Dear Healthy Friend,

My family has a history of cholesterol. My father, my sister, my grandmother and if I looked further down the line, I would probably come up with a long list of cholesterol sufferers in my tree. But never fear, as there are meds that can help control it...  But what if cholesterol isn't the only thing we should be looking at... What if we should be concentrating more on our hearts?

Jenny Thompson reveals the research that challenges the conventional ways of thinking about this deadly disease...

In the name of good health,

Taryn Strugnell
Managing Editor of Nutrition & Healing

P.S: Send to a friend! Please send your friends and family these health tips and advice! And if they want to subscribe all they need to do is click here!

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New study challenges current cholesterol guidelines
Jenny Thompson
Director, Health Sciences Institute
 
"We've been worrying too much about people's cholesterol level and not enough about their overall risk of heart disease."

Wow! That's refreshing!

It's also a surprise, coming from deep in the medical mainstream - a professor of internal medicine who's also director of the Veterans Affairs Centre for Health Services Research and Development.

He's Dr Rodney A. Hayward and he recently led an Annals of Internal Medicine study that inspired him to add this remark: "Our fixation on just one factor, LDL cholesterol, is leading us to often treat the wrong people."

Well, welcome to the conversation, Dr Hayward! I mean, you've got to like a conventional doctor who appears to be bucking the system and shouting "Enough!" to the insane overuse of statin drugs.

Dr Hayward and his team examined several statin trials conducted between 1994 and 2009. They focused on two different treatment approaches:

1) "Treat-to-target" - an approach that uses statins to force LDL cholesterol to less than 70 for high-risk patients and no higher than 130 for people not at risk

2) "Tailored treatment" - an approach that gives far less importance to LDL level, while weighing multiple risk factors to develop a variety of treatments including exercise, diet modification, etc.

Results showed that tailored treatment prevented more coronary artery disease events while treating fewer subjects with high-dose statins. The authors wrote: "No circumstances were found in which a treat-to-target approach was preferable to tailored treatment."

All this sound reasoning about statins is making me dizzy!

In a University of Michigan press release, Dr Hayward said, "The bottom line message - knowing your overall heart attack risk is more important than knowing your cholesterol level."

And if only - IF ONLY - he had just buttoned it up right there, we'd have a happy ending.

But he didn't.

He added: "If your overall risk is elevated, you should probably be on a statin regardless of what your cholesterol is and if your risk is very high, should probably be on a high dose of statin."

Noooooo! So close.

Come on, Dr Hayward! After the results of your study, after making so much sense, why in the world would you recommend a statin? Even when cholesterol is LOW? Just because risk is ELEVATED? Complete nonsense!

Years ago, the Framingham Heart Study showed that total cholesterol levels below 160 caused heart disease problems to RISE! So it's been well known for decades that low, lower, lowest is not good, better, best.

More recently, a team of US and Swedish researchers examined about 20 years of medical records for elderly subjects and found that elevated levels of total cholesterol recorded while subjects were in their early 70s were linked with REDUCED dementia risk in their later 70s. And elevated cholesterol throughout their 70s was associated with reduced dementia risk throughout their 80s.

In a news interview, one member of the US team, a Johns Hopkins researcher, noted that we can no longer rely on oversimplified answers, "for example, that high cholesterol is always bad and low cholesterol is always good."

Maybe there's hope for these mainstreamers after all.

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It's just not worth it...

Q: I hear about all these celebrities getting collagen shots in their lips. What exactly is in these shots and is it safe?

Dr. Wright: There are actually several different kinds of collagen used for these purposes, but cow collagen is probably the most common.

Cow collagen is very similar to human collagen, but it's not exactly the same. Some people's bodies might react to the slight differences by making antibodies to the cow collagen and these antibodies could theoretically react with the person's own tissues, which could result in serious autoimmune problems.

So, like Botox, even though cow collagen has the FDA stamp of approval, I recommend you stay away from it. Just as horse oestrogen belongs in horses, cow collagen should stay in cows.