Mark Sisson on the Importance of Cholesterol, Problems with Statins

This really gets old people for what I would say are obvious reasons, whether it's immune system, whether it's lack of vitamin D, whether it's being shut up, whether it's a lowered cholesterol. I mean, we haven't even talked about what happens with all of the statin drugs that people are taking to lower their cholesterol. Well, high cholesterol is actually protective for something like this. So you could predict that a lot of older people were going to die if they weren't well protected. Can we talk about that for a second? So statin drugs, the idea is you're lowering cholesterol because people have high cholesterol, the high cholesterol puts them at a higher risk of heart attack and stroke. Not really. Not really, but I mean, we can talk about that too. That's the irony there. That's where it gets confusing, right? Because some people will argue that it's the balance of LDL and HDL and that cholesterol is actually essential for production of sex hormones and a lot of other things that the human body requires. A lot of things is probably the most important. Cholesterol is probably the most important molecule in the human body. If you really were to parse it, vitamin D, sex hormones, it's a working molecule on a lot of cell membranes. And to think that we would, I mean, the body is so important. The body makes like 1300 milligrams a day, regardless of what your cholesterol intake is from food. So in my mind, the notion that we would take this amazing molecule that is basically life-giving in many regards and vilify it and then take drugs to lower it, which if you look at the research and I wasn't planning on going down this path today, but if you look at the research on cholesterol and heart disease over the past 20 years, it's shifted everything away from cholesterol being the proximate cause of heart disease. Cholesterol and saturated fat are not the proximate cause of heart disease. It's oxidation and inflammation. Cholesterol is involved in the repair of damage to the tissue and as a result, people get, because of the oxidation and inflammation, there's cholesterol that's in the plaques and things like that. But I think many, many doctors, I'm going to say the preponderance of doctors now agree that cholesterol isn't the bad guy that people made it out to be. And if you look at other studies, cohorts of people who've had cholesterol of 130 and lower or 200 and above, the all-cause mortality, you die of everything else at a much greater rate with low cholesterol than you do with high cholesterol, the only difference is the cardiac outcomes. And it's not even death. It's just cardiac events is a little bit higher in the higher group. And what is it about cholesterol that, why did cholesterol become the bad guy? Why did it become the boogeyman? Does it have to do with, I hate to interrupt you there, but does it have to do with when the sugar industry paid off those scientists to push the blame on the saturated fat? Yeah, I mean, a lot of this goes back to, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I think most people at the top are too greedy and stupid to organize into a cabal. So I'm thinking, how did this happen in terms of the collective conscious? So mistakes were made early on, whether it's Ansel Keys, and I know you've had a lot of people on the show talking about Ansel Keys in the seven-country study. Can you explain that real quick? For people who don't know the current mind? Oh, just this scientist in the 60s, I guess, around then, Ansel Keys had done a study looking at saturated fat intake correlated with heart disease in different countries. And at the end of the day, he found that there was a correlation between high saturated fat intake and heart disease. But then later on, you find out that he looked at 32 countries, but picked the seven that fit his paradigm mostly. So that was, I don't know if you've had Gary Taubes or Nina on the show, but everyone has sort of beaten this one to death. So the idea was that that was sort of the start of it. And then McGovern and his committee, when he was overseeing the US Department of Agriculture and trying to create the first food pyramids, was convinced by Pritikin that because McGovern's wife had had a good experience at the Pritikin Longevity Center, which was a zero-fat sort of protocol. So that politicized that enough that they decided to vilify fat. Cholesterol over the years has been more vilified because of studies done, again, correlating higher cholesterol with higher incidence of heart issues. And the drug industry certainly got on that, and that's why statins came to the forefront. Statins themselves, though, have a host of pretty bad side effects. I'm telling you, I mean, I think until some of these other things have come down recently, I would say that statins are probably the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public in terms of medicine. But that's just me. I'm not a doctor. I just do a lot of research and reading. So the idea that we would, yeah, so to your point, statins tend to, you know, there are brain fog issues, liver issues, muscle weakness issues. One of the things that statins do is they decrease the amount of CoQ10 that your body produces because it's a similar pathway, and so you have to, you should generally take supplemental CoQ10 with statins. A friend of mine said that when he did the original, when he was researching statins, one of the original patents on statins, acknowledged this deficiency of CoQ10, and so it included CoQ10 in the drug, but CoQ10 was so expensive to make, they just cleaved off that part of the patent. Anyway, where, I don't know where that was headed, but you know, where the, if we're talking about COVID, it appears that high cholesterol, higher cholesterol is protective for infections like COVID. But how is that the case? Because one of the problems with COVID is people with high obesity. Obese people tend to have a really hard time with COVID. In fact, 78% of the hospitalizations, they found out that those people were obese. I would imagine a lot of those obese people also have high cholesterol. Okay, but look at all the other factors. So if, if we're, again, obesity is a big factor in terms of overall diminishing of your immune system. Yeah, exactly. But I would say, I would say that from, you know, what I've read, blood glucose, so you know, diabetics are much more susceptible to COVID because this virus tends to like higher blood sugar. If you have a pre-existing systemic inflammation, not a good sign. Vitamin D probably, you know, across the board, the greatest predictor of your survivability of COVID. Yeah. So if people have been locked inside all, you know, all year and haven't had any sun exposure, their vitamin D status has been compromised tremendously. Watch new episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. 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