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Why I would NEVER take a statin drug image

Why I would NEVER take a statin drug

Connecting Minds
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Transcript

Introduction: Why Avoid Statins?

00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, Christian Yordnov here.
00:00:04
Speaker
Today, I want to talk to you about why I would never take a statin drug. This is not medical advice. Always follow the advice of your doctor and all that good stuff. So I jotted down a few points I wanted to discuss with my morning coffee.

Pharmaceutical Critique and Corruption

00:00:21
Speaker
So I'm going to kind of brain dump them here. I'm going to try and keep it short. But if you're a regular listener, you understand that brevity is not my strong point.
00:00:34
Speaker
And I occasionally go on little rants here and there because I'm so passionate about some of these topics. But to begin with, for the companies that create these drugs are felons. They are criminals. They have paid billions and billions and billions in damages.
00:00:53
Speaker
criminal liabilities and whatever other things. I'm not super deep on the research on that side of things. So many, so many people have done amazing work. And for example, I have this book here called Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime, How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare by Peter Gottsche.

Prescription Drugs and Mortality

00:01:14
Speaker
Gottsche. And there's a forward by
00:01:17
Speaker
editor in chief, the former editor in chief of the BMJ British Medical Journal and the deputy editor of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. So a lot of people in the system understand that, you know, these guys are criminals. Really, it's really just that simple.
00:01:41
Speaker
And a lot of their drugs have killed and maimed and destroyed the health and the lives of millions upon millions of people. It's kind of been scrubbed off the Internet. You can still find articles, I think, like on MSNBC or

Book Insights: 'Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime'

00:01:54
Speaker
CNBC. I can still see if you do a third leading cause of death, if you do a search on that, on DuckDuckGoats, some articles from before 2020, like in 2018, 2019, will still come up.
00:02:10
Speaker
And I've actually saved some of these because up until then, even Wikipedia showed that the third leading cause of death is prescription drugs. And that's what this book talks about. And he gets really deep into the specific drugs and the fraudulent safety trials and efficacy trials and all the marketing and the
00:02:33
Speaker
you know, the corruption and so on.

Conflicts of Interest in Healthcare

00:02:36
Speaker
So that's my biggest, I suppose my biggest reason why I don't trust by default anything that comes out of these companies. But here's the thing, you have to understand I'm not against all the drugs. There's so many good drugs out there. The problem is they're not getting used.
00:02:55
Speaker
because they're not sexy, they're not new, they're not patented or the new ones that are patented, you know, they're going to be super expensive because at the end of the day, it's a profit maximization sort of business model that they're running. And that's at the expense of the customer, the client, right?
00:03:12
Speaker
You got to understand, you getting super healthy makes these companies obsolete. Everybody being super healthy makes these companies obsolete. So understand if nothing else, there's a massive, massive conflict of interest in terms of
00:03:28
Speaker
what their goals are and what your goals are so I'll leave that there because I could rant about this for hours and hours but just understand I'm not against innovation or pharmacological means like I use I use a drug a pharmaceutical drug every single day of my life I've been doing so on and off for like years for since 2018 and

Personal Drug Use: Piracetam and Aspirin

00:03:53
Speaker
For the last two years, I've been taking it every day. And that's piracetam. I love it. I love piracetam, but it was made in the sixties and it's very, it's very rarely used now, you know, with folks with maybe with after a stroke that might prescribe it. So, but this is an amazing thing. It's a new tropic.
00:04:12
Speaker
And I have other specific things like antihistamines and stuff like that in my stash that I think are really good. They're useful tools. And I actually think aspirin is good. I take aspirin now every day for almost the past year. But that comes from a natural compound. You see, the best things seem to be usually
00:04:37
Speaker
things that block harmful stuff in the body, like histamine and estrogen or whatever else, serotonin, or their analogs of natural compounds that have beneficial effects like aspirin, which is, you know, among other things, a Cox and Lox inhibitor, which stops inflammatory cascades in the body, which is awesome. So
00:05:02
Speaker
It's not that I'm against necessarily everything that comes out of them, but for the most part, you have to understand their motives.

