Name: Mark Sisson on the Importance of Cholesterol, Problems with Statins
Uploaded: 2021-03-26T17:53:29.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mark Sisson on the Importance of Cholesterol, Problems with Statins' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Mark Sisson on the Importance of Cholesterol, Problems with Statins' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-26. Transcript available.

This really gets old people for what I would say are obvious reasons, whether
it's immune system,
whether it's lack of vitamin D, whether it's being shut up, whether it's
lowered cholesterol.
I mean, we haven't even talked about what happens with all of the statin drugs
that people are taking to lower their cholesterol.
Well, high cholesterol is actually protective for something like this.
So you could predict that a lot of older people were going to die if they weren't
well protected.
Can we talk about that for a second?
So statin drugs, the idea is you're lowering cholesterol because people have
high cholesterol.
The high cholesterol puts them at a higher risk of heart attack and stroke.
Not really.
Not really, but I mean, we can talk about that too.
That's the irony there.
That's where it gets confusing, right?
Because some people will argue that it's the balance of LDL and HDL,
and that cholesterol is actually essential for production of sex hormones and a
lot of other things that the human body requires.
A lot of things.
It's probably the most important hormone.
Cholesterol is probably the most important molecule in the human body, if you
really were to parse it.
Vitamin D, sex hormones.
It's a working molecule on a lot of cell membranes.
And to think that we would—I mean, it's so important.
The body makes like 1,300 milligrams a day, regardless of what your cholesterol
intake is from food.
So in my mind, the notion that we would take this amazing molecule that is
basically life-giving in many regards and vilify it,
and then take drugs to lower it, which if you look at the research, and I wasn't
planning on going down this path today,
but if you look at the research on cholesterol and heart disease over the past
20 years,
it's shifted everything away from cholesterol being the proximate cause of
heart disease.
Cholesterol and saturated fat are not the proximate cause of heart disease.
It's oxidation and inflammation.
Cholesterol is involved in the repair of damage to the tissue, and as a result,
people get—because of the oxidation and inflammation,
there's cholesterol that's in the plaques and things like that.
But I think many, many doctors—I'm going to say the preponderance of doctors
now agree—
that cholesterol isn't the bad guy that people made it out to be.
And if you look at other studies, cohorts of people who have had cholesterol of
130 and lower or 200 and above,
the all-cause mortality—you die of everything else at a much greater rate
with low cholesterol than you do with high cholesterol.
The only difference is the cardiac outcomes.
And it's not even deaths.
It's just cardiac events is a little bit higher in the higher group.
And what is it about cholesterol that—why did cholesterol become the bad guy?
Why did it become the boogeyman?
You know, I—
Does it have to do with the—I hate to interrupt you there.
Yeah.
Does it have to do with when they—when the sugar industry paid off those
scientists to push the blame on the saturated fat?
Yeah.
I mean, a lot of this goes back to—I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
You know, I'm not—I think most people at the top are too greedy and stupid to
organize into a cabal, right?
So I'm thinking, how did this happen in terms of the collective conscious?
So mistakes were made early on, whether it's Ancel Keys.
And I know you've had a lot of people on the show talking about Ancel Keys in
the—in the seven-country study.
Can you explain that real quick for people who don't know what they're talking
about?
Well, this scientist in the 60s, I guess, around then, Ancel Keys had done a
study looking at saturated fat intake of—
and correlated with heart disease in different countries, and found—at the
end of the day, he found that there was a correlation between high saturated
fat intake and heart disease.
But then, later on, you find out that he looked at 32 studies—at 32 countries,
but picked the seven that fit his paradigm, mostly.
So that was—you know, I don't know if you've had Gary Taubes or Nina on the
show, but, you know, they've all—everyone has sort of beaten this one to
death.
So the idea was that that was sort of the start of it, and then McGovern and
his committee, when he was with the—you know, overseeing the U.S. Department
of Agriculture
and trying to create the first food pyramids, was convinced by Pritikin that—because
McGovern's wife had had a good experience at the Pritikin Longevity Center,
which was a zero-fat sort of protocol, so that politicized that enough that
they decided to vilify fat.
Cholesterol, over the years, has been more vilified because of studies done,
again, correlating higher cholesterol with higher incidence of heart issues,
and the drug industry certainly got on that, and that's why statins came to the
forefront.
And statins themselves, though, have a host of pretty bad side effects.
I'm telling you.
I mean, I think, until some of these other things have come down recently, I
would say that statins are probably the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the
American public in terms of medicine.
But that's just me.
I'm not a doctor.
I just do a lot of research and reading.
So the idea that we would—yeah, so to your point, statins tend to—you know,
there are brain fog issues, liver issues, muscle weakness issues.
One of the things that statins do is they decrease the amount of CoQ10 that
your body produces because it's a similar pathway,
and so you have to—you should generally take supplemental CoQ10 with statins.
A friend of mine said that when he did the original—when he was researching
statins, one of the original patents on statins,
acknowledged this deficiency of CoQ10, and so it included CoQ10 in the drug.
But CoQ10 was so expensive to make, they just cleaved off that part of the
patent.
Anyway, I don't know where that was headed, but, you know, if we're talking
about COVID, it appears that high cholesterol, higher cholesterol, is
protective for infections like COVID.
But how is that the case?
Because one of the problems with COVID is people with high obesity.
Obese people tend to have a really hard time with COVID.
In fact, 78% of the hospitalizations, they found out that those people were
obese.
I would imagine a lot of those obese people also have high cholesterol.
Okay, but look at all the other factors.
So, you know, if we're—
Obesity is a big factor in terms of just overall diminishing of your immune
system.
Yeah, exactly.
Your vitality.
But I would say that from, you know, what I've read, blood glucose, so, you
know, diabetics are much more susceptible to COVID because this virus tends to
like higher blood sugar.
If you have a preexisting systemic inflammation, not a good sign.
Vitamin D, probably, you know, across the board, the greatest predictor of your
survivability of COVID.
So if people have been locked inside all, you know, all year and haven't had
any sun exposure, their vitamin D status has been compromised tremendously.
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