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What is the best supplement for me? What potency is right? What does the research show? Is it worth the money? These and all of your other supplement questions are answered here. Jared St. Clair brings well researched information so that you can make more informed decisions regarding your health, specifically focused on how to effectively use natural supplements to optimize your health and Vitality. Of course supplement and food choices aren't the only factors in optimal health. Jared also shares a regular series of Emotional Vitality episodes that will help you release the negativity that may be holding you back and embrace your full potential. Vitality Radio is not JUST about health, it is about HEALTH FREEDOM. Jared provides needed insight into the current threats to your health as well as the threats coming from government agencies, pharmaceutical companies and modern medicine as a whole. With over 35 years of experience in the natural products world, and a hearty dose of wit and sarcasm, Vitality Radio isn't just educational but entertaining and enlightening.
Welcome to the Vitality Radio podcast, your source for the truth about health, wellness, and real alternatives to drugs, surgeries, and the status quo of health care. Here, you'll find information that empowers you to take control of your health. But it's not just about health and wellness. It's about the politics of healthcare and protecting your health freedom. Now here's your host, Jared St.
Announcer:Clair.
Jared St. Clair:Welcome to Vitality Radio, the podcast where we help you master natural supplements, enhance your emotional vitality, and thrive without the use of pharma drugs. My name is Jared St. Clair. It's good to be with you again on Vitality Radio, and I've got a launch of a brand new series on Vitality Radio for you today. It's gonna be called Suppressive Medicine, How Big Pharma and FDA Get It Wrong.
Jared St. Clair:I thought about calling it suppressive medicine, how FDA and pharma get it backwards, because both of those I think will apply and you'll understand what I'm saying here in just a moment. But let me give you just a little preamble to what we're gonna be talking about about today and what we'll be doing on, these in this series on future episodes of Vitality Radio. Pharmaceutical companies often develop drugs that target specific symptoms by interfering with the body's natural processes. These medications can be effective in providing temporary relief, but may not address the underlying cause of a condition. For instance, drugs that reduce inflammation or block pain signals can alleviate discomfort, but do not resolve the source of the inflammation or pain.
Jared St. Clair:This approach can lead to side effects because the medications disrupt the body's natural processes and thereby its natural balance, leading to additional health issues or exacerbating existing conditions. By focusing on symptom suppression rather than root cause resolution, such treatments may offer short term benefits at the cost of long term health. So why did I decide to do this series? Well, recently well, I'm gonna say over the last few months, people listening to this show have been sending me messages via Instagram, in the Vitality Radio listeners community, on Facebook and here in the story, they're over the phone or in person asking me about what to do about their quote unquote high cholesterol. Now, high cholesterol, in my view, is up for grabs, like, what that actually means.
Jared St. Clair:Is it 200? That's what FDA and AMA and your doctor probably is telling you. Is it two fifty, which they were telling us back in the early eighties and and late seventies, or does it matter at all? Now again, before we get going too much further down this, little rabbit hole of cholesterol and statins, remember I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, but I do want to lay out some information for you that I think you should have in your pocket next time you're at your doctor's office and he or she is telling you that you have a con they they have a concern about your cholesterol numbers. Now, this particular episode all about statins and cholesterol, and what I'm gonna be doing is I'm going to be getting into the mechanism of action of these drugs like how they actually work not what they do, in the case of statins lowering cholesterol or in the case of blood pressure medicines lowering blood pressure, but how they do it.
Jared St. Clair:What is the mechanism of action, and why is it a potential problem when it comes to side effects, both short term and long term. And then where applicable I'll offer alternative, possibilities that you can consider if you're concerned about this issue but would prefer not to do the pharmaceutical route. So that's the idea behind the series. There's a lot of research involved in this, a little more than a lot of the episodes that I do, all of which always take longer for me than I think they're going to as I sit down to write them. But this one, this took some digging around, to really understand, you know, how this all works and especially because it's one of these things that's pretty controversial even in the medical industry.
Jared St. Clair:You may not believe that because if you're just talking to your doctor or your cardiologist, they're likely gonna tell you, hey, you gotta get your cholesterol down. But there are doctors and researchers that are saying wait a minute maybe this hypothesis because remember cholesterol and lowering cholesterol for the prevention of blood or sorry of heart issues is indeed a hypothesis and I'll go over that towards the end of this show, but this hypothesis is up for grabs in terms of who's right and who's wrong. I'm just going to lay out the information for you and let you decide what you think. So let's talk about statins. As I said, I've had lots of people asking.