Statins: Effectiveness and Trial Validity

00:05:10
Speaker
So here's the thing, though. Statins are very effective at lowering cholesterol, but they might not actually have any meaningful effect on decreasing mortality. And that's the whole point of the exercise, right? We are lowering
00:05:29
Speaker
the cholesterol in order to reduce mortality, chance of death and so on. But they don't seem to do that. And the initial trials seem to do that, but they were run by the companies, right? And then as I cite in my How to Actually Live Longer book, volume one,
00:05:50
Speaker
This is from a study called a paper called Statin Stimulate Atherosclerosis and Heart Failure, Pharmacological Mechanism. Let me just repeat that again. The paper, I think it was out of Japan, is called
00:06:10
Speaker
statins stimulate atherosclerosis and heart failure, pharmacological mechanisms. And this is now citing the paper, since the introduction of statins to clinical medicine in 1987, several kinds of statins were reported to be effective in lowering LDLC and also preventing coronary heart disease events, mostly in the 1990s. However,
00:06:38
Speaker
Unfair and unethical problems were associated with clinical trials reported by industry-supported scientists, and the new penal regulations on clinical trials came into effect in 2004. After 2004-2005,
00:06:56
Speaker
All clinical trials performed by scientists relatively free of conflict of interest with pharmaceutical industries reported that statins were effective in lowering LDLC, but no significant beneficial effects were observed for the prevention of coronary heart disease. Okay.
00:07:22
Speaker
So they are really good at lowering cholesterol, but no significant beneficial effects were observed for the prevention of coronary heart disease, okay? So that's one reason.
00:07:36
Speaker
And then from the same paper, they also stated the authors. They stated, currently, the majority of scientists continue to claim that statins are effective in preventing coronary heart disease. But these claims are based on meta-analyses of reports, including those published before the EU regulation, mostly in the 1990s. So there's tons, tons of research, meta-analyses and
00:08:06
Speaker
all that good stuff that has Intuit fed a bunch of crappy science. That includes all the cholesterol and stuff from the 1950s, the 1960s. A lot of that research was built on foundations of sand and all the meta-analyses and all the stuff people are citing nowadays in support of that.

Cholesterol Hypothesis Origins and Critique

00:08:29
Speaker
A lot of it is
00:08:31
Speaker
You know, some of it is downright fraudulent to begin with and then a lot of it is based on erroneous assumptions and so on. So a lot of the big body of evidence that people will sort of throw at you about cholesterol and LDL and heart disease and all that stuff, right?
00:08:53
Speaker
based on really very loose associations and terribly done science and in some cases fraud and in other cases just cherry picking of data which is kind of fraud when you think about it. So the guy that sort of spearheaded this cholesterol hypothesis
00:09:13
Speaker
which again, the word hypothesis here is a keyword. So it was Ansel Keys in the 50s. He kind of really was the prominent guy that was pushing this hypothesis. And the thing about a hypothesis you have to understand is if it's true,
00:09:35
Speaker
more and more evidence will build up over the decades to support it. But with the cholesterol hypothesis,
00:09:44
Speaker
it's the opposite. It's becoming weaker and like more holes being found in it as we go. So that's a big red flag. But this Ancel Keys guy, there's a famous seven country study that showed his associations with
00:10:07
Speaker
high cholesterol and heart disease and so on. But that actually was a 22-country study. And he cherry-picked those seven countries that would support his hypothesis. So there's a lot of folks that have done good work in this area, so I'm not going to rehash it all.

Recommended Readings on Cholesterol

00:10:25
Speaker
And if you want the details, there's a book called The Great Cholesterol Con
00:10:30
Speaker
by the name of the author is Malcolm Kendrick. He also wrote another one, I think something like, The Cloth Thickens is part of the title. I forgot the whole name. I haven't read that one, but The Great Cholesterol Con explains a lot of the stuff and Nina Tycoats, T.I.
00:11:00
Speaker
The big fat surprise that explains a lot of the history and the drama there. There's a lot of political stuff.
00:11:13
Speaker
sort of infighting and vying for media attention in the nutrition space. You think they're all doing it for our good. What should we eat to live healthier lives? But a lot of it is very
00:11:29
Speaker
shaped by industry interests and farming interests trying to sell drugs and you know folks wanting to sell a lot of seed oils and products that replace butter so it's an interesting tale she weaves I think it took her like 10 years to write that book and it's a masterpiece and God bless her for putting so much time into it but I do not agree with her views about carbohydrates and
00:11:58
Speaker
and low carb. So if you do read the book, know that I disagree vociferously with her views on low carb, as you may know, and if you read my How to Actually Live Longer book, I don't think low carb keto

