Importance of Cholesterol and Dangers of Statin Drugs

August 3, 2018

Statistics show that heart disease is the #1 cause of death in America, but is cholesterol the culprit? Dr. Hotze discusses the importance of cholesterol for our health and reveals the dangers of statin drugs.

Podcast Transcription

Stacey: Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. I’m Stacey Bandfield here with Dr. Hotze, who is the founder of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. So glad you joined us today. As we always like to say, everybody needs a health coach. We’ve got some good topics on tap to listen to today, a couple of things that people are very concerned about. One is cholesterol and one is heart disease. These go on the rampant in our culture. It’s a real problem. People try all different ways, but you can’t go wrong with the natural way. Isn’t that right Dr. Hotze?

Dr. Hotze: Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Stacey, for our kind introduction, as always.

Stacey: You’re welcome.

Dr. Hotze: I wanted to visit with you about heart disease, the causes of heart disease and its relationship to cholesterol. Now heart disease is rated the number one killer of all Americans. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 600,000 to 700,000 people die annually with some form of heart disease. That includes not only heart attacks, but congestive heart failure, vascular disorders and strokes, that all fall under the whole term cardiovascular disease. Somewhere in the neighborhood of about 700,000 people, half men, half women, die of heart disease.

It’s rated as the leading cause of death in America. It’s probably not the leading cause of death. There’s an article that was written in Life Extension Magazine by Dr. Gary Null and Dr. Carolyn Dean entitled Death by Medicine in which they document the fact that there are literally millions of Americans that die annually from the adverse effect of drugs. Now, I’ve said this on many occasions, that drugs are all poisons. My dad told me that when I graduated from med school. He turned to me and said, “Son, don’t poison your patients like all the other doctors do,” and in fact, he was right. Drugs are poisons. They’re toxins, and they have to be detoxified by the liver. And toxin, by the way, is a poison, that’s the definition, so you can’t poison yourself to good health, and all drugs are poisons. They have a lethal dose 50, an LD 50. That is the dose given an animal, whether it’s humans or rats in a cage, the dose that you can give that will cause 50% of the animals to die at that dose. That’s the lethal dose 50, LD 50.

The effective dose 50 is the dose that you have to give to solve a disease or cure a problem, or at least arrest a problem, and that’s called the effective dose. So when you divide the lethal dose by the effective dose, that gives you a ratio, and the smaller that ratio is the more dangerous the drug is. So every drug…let’s just make sure I’ve established the fact that every drug, pharmaceutical drug that you take, is toxic. It’s a toxin, so that has harmful effects on your body.

Cholesterol is NOT the Cause of Heart Disease

Well, if drugs are harmful, then let’s talk about cholesterol, which is natural. Now if we ask the average person on the person on the street, in fact the average doctor, what’s the cause of heart disease, what are they going to say?

Stacey: Cholesterol.

Dr. Hotze: Cholesterol causes heart disease, which is totally wrong. I’ve just finished reading a book called The Great Cholesterol Myth. I’ve read books The Cholesterol Hoax, The Hoax of Cholesterol, The Myth About Cholesterol, all of the books. I’ve read all of the various arguments that have dispelled the notion that cholesterol is the cause of heart disease. That’s bogus and it’s wrong. It’s not.

Cholesterol is a molecule made by your…every cell in your body makes it. Primarily the liver produces cholesterol, and cholesterol is important for the production of all your sex and adrenal hormones. The term cholesterol has the ending term sterol. That’s where we derive the word steroid hormones. Your sex hormones and adrenal hormones are all naturally occurring steroid hormones. They’re hormones made from cholesterol, so it’s the building block of your hormones.

Every cell in your body has a lipid ring, that ring around it, and that ring is made of cholesterol. Your brain has a total body weight of about 2%. 2% of the body’s weight is in the brain. In the wet brain 25% of the brain’s weight is cholesterol. In the dry brain it’s 50%, so cholesterol is very important in the functioning of our brain. As a matter of fact, it is important and essential for the utilization of your neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin and other neurotransmitters in the brain that enable you to think.

It’s important for the production of bile. The bile in the gallbladder, which helps you dissolve fats that you eat is made from cholesterol. Vitamin D, which is not really a vitamin at all, it’s a hormone, because it’s made from cholesterol, the building block of hormones. It’s important for new bone formation, so it helps prevent osteoporosis. It’s important and essential for good health in the immune system and good heart health. It’s a critical vitamin that your body can’t produce without cholesterol.

So if you took a drug like a statin drug, which are very popular now, and promoted it everywhere as the cure of heart disease, which, by the way, all the studies, and there have been scores and scores of studies, and there’s many studies that indicate that the taking of statin drugs does not decrease your overall mortality rate. Forget about heart disease, whether you die of a heart attack.

In many of the studies, the statin drugs increase your overall death rate over not taking a statin drug. Well, it may decrease by 1 or 2% in certain individuals the risk of heart disease, 1 or 2%, but it increases the overall risk of dying.

Stacey: Dr. Hotze, isn’t that because it just removes too much of the cholesterol with statin drugs that you need for life?

Dr. Hotze: It does two things. One, it stops the production of cholesterol in the liver and anywhere in the body. It blocks an enzyme. All these drugs…this drug particularly, the statin drugs, poison the enzyme in the liver and in the cells, a reductase enzyme. It’s called HMG-CoA reductase, and that particular enzyme is important for the production of cholesterol, so it blocks the production of cholesterol.

