FDA Ramps Up the Great Cholesterol Con

The cholesterol con, the greatest medical scam in human history, continues to expand. The feds just approved a newer, more expensive cholesterol drug. Gee, what a surprise. Caveat emptor, folks!

If you haven’t caught onto this scam yet, and you are taking drugs to lower your cholesterol … well, good luck getting healthy ever again.

Basics of the Cholesterol Con

Let’s take a look at some cholesterol circularity for a moment to see what I am talking about.

THE DOGMA: …LDL, also known as bad cholesterol… because it is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease … which is defined as a higher level of LDL cholesterol …

SAY WHAT?

OOPS!

The scam does have a historical anchor in research. It started about a century ago with a study showing that rabbits develop atherosclerosis when they are stuffed to the gills with cholesterol in their food, dissolved in vegetable oil. Two variables already!! Rabbits are herbivores (aka, vegans), so their physiology is nothing like ours. Another variable unaccounted for!!

On top of all that, the rabbits did NOT develop atherosclerosis if they were given a supplement of thyroid. Still one more variable!! This whole sordid science was published in the 1930s, so it should come as no surprise to anyone in medical science by now.

References and much more detail about the realities of cholesterol metabolism are summarized in a wonderfully analytical article by Ray Peat, Cholesterol, longevity, intelligence, and health. Dr. Peat is very thorough (i.e., the article is real long), so you may want to just make note of this early paragraph that provides an overview of the rabbit research.

Almost 100 years ago, some experiments in Russia showed that feeding rabbits cholesterol caused them to develop atherosclerosis, but subsequent experiments showed that rabbits are unusual in responding that way to cholesterol, and that even rabbits don’t develop atherosclerosis from cholesterol if they are given a supplement of thyroid (Friedland, 1933). By 1936, it was clear that hypercholesterolemia in humans and other animals was caused by hypothyroidism, and that hypothyroidism caused many diseases to develop, including cardiovascular disease and cancer. There was already more reason at that time to think that the increased cholesterol was a protective adaptation than to think that it was maladaptive.

Jumping Ahead to the 21st Century

The medico-pharma cabal has clearly managed to parlay some godawful science into a multi-gazillion dollar industry. Research and politics along the way have continued to stink up the issue. Doctors of all stripes are now completely brainwashed on the non-existent (and even dangerous) health effects of drugs for lowering cholesterol.

AND YET CHOLESTEROL LEVELS NEVER HAVE BEEN A HEALTH PROBLEM!

In fact, cholesterol is just one of several components of artery clogs. The other main one is calcium. How about that? Gee, why don’t we have an industry based on calcium-lowering drugs? Right, where is the rabbit research on THAT one, huh?

By the way, an inconvenient truth about high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease is that the association occurs about half of the time.

Want to know what occurs ALL THE TIME?

Inflammation.

Oh, and that bit of seeming trivia about preventing cardiovascular disease by treating with thyroid is closer to what is really happening. It is all related to inflammation and how various components of human metabolism, including LDL-cholesterol, become oxidized when thyroid hormones (especially T3) are deficient.

Undermining the Scam

You could, of course, do a light search on Google and find that dietary cholesterol – i.e., how much you eat – has almost no impact on blood levels.

If you are reading between the lines, you might wonder about how the cholesterol scam has invaded food production. Yup – ‘cholesterol-free’ foods and ‘low-cholesterol’ diets are absolutely irrelevant. Take eggs, for example, and see what the latest is (and always should have been) on one of our favorite high-cholesterol foods of all time: Eggs and Cholesterol – How Many Eggs Can You Safely Eat?

The point is, consuming cholesterol is not a health problem. It never was.

Now for some really cool articles on cholesterol that should give you some perspective.

Cholesterol is important for longevity:

Statin Scam: People with Higher Cholesterol Live Longer than People with Low Cholesterol

Cholesterol is more important as you get older:

Cholesterol Lowering Drugs for the Elderly, a Very Bad Idea

Cholesterol sulfate is the key to health in all cells (see esp. about skin cells below):

How Sun Exposure Improves Your Health and How Glyphosate Disrupts It

The driving force behind understanding the role of sulfates, including cholesterol sulfate, in human health is Dr. Stephanie Seneff at MIT.

Dr. Seneff on Cholesterol, Sulfate, and Heart Disease.

Dr. Seneff on Prescription Drugs.

Those are big PowerPoint files (sorry about that) that give you an idea of the importance of cholesterol in many, many aspects of human health. The file on Prescription Drugs also shows you some ugly details behind the corruption in modern medicine that underlies the overuse of so many drugs, including cholesterol drugs, and the detrimental effects of this industry to society in many ways.

Dr. Seneff provides all of her presentations for download from her MIT web page, so be sure to take a look at what other surprises you can learn about from someone who is thinking clearly about health.