The Importance of Open-mindedness

00:12:16
Speaker
and
00:12:16
Speaker
skipping carbohydrates is in any way, shape or form good for general health, longevity and or recovering from health problems. So anyway, we should never like this. This is something I believe I have a talent for is I can listen and read people's work who might disagree with on a fundamental level, but I still kind of want to see their viewpoint in case I'm wrong and to learn something. And I do that a lot.
00:12:45
Speaker
And I think a lot of people just can't do it. I sometimes even listen to people that I strongly dislike because I know, even though I think they're wrong about the main points, I might still learn something along the way. And I think this is probably one of the things that kind of set me apart from a lot of other practitioners.
00:13:07
Speaker
Because we hate to be wrong and we hate to kind of revisit our views. And I believe I, I mean, I hate being wrong, of course, but I'm not gonna let that stand in the way of learning what is right and correcting myself because at the end of the day, I'm advising people about their health. And, you know, I'd rather backtrack on something than for their benefit than kind of
00:13:33
Speaker
know, not mention it and hope that everything will be okay. I don't think that's unethical on many levels.

Cholesterol's Role and Misconceptions

00:13:39
Speaker
But here's the thing. Let me just get back on the on the track I had scribbled down. So cholesterol is needed to synthesize vitamin D. It's needed to synthesize the steroid hormones, including
00:13:57
Speaker
testosterone, progesterone, DHEA, right? These are protective hormones and some other stuff, obviously, cortisol and estrogen and aldosterone. These are steroid hormones and not as beneficial, but we still need them in small amounts for basic survival. So why in the hell would I, at least as a man, from my point of view, why would I want to reduce
00:14:23
Speaker
the sort of turn down the tap on the testosterone synthesis pathway. Why would I want to give my body less of the building blocks for testosterone or vitamin D for that matter? And I think a big reason why today most people basically are vitamin D deficient. Not only are we indoors a lot, not only are we over protecting ourselves from the sun,
00:14:49
Speaker
But when we are out in the sun, if we don't have a lot of cholesterol in the body or enough, this may impede the synthesis of vitamin D. I think it's a bad, bad idea to lower what is a needed component in all cells as well. It's a structural component. There's so much cholesterol in the brain that it would be insanity to actually lower this building block.
00:15:16
Speaker
Now, what statins do is not only do they inhibit that enzyme HMG-CoA reductase, which is kind of one of the enzymes in the cholesterol synthesis pathway, but they also inhibit the synthesis of Coenzyme Q10, which is
00:15:37
Speaker
People know it as an antioxidant, but it's needed in the production of energy, right? So it's small wonder a lot of people report sort of muscle cardiomyopathy and stuff like that, muscle type symptoms and weakness on statins because muscles need a lot of energy to produce force.
00:16:03
Speaker
The other thing that statins inhibit is with vitamin K2 metabolism. And what's interesting is that vitamin K is needed to basically shuttle calcium away from soft tissues and into bone. So if you are vitamin K deficient, which I think a lot of people are nowadays,
00:16:30
Speaker
you may be more prone to soft tissue calcification, okay? And statins inhibit this vitamin K to metabolism. In fact, let me just go back to that paper I cited earlier. So the paper is, remember, it's titled, Statins Stimulate Atherosclerosis and Heart Failure.
00:16:57
Speaker
pharmacological mechanisms. It's a pretty long paper, but I have a short paragraph.

