the same time, we don’t produce as much HDL as we would like, so you have a negative balance.
It took decades for a younger generation of medical experts to finally be heard, after understanding what cholesterol really is, how it behaves and what it does. Unfortunately, for some people, it was just too late.
Advanced diagnostics that we have now, is allowing us to measure the calcification in the arteries, as the most precise method to assess the potential risk of heart attack. The major factors that speed up that calcification process are:
- Diabetes
- Kidney insufficiency or tendency towards it
- Naturally low levels of cholesterol
- Intake of STATINES!
“How can you claim that statins lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases, when, in the same time, you are accepting the thesis that statins speed up the calcification of arteries, which is now considered as the best predictor of cardiovascular problems?”
Dr. Michel DeLongeril
The side effects of statin-based drugs are felt in 6 months because the body is fighting to produce more cholesterol, which puts the liver under immense stress. The Symptoms are similar to those we are seeing at old people because statins penetrate the blood-brain barrier and mess with cholesterol synthesis, causing memory loss, insomnia and early onset of Alzheimer’s-like conditions, which makes every statin-based drug, in fact, NEUROTOXIC!
British researchers, who were persuading doctors for years how statin drugs have no side effects, are now admitting that there is an increase in patients with diabetes type II, and numerous other serious conditions.
The fact is that 10-15 years simply isn’t enough to assess all the consequences and the potential adverse effects of some new and trendy drug.
Just by observing the list of side effects found in every package of statin drugs, one can clearly see how important the cholesterol is!
So if your doctor is getting ready to put you on statins or has already done that, enter into an argument. Force him to explain it to you, why do you need situations if your serum cholesterol is 5,6,7 or even 8?
Mine is between 6 and 8. But I don’t give a fuck about my doctor’s recommendations. If Masai warrior can live with 8-10 grams of cholesterol per liter of serum, and eat bloody beef; if a French guy can live on cheese, ham, bacon, warm bread, and olive oil, why couldn’t I, as long as I’m keeping myself active?
That’s right. I’m simply being active, for most of the day, that’s all.
Oh, yes, we forgot about our dear Finns? How come they are dropping like flies over there?
I have a friend who lives and works in Svalbard for 3 years now. That’s high up in the arctic circle, just like parts of Finland. For 6 months, they don’t see the Sun. He ended up in the emergency room twice during his first polar night over there. No sunlight means reduced metabolism of many micronutrients, predominantly vitamin D. People who live in such environment have to take care of that problem using more or less medical approach. That mostly means injections. If, of course, you are not an Eskimo.
Just imagine the situation in Finland. Almost perpetual cold is forcing you to digest strong, fat-saturated food. Night makes you slow. It’s hard to even get up from the bed. And then, it just flips to daylight for the next 6 months. The body has severe difficulties adapting to such a radical and frequent change.
Which makes Finns prone to cardiovascular diseases.
You see how simple it is to find the cause if you are not deluded with some idea?