#2078 The Statin Delusion - David Gillespie

Like I don't bother writing books, you know, clutching our pearls and wringing our hands about climate change even though it's very real and very dangerous and so on, because I can't think of a way to write a book that results in someone being able to meaningfully affect it. And it's sort of something that I follow with everything I write. The person has to be able to put the book down and immediately implement something at a personal

level that changes something about their lives. And I guess that doesn't need me to be an Instagram star to do that. It just needs me to be accurate and constant. And like I said, probably all boils down to laziness in the end, because to be an Instagram star, I'd have to do all sorts of things I quite frankly wouldn't be comfortable doing, you know, tiktoks and videos and unboxings and all that sort of crap.

But I just think for you, the bigger the bigger your social media presence, the more awareness around your messages, Like if you had a million followers on Instagram, not because you're dancing like a fuck with at a train station or unwrapping a fucking you know, a high def TV or I don't know.

is required to make that happen. So yeah, like I said, it comes back to laziness.

blah blah. Right, And Penguin saw that book and reached out to me, which I know is not the normal kind of protocol, and said, we had a look at it, we liked it, and I sold a lot, right, I sold a lot of that book, as you know, like I think in Australia ten thousand is the best seller, and it was way way, way more than that, with no distribution, no publisher, al self published, no interviews, right, And so they went, we want.

and they were great. Everything was great except the title, and then that book, which was a much better book in my opinion. I wrote both it it was outsold by the first one six to one.

that even when in writing an article. You know, at the end of writing an article, I have to think of a title for it, and I'm usually pretty stumped about what to call it. And I doubt I've cracked the magic. You know, this is highly clickable if you just call it this title. You know, for starters. I don't use the word fucking any of the titles of any of my pieces or books.

And it was an emotional kind of investment scale friendship, understanding, caring, and kindness and fuck was an acronym for those four words, and it was like how many one to seven fucks on a like art scale, like how many fucks do you give?

to you and me? And I don't like to just do the research and not be able to do that, and so it's yeah, it's mostly yeah, it's that it's not education. Sounds a little bit creachy, like I'm trying to teach you something, like like I know it and you don't, and I've got to teach you. And usually in my books, I don't know the answer before I start. I just have a sense that there's something wrong in what we're being told about how something works, and I like to dig in, and the book ends up being

the documentation of what I found. And there's been many starts at books where I find, actually what we're being told about this is the sum of our knowledge on this, and there is no other evidence. And so there really is no point writing a book that says, well, you know, everything the Heart Foundation says is absolutely correct.

wasn't We didn't talk about their supplements. It's just an education night for blokes, you know, in that health, fitness, wellness, performance, aging, anti aging, just general stuff, you know, food, exercise, lifestyle, sleep, stress, anxiety, self management, all that stuff. And I'm constantly going, so, here's something that's worth thinking about, or here's some information, here's what we know, here's a bit of research. But then I've kind of got to go so what can we do about that?

or not take a drug. In this particular space, what we're talking about is what is the evidence actually say? And I guess what does it say about us? Given the evidence?

If a person is over the age of sixty five and also has type two diabetes, they've got an eighty percent chance of being on Staaten's in Australia. So statins are handed out like lollipops at the fate. You know this is this is a drug that is massively prescribed in Australia. Australia is, by the way, the world leader in the prescription of statns. There is no one who prescribes more of them on a per capita basis than Australia, and we've.

lot of people, lower the level of LDL cholesterol. And if you've ever been to a doctor and had a blood test, they'll they'll show you a print out that will give you a level of LDL cholesterol. It will give you sort of total cholesterol, also give you ld old cholesterol and sometimes HDL cholesterol, which is theoretically the good cholesterol. And Staton's lower for many people the number LDL cholesterol. And for a long time now, the accepted

science has been that that's a good thing. That if you lower people's ld OL cholesterol, it should present prevent them having fatal heart attacks or any heart attacks, or you know, should reduce the number of heart attacks they're likely to have or reduce their risk of heart attack, or any number of ways of spinning it, but in general, the theory is that if you lower LDOL cholesterol, you

should have less cardiac events in your life. And initially these drugs were used when they first sort of hit the market in the nineteen eighties or late nineteen eighties early nineteen nineties, they were initially used to give to people who had already had a heart attack, so they've had their first cardiac event, often young, younger people sort of around you, under fifty or so, and they were given to them as a way of presenting preventing further

cardiac events. And there were some early studies that suggested that they were reasonably effective at that and honestly, those studies have not to my knowledge, been debunked in any great degree since then, despite some of the problems I'm about to discuss with the studies. But the what has happened though, is that the drug companies have taken that glimmer of success. And you might imagine that people under fifty who've had a heart attack, well it's actually only

men under fifty who've had a heart attack. The studies didn't show any definitive benefit for women, but men under fifty who've had a heart attack is a relatively small market, and it's certainly not getting you anywhere near the numbers I just gave you before. You know, with six out of ten people over the age of sixty five taking a drug every day of the week, you're not getting

near that. So the drug companies managed to convert that glimmer of success into over the last thirty years, a widespread program of everyone being given or as many people as possible being given these things as a preventative measure. So you might feel perfectly well. And this is why I use the mechanic analogy. The start, you might feel

perfectly well. It might you might look perfectly well. There might be nothing wrong with your heart to you know, the casual observer or the medical observer, but you never know, you know, just in case, just in case, take this thing, and you know it'll it'll reduce your risk of ever having a heart attack.