Statins: Side Effects and Health Risks

00:17:04
Speaker
I have a paragraph from it in my book, How to Actually Live Longer. And this is what the authors state. In contrast to the current belief that cholesterol reduction with status decreases atherosclerosis, we present a perspective that status may be causative in coronary artery calcification and can function
00:17:27
Speaker
as mitochondrial toxins that impair muscle function in the heart and blood vessels through the depletion of coenzyme Q10 and he may and thereby ATP generation. So ATP is the storage form of energy basically. It's the energy currency of the cell as it's known.
00:17:51
Speaker
So statins inhibit the synthesis of vitamin K2, the cofactor for matrix GLA protein activation, which in turn protects arteries from calcification. Statins inhibit the biosynthesis of selenium-containing proteins, one of which is glutathione peroxidase, serving to suppress peroxidative stress. Now, peroxidative stress
00:18:21
Speaker
causes damage. And if that stress happens in the vascular endothelium or the blood vessel lining, there's the potential for injury. And then at the injury site comes sort of cholesterol and things that are trying to repair, but it's ineffective fully. It's not 100% effective. And then over time you can have these build ups. I think it's a little bit of
00:18:49
Speaker
oversimplification, but you get the idea. Continuing the quote, an impairment of selenoprotein biosynthesis may be a factor in congestive heart failure reminiscent of the dilated cardiomyopathies seen with selenium deficiency. Thus, the epidemic of heart failure and atherosclerosis that plagues the modern world may paradoxically
00:19:18
Speaker
be aggravated by the pervasive use of statin drugs. We propose that current statin treatment guidelines be critically reevaluated. So end quote. And I wrote in the book, good luck getting that critically reevaluated. We won't be holding our breath. So

Cholesterol Levels and Health Implications

00:19:42
Speaker
So yeah, so as I write in my book, blocking cholesterol production is a very dumb idea. Worse, even it's harmful. So lower cholesterol levels in people are associated with lower immune function, increased risk of infection, reduced antioxidant activity, and increased incidence of cancer. And also low levels have been associated with cognitive decline. And in fact,
00:20:13
Speaker
As people get older, so this is a quote from another paper in the book, in people older than 85 years, high total cholesterol concentrations are associated with longevity, owing to lower mortality from cancer and infection. And then another quote from that same study in my book is,
00:20:41
Speaker
The impact of total serum cholesterol as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease decreases with age, which casts doubt on the necessity for cholesterol-lowering therapy in the elderly.
00:20:59
Speaker
This is preposterous sort of to think that something that is harmful in your 40s, 50s, 60s can become less harmful as you're getting in your 70s, 80s and 90s. That's stupid to think that bacteria, viruses, pathogens, toxins, all these things
00:21:21
Speaker
remain just as harmful and potentially more dangerous because you get more depleted and older and there's more oxidative stress and less vitality and less adaptive reserve. So it's kind of silly to think that something can be dangerous. I'm not saying there isn't things like that, but it's kind of stupid to really believe that cholesterol is so dangerous when you're 50, 60, 70.
00:21:46
Speaker
but then it will become sort of more protective and associated with less cognitive decline and better outcomes, less incidence of cancer. It's kind of stupid. Like the entire thing is, like I said earlier, it's built on very shaky ground. What else about cholesterol? So, oh yeah, so there's a really cool chart. I need to find it and kind of link to it on my website. So this chart plots WHO
00:22:14
Speaker
mortality database data from 2002 and total cholesterol data in men in 2005 from the British Heart Foundation statistics from 164 countries and it's kind of hard to visualize obviously over audio but basically
00:22:36
Speaker
They found, not they found, but you can see on the chart clearly that there's a sweet spot where the cholesterol is 200 to 240. In that 200 to 240 range, that is a sweet spot, sort of, of lowest all-cause mortality.
00:22:58
Speaker
All that's to say is my cholesterol, I would want to see that between 200 and 240 most of the time. It actually varies a lot based on what you eat. So you don't really want to test it once and base any assumptions on that value. You want to test it multiple times and really see kind of what it is on average.
00:23:26
Speaker
I would want my cholesterol to be around 200, 240, and I've had my cholesterol up to 300 in the past, but that was when I was doing keto low carb stuff. I wasn't worried, but it wasn't okay. It did mean there's an issue. Generally, if the cholesterol is over 250, 260 and higher, that is indicative of an issue.
00:23:56
Speaker
The solution is not to muscle the number down. We need to figure out what is the issue causing the high cholesterol and it can be hypothyroidism. Okay, that's probably one of the major causes for high cholesterol. It could also be if it's an acute elevation, it could be infection, right? And it could be actually certain nutrient deficiencies
00:24:25
Speaker
can also play a role. Actually, I found this out a little bit more recently, but certain mineral deficiencies could also play a role. So there's a lot of things that could cause the cholesterol level to rise.