Jared St. Clair:I have done a pretty comprehensive show on cholesterol, but what I recognized was that I probably didn't lay out nearly the detailed information that needed to be laid out, and that's how this series was born. So hopefully, this will be useful for you. I would love to have feedback on it and, you know, make sure I'm on the right track because I intend to do one of these on PPIs, proton pump inhibitors, like Omeprazole, high blood or blood pressure medicines like Lisinopril and, NSAIDs, that's Tylenol, Ibuprofen not all Tylenol is not an NSAID, but Ibuprofen, Aleve, things like that. And so I'm gonna keep running down that path and we'll release these periodically as long as this is something that you're interested in. So please let me know once you've listened to this episode.
Jared St. Clair:Alright. So let's first talk about the cholesterol drugs themselves, how they work, the the drugs known as statins. And there's so many of them Torvastatin and, Simvastatin and so many other Statin drugs and, yes, they're all a little bit different but largely they're the same in terms of what their, end goal is. And there's one particular primary mechanism of action, they do have some secondary mechanisms. We're gonna focus on this one particular primary mechanism of action today.
Jared St. Clair:Statins competitively inhibit something known as in sorry, HMG dash COA reductase. The enzyme responsible for converting h m g coa to mevalonate, sorry. This step is crucial in the biosynthesis of cholesterol. By inhibiting this enzyme, statins reduce the production of cholesterol in the liver. So what they're doing is going right to the source where cholesterol is being produced in the liver, and essentially turning off that process by competitively inhibiting the reductase enzyme that, allows for cholesterol to be formed.
Jared St. Clair:So getting right at the base, the root of the quote unquote problem of high cholesterol. Okay? Now, that sounds pretty good if low cholesterol is actually better for you than high cholesterol, but I want to explore that and I wanna really get into cholesterol itself and what cholesterol is, what it does in the body, and why I believe we may be jumping the gun when it comes to lowering our cholesterol too much. Okay. So where do we find cholesterol at the cellular level?
Jared St. Clair:Where is most of it, found? The brain is number one, it makes up about 25% of the body's total cholesterol content is in the brain even though the brain only weighs about 2% of the human body, so it's largely found in the brain and in brain cells specifically. One of the other major places in is in what's called the myelin sheath. The myelin sheath, is what surrounds and protects, the nerve fibers. So if you think about people that you know that have, neuropathy, for instance, or maybe you have neuropathy.
Jared St. Clair:Neuropathy is, in large part due to, the myelin sheath itself being affected and the nerve essentially being, open, to attack, we'll say, for lack of a better term. The myelin sheath is what is supposed to protect the nerve the same way as my microphone cord, that I'm speaking into right now has, an insulating protection wrapped around the wires inside. That is what the myelin sheath does at the in the nervous system and on the nerve. So it's good to have healthy myelin sheaths and that's where a lot of cholesterol is found. Cholesterol is also found heavily in the liver, of course, that's where it's formed, that's also part of the process of eliminating cholesterol, from the body.
Jared St. Clair:It is also found in the adrenal glands, people that are concerned about adrenal fatigue or, high levels of stress, anxiety, things like that, take note. The adrenal glands, particularly the adrenal cortex, have high cholesterol content because they produce steroid hormones such as cortisol, aldosterone, and androgens. And cholesterol is a key portion of the production of those hormones that can't be made without it. How about, in the gonadal cells, k, that's gonna be sex hormone production. Cells in the testes and ovaries, use cholesterol to synthesize sex hormones such as testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone.
Jared St. Clair:So if you're concerned about your sex hormone levels, especially if you are concerned that they're too low, cholesterol is a big factor in that and then also the intestinal cells have a lot of cholesterol in them and they play a it plays a major role in the body's ability to utilize the fat that we eat, the fatty vitamins such as vitamin d three and the production of vitamin d three in the skin, as well as absorption of nutrients like vitamin d three, vitamin k two, vitamin a, vitamin e, that kind of thing. So that's where we find a lot of cholesterol. Let's talk about what it does. I just mentioned briefly the vitamin d synthesis. We know that cholesterol in the skin, when the UVB radiation hits the skin, the body then utilizes that or that UVB in conjunction with cholesterol to make vitamin d.
Jared St. Clair:Cell signaling, this is a really really big deal. Cholesterol is a key component of lipid rafts, in cell membranes. These micro domains, as they're known, are involved in organizing cell signaling molecules that facilitate communication between the cells. So cellular communication, cholesterol, crucial. How about membrane composition in the immune system?
