Hey, statins—leave those fats alone

The drugs are the stars of Big Pharma despite risk of memory loss, says Bryan Hubbard

AI is one clever fellow. Ask it anything, and it has a perspicacious response at the ready. Ask it about cholesterol-lowering statins, and it’s especially insightful.

“Statin drugs are a modern success story. They are the medical treatment for coronary disease and the star of the pharmaceutical industry. Worldwide, sales of statins are running at about $19 billion a year and growing quickly,” Google’s AI search engine told us.

Yes, they are a modern success story, mainly because docs are pushing them at every 50-year-old patient, telling them to pop a statin a day to keep heart disease at bay. And they’re perfectly safe, everyone is told, but here’s something your doctor might not tell you: They have a warning on the label about memory loss and confusion.

Label warnings are a device used by America’s drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and they’re not something it dishes out willy-nilly. The FDA is funded almost entirely by the drug industry, the sector it’s supposed to be controlling, and its oversight committees are packed with drug company executives. So when it’s cajoled and crowbarred into issuing a warning, you should take notice.

It seems to have passed everyone by, but the agency issued the warning on the whole family of statins way back in 2012, and nobody has mentioned it since. The warning wasn’t about muscle aches and pains or even about digestive problems, the usual things people associate with statins. It warned that the drugs could cause liver problems and dementia-like symptoms, such as confusion and memory loss.

To a man (and woman), doctors have ignored the warning and still hand out statins as a safe “just-in-case” remedy. Nearly 100 million Americans and Britons pop a statin every day, and they do so because they’ve been told that statins reduce levels of LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol. LDL has been demonized as the “bad” cholesterol because it gathers around artery walls and blocks blood flow, which can cause atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and heart disease.

Ignoring the warning was made easier because neuroscientists argued that it should never have been issued in the first place. Statins can’t interfere with cognition, they said, as the brain feeds exclusively on sugars.

But a new study disproves the theory. The brain also needs fats—and in the absence of sugars, it can feed on fats entirely. Neurons can revive and energize within 48 hours on a diet of saturated fats, and they aren’t dependent solely on sugars, breakthrough research at the University of Helsinki has discovered.¹

Even more remarkably, when the brain’s energy demand increases, neurons can produce certain fats by recycling their own cell components, a process that depends on a protein known as DDHD2. And they regulate levels of these fats based on their needs.

When we eat these same types of fats, they raise our cholesterol levels.

The discovery may mean cholesterol is vital brain food we shouldn’t reduce. Nourishing the brain becomes increasingly important as we get older. So, just when we need to ramp up fat supplies to support an aging brain, we suddenly reduce them by taking a statin.

Are statins wholly, or partly, responsible for the epidemic of dementia and Alzheimer’s cases? We couldn’t possibly say, although the FDA—and quite a few others—could.

But, despite all that, isn’t LDL cholesterol “bad,” as we’re told? Many years back, WDDTY established that LDL is a healing agent, and it accumulates around artery walls to repair damage caused by inflammation. We likened it to blaming the fire brigade because they always seemed to be around when there was a fire.

So, what causes inflammation in the first place? Step forward all the usual suspects: stress, pollutants and, most important, diet and malnutrition, or a lack of inflammation-fighting nutrients. More than 50 years ago, researcher John Yudkin put forward the idea that sugar was the primary cause of heart disease, but he was banished for his troubles.

Aided by the partial research of Ancel Keys, the fats theory was born—and since then it has not only dominated dietary guidelines but also launched the multibillion-dollar statins industry. And no warning on the label is going to stop that money machine a-rollin’ along, just as Google’s AI predicts.

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