Cholesterol and Heart Disease Complexity

00:24:39
Speaker
But you have to understand, there's a lot of people with high cholesterol levels that don't get heart disease. And there's also a lot of people
00:24:49
Speaker
with low cholesterol levels that do get heart disease, right? So in fact, what was the name of the study? Let me just bring it up. Oh, yeah. So this is a very famous, probably the most famous, the most influential heart disease study ever, the Framingham Heart Study. So the total cholesterol levels of the people who developed coronary heart disease were nearly identical to those that didn't.
00:25:19
Speaker
And the only exceptions generally were when the levels were under 150 or over 380 milligrams per deciliter. But most of us fall in the category or in that sort of 150 to 380. Most of us are in that range. I think most people would be probably in the 150 to 250 range.
00:25:47
Speaker
that study was done I think Jesus in the 70s I think it was in the 70s so so people with low cholesterol level get heart disease and a lot of people with very high cholesterol levels don't get heart disease so it's gotta be something else and think about it this way this is I really think when you when you start putting the
00:26:13
Speaker
the pieces together. This one really dismantles the whole cholesterol hypothesis. So we get atherosclerosis in very specific places, arteries. Veins don't get atherosclerotic plaques and lesions, at least nowhere near as much as
00:26:37
Speaker
arteries, right? So it seems like it's a factor of maybe the blood pressure, the blood flow speed and stuff like that. But what's probably the biggest reason why people get damaged in this sort of vascular endothelium is I think the biggest reason, this is probably the biggest reason, is the very high
00:27:05
Speaker
polyunsaturated fat content of our tissues of our body it's because we've been eating as a population
00:27:13
Speaker
We've been eating a lot of Omega-6s, a lot of polyunsaturated fats. And when these become part of our body, our brain, our skin, our organs, our blood vessels, these are very easily peroxidized. And when they get peroxidized, they cause damage to things around them. It actually creates a chain reaction of peroxidative damage that has to be
00:27:36
Speaker
terminated by what is known as a terminal antioxidant. So certain enzymes, I think vitamin C and vitamin E as well, these are kind of terminal antioxidants. And when that damage occurs, this is where we get sort of the, this is the analogy people sometimes uses.
00:27:56
Speaker
that damage to the blood vessel is the fire. So you have firemen coming to put out the fire, like cholesterol and so on. So what the research has done is they looked at the issue, atherosclerotic plaques, lesions, whatever, and they see cholesterol there in those plaques. So they say,
00:28:23
Speaker
the firemen that are coming to this fire, they're always here. Every time there's a fire, there's firemen. Therefore, the firemen are causing the fire. That's kind of the example that some folks that go deeper into the cholesterol, heart disease hypothesis use. And it's a really good example. It's like, okay, well, could it be because cholesterol is a,
00:28:51
Speaker
part of the cell structure, it's like a structural component and there's so many other roles in the body, protective roles, steroid hormone production and so on. Could it be it's being shuttled there as part of the repair processes, but because of the
00:29:07
Speaker
because of a lot of other problems that most people have is, you know, a lot of inflammation and inflammatory environment, a lot of oxidative stress, the two kind of go hand in hand. So those repair processes are suboptimal. And when you also look at other things, like a lot of people have deficiencies in minerals, in vitamins like the fat soluble vitamins. So vitamin E protects from
00:29:30
Speaker
this oxidative stress, right? Because it's a terminal antioxidant. When there's omega-6 fatty acid per oxidation, it will protect those cells or those fatty acids rather.