Jared St. Clair:Cholesterol is essential for the proper functioning of immune cells such as t cells and macrophages. It influences the fluidity and organization of immune cell membranes, which is critical for immune responses and the formation of immune synapses. Also, it's a powerful antioxidant. It actually helps to protect the cells from oxidative stress and free free radicals. It is neuroprotective, specifically in the brain as we just talked about and in the nervous system.
Jared St. Clair:Cholesterol is vital for brain function and supports the formation and maintenance of synapses, in between the brain cells themselves. It also, plays a role in hormone transplant transplant transport, not just hormone production, that it's actually carried in the blood by lipoproteins which also transport fat soluble vitamins and other essential molecules. The transport system ensures that hormones and other vital substances reach their targeted tissues and it's also critical for the development and repair of the cells themselves and it plays a big role in the barrier, the skin barrier itself, preventing from water loss, protecting against environmental toxins, pathogens, and things like that. So clearly, cholesterol plays a lot of roles in human health. It's an important thing to have and we wouldn't live, like, literally couldn't live without it.
Jared St. Clair:So then the question must be about balance, right? Because we know that too high testosterone can be an issue, too high estrogen can be an issue, but also too low can be an issue, and maybe that's how cholesterol is and I suspect that that's probably the case. We'll talk about the numbers in a little bit. So then with statins themselves, we know that they reduce cholesterol and here's the thing that's really interesting and I I've posed this to a lot of people that I've talked to. It isn't really a question about do statins actually work, right?
Jared St. Clair:Do they do their job? Do they reduce cholesterol? Because as I said, I'm gonna do another episode like this on drugs like omeprazole, PPIs. Do they reduce acid in the stomach? Yes, they do.
Jared St. Clair:The question is, is that a good thing or a bad thing? And the same can be said about, statins. So we've talked about how cholesterol drugs are, effective. We've talked about how cholesterol works inside the body. Now the question is, we know the primary mechanism of action for cholesterol drugs, and we also know that they are effective at reducing cholesterol.
Jared St. Clair:So then question is, in that suppression of cholesterol medication, because remember, this show is about suppressive medicine, meaning we're suppressing a thing inside the body to achieve a specific result. In this case, we're suppressing that enzyme to achieve the result of lower cholesterol because we believe that high cholesterol is dangerous and leads to heart attack heart attack and strokes. And when I say we, I mean, you know, the greater we. I'm not so sure that I believe that myself. So in the process of reducing cholesterol which statin drugs are extremely effective at, what side effects might occur?
Jared St. Clair:In the short term, the most common side effects are muscle pain and weakness. It's quite common occurring in about ten percent of total users. Digestive health problems, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, indigestion and stomach cramps are common, but according to FDA typically mild and transient. So it can happen, but it's not too bad and it goes away. Well, yes, nausea, stomach cramps, constipation, you know, usually they go away eventually.
Jared St. Clair:The question is, you know, how uncomfortable are they while they're there? And maybe the greater question is, does it indicate that there's a bigger problem beyond that symptom? Right? Headache, these are relatively common, mild to moderate headaches from statin drugs. Elevated liver enzymes, this elevated liver enzyme thing is an interesting thing I see more and more actually, both fatty liver and elevated liver enzymes.
Jared St. Clair:So that can be, concerning as well. And then another one that's not as common as these others, but still common, is skin rash or redness in the skin from cholesterol drugs. Those are all short term. Long term side effects and these are the ones that concern me the most when it comes to pharmaceuticals. They concern me for a very simple reason and that is that if you let's just say for instance that you're prescribed a statin drug, you go on that statin drug and you're on it for say six months and you go back into your doc and he says, oh my gosh, your numbers are looking much better.
Jared St. Clair:You know, let's keep you on this thing and we're just gonna keep rolling. You haven't had any noticeable side effects at this point, but three months later, a year later, two years later, whatever it is, you start experiencing significant muscle weakness. You don't think that it's the cholesterol drug because you've been on the cholesterol drug now for a year, year and a half, two years. It couldn't possibly be that because side effects happen quickly. Right?
Jared St. Clair:Well, some do, the short term ones, but the long term ones are a little more tricky because then you have to try and figure out, okay, so why do I have this thing, this muscle weakness? Is it because I'm getting older? Is it because I'm not eating enough protein? Is it because I don't digest and assimilate my protein very well? Is it because I'm on a cholesterol drug that I've been on for the last couple of years and didn't realize that?
