The untold story on cholesterol lowering drugs: no drug comes close to the effectiveness of nutrition and exercise

Wednesday, April 28, 2004 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: bad medicine, prescription drugs, physical exercise

A study commissioned by Bristol-Myers Squibb and hoped to prove that its own cholesterol-lowering drug outperformed a competitors recently backfired, proving Pfizer's Lipitor to be more effective. The headlines are ablaze with news about this study, and doctors continue to push these drugs (statins) on patients, demanding they take them for life. But the real story is that neither drug comes close to the effectiveness of nutrition and physical exercise. And, in fact, statin drugs in general are already being linked to a variety of problems, most notably an imbalance of sex hormones which makes it difficult for men to juice up or perform in a sexual context. Of course, Pfizer offers another drug for that -- Viagra -- and that's how the whole chain reaction of prescription drugs starts: first you take one drug, and it causes another problem. Then you take a second drug to fix that problem, and before you know it, you're on twelve prescriptions costing you $500 / month just to get a hard on.

Changes in diet are by far the most effective and safe way to reduce cholesterol. Eating ginger, garlic, psyllium husk fiber, and superfoods like The Ultimate Meal can have dramatic cholesterol lowering effects, all without the potential negative side effects of statin drugs. Avoiding metabolic disruptors like high fructose corn syrup, white flour, sodium nitrite, and hydrogenated oils helps even more. If you add daily walking or other physical exercise to the strategy, your cholesterol drops yet again and, eventually, sustains a healthy, normal level for the rest of your life.

These doctors and pharmaceutical companies who keep promoting statin drugs are engaged in very bad medicine -- a health sham of such proportion that it can only be called criminal. They tell people about this "magic pill" that will lower their cholesterol, and they almost never mention the negative side effects. Much of the same hype was used for now-discredited Hormone Replacement Therapy. There's always another line of "miracle drugs" being pushed by organized medicine. It's only later, after a hundred thousand people are potentially injured or killed, that the real side effects of the drug come to light.

Doctors should be telling people to change their diets and take up exercise, not prescribing "miracle" pills that claim to balance their cholesterol for them. In fact, prescribing the pill may actually harm the patient because it may dissuade them from making the hard choices (nutrition and physical fitness) they really need to make if they want to be healthy in the long term. Drugs are never the long-term answer to health, and yet they are regularly pushed onto patients by doctors with precisely that message.