So coenzyme Q ten you might have heard of before if you've ever seen any cosmetics commercials, because it's often touted as being something that you want to rub on your skin or something. I've never quite followed the logic of that, but it's it is actually a pretty handy thing to have in your body. It's it's kind of regarded in medicine as the starter motor for your cellular metabolism. So it's it's the spark that gets cells producing the

right level of energy, and it's all. It does some other things as well as as always the body never just does one thing with anything, you know, and some one of the others is that it is a very very powerful antioxidant. So, and antioxidants are pretty handy. You will recall from how many discussions about cancer that antioxidants are a big part of stopping that happening because they reduce the potential for oxidation within the system, particularly when

you take things that oxidize easily like seed oils. But that's a little bit of the side So the mechanism of action for Staton, though, is that they shut down the production of coenzon q ten. So, as you might imagine, there could be side effects, and the side effects have

started to become really quite apparent. There's a significant increase nine percent increase in the incidence of type two diabetes because apparently coinzon q ten is pretty handy in the pancreas, and so there is a significant It's so much so that the FDA and the United States now requires a warning on statins to say that to say that there's also many people who take statan's report muscle pain, and it's often the reason that people stop taking them. You know,

much of the spare of the medical profession. You know, they call that non compliance. Well, a big reason for non compliance is that people experience muscle pain. Some of the studies have shown that it's around twenty percent one in five people taking statin's experience study experience muscle pain. There's some interesting new evidence that suggests that they also increase the incidence of stroke, which is a bit ironic because you know, it's sort of training avoiding heart disease

and acquiring a risk of stroke. And these are all quite concerning things for something that you may not need to be taking at all in the first place. And

the problem here is with the evidence. Now there's precious little objective evidence about the effectiveness of statins, and that's because of a really peculiar arrangement between the drug companies and the research group who are responsible for I think it's twenty seven out of twenty eight of the major statin trials analyzed and reported on by something called the Clinical Trial Service Unit, which is part of the University

of Oxford. It's a joint thing between the NHMRC in Australia and the University of Oxford, and so almost all the data we have on the efficacy of statins comes from this group, which in itself isn't necessarily a problem except when you start to digging in a little about

how they're funded. So they're funded essentially by the companies and they which once again you'd say, okay, well, that's a cause for concerns, So we need to be a little bit careful about anything that they say, particularly when what they say seems to be at odds with the few independent studies that have been done. But maybe that's a coincidence, So you need to dig a little bit

further than that. And one of the big concerns about this group is that they never publish the original data, the raw data that is being used in the trials, So they'll publish their interpretation of the data, but never the actual data, so other scientists can't look at the data and see if they agree with the conclusions that they've come out.

to me, that's not science at all. There's no objectivity there like that just and I don't just mean with pharma college or pharmaceutical industry, but with all of it.

fundings come from something called ICSI. I can't remember the acronym stand for, but it's an international research thing, and you have to dig pretty hard to find out who's actually paying for it. And you have to really understand the study to understand how they've bent the rules a bit to make sure that they get the result they want. And on that point, one of the big criticisms of the studies that these folks produce is that they use a way of measuring the results which is not standard.

So in a normal trial, you just go head to head, you say, right, we've got a thousand people taking the drug, we've got a thousand people taking the placebo. Let's measure the outcomes. You think that would be the That's called an intention to treat trial, and that's the way most science is done if you want a placebo controlled trial, which is what you do with the drug, right, But that's not how they do it. So what they do is they report their results based on the degree of

responsiveness to the drug. So the amount that the person's LDL was reduced, and they put them in one group and the people whose LDL wasn't reduced in another group. And these crossover both of the people with the perceibo

and the non perceivo on. Because you can't see the original data, you don't know which is which, and they're just saying, of the people whose LDL was reduced, we report that they had, you know, ten percent lower incidents of maya cardial events ten years later or something like that. And because you can't look at the original data and you can't essentially do what any study would do, which is just put the people who took the perceibo versus the people who took the drug side by side and

see the outcomes, you've just got this muddy in. And there is a strong suspicion amongst many researchers that the reason it's done that way is to make it that you get a positive outcome for statins from their trials that otherwise would not be there. So it's that's why there's concern in this area. Now there are studies done by independent groups. There are independent groups of scientists who have looked at as much data as they can find

on this. Have tried to work back from the data that is published about this and have come to the conclusion that there's by and large no real preventative benefit. They would agree there is a benefit to people who have already had a heart attack. There is a benefit.