Jared St. Clair:I've run into so many people over the years that don't recognize that the side effect they're experiencing could possibly be from the pharmaceutical and in many cases is from the pharmaceutical. So listen to the long term side effects, especially if you're on a cholesterol medication. Myopathy, that's persistent muscle pain and weakness. There's one even worse than that called Rhabdomyolysis. That one is severe muscle damage leading to the release of muscle proteins into the bloodstream potentially causing kidney damage.
Jared St. Clair:Now, both of these are considered rare, but I will tell you that there's a lot of questions in the scientific literature on this because they aren't running, you know, studies on people five years after they start the cholesterol medicine to determine it what percentage of people have rhabdomyolysis or myopathy, this kind of thing. So we really don't know, especially because users of the cholesterol drugs, like I just talked about, may not even realize and correlate cholesterol drugs like I just talked about may not even realize and correlate the drug with the side effect. Liver damage is the next one, that's persistent elevated liver enzymes, jaundice, fatigue and dark urine. Increased blood sugar levels and type two diabetes, we'll get back to that one in just a minute. Neurological effects, many have reported memory loss, confusion, and cognitive decline.
Jared St. Clair:This one makes sense to me that as you're on it longer and longer and longer, you'll have more and more potential for that issue because your cholesterol numbers are coming further and further down or remember 25% of your cholesterol hangs out in your brain. Peripheral neuropathy, we talked about what happens with the myelin sheath, at the nervous system level. Well, peripheral neuropathy is from degradation of the myelin sheath that can include numbness, tingling, and pain in the extremities, which is typically known as diabetic neuropathy, but it happens more and more to people who are not diabetic. And then also, this is an interesting one, the risk increases of hemorrhagic stroke. It's slightly increased according to the research, but because of the potential reduction in ischemic strokes, they say the risk is worth the benefit.
Jared St. Clair:Let's talk about where the rubber really meets the road when it comes to pharmacy or really even natural medicine, although we don't have as many numbers on natural medicine as we do on pharmacy. There's a thing that I've talked about, I did a whole show on it, we'll link to it here, called NNT. That's the number needed to treat to achieve the result that is ultimately being looked at. Now, in the case of cholesterol, it's a little bit of a chain. The idea is we have this hypothesis that cholesterol is high cholesterol is bad, and specifically, LDL over a hundred is considered too high and total cholesterol over 200 is considered too high according to the guidelines.
Jared St. Clair:We'll talk about how those guidelines came about in just a moment. So the hypothesis is that too much cholesterol is bad. The drug reduces cholesterol through the interference in the liver of how cholesterol is produced. Right? The last or the endpoint would be we want to reduce cholesterol because it's going to, at least in theory, reduce our reduce our risk of cardiovascular events, heart disease, sorry, stroke and heart attack if I can spit it out.
Jared St. Clair:So that's the kind of end point that we're looking at. How do we reduce heart attack and stroke? Well, we reduce it by reducing cholesterol because cholesterol is the leading cause of heart attack and stroke according to something known as a hypothesis theory. Right? So let's talk about this number needed to treat.
Jared St. Clair:The number needed to treat in the case of cholesterol is how many people have to be on a cholesterol drug for five years in order to achieve the end result, not lower cholesterol, because almost everybody that goes on a statin drug does achieve lower cholesterol, but lower risk of heart disease, specifically cardiovascular events such as stroke and heart attack. And according to the research, the NNT for statin drugs is one person will avoid a heart attack for every two hundred and seventeen people that take a statin drug for five years. So the number needed to treat is two hundred and seventeen. You gotta have two two hundred and seventeen people in the pool taking the cholesterol drug for one of those people not to have a heart attack. In the case of stroke, that number goes up by almost a hundred to three hundred and thirteen people.
Jared St. Clair:Three hundred and thirteen people treated for five years for one person to avoid a stroke. That's the number needed to treat. So then the question is, is cholesterol actually the devil that has been made out to be? And I guess you get to answer that question for yourself. Again, I'm not a doctor and I'm not here to tell you not to do what your doctor is asking you to do or prescribing for you to do.
Jared St. Clair:I'm just laying out this information so that you can make a good decision for yourself. This is not medical advice coming from Vitality Radio or from me. Okay. So what about the number needed to treat to have a side effect? So this would be known as the harms, the number needed to treat and and, to create a harm.
