Does Lower Cholesterol Matter?

By admin on September 10th, 2008

The fight against heart disease has relied on statin drugs as a front-line method to lower the risk of heart disease by lowering cholesterol levels. Cholesterol has been the ‘bad guy’ for many years now, even recently being used by Cheerios and Quaker Oats in major marketing campaigns. But is cholesterol the culprit that modern medicine has caused us to think it is?

So, the other day I stumbled across some article that talks about cholesterol, statins (cholesterol lowering meds), and how bad for you the DRUGS are, and how NOT bad for you the cholesterol is. So a few hours (and multiple websites and articles) later, I’m all fired up and going to write this big blog post on what I’ve been reading.

I started writing this post last night, the first paragraph as you see it above. I had 11 browser tabs open with different articles on how bad cholesterol medications are for you and why you don’t need them. Well, I started getting lost in all the information and quit writing and went to bed! (If you’re interested, I’ve linked to a bunch of the sites/articles at the end of this post). I was thinking about all this today at work and decided that all of that stuff is not really what you care about. I won’t put words in your mouth, but what I care about is NOT being sick, NOT worrying all the time about my health, and NOT shelling out half of my annual income on healthcare and prescription costs.

I’m 35, and had my cholesterol checked last year. It was 220. According to any physician, that is too high. So even though I’m not overweight, I eat fairly well (Not great, mind you), and do some sort of exercise on a fairly regularly basis, the little voice in the back of my mind has been saying “Hey, You’d better skip the eggs and eat some oatmeal” or something on these lines multiple times daily. Could I eat better, sure, we all could. Am I going to make major drastic changes in my life because of this cholesterol number? Probably not (actually, there’s no ‘probably’ about it, I just haven’t).

Now, I work in health care, in a fairly good sized hospital as a Registered Nurse. I see people every day that come in with 20 or 30 (or more) prescription drugs that they take on a daily basis. Well, all this reading on the huge discrepancy on whether cholesterol lowering drugs are good or bad (I’m getting more and more convinced that they are bad) has really made me fired up on helping people get accurate information from all of the available sources (not just your doctor) and make educated decisions (and save money besides!).

I’ve seen the money “Big Pharma” spends to market their products TO US, the consumer. Have you ever asked yourself why they market to ME when I can’t even go out and get it at the local family drugstore? Well, I’m pretty sure it’s because they are making BILLIONS of dollars doing it. I really felt this last month. My wife is one one prescription medication, and for one month during a job change, she only had a short term, catastrophic health insurance policy. Well, not even thinking that the prescription wouldn’t be covered by this policy, we called in the refill and I went to pick it up. The gal behind the counter just about had to pick me up off of the floor after giving me the bill. $230 for one month! Wow!

Well, that experience really got me thinking about all the MONEY in prescription drugs, and that we are ALL paying for it one way or another, and that keeps making me more and more angry. I’m paying it out of pocket, in insurance premiums, in taxes to support government sponsored insurance, and in drug company programs to provide the “newest and best” to those that can’t afford it. So, I started looking at ways these costs could be contained. Turns out, there are all sorts of cures out there that could help us at least decrease our reliance on drugs with a capitol D. Can you imagine if you had a real, cash savings of $230/month in either out of pocket or insurance premium savings? This just for one medication would save you almost $2800 per year! (Hmm, I think we just discovered a fix for our nations healthcare crisis!)

Well, I’m going to give an alternative program a try. I’m going to get this report from Barton Publishing, give it 60 days or so, and re-check the ‘ol cholesterol. I’m guessing I could get most of the information somewhere online for free, but I really don’t have the time to do all of that research (and tend to get bogged down with ‘analysis paralysis’) So I’m going to drop the 40 bucks or whatever in the name of ‘research’ and I’ll let you know what I think of the report and how it goes.

Oh yeah, some of the other articles I was looking at were:

http://www.spacedoc.net/

http://www.biohealthinvestor.com/2008/07/is-fish-oil-red-yeast-rice-better-than-statins-in-cholesterol-treatment.html

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2005/05/28/cholesterol-heart.aspx

http://www.newswithviews.com/Richards/byron44.htm

http://betterwaytowellness.com/blog/2007/02/13/the-inflammation-theory-of-heart-disease/