And by the way, when that happens we get a host of health problems. We get poor production of your adrenal hormones which are important. Those are your stress hormones. Your sex hormones go down. People have sexual dysfunction when they get on these drugs. It causes cognitive disability, significant cognitive disability. They’ve done studies of this, that people that take statin drugs on cognitive testing, that’s testing to see how people think, go down whenever they take statin drugs.

As a matter of fact, thousands of individuals, when they take the statin drugs, get amnesia. They get global amnesia from these drugs, and oftentimes the doctors are completely unaware that that’s what has caused the problem and they’ll put them on a bunch of antidepressants or other antipsychotic drugs and they’ve ruined the person’s life.

Dr. Duane Graveline wrote a book about this, Graveline, G-R-A-V-E-L-I-N-E. He had this problem with acute global amnesia after he got on these drugs, and thank goodness the doctor had enough sense to take him off the drugs and he got well. He got his brain back. (Listen to Dr. Hotze’s amazing radio interview with Dr. Graveline here.)

Dr. Graveline worked with the astronaut program at NASA. So he began to study this and saw how the pharmaceutical companies had really been promoting cholesterol as the bogeyman of all heart disease and the cause of heart disease. Well, the treatment of cholesterol causes a host of health problems. It impairs the membranes around the cells. It decrease the normal production of adrenaline, sex hormones. It affects brain function adversely, so you don’t get proper utilization of your neurotransmitters. It affects bile production, and it also affects the production of vitamin D.

So cholesterol is one of the most important molecules the body makes and you’re going to poison it? Really? That’s what we’re going to do? Okay. Besides that, the statin drugs poison that same enzyme that makes cholesterol, HMG-CoA enzyme, the reductase enzyme. It also makes…that enzyme is important for the production of Coenzyme Q10, ubiquinol. Now Coenzyme Q10 is an essential…it’s really the spark plug of the cell, very similar in the sense like the thyroid is the spark plug of the cell. It helps the cell produce energy.

Well, so does Coenzyme Q10, and it’s primary locations, although it affects every cell in the body, are in the heart, because the heart has thousands of power plants within each cell, the liver and the brain. Coenzyme Q10 is important for the transfer of electrons from the various nutrients that you eat and from oxygen. It transports these electrons into the power plants in the cells, which are called the mitochondria, that produce energy that make the energy currency of the cell called ATP, adenosine triphosphate.

The Coenzyme Q10 is critical for the transport of that electron into the mitochondria to enable that electron to get hooked to ATP so it can go out and then drive all the biochemical processes in the body.

Remember, we’re a bundle of electrons and you have to have good energy production to be healthy. If you have low energy production, you’re not going to be healthy. So it poisons Coenzyme Q10, which is going to poison…it’s going to poison the heart.

So, I’m going to give a statin drug which is going to poison cholesterol, which is a very important molecule for the normal health of the body, and it’s going to poison my ability to make Coenzyme Q10, which is important for energy production of the heart, so they put these patients with heart failure…they put them on statin drugs. Well, what do you think that’s going to do to the heart? It’s going to decrease the ability of the heart to produce energy and it’s going to lead to earlier, quicker demise.

So stay away from statin drugs is my advice. I would advise any guest of ours, and I do every guest, get off and-

Stacey: And you can go cold turkey too?

Dr. Hotze: Yes. You can get off of them right away.

Stacey: No need to wean off of them?

Dr. Hotze: The studies that have been done and show despite what the drug companies…remember, all the studies that are done on statin drugs are done by who? Not by the FDA. They’re done by drug companies, and they don’t have to turn in the studies that show bad effects. They only have to show two studies that show that it works better than a placebo, even if it’s insignificantly better.

So that’s what the drug companies do. They will go and create…they’ve been known to manufacture studies and then they get high-named professionals in medical schools to sign off who had nothing to do with the study, and they pay them to do that. It’s been documented. The drug companies are highly, in the way they manage these studies, unethical in their presentations. They’re doing one thing. They’re going to put that study in the best light so they can sell their drug to you and convince you that if I just take a statin drug, I won’t get heart disease.

Well, that’s what I have to say about cholesterol and Coenzyme Q10 and how they’re both adversely affected by the statin drugs. Statin drugs are dangerous. They’re poisons. They poison your ability to make natural occurring cholesterol which your body needs, as well as Coenzyme Q10, which your body needs for energy production.

Side Effects of Statin Drugs

When you take these statin drugs, the common complaints that people have is they have loss of energy, inability to focus and think clearly, they get muscle spasms, they get muscle aches, they get joint and muscle pains, they feel terrible on these drugs, and they can’t think as well.

I just saw a guest this morning that I had taken taken off his statin drug and he came back in and he said, “I’m thinking so much better, Doc. What do you think is causing it? It’s only been a month. I just think better, I feel better.” Well, I got him off the statin. Now there are other drugs I have to get him off and I’m weaning him off those, but the statin drugs can cause a host of problems and you need to make yourself aware of that.

You need to find a physician…and we’re going to come back and I’m going to talk in our next podcast about heart disease, what the underlying cause of heart disease is, and what you can do to prevent it…reverse it and prevent it from occurring.

Stacey: So the big takeaway, statins are bad for you. I think it’s safe to say if there’s one takeaway, just know that there is something very simple that you can do right now to improve your health. And if you would like to know more about how we can help you get healthy and well, you can contact us or give us a call at 281-698-8698, that’s 281-698-8698. Thank you for tuning in here to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution.

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Tags: Dangers of Statin Drugs

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