Jared St. Clair:One in twenty one, that first number is just twenty one, not two hundred and seventeen, but twenty one. One in twenty one experience pain from muscle damage, and one in two hundred and four developed diabetes mellitus, type two diabetes. Now let's talk about that for a minute. Two hundred and seventeen was the number to avoid a heart attack, and two hundred and four is the number to get diabetes as a result of the drug. So in that pool of two hundred and seventeen people, one is gonna get diabetes and one is gonna avoid a heart attack, according to the numbers that we have.
Jared St. Clair:That's kind of crazy if you ask me. Alright. Let's talk a little bit more about that then. There's this number, two hundred. Not how many people need to be treated to avoid a heart attack, but the number of high cholesterol, what's considered high cholesterol.
Jared St. Clair:And I decided to investigate, play a little game. I do this sometimes, it's actually quite entertaining, and I've used it for, vitality radio podcast before. You've all heard of ChatGPT, maybe you've used it, maybe you haven't. Maybe you've heard that artificial intelligence is not exactly unbiased. Okay?
Jared St. Clair:It's influenced, we'll say. Maybe you heard about what happened when people started to plug in, you know, founding fathers into the Google AI. Well, ChatGPT also influenced by whoever writes the program, right? I don't understand how all that stuff works, but I do know that it comes from humans originally, this artificial intelligence, and therefore it does have some bias. So it's sometimes fun to ask artificial intelligence some questions about this kind of stuff.
Jared St. Clair:So I asked this question, is there any evidence that cholesterol over 200 is unhealthy? And if so, where is that evidence? CHAT GPT said, yes, there is evidence that cholesterol levels over 200, particularly for l for sorry, LDL cholesterol can be associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The evidence comes from various studies and guidelines that examine the relationship between cholesterol levels and heart health. Then it laid out a bunch of studies and a bunch of guidelines, none of which, not a single one had anything associated with 200 being a number that had any clinical significance at all.
Jared St. Clair:And so I asked another question. None of that specifically mentions proof that the number 200 is a problem. So I guess it was more of a statement, but that's what I punched back with at ChatGPT. None of that specifically mentions proof that the number 200 is a problem. And ChatGPT said, you're right.
Jared St. Clair:The evidence typically focuses on the association between high cholesterol levels and cardiovascular risk, rather than specifying exact thresholds like 200 as a definitive cutoff. However, the number 200 for total cholesterol is often referenced in clinical guidelines and studies as a threshold that warrants attention. Now, first, I want to thank CHAT GPT and whoever created it, for recognizing that I was right, right? So since we didn't get that much out of them, okay? But really, I digress.
Jared St. Clair:Interesting thing though, right? Because I said the first question was this, is there any evidence that cholesterol over 200 is unhealthy? And the answer was an unequivocal, yes. There is evidence. The cholesterol levels over 200 can be a problem right?
Jared St. Clair:And then I said, but the evidence you laid out doesn't actually give me any actual evidence of that none of that specifically mentions it and then it backtracks a little bit says, yeah, you're right. It doesn't mention it, but we have all of these guidelines that indicate that it's a problem. So what is ChatGPT trying to say? Well, unfortunately, it's the same thing that doctors are often saying. Well, we have these guidelines and if you're over 200, you have high cholesterol.
Jared St. Clair:Well, why? Where did that number 200 come from? So I decided to ask chat g p t another question because I knew that at one point I couldn't remember what year it was but I knew at one point that 02/1950 was the number and then it dropped down to 200, and actually I knew there was something in between it turns out it was 02/1940. So it went from February to February down to February And I wanted to understand why, because everything I've ever heard or read up to this point indicated that there really wasn't any great hard evidence to indicate that 200 was more danger or sorry, safer than two fifty and therefore, we needed to lower the number again. So the question I asked was, when did the recommendation change from two fifty total to 200?
Jared St. Clair:ChatGPT said, the recommendation to lower the threshold for total cholesterol from two fifty to 200 reflects evolving understanding and evidence about the impact of cholesterol on cardiovascular health. This change, formalized in 02/2001, aimed to better identify and manage individuals at risk of heart disease by setting a more proactive target for cholesterol levels. Subsequent guidelines have further refined approaches to managing cholesterol and cardiovascular risk with a greater focus on LDL cholesterol and overall risk management. Now, I don't know what that means to you but I can tell you what it means to me. There's no evidence that 200 cholesterol is safer than 250 cholesterol especially when you look at drugs that work.