Fats, Diet, and Heart Health

00:29:48
Speaker
Vitamin K, again, one of its roles is to make sure that calcium gets where it's supposed to go to the
00:29:58
Speaker
to the bones instead of allowing the soft tissue to become calcified. So a lot of people are very deficient in these fat soluble vitamins. One of the reasons is because of the demonization of saturated fats and the saturated fat on an animal, the butter, the fat on like beef and lamb, that contains a lot of fat soluble vitamins.
00:30:23
Speaker
demonization of saturated fats along with the cholesterol hypothesis is another thing that's been picked apart, complete BS, yeah? And that's been another thing perpetrated upon humanity and it has caused untold harm and just
00:30:46
Speaker
innumerable early deaths and disease and so on and so forth. Because the omega-6 is these polyunsaturated fats and margarines and shortenings and oils, plant oils that replaced the butter, the saturated fats and the whatever else, ghee and stuff like that. These do have
00:31:12
Speaker
vitamin E. There are a good source of vitamin E, but they are pretty much devoid of vitamin A, vitamin K, vitamin D, and stuff like that.
00:31:34
Speaker
Really, it creates a very unbalanced environment. At the end of the day, the reason I would never take a statin is, first of all, what I teach my clients is how to create a dietary and nutritional
00:31:54
Speaker
program for yourself where these risks are greatly ameliorated. And then we also work on the stress piece. I have a lot of strategies for lowering stress physically, like the cortisol physically getting lowered because
00:32:16
Speaker
It's very damaging and harmful, but that's another piece that I really don't have time to get into, but stress is a big factor in heart disease actually, because let's say you are eating sub-optimally, you're not eating the way I advise my clients to eat, and you're not taking the supplements that will help protect you like my clients do, and I do, and I take.
00:32:41
Speaker
Then you're not using the strategies we use with my clients to lower your stress hormones and stress levels.

Holistic Health Approaches

00:32:52
Speaker
If you have this environment, so it's an inflammatory environment where there's a lot of omega sixes in the body and you're not protecting yourself from them, from their inflammatory potential and their oxidative stress potential.
00:33:08
Speaker
And then when you add the stress on top that is not mitigated or ameliorated using some of the strategies we use, then you have potential for inflammation and oxidative stress. And on top of that, when your stress levels are high and then mitigated, what does that do? Well, first of all, it degenerates the body over time. Yeah. The lean tissue, the muscles, the bones, the organs.
00:33:33
Speaker
joints, skin, anything that has collagen and protein will get broken down by cortisol because that is its primary role. But the other piece is the adrenaline. The stress hormones rise in tandem and they fall generally in tandem. The adrenaline
00:33:53
Speaker
will also raise your, well, in general, the stress hormones, they will raise your blood pressure. Some of them have vasoconstrictive properties, others generally will just raise the blood pressure through other mechanisms. So this then will put a greater strain on the vasculature at the end of the day, right? And if you
00:34:21
Speaker
are not getting the nutrition and the supplementation to mitigate that inflammation and oxidative stress potential, then having a high blood pressure on top of that may exacerbate or accelerate the damaging processes. And this is how if you take two people, and I don't have data on this because obviously I've not been a practitioner for 20 years, and we won't really be able to clone people and do this kind of
00:34:49
Speaker
experiments, but if you take a person that just continues on their merry way, ignorant of all this information that I have in my head and share with my clients, and then you have the other person that immediately begins to eat the right way, supplement in a way that reduces the inflammatory processes, the oxidative stress, adding nutrition,
00:35:16
Speaker
adding supplemental stuff that is required for, uh, you know, all these processes to, to work optimally and lowering the stress through lifestyle interventions, but also through supplementation. Well, over these, let's say 20 year time period, this person, the sort of client
00:35:36
Speaker
prototype I'm talking about, they will accrue less damage over time because again, the stress hormones like cortisol degenerate the body, they raise the blood pressure so that can exacerbate
00:35:53
Speaker
potential problems then the inflammation will continue continuing unabated will continue to cause problems like oxidative stress tissue damage immune system dysregulation a million things could really happen here so that is that is what we
00:36:14
Speaker
It's one of the things we do with clients is we really get these pieces sort of put in place and then the rest is some of it takes time by getting these Omega sixes out of the body takes time improving metabolic function.
00:36:32
Speaker
Improving sort of the the the thyroid side of things with by eating enough carbohydrates by you know not doing stupid things like intermittent fasting or fasting or whatever these things would then. On their own.

