Transcript:

Can you get off statin drugs? Yes, you can. These are the kinds of conversations I have in Undoctored, my new book Why Health Care Has Failed You And How You Can Become Smarter Than Your Doctor.

Your doctor is trying to “treat” a cholesterol panel, a very sloppy outdated panel — for a variety of reasons: the total cholesterol for instance, that they often try to treat, is a very deeply flawed number, largely because it contains the HDL cholesterol. The HDL cholesterol is good, and HDL will go up on the Undoctored program, by the way.

My HDL, for instance, went from 27 many years ago to 94 — quadrupled, which is very common in this in this lifestyle. And HDL is a good value. It’s a great index of overall lifestyle and cardiovascular risk, and it will go up. Well, my HDL went from 27 to 94, which is about what, almost a 70 milligram rise. It made my total cholesterol go up by, 70 milligrams.

Conventionally my doctor would say we have to treat that. Why would you treat a good thing, the HDL, that’s ridiculous. So ignore total cholesterol. It’s a lousy marker to start with, and even worse, less useful, because it includes that HDL that rises. So ignore it. Cross it out. Black it out — has no bearing whatsoever on your health — has no meaning in your cardiovascular risk.

The LDL cholesterol, likewise an absurd value, for one, it’s calculated. You’ll see that on the on your results (in parentheses), calculated; is not even measured. The calculation is from an old outdated calculation called the Friedewald calculation, from the 1950s, meant to crudely estimate the amount of cholesterol in the low-density lipoprotein fraction. Well, it has many assumptions built into it, like we all weigh about the same, and we all eat the same. Well, that’s ridiculous. We don’t, and even more, if you cut the carbohydrate content of your diet, as we do in the Undoctored lifestyle, it modifies the lipoprotein composition in the bloodstream, and it invalidates it — invalidates the Friedewald calculation.

So the LDL cholesterol value the doctor’s trying to treat (and the drug industry promotes treating that value) is a completely unreliable number, as much as 100% inaccurate. That’s how bad it is when you apply to a specific individual, yet they try to treat it. LDL cholesterol is a worthless value. If it goes up, it goes down — doesn’t mean anything because it’s not a real number and it’s invalidated — the equation’s invalidated.

Now there are two good pieces of information though, in a cholesterol panel:

• the HDL cholesterol: that is a good index of overall health and cardiovascular a risk — the higher the better, and
   
• the triglycerides: an index of your carbohydrate intake among other things. Mine dropped from 350 down to the 40s.

This lifestyle is wonderfully effective for improving both HDL and triglycerides. Those two values do put some useful value in the conventional cholesterol panel.

To avoid statin drugs — you can see the problem here — they’re trying to treat two ridiculous numbers, right, useless, inaccurate, outdated numbers. If you really want insight into cardiovascular risk, you need something called an NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) lipoprotein panel. Your doctor can order it. He can get it from SpectraCell or Quest. If your doctor refuses, find another doctor, or get it done yourself. Direct Labs and some of the other direct consumer lab testing companies will do it for you, without a doctor’s order. You can get it done.

It’s an NMR lipoprotein panel. The most useful number there (there’s two numbers) is:

• the total LDL particle number (not LDL cholesterol, ’cause cholesterol’s just a marker, it’s not the cause for heart disease; it’s just a marker) but the LDL particle number tells you how many particles there are per volume, and then there’s
   
• a small LDL particle number.

Let’s pretend you get, at the start of your program, an NMR lipoprotein analysis. And it says you have:

• 1800 nanomoles per liter, particle count per volume, small LDL, and
   
• 2400 nanomoles per liter, total LDL particle number.

So 1800 of the 2400 are small. Well, that’s important to know, because you know those will very likely go away, when you eliminate grains and sugars and follow the other strategies in the Undoctored Wild-Naked-Unwashed program.

So you do this. You lose a bunch of weight (and by the way don’t repeat the panel until your weight loss is stabilized for at least four weeks), then repeat it: numbers like this, maybe:
• 1100 total LDL particle number
• zero small LDL
To give you some perspective on how this looks if it were a cholesterol panel, take that LDL Particle Number, drop the last digit. So 1100 total LDL Particle Number is roughly equivalent to 110 LDL cholesterol.

You did that without statins. And, the HDL will rise dramatically over time. And the triglycerides will drop dramatically over time — from all the efforts you’ve started: vitamin D restoration, iodine, thyroid normalization, fish oil. All these numbers start to look so good that, if you had taken a statin drug, all you would do is drop the total cholesterol and the LDL cholesterol number; HDL doesn’t change much at all, and triglycerides drop only a little bit.

In other words, what you achieve in the Undoctored program is spectacularly better — superior to what a statin drug would achieve. And this is the program that allows your heart scan score to drop, in most instances — regression of disease, which the statin drugs do not do. This is how you avoid statin drugs.

It would be nice if you had a doctor who is smart about these kinds of things, but unfortunately most them are educated by the sales representative for the statin drug industry, and therefore don’t think beyond cholesterol values. This is why I say, with a little knowledge you can get the job done, and you can get superior results to what the doctor would have obtained, and that is the Undoctored way.