Jared St. Clair:Statin drugs do their job. They reduce cholesterol and generally get it under 200, which is where your doctor is probably telling you he wants your cholesterol to be. These drugs work. They get the number down but the number needed to treat is two hundred and seventeen people before one person avoids a heart attack and in that group, one person will also develop diabetes because of the cholesterol drug. So the question is, would two fifty be a healthier number than two hundred?
Jared St. Clair:You know what? We don't know. Nobody's funding that study. Nobody's funding a study at 300 either or three fifty or 400. There we we just don't have that.
Jared St. Clair:Most of the studies are observational. They stem primarily from something called the Framingham, studies, which were an absolute joke of a set of studies way back in the sixties. These are the ones that told us that margarine would be healthier than butter. Okay. Same studies.
Jared St. Clair:That's where a lot of this stuff about cholesterol comes from. We're talking ancient history and bad studies in the first place. So hopefully you're understanding and I'm painting a pretty good picture of why I have an issue with the whole hypothesis of cholesterol, not just statin drugs themselves. The question is, with all the side effects of statin drugs, which are one in twenty one people to experience a side effect, but one in two hundred and seventeen to experience a benefit, okay, then what are we doing here? Why is your doctor freaking out when your cholesterol is above 200?
Jared St. Clair:It's not because there's excellent evidence that supports that that's a problem, not that I can find. In fact, there are many books written on this subject including one called The Cholesterol Hoax you might want to look up. And again, I'll reiterate, I'm not your doctor. And frankly, I think your doctor is probably doing exactly what he or she thinks that is best for you because they've been told that they should be scared of cholesterol over 200. But who's telling them that?
Jared St. Clair:Who's actually telling them that? Well, it's interesting because as I pushed along further with ChatGPT, they cited a study that was done by a pharmaceutical company on a statin drug, and it was the closest thing they could come to evidence and it still didn't provide evidence. Not anything concrete and certainly nothing close to, hey, 200 is dangerous and under 200 is safe. The pharmaceutical companies are the ones that benefit from putting as many people on statins as they possibly can and reducing the number from two fifty down to two forty down to two hundred achieved a great great level of success in getting more Americans on statins. As I said, we're talking about a hypothesis a hypothesis that is yet to be proven.
Jared St. Clair:The cholesterol hypothesis is this It's also known as the lipid hypothesis, a scientific theory proposing that elevated levels of cholesterol in the blood, particularly LDL cholesterol, are a primary cause of arthrosclerosis and cardiovascular diseases such as heart attacks and strokes. That's the theory, the hypothesis. It's yet to be proven. So here we are at the end of the conversation about statins and you may be sitting here wondering, okay, so what do I do? Do do I lower my cholesterol?
Jared St. Clair:Do I not lower my cholesterol? And it's a great question. And people ask me, well, what would you do if you're because my cholesterol, personally, last time I had it checked, was under the number that would be cause for concern for a doctor. Now I can tell you that my doctor probably wouldn't be that concerned even if it was above that, but I I don't remember where I was. I was one eighty something on my total cholesterol, and my HDL was very good.
Jared St. Clair:My triglycerides were where they wanted me and all this kind of stuff. So I don't have the problem, quote unquote problem. I'm not convinced that it is a problem necessarily, but, I've never been prescribed a statin drug. If my cholesterol was two fifty, if my cholesterol was 300, would I go on a statin drug? Well, based on the evidence that I have, no.
Jared St. Clair:I wouldn't. But I might want to balance my lipid levels. I might especially if my triglycerides were higher, my HDL wasn't high enough or something like that because I do believe that higher HDL is a good thing based on the research that I've done. And I have people ask me that all the time and again, I have to always throw out the caveat that, you know, I'm I'm not your doctor, it's not my, position, to inform you on how to do this. And frankly, I think this is maybe where the whole thing kind of falls apart in modern medicine in America is that the position that your doctor finds himself in oftentimes, I think, is almost an unenviable position when a patient comes in and just does what they're told without doing their research, the doctor can only do what they're trained to do, which is to prescribe that medicine, because they can actually get in trouble if they don't prescribe that medicine.
Jared St. Clair:It's called the standard of care. I've talked about it before on this show. Maybe I'll do a whole show on that. But it's not really your doctor's decision either. Right?
Jared St. Clair:Your doctor is there to prescribe things for you based on diagnosing things for you. It is your position ultimately to decide what you actually do with anything I say, with anything a doctor says, with anything you read in a book or hear on a podcast or watch on YouTube. And this is why I am hoping that this show and this series of shows on Suppressive Medicine will give you some of the ammo that you need to feel comfortable in doing what you decide to do in the end. Whether that's going on a statin drug, whether that's going on something like Berberine. So let's talk about that.
