One of the most distressing things about practicing medicine these days is the blind faith that most people, doctors and patients, have in cholesterol pills like Lipitor, Crestor, Vytorin, and Zocor, just to name a few of the most popular. This faith comes not from gullibility, but from carefully crafted drug company misdirection. There's no question statins reduce your LDL levels. The question is, do we really need to reduce your LDL to 100 or less? Sean Croxton invited me onto his show yesterday to clear up this confusion over the value of statins and shed some light on their…
CNN keeps airing “The Last Heart Attack,” in which Dr. Sanjay Gupta tells the story of how and why President Bill Clinton was put on a vegan diet by Dr. Dean Ornish, and how Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's #1 selling book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease echos the same dietary advice. As you know, reversing disease is something I care a lot about, but I'm not convinced Dr. Essylstyn's heart attack proof diet is delivering what he promises. Does this story really have a happy ending? Early in the show Dr. Gupta discusses Clinton’s strict vegan diet and defines its underlying philosophy:…
You know cholesterol pills will lower your cholesterol. But do you know cholesterol pills don't prevent heart attacks by lowering cholesterol? They work by what the pharmaceutical companies call "a pleitropic effect" meaning they have so many effects we can't understand or predict them all. Isoprene: A Building Block for Cellular Health Cholesterol pills called statins lower cholesterol by blocking the enzyme that forms a chemical required for the earliest steps of cholesterol manufacture, the making of isoprene units. If you can't make isoprene units, you can't make cholesterol. But your body uses isoprene units for a whole bunch of…
