Merck & Co. has taken a large hit with the rejection of its latest cholesterol drug, as the FDA finally takes a stand against such useless medications. Although the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, like the medical establishment, has by no means abandoned the untenable hypothesis that cholesterol causes heart disease, they at least recognize that a drug ought to be judged on its clinical outcomes rather than its ability to change numbers on lab tests.
It has long been known that many cholesterol drugs are of limited or negligible effectiveness. Statins are not effective at primary prevention and have a host of serious side effects. Fibrates are clinically worthless, having no impact on clinical outcomes, though they do successfully lower LDL, “bad cholesterol,” and in the case of fibrates, raise HDL, “good cholesterol”. This fact alone might cause rational people to see problems with the cholesterol hypothesis as a cause of heart disease. Instead, it is more likely that high LDL is an indicator of other factors, such as lack of exercise, that are also linked to heart disease risk. Unfortunately, the distinction between correlation and causation is often confused in medicine, and the misleading term “risk factor,” which refers only to statistical correlation, does much to confuse lay persons.
The lack of substantial positive clinical outcomes from cholesterol drugs ought to be weighed against the negative side effects, including weakening of the nervous system and Co-Q10 depletion by statins, and increased risk of liver disease from fibrates. The supposed benefit of these drugs is to alter cholesterol levels, which may or may not reflect an underlying unhealthy condition. High LDL is positively correlated to obesity, smoking, lack of exercise, excessive alcohol consumption and other unhealthy conditions. Yet it would be a mistake to consider LDL “bad cholesterol” as it is essential to the formation of hormones. Indeed, cholesterol that is too low can also be dangerous, yet there is no recommended minimum LDL level, only a maximum.
Far more devastating to our health than the false equation between serum cholesterol and heart disease is the fictitious link between blood serum cholesterol and dietary cholesterol, particularly saturated fats. There has been no proven link between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol; in fact, most blood cholesterol is produced by the body. Further, hundreds of tribes throughout the world, known for the near total absence of heart disease among them, eat food rich in fat, especially game meat. This hunter-gatherer diet should be proof positive against any simplistic correlation between dietary fat and heart disease. In many Western countries, animal meat is unhealthy for other reasons, such as the fact that cattle are not grass-fed, and thus have all the unhealthy traits of a high-carbohydrate diet.
This leads to the core problem of heart health in modern societies: the consumption of refined sugars and other carbohydrates. These, combined with hydrogenated oils and other processed oils, are far greater health dangers than the unfairly maligned red meats and saturated fats. Indeed, much of the nutritional advice proffered in the U.S. over the last fifty years has been the exact opposite of what would promote heart health, which is one reason age-adjusted incidence of heart disease has increased.
The phenomenon of cholesterol drugs is but one aspect of the greater problem of Western medicine, which regards the human body as a mechanical composition of chemicals, and tries to crudely tinker with certain quantities, often valuing these quantities more than clinical outcomes. This modality has the effect of emphasizing the use of drugs and surgical remedies rather than effective preventive measures. Ironically, such preventive measures would include rejecting some of the technology-laden aspects of food production that have ignored potential negative effects on the human organism.