Jared St. Clair:If you decide that you are in a position where you'd like to maybe balance your cholesterol levels a little bit or maybe you'd like to bring them down a little bit. Maybe you're convinced that high cholesterol is a problem. I'm gonna tell you right now, I'm not convinced that it's a problem. I I simply am not convinced. I can't see the evidence that indicates that it is.
Jared St. Clair:But again, that's where I am coming from and from the position that I stand in right here speaking into this microphone. If you decide that you are concerned, then what do you do if you're concerned about taking a statin or maybe you've taken a statin and it's caused issues for you. Well, I think berberine is the thing that is the most obvious, alternative. And interestingly enough, to their credit, I've had multiple people who now have come in, who have told their doctor they're not interested in a statin drug and would like to do something natural, who's their doctor has then prescribed or recommended, I guess, berberine. So let's talk about how berberine works from a mechanism of action standpoint.
Jared St. Clair:Okay? Because I think this is really, really important. We talked about the mechanism of action for the statin drug. Let's talk about what Berberine does because while they both can reduce cholesterol, they do it differently. Berberine, actually increases the expression of LDL receptors on the surface of liver cells.
Jared St. Clair:This promotes the clearance of LDL cholesterol from the bloodstream leading to lower plasma LDL, cholesterol levels. So it actually essentially assists the body in moving cholesterol along. It also and this is maybe the one that people are the most excited about Berberine, actually helps with something known as AMPK, a m p k. Okay. It activates that AMPK, which is Adenosine Monophosphate Activated Protein Kinase.
Jared St. Clair:Okay? That's why they call it AMPK. That's an enzyme that plays a crucial role in cellular energy homeostasis. Activation of AMPK inhibits the activity of that HMG COA but from a different mechanism. It's a different mechanism and that's a really important thing.
Jared St. Clair:They haven't found that reduction of HMG CoA, which is what statins do is necessarily a bad thing. That reducing HMG CoA is necessarily a bad thing unless it gets cholesterol too low, which is kind of interesting and I think this is a really really important thing because we know there is some very good clinical evidence that cholesterol that dips below one fifty can actually be more dangerous than cholesterol that raises above 200 or even 300 according to the research that I've read. And so the question is all still about balance. It's always about balance when it comes to health. But why is AMPK such a really, really awesome tool to increase in the body?
Jared St. Clair:The reason is because a, yes, it can lower cholesterol, but what I found and this is really really important too is that we do have to be cautious of too low cholesterol and it appears that statins because they just turn this enzyme off over and over again can lead to too low cholesterol. In fact, there are some people that I've talked to get on a lower dose of a statin because their cholesterol is actually dipping too low. Sadly, I've talked to people whose cholesterol is under one fifty and their doctors leaving them at the same dose of the statin drug, which to me indicates it's a it's a problem. That's all I can say because the evidence of too low cholesterol for all of the reasons we talked about at the top of the show is pretty strong. We have to be really cautious about overdoing the low cholesterol thing.
Jared St. Clair:It appears that by bumping AMPK up, Berberine can reduce that enzyme that, makes cholesterol but it seems to be able to do it in, I guess the best way I can put it as a responsible way. It doesn't seem to have the ability to drop cholesterol too low. Now, I would still recommend that you're keeping an eye on your cholesterol levels if you are using Berberine for this purpose for sure. But, I haven't seen it in in in my experience with people that I've worked with. But why is AMPK at a higher level a good thing?
Jared St. Clair:Well, because it actually helps to fight obesity. Low AMPK activity can contribute to the development of obesity by impairing the regulation of energy balance, decreasing fat oxidation and promoting fat storage. So higher AMPK, good if you're trying to fight obesity. Type two diabetes. Now, remember, cholesterol meds, it takes one person in every or sorry, two hundred and four people for one person to develop type two diabetes because of a statin drug, but AMPK enhances insulin sensitivity and glucose uptake in tissues such as muscle and liver.
Jared St. Clair:Reduced AMPK activity is associated with insulin resistance, which is a hallmark of type two diabetes. So, one of the beauties of Berberine as a cholesterol, answer is that it's also really really great for blood sugar and prevention of type two diabetes. It also appears that higher AMPK actually can reduce the risk of atherosclerosis. It can also reduce hypertension or high blood pressure and it helps to benefit and and reduce fatty liver disease. There's even some evidence that higher AMPK can reduce the risk of Alzheimer's and the risk of certain types of cancer.
