Trying to stay healthy can seem like a full-time job sometimes, especially during a pandemic.

But I'm here to make that goal a little easier.

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

Did you know that the cholesterol-lowering drug Lippertour has become the best-selling drug of all time?

That's a lot of Lippertour.

Today, we take a close look at how to calculate your own personal heart disease risk and whether or not you should take a statin yourself.

The muscle-related side effects from cholesterol-lowering statin drugs are often severe enough to make patients stop taking them.

Of course, the side effects could be coincidental or psychosomatic and have nothing to do with a drug, given that many clinical trials show such side effects are rare.

Of course, it's also possible that those clinical trials funded by the drug companies themselves under-reported the side effects.

The bottom line is that there's an urgent need to establish the true incidence of statin side effects.

What proportion of symptomatic side effects in patients taking statins are genuinely caused by the drug?

Even in big pharma-funded trials, they found only a small minority of symptoms to be attributable to statins, researchers found that those taking statins were significantly more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those randomized to placebo sugar pills.

Why?

We're still not exactly sure, but statins may have the double whammy effect of impairing insulin secretion from the pancreas, as well as diminishing insulin's effectiveness by increasing insulin resistance.

Even short-term statin use may approximately double the odds of developing diabetes and diabetic complications.

And if that's not bad enough, this increased risk per se for years even after the statins were stopped.

Now, in view of the overwhelming benefit of statins in the reduction of cardiovascular events, the number one killer of men and women, any increase in risk of diabetes, only our seventh leading cause of death, would be outweighed by the cardiovascular benefits, right?

That's a false dichotomy. We don't have to choose between heart disease and diabetes. We can treat the cause of both with the same diet lifestyle changes.

The diet that can only stop but reverse heart disease is the same one that can also reverse type 2 diabetes. But whatever, for whatever reason, you refuse to change your diet lifestyle.

In that case, what other risks and benefits of starting statins? Don't expect to get the full scoop from your doctor as most seemed clueless about the causal link with diabetes, so only a small fraction even bring it up with their patients.

Overall, in patients for whom statin treatment is recommended by current guidelines, the benefits are said to greatly outweigh the risks, but that's for you to decide.

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