Cholesterol production is a healing response:

You have to have cholesterol to fix certain things or you die! This article is just the tip of the iceberg.

Cholesterol the unknown healer

Good News/Bad News About Big Pharma

These folks have to be smart enough to take a non-issue (i.e., the cholesterol con) and persuade a gullible public and medical establishment into believing their crap to the tune of billions of dollars in revenue every year. The good news is that, if you are a stock holder in any such company, you are the primary beneficiary of this industry. If, on the other hand, you have been duped into taking their drugs, then woe unto you.

Now for the final straw that precipitated this post … a new cholesterol drug has been approved by the FDA. This is where the cholesterol story gets more bizarre than ever.

The new drug is Praluent (FDA approves Praluent to treat certain patients with high cholesterol). The key blurb at that link is:

Praluent is approved for use in addition to diet and maximally tolerated statin therapy in adult patients with heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia (HeFH) or patients with clinical atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease such as heart attacks or strokes, who require additional lowering of LDL cholesterol. [My bolding]

In other words, if you are of a genotype to ‘require’ as much statin as you can tolerate, you can then add Praluent to drop your LDL even further. At the moment, this applies to a certain genotype (ignore the genetic gobbledygook for the moment). Recommendations will undoubtedly expand over time, as they have for all cholesterol drugs.

(As an aside, please be aware that the thinking behind genes determining health outcomes [i.e., ‘genetic determinism’] is obsolete. Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of thinking that still drives new drug development. It doesn’t work. It has never worked. The genetic key for health outcomes is more appropriately explained by the relatively new field of epigenetics. It has been around officially since the 1990s, although Charles Darwin was onto it in the mid-19th century. I taught the theories behind genetic determinism at the university for decades, and included the topic in my own textbook on plant biology. I feel guilty about having misinformed untold thousands of students in my classes and in other classes worldwide that adopted my book. Sorry about that!)

Note a couple of things about Praluent. First is that the FDA announcement is chock full of absolute BS about the ‘need’ to lower cholesterol. Same old industry crap.

Second, and this is a real corker, is this comment:

A trial evaluating the effect of adding Praluent to statins on reducing cardiovascular risk is ongoing.

That is the part that really surprised the medical community: The FDA approved Praluent without any definitive evidence that it actually prevents heart attacks or strokes.

In other words, they have really jumped the gun on this one. Of course, only future shoddy science will show any actual health benefit from lowering cholesterol with Praluent.

What Do You Want?

Good health? Longevity? Here is pretty much the certainty: You will never have either one if you artificially lower your cholesterol levels with prescription drugs.

A couple more things before I end this rant and go meditate to calm myself down.

CoQ-10

Statins not only block the synthesis of cholesterol, they also block the production of CoQ-10. This substance is absolutely crucial in a key energy pathway in the mitochondria in nearly every living cell in your body (the big exception is red blood cells, which have no mitochondria). The biggest consumer of CoQ-10 for this purpose is your heart muscle. Robbing your heart of energy from CoQ-10 is not a good idea. If you have ever been given a prescription for a statin without also being advised to take CoQ-10, then you have put your heart in danger. It is unconscionable for doctors to NOT know about this.

BTW, CoQ-10 comes as a supplement in two forms, what we chemists called ‘reduced’ (ubiquinol) and ‘unreduced’ (ubiquinone). The reduced form is absorbed about 8-fold more efficiently than the unreduced form. A dose of 100 mg per day, which is what I take, is standard if you are not on statins. You need more if you are taking statins.

Steroid Metabolism

It should be no wonder that cholesterol-lowering drugs have so many negative consequences once you see what cholesterol does for steroid metabolism.

Cholesterol is at the head of the class. In other words, all of the key steroids (see some of them marked in red below) are made from cholesterol.

Many things can change the balance of these hormones. However, cholesterol is what gets the whole pathway started. Care to speculate on what the effects of cholesterol-lowering drugs might be on your steroid hormone balance? Not a pretty thought.

Keeping this pathway in balance requires a myriad of things to be right in your life. Your thyroid hormones (esp. T3) are just a starting point, as we have known since the early rabbit experiments in the 1930s. Diet and exercise are contributors. Exposure to non-native electromagnetic fields are even more impactful. The list goes on.

Cholesterol, however, is a crucial player every step of the way.

Comments or Questions?

I’d love to hear from you. This and every other post here provides a comment section at the end of the post, exactly for that purpose.

So, by all means, leave me your thoughts.

I would be especially grateful if you point out any flaws in my logic, factual errors, or ordinary typos. (I’ll give you a little ‘huzzah’ in my heart.)

Then I’ll respond as soon as I can.

All the best in natural health,

DISCLAIMER

Statements on this page have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Information here is not is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.