Jared St. Clair:It also plays a major role in mitochondrial function therefore, the overall energy of the body at the cellular level. So having higher AMPK is a really good thing and that's how Berberine works. So I like that a little better than the alternative of how the statin works and it does seem to work more in concert with the body as opposed to in defiance of how the body wants to work. Okay. So the benefits of Berberine are pretty simple.
Jared St. Clair:There's actually clinical studies showing that it works as well as Lipitor in many cases. It does reduce LDL cholesterol and it does tend to reduce triglycerides in most studies and in some studies, it's been shown to actually increase HDL otherwise known as good cholesterol. And the big side effect and it's a big one it's a big one okay is gastrointestinal issues such as constipation, diarrhea and abdominal pain. Same side effects that statins can have for some people And I I said it's a big one and and this is why I'm saying it. Nobody wants abdominal pain.
Jared St. Clair:Okay? I get it. I've recommended so much Berberine over the years and it is an issue for a very small percentage of the people that we sell it to. I don't know what the percentage is. We do have some people that come back from time to time and say, hey, Berberine really upsets my stomach.
Jared St. Clair:Here's what's really cool. In recent years, really in about the last year, many companies have come out with what are called either liposomes or phytosomes of Berberine that you can take a lower dose like five hundred milligrams a day instead of fifteen hundred milligrams a day and it eliminates the problem with stomach upset. So if you've tried Berberine and it bothers your stomach or if you're concerned that it could bother your stomach, maybe you have a sensitive stomach and you're interested in trying Berberine, then get a Liposomal Berberine or a Phytosome. I think they're pretty equal, in my book in terms of our customer feedback and vitality. They've been great and I've yet to have a single person say that they caused any kind of stomach upset at all.
Jared St. Clair:So that pretty much alleviates the side effect issue. So, I think we've come to the end of the show here and I just want to wrap it up by saying this. In pharmacy today in America, what I see is what I call medical whack a mole. It's when you are given a mallet, which is the drug to smack down a symptom, which is the mole if you know about that arcade game from years gone by, and you hit one mole and another mole pops up somewhere else. So we're suppressing one symptom, we're creating another symptom.
Jared St. Clair:The reason for that is pretty simple. We're pushing down and pushing against the natural way that our body wants to function. And instead of supporting the body's function, we are actually thwarting the body's function through these pharmaceuticals. If we can learn to support the body's function through either a change in diet, a change in exercise, movement, even what we can do with our minds and our mindset about our illnesses. There's so many different things can that can be done, to support the body's natural function.
Jared St. Clair:And if needed, we can support it also through natural means such as something like Berberine. To me, it's just logical that if on the one side, we're suppressing a symptom but not looking at the root cause, and it is a little different with statins because the root cause of high cholesterol, as they call it, we don't even really know. It's hereditary in some cases. It can be dietary for sure, but nobody quite knows exactly why one person is and one person isn't higher in cholesterol, even in many cases with the exact same diet and it's different also because cholesterol might not even be a problem. Yeah, we want to stop heart attacks and stroke for sure, right?
Jared St. Clair:We know that, but stopping them through getting rid of something that is so powerfully beneficial to the human body seems a little backwards to me. And that's why this episode and the episodes that I'll produce after this episode on these other drugs as we keep going along is called Suppressive Medicine, How Big Pharma and FDA are Getting It Wrong. I hope this has been helpful. Again, remember, it's not medical advice and I really do mean that. Talk with your health care professional.
Jared St. Clair:If you have concerns about your health, that's what they're there for. If you're concerned about your regular doctor and you feel like you need support from somebody who has a more functional medicine, way of doing things, then look up that type of doctor and find someone who jives with the way that you want to take care of your health. If you're constantly beating your head against the wall with your doctor, it may be time to look for someone who can work with you a little bit better. I think I can safely and legally say that. This has not been medical advice.
Jared St. Clair:This has been for informational purposes only. I hope that it was helpful for you. If you enjoyed the content of this show and you'd like to hear more just like it, let us know please. You can reach out to us on Instagram at Vitality Nutrition Bountiful, and you can DM us there. You can also post in our Vitality Radio listeners community.
Jared St. Clair:You can also call us at (801) 292-6662. That's (801) 292-6662. I hope this has been helpful for you. Thank you so much for listening to me. I'll be back in a few days with another episode of Vitality Radio.
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