The Cholesterol Molecule - Image credit: World of Molecules.

These drugs are highly inefficient in what they are advertised to do. As Dr. Michael Wilkes says in a recent article in the Sacramento Bee:

"I recently wrote a column about cholesterol-lowering medications. I stated that if 67 healthy men with elevated cholesterol took a cholesterol-lowering drug (from a class of drugs called statins) for five years, only one would benefit. The other 66 would not benefit, and it would cost about $5,500 over the five-year period."

But that is not all - according to several experts, the decision to "lower cholesterol" has been a bad mistake. Take the fact that statins are the most profitable medicines of all times and rake in tens of billions of profits every year for their makers, and you have an idea of what the underlying motive for that decision ultimately might have been.

Not only are the pharma multinationals making a mint with statins, they are playing Russian roulette with our health. How exactly the drugs attack the body's immune defenses and even our emotional equilibrium, is the subject of a recent article by Duane Graveline, MD, who examines the effect statin drugs have on the metabolism of sugars or glyconutrients...

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Statins & Glyconutrients

(See original here)

For the past five years I have been talking about the importance of the mevalonate pathway and the inevitable problems to come from inhibition of this vital biochemical complex especially at its very beginning.

Think of the mevalonate pathway as a tree with multiple branches and then think of the effect of our statins drugs as "girding" this tree at the base, in our misguided efforts to block cholesterol.

Our pharmaceutical industry threw caution to the wind 15 years ago when our national priority to lower cholesterol so fogged our minds that we (medical, pharmaceutical and the food industry) focused just on the cholesterol branch of the mevalonate pathway and completely disregarded the important consequences of collateral damage to the other main branches of our tree from our statin drugs.

The predictable result of all this has been our bizarre spectrum of statin associated side effects ranging from cognitive, to myotoxic, neurotoxic, neurodegenerative and even behavioral.

When our powerful statins cut our cholesterol 50%, our CoQ10 is also likely to be cut a similar amount and therein lay the problem, for CoQ10 has vital roles in energy production, cell wall integrity and mitochondrial anti-oxidation, all of which leads to the enormous variety of symptoms and problems we now are seeing.

And what about another major branch of the mevalonate tree, that of dolichol? Recently I have learned much about the vital role of dolichols and it is time to share it with you. I have been talking of the consequences of statin associated dolichol inhibition for years now, calling attention to the importance of this substance in neuropeptide formation and our feelings of thought, sensation and emotion. More recently, I have pointed at dolichol inhibition as a possible cause of our statin associated behavioral side effects, such as irritability, hostility and depression, while wondering how, with so few proteins, such amazing subtlety of emotion could be created.

Now, however, I have learned that along with peptide assembly within the endoplasmic reticulum of every cell is the process of sacharride attachment. It is here in the heart of every cell that our saccharides (sugars) are attached to proteins to give a far broader range of diversity and information transfer than protein alone. This process is called glycosylation and it demands a ready supply of dolichol.

No longer do we consider our sugars as just simple fuel. The effects of these eight vital sugars on the resulting peptide structure being created in the endoplasmic reticulum and companion piece, the Golgi apparatus, is just short of miraculous. And this attachment of sugars, this glycosylation, is completely dependent on dolichol's orchestration. Throw in a statin and what do you have - an inevitable inhibition of dolichol (roughly comparable to the degree of cholesterol inhibition). The resulting effect upon our body of this dolichol theft is completely unpredictable for this is at the very center of cell communication and immunodefense.

Dolichols may well be fully as important as CoQ10 in this unfortunate game of statin roulette that Big Pharma has placed us in. Statin damage is often additive to pre-existing impairment of glycolysis from aging, disease and poor nutrition. Glyconutrients, now increasingly available as a source of these vital sugars, may offer hope to thousands of statin damaged victims to help the body repair the effects of impaired glycolysis. It is much too early to talk of proof of effect for studies are only now in the planning stage. However, based upon my six years of research, I have an intuitive feeling of success and anxiously look forward to the results.