In the UK, advertising for prescription pharmaceutical drugs on television, in newspapers and mainstream popular magazines, is currently banned. In the US, however, it's a completely different kettle of fish. There, your favourite primetime television drama will often be interrupted by an ad for a powerful cholesterol-lowering statin drug or some new cancer treatment. There's no escaping these ads!

Our arteries are lined with cells, called endothelium. Blood should be able to move through the arteries without damaging the endothelium. However, when blood is thick and sticky it causes friction, which in turn causes abrasions and damage to the cell lining of the arteries. When your endothelium is damaged, your body patches the tissue with fats (lipids), which forms a plaque by thickening and hardening. However, the abrasions from your blood flow prompts the body to thicken artery walls with even more fats, which narrows the arteries, causing more friction, prompting more patches... You get the picture. Eventually, the artery wall becomes so thick that blood can no longer flow through, and that produces a heart attack. This vicious cycle is called blood viscosity.

According to the FDA, the most common side effects of Juvisync include upper respiratory infection, stuffy or runny nose and sore throat, headache, muscle and stomach pain, constipation, and nausea. Our regular readers, will know that muscle pain is one of the most common statin-related side effects and in the worst cases, that damage can be a precursor to kidney impairment... and believe it or not, diabetes is one of the most common causes of kidney failure.

A recent study, involving heart attack survivors, offered prescription drugs, like the cholesterol-lowering statin Lipitor, to the participants FREE... and guess what? The US researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston found that many of the patients still didn't 'bother' to take their medicine.

Studies of red yeast rice have indeed shown "impressive" cholesterol-lowering results, according to Prof Joe Dixon, an associate professor from the Centre for Lipid Research at Rutgers University, in the US. Dixon is also of the opinion that from all the different alternative products for lowering cholesterol, red yeast rice stands head and shoulders above the rest. For instance, in one high-profile study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 1999, 83 people with high cholesterol took either 2,400 milligrams of red yeast rice or a placebo every day for three months. At the end of the study, the group taking red yeast rice had, on average, cut about 50 points from their LDL 'bad' cholesterol — a reduction of about 20 per cent.

The polypill is an all-in-one combination of statins, aspirin and ACE inhibitors, designed to lower cholesterol, blood pressure and help prevent atherosclerosis. Those advocating this three-in-one version of the Pharma five-a- day, are touting it as one of the most important pharmaceutical developments in the past 50 years. According to them, it will help prevent heart attacks and strokes, and ultimately save thousands of lives...

Mainstream medicine has worked tirelessly over the years to drive the message home that raised cholesterol levels cause heart disease. As part of their mission, the mainstream often advises people to avoid saturated fats altogether in their diets and to replace them with carbohydrates. This of course stems from the belief that saturated fats are bad for the heart and circulation, and carbohydrates are better. As Dr. John Briffa has pointed out previously on The Cholesterol Truth, this misguided belief can do much more harm than good.

What concerns me most, is that in many cases the effectiveness of these so-called cure-all Pharma Cocktails are not proven and their harmful effects are seldom disclosed until years after they have flooded the market... causing misery for countless people! A case in point is the class of drugs called cholesterol ester transfer protein (CETP) inhibitors. According to the latest headlines, CETP inhibitors will help raise "good" HDL cholesterol and stabilise blood sugar levels, reducing the risk of heart disease and diabetes. If you believe what the mainstream is saying, then according to them, early trials of CETP inhibitors have shown that when given in conjunction with a statin drug to lower levels of bad cholesterol, levels of good cholesterol rose by 67 per cent!

With Big Pharma’s mission to get almost everyone on the planet to take statins, the majority of people taking statins are doing so completely unnecessary. This is down to the simple fact that statin drugs were originally prescribed for secondary prevention. In other words, to help prevent a second heart attack or stroke if you'd already suffered one or if you have clear signs of heart disease. In the study, US researchers at the Department of Medicine, Michigan State University, evaluated the effects of statin therapy on heart muscle function in 28 patients. They found that there was significantly better heart muscle function in the control group, compared to the statin group. Statins lower your levels of an important heart nutrient, Co-enzyme Q10(CoQ10), by blocking the pathway involved in cholesterol production. This is the same pathway by which CoQ10 is produced. Statins also reduce the blood cholesterol that transports CoQ10 and other beneficial fat-soluble antioxidants.

I was extremely interested to learn about a new study revealing how too low cholesterol levels can actually increase stroke risk. You probably haven’t come across the findings as, unsurprisingly, they’ve been ignored by the mainstream... after all they imply that cholesterol-lowering statin drugs could increase stroke risk.