Health Markers vs. Overall Health

00:36:47
Speaker
lower the cholesterol level. But again, the problem is not the high cholesterol level. Again, we have many examples of people that do not develop coronary heart disease and so on that have high cholesterol levels and many people that have low cholesterol levels that do develop heart disease. So it's not that we're trying to lower a number on a piece of paper like cholesterol, hemoglobin A1c,
00:37:15
Speaker
blood glucose whatever it's we're putting things into place that optimize the body's functioning and then the body will decide how high that cholesterol level will be and it will rise and fall depending on a lot of things you know depending on diet depending on sort of not just the the components of the diet but how much
00:37:40
Speaker
how many calories of total energy intake, let's say, you're taking in. If you get sick, if you have an acute infection. So these things fluctuate a lot. So something like the cholesterol level needs to be under 200 for optimal health. These are just numbers someone plucked out of their ass. Excuse my French.
00:38:03
Speaker
to come up with it. And I just explained that, at least for men, the sweet spot is actually 200 to 240. And if you go to, at least here in Portugal, if you go to get your blood work done, 199 and under, you're going to get
00:38:27
Speaker
participation meadow. If it's 200 to 239, that's moderately elevated. And then if it's 239 or 240 plus here, it's very elevated. So you're considered a higher risk factor for a bunch of different things, but that's BS basically. So I'm trying to say you are a high risk factor for a lot of disease and
00:38:50
Speaker
horrible symptoms and low quality of life and poor health. If your body's internal environment is that of high inflammatory potential, a lot of oxidative stress, nutrient deficiencies, not eating enough, high quality food, so a lot of toxins, congested liver, poor gut function, inflammatory dysbiosis,
00:39:20
Speaker
diminished detoxification capacities. This is what will cause you to have diseases and shorter lifespan and reduced health span. These are the things. You could chase numbers all you want, but if you don't address these things, which is what we work with
00:39:42
Speaker
we work on with my clients. The chasing numbers is really an exercise in futility. So I hope that, geez, 40 minutes. I was hoping this to be 20 minutes. So I hope that made sense why I would never, and it's not necessarily a statin. I don't think any sort of measure like this to lower, most markers on a piece of paper, on a lab test,
00:40:10
Speaker
If we just try to lower the number, if we're chasing numbers on a piece of paper, we're not doing our job in terms of optimizing the body's functioning. We should be using them as sort of data on which to base our actions, but we shouldn't be
00:40:32
Speaker
taking a pill to lower a number on a piece of paper. This is what I'm trying to say. If we do that, we could do that, let's say, with metformin, that will lower your blood glucose. But did it address the cause of your high blood glucose? What if your high blood glucose is because of a highly stressful lifestyle and job? So cortisone we know raises your blood sugar. It's primary role. So if you take metformin or berberine,
00:41:01
Speaker
you will lower the blood glucose, but you've done nothing about the high cortisol level or your stresses. So you're doing nothing. All you are doing, I'm not saying you, but your practitioner recommending these things, they are happy. They think they've done their job because the blood glucose is lower or the cholesterol level is lower, but they have done nothing to actually improve your health when they do silly little things like that. Okay. So,

Conclusion and Personal Health Advice

00:41:30
Speaker
Hope that makes sense. Thank you for listening or watching this. And remember, if you haven't got my book, how to actually live longer, volume one, get yourself a copy. Keep in mind...
00:41:43
Speaker
Volume two and three are in my head and I do the stuff with my clients I just haven't had the time to to pull up put it on down on paper So I have multiple volume if you've read the book and you got value out of it There's a lot more if you become a client that you can get out of my head basically so keep that in mind if you're if you need help with your health journey and
00:42:06
Speaker
go to my website and you can request a free call with me see if we're a good fit to work together otherwise thank you for tuning in hope you got value out of this and I'll see you on the next episode