A Statin-Free Life: A revolutionary life plan for tackling heart disease – without the use of statins

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As long as I’m on statin, they continue to gain weight. And there was one study in JAMA Internal Medicine a few years ago that showed if you followed people of similar risk profiles who were on statins and ones that weren’t on statins, over a 10 year period, the ones on statins gained more weight. And the reason for that probably is to some degree the illusion of protection. So again, this is about educating and informing patients- The risks of any side effects also have to be balanced against the benefits of preventing serious problems.

getting help with prescription costs I think my statins are giving me nightmares. Can I take them in the morning instead? It’s really about looking at the honest accounting of what we know and what we don’t know and actually where should we be looking. So as a cardiologist, what really is the best predictor of heart disease if it’s not LDL and what can we do lifestyle-wise to both prevent, treat and reverse the risk and even the status of actually having heart disease? Well, exactly. Well, that’s [inaudible 00:36:27]. In the real world, when you look at studies and surveys, in one study in the US, statin usage survey, 75% of people stop taking the pill within a year of prescription. And when you ask the patients why, 66% of those said it was because they had side effects. So that makes me think, hold on a minute, there’s something that doesn’t add up here. And I don’t think it’s about… They talk about something called nocebo effect. If the patient is going to be aware of potential side effect, they’ll imagine it. And of course that exists, but a lot of the awareness of side effects of statins, Mark, in the mainstream only came out really in the last several years. I mean, they were prescribed for a very long time under the belief those side effects didn’t really exist. So I don’t think these patients were imagining it, I think it’s more likely they genuinely suffered side effects.

We now know that heart disease is linked to two biological processes, he says: “Insulin resistance and chronic inflammation.” Insulin resistance is when cells don’t easily absorb glucose from your blood – from sugar and high GI foods – so it’s chronically raised. “Insulin itself directly damages the inner lining of the heart arteries,” he says. Absolutely, absolutely. And we also know it now has been established about 1% of people who take statins will develop type 2 diabetes because of the statin, right? So there’s a lot of information that people aren’t being told and would change their decision making process and that’s really where we need to change the conversation across the whole of medical practice. And it’s taking time. I think people are becoming more aware. Doctors are becoming more aware. I think one of the concerns and issues I’ve had and I’ve campaigned on in the UK is that when you financially incentivize doctors to meet certain targets of cholesterol lowering or targets of treating certain people at certain risk, then it’s more like to bias a conversation and the patient really is the one that suffers at the downstream because they’re not really getting involved in fully informed consent. And that for me is ethically dubious. Statins are a group of medicines that can help lower the level of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol in the blood. A Statin-Free Life contextualises his arguments. For example, he notes that cholesterol – a fatty substance made in the liver and present in all our cells – has important functions, and that LDL cholesterol plays a crucial protective role in our immune system.

Given almost one in five deaths worldwide are caused purely by bad diet, according to the 2019 Lancet Global Burden of Disease report, Dr Malhotra argues the a switch in focus from statins to lifestyle changes will prolong life and save lives.

These are very powerful drugs and in the early days of statins, understandably, some people were concerned about potential undiscovered risks associated with them. They’re now one of the most investigated drugs, and we have lots of reliable data – some of which originated from work that’s been funded by the BHF – that show they are very safe and effective to take. How will taking a statin help me? There’s a whole issue on a separate discussion about, and I’m not going to go into any detail on this, but even our management of the pandemic about COVID, about vaccines, about informed consent, all of that’s there and if we don’t speak the truth and we don’t get access to the truth, then the whole of the world and society’s going to suffer. And you combine that with hostility and division, people [inaudible 01:06:52] very tribal about statins or whatever else and exacerbated by social media, my concern is losing our capacity for empathy, as well as access to the truth. And that’s sending us down to a very, very dark place. So our job now is to reverse that. Statins are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. Yet many report unacceptable side effects and a US survey revealed that 75 per cent of respondents stopped taking them within a year.