Product Description

Statins are the so-called wonder drugs widely prescribed to lower blood cholesterol levels and claim to offer unparalleled protection against heart disease. Believed to be completely safe and capable of preventing a whole series of other conditions, they are the most profitable drug in the history of medicine. In this groundbreaking book, GP Malcolm Kendrick exposes the truth behind the hype, revealing: high cholesterol levels don't cause heart disease; a high-fat diet - saturated or otherwise - does not affect blood cholesterol levels; and, the protection provided by statins is so small as to be not worth bothering about for most men and all women.Statins have many more side affects than has been admitted and their advocates should be treated with scepticism due to their links with the drugs' manufacturers.Kendrick lambastes a powerful pharmaceutical industry and unquestioning medical profession, who, he claims, perpetuate the madcap concepts of 'good' and 'bad' cholesterol and cholesterol levels to convince millions of people to spend billions of pounds on statins, thus creating an atmosphere of stress and anxiety - the real cause of fatal heart disease.With clarity and wit, "The Great Cholesterol Con" debunks our assumptions on what constitutes a healthy lifestyle and diet. It is the invaluable guide for anyone who thought there was a miracle cure for heart disease, an appeal to common sense and a controversial and fascinating breakthrough that will set dynamite under the whole area.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14533 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 238 pages

Customer Reviews

If you have been prescribed statins, you owe it your body to read this book
For the newly diagnosed patients with raised cholesterol, who have been prescribed Statin therapy, this book will explain simply, and with great humour, why you ought not to take statins. It explores (and debunks) the current medical gold standards which have been based on rather poor science, since the first major study (Framingham, Mass) was carried out, ostensibly to determine the effects of cholesterol on heart disease. The long-term statin taker could also benefit from reading this book.

You will be surprised at the twists and turns that the medical profession, in conjunction with the large pharmaceutical companies, has taken to preserve the illusion that high cholesterol is a predictor of heart disease. The most startling evidence is that low cholesterol levels are a robust predictor of the risk of dying prematurely.

Dr Kendrick is to be applauded for writing about a complex subject, in terms that any layperson could easily follow. He explains medical jargon simply and summarises each chapter in plain English. If your own personal medical practitioner is banging on about your elevated cholesterol levels and the risks you run of dying from coronary artery disease, you now have the means to prevent yourself being bullied into accepting statin medication.

Information is power and knowledge is the means by which you can wield that power. You deserve the opportunity to take control of your own health... which is far better than letting a drug company decide how you will live your life. The book is very reasonably priced and it does not attempt to sell anything to the reader nor do you have to sign up to any cult.

This book truly deserves to be a best-seller and there should be a copy of it on every medical practitioner's desk.

A tribute to proper science
Despite monumental efforts, cardiovascular disease is still the leading cause of disability and death in many countries. The Great Cholesterol Con by the British physician Dr Malcolm Kendrick will be a very discomforting piece of literature for many of his colleagues. For in this groundbreaking work, Dr Kendrick shows painfully clearly that the medical establishment has been chasing the wrong enemy for over four decades, while the real villain has been staring them right into their faces.

In the first chapters, Dr Kendrick uses plain textbook biochemistry to show that there is no such thing as a `cholesterol level', that there is no thinkable way for the bogyman LDL to cause arterial plaque, that the idea that the `good' HDL could reverse plaques by breaking out incorporated LDL is a perfect example of magic thinking and that the ingestion of saturated fat can not have any influence at all on the amount of any lipoprotein floating around in the blood stream. He presents statistics from the WHO ("Not the pop band, but the World Health Organisation") that show that countries with the lowest saturated fat intake invariably have a much higher cardiovascular heart disease mortality than the countries with the highest saturated fat intake.

After describing in detail why statin therapy probably does more harm than good in the general population, Dr Kendrick explains the observation that people with inherited super high LDL levels (familial hypercholesteraemia or FH) indeed do have a substantially increased risk of dying of cardiovascular disease. In the land of FH, children aged ten die of massive heart attacks (although others live happily to be 104...) Even to those who clearly understand that the cholesterol hypothesis must be utter bonkers, made up in the minds of the worlds most gifted fairyologists, this has always been a hard nut to crack. To many doctors, the excess pathology in the FH population is the kind of Aha experience that overrules all the contradicting evidence. Children aged five get massive heart attacks, aha! Astatinate, astatinate! Aha!

