I frequently read Zoe Harcombe, PhD because she’s excellent at picking apart research studies and looking at the methods and data to determine if the published results have any real value. I was perusing her review of a book about the history of the statin drugs. Read her entire review here. It’s excellent and gives you an incredible understanding of the way in which statins work and how they fail us. It’s well worth your time even if you don’t understand every term mentioned.

Here is a final excerpt:

Cholesterol is utterly life vital. We die instantly without it. We need it for every single cell of the body, the muscles, the brain, hormones, bile production, fat digestion, reproduction – it simply cannot be emphasised enough how vital cholesterol is.

It is so vital that the body makes it – the body cannot afford to leave it to chance that we would need to get cholesterol from our diet. This makes cholesterol even more vital to the body than essential fats and protein – as we need to eat these.

Statins stop the body from making the cholesterol that it was designed to make (not entirely, or they would have an immediate 100% death rate).

Statins block something called “the mevalonate pathway”. This is catastrophic. Blocking the mevalonate pathway means that cells cannot replicate or repair themselves properly. Blocking the mevalonate pathway means that every cell in the body dies. The only thing that varies is how long each cell takes to die – some take more time than others.

Nothing can compensate for blocking the mevalonate pathway. Nothing except adding mevalonate back in to the body and we don’t do this. (We don’t even know if we can do this in humans. We shouldn’t block this pathway in the first place.) Adding cholesterol makes no difference, adding CoQ10 makes no difference. Blocking the mevalonate pathway is so flipping serious that anyone who does it should be shot. (I really think using the ‘F’ word here is quite appropriate).

The body tries to respond to the crisis that it detects. As cells realise that their ability to make cholesterol has been impaired, they try to take the cholesterol they need from the blood stream. This lowers blood cholesterol levels and ignorant doctors are happy. They know not what they have done.

There is a second way in which the body tries to save itself – it tries to increase the production of reductase, hoping that this may unblock the mevalonate pathway. It can’t. Hence reductase is both stimulated and inhibited at the same time. Who knows how the body responds to this mechanism being totally confused.

LDL receptor activity and reductase activity increase in parallel. The LDL receptors (the ‘doors’ on each cell responsible for letting LDL in to the cell, with the cholesterol and other good stuff that it is carrying) work harder to try to get LDL from the blood stream into the cells. The reductase production increases to try to reboot the mevalonate pathway, so that cells can make cholesterol as they are designed to do.

The inventors of statins knew what statins were really doing throughout the development of this drug (mevastatin literally means to stop mevalonate – they knew exactly what mevastatin would do). They knew that statins blocked the mevalonate pathway. They knew that this caused cell death. They knew that nothing could compensate for this other than putting the vital mevalonate back. They knew that CoQ10 was affected and this was serious. They patented adding CoQ10 to their statins but then never bothered to add it.

Statins were only originally intended for the 1 in 500 people with Familial Hypercholesterolemia. This would not have enabled drug companies to reach the profit potential of their dreams. Hence cholesterol has been demonised and targets have continually been reset by conflicted bodies so that the norm is no longer the norm and everyone can be told that they need statins.

I am sickened by doctors who continue to use “standard of care” with no thought or curiosity as to why their patients get sicker and sicker. It makes me sick to know that members of my family continue to suffer because their doctors have failed them.