what to say to doctor who wants to put you on statins
Dr. Elizabeth Klodas is a practicing cardiologist in Minneapolis and the creator of Stride One Foods. This piece represents her views and not necessarily those of CNN.
(CNN)High cholesterol? Here's a pill. High blood pressure level? Here's two pills. High claret carbohydrate? Here's two pills and an injection. This is what many doctors routinely do without always addressing why the cholesterol, claret pressure or blood sugar is abnormal in the first place.
I used to exercise this way until I realized that all I was doing was covering upward the downstream effects of poor diet with a bunch of drugs, instead of changing the food.
I am a practicing cardiologist. I trained at some of the finest medical institutions in the world, including Mayo Dispensary and Johns Hopkins, and accept been