To speak with Dr Kendrick: "And Aha to you too!" Once again, it's not what it looks like. Actually, it's a hell of a lot more complicated than so. To begin with, many individuals with FH not only have elevated levels of harmless LDL, they also have higher levels of lipoprotein a, most often called Lp(a). This is ordinary LDL, with a slightly different protein coat. Lp(a) - which is never measured in ordinary cholesterol tests - is the only cholesterol containing vehicle that actually is atherogenic. Extremely so. It is a potent clotting factor. Once incorporated in clots, it makes them as robust as concrete, keeping them out of reach for natural clot dissolving agents. Secondly, many hypercholesteraemiacs (but not all of them) suffer from a whole range of other clotting abnormalities. These people should be identified and subsequently treated for their life threatening clotting disorders, not for their elevated LDL levels.

Then what is it that really causes this dreaded `killer of the Western world'? Well, a huge part of the cause is in our brain, or more precisely, in our nervous system. Perceived stress - especially the prolonged stress brought on by social dislocation, lack of control, insufficient reward - disrupts the HPA-axis: an intricate and highly complicated set of hormonal feed back loops that allows us to properly deal with life's challenges. By constantly pushing the HPA-axis over the edge, we are effectively giving ourselves various degrees of `Cushing's Disease,' a malady characterised by chronic overproduction of the stress hormone cortisol. Cushing's Disease, invariably ruins the cardiovascular system. This is well documented. The sub clinical form - which is induced by such apparently unrelated stressors as smoking, cocaine or steroid abuse, discrimination and spinal cord injury - is no less dangerous. Kendrick explains exactly how this works. His model also for the first time explains the distribution of cardiovascular heart disease in time and place. Why did the Fins once have the world's highest heart disease mortality? Did anybody know that Finland endured the greatest forced relocation in the recent European history?

Once you have read the first lines, you will read the whole book, probably right on the spot. It is extremely information dense, so it definitely helps that Malcolm Kendrick is one of the better writers of our time, gifted with an ultra dry Scottish wit. I challenge everybody in the field - cardiologists, GP's, lipid researchers, health insurers, nutritionists and journalists - to carefully read this book and shoot at its flaws.

I expect a deafening silence. It requires a great deal of courage to admit that one plus one is two, when you have always maintained it is three.

Melchior Meijer
Medical reporter
The Netherlands

Amusing destruction of Statins
Having done my own research into cholesterol and statins, I thoroughly concur with this book. I have believed for a number of years that big pharma have a vested interest and are big enough and powerful enough to skew research in their favour. After all business is busines! I've also come across more than a few people who have become weak, insomniac, fatigued and with muscle cramps. One who lady kept trying to get her cholesterol down to below 2, ended up in hospital totally distraught. The doctor explained her folly. Anyone who doubts the validity of this book, just do your own research - if you are able (it's avery complex area). You will find dirty tricks and "massaged" results all over the place.
At a nutritional therapist I cannot agree with Dr. Kendricks stance on diet. He is totally wrong to think it does not matter - but that is his view. Really he is only talking about the saturated fat/cholesterol link. The other foods in your diet do make a big difference - for example high sodium/low potassium diets may increase BP in some people. There can be no doubt that high BP makes CHD worse.

I thught his point on side effects was excellent. Large studies do not monitor comparatively minor side effects like fatigue, increased diarrhoea, constipation etc., so if the treatment induces them in trials, it will during treatment. It seems that statins can do this.

On the point about going to a doctor to be healed. Doctors are not trained in healing, whatever you might think: they are trained in treatment. There is a big difference: it means they "manage" the problem. Healing comes from within the body and that means correcting the root cause (if it can be found).

I found the book highly oringinal, amusing and readable, making a complex subject accessible to the lay-person.

As an aside by eating a healthy diet including meat, cream, butter, full fat cheese & milk my LDL cholesterol (so called bad) dropped from 4 to 3 and my HDL (so called good) increased from 1 to 1.2. So how is it sat fat increases cholesterol?