It is not a huge one, but there is one. Yes, But they would say there just isn't data there to support the notion that people taking these things as a prophylactic you know, or you you with your motiviing helmet, it just makes any difference whatsoever There might even be There might even be an argument depending on who's taking it.

You know, somebody with no history of anything, who's relatively fit and healthy and forty years old, the risks might be greater than the potential benefits even well, exactly because of the risk that I outlined before. So we're talking about things like hemorrhagic stroke, type two diabetes. So those type two diabetes incidences are relative increase over a person who would never have gotten it before. So this is a brand new disease that they would not have been

likely to get prior to taking the drug. And this has been established beyond doubt in the research. So you know, hemorrhagic stroke, type two diabetes, massive incidents of muscle pain one in five with muscle pain that is significant. There's some evidence of cognitive decline making dementia worse, so you know, it's there are certainly a list of things that we should be a bit concerned about with these things, which is why I say these are not lollies, these are

not placebos. It does matter if you take it if you don't need to take it. And then besides all of this, we've also had a persistent moving of the goalposts in terms of what is the target level of LDL. So and I put a bit of a history of this in the in the article where they you know where the goalposts have been moving. The target started at three point five and has moved so that these numbers, by the way, are the standard numbers that appear on

Australian you know, blood reports. So when these drugs first came out, if you had a total cholesterol count of six point five million miles per later you were given a clean bill of health and cent on your way. But then they said they started moving the target on once they discovered LDL and started to be able to say, oh, this is the magic thing that needs to be fixed.

They started at the target of you want to get it at three point five, and then it moved to two point five, then to one point eight, and today

it's one point four. So each movement of this target increases the number of people in the population who the target would suggest need to have this thing right, and so steadily, not surprisingly, the number of people in the population being prescribed to these things has increased very rapidly, until now we are, as I said, top of the league in the OECD, We now prescribe more statons per person than anyone else in the world. Yes, so, and that's a direct result of you know, the well meaning

GP down the road he sees the official target. Oh, it was three point five and now it's one point four. I guess before I barely had any patients that were, you know, needing to have these things, and now they now suddenly all of them do.

really well written. They are academics, really well written. And these papers there was I think it was like nine of them got published in like Tier one and two, which for my listeners is kind of the gold standard Tier one anyway, papers journals, and I just wonder how much stuff. And I was just looking then at some

of the stuff I was trying to find. I was trying to find those I can't, but I wonder how much just fabrication and kind of you know, I don't know, bending bending of the rules, but bending of the truth

goes on in trying to put these papers together. And like I know, one of my friends is going through this thing now where they're looking at the data and the data is not telling him a lot with his research, and so they because he has to produce a paper, and he's desperately it's not me, by the way, but desperately trying to find something to write a paper on and to find some kind of correlation between A and.

because of the massive rates of smoking. But even to this day, no one's going to admit that they still want to pin it with saturated fat. But they did these huge studies where they Minnesota County Experiment for example. I can't remember how I think it was close to

one hundred thousand people were enrolled in it. I can you imagine the cost of doing something like that for years on end, where they were having half the people were eating a normal saturated fat diet and the other half had a lower fat diet or eating seed oils instead or things like that, and they measured and their hypothesis was that the people who were eating the lower fat diet and the polyon saturates, etc. Would have less coronary events than the people eating the normal the butter,

the cheese, the milk, et cetera. And it turned out it didn't, and so they never published. So this thing went on at enormous expense for I think four years, huge numbers of people involved, large, you know, and they put out a paper that essentially said nothing, so essentially

didn't publish at all. Recently, the National Institutes of Health reinvestigated that and had access to the original data, so they went back into the archives, they dug up the data, and they did their own reanalysis of it without all the preconceptions of the people who were running it in the first place, which was to find that eating saturated fat cause heart disease. What they found was in fact

the opposite. What they found was that when you properly analyze the data, the people who had more heart disease,

and in fact the people who died more often. So the higher mortality rate was with the people who were not eating the standard saturated fat diet, the people who were lowering the cholesterol, the people who were having less fat and on actually had not just a higher rate of cronary events leading to death, but a higher rate of all causes death, meaning usually that is another way of saying a lot more of them died of cancer as well. So you know, we talked some other time

about why that was. But that's why having access to the underlying data is really important, so that other scientists can go back and have a look themselves and do their own analysis and see if they agree with what you came up with.

seek funding from the private sector. If they have two choices, they either start firing people or they get funding from the private sector. And the private sector is only going to give them money if they produce the results they want to see.

Before you do anything, assuming you want to, about taking statins or not taking statins, you have a conversation with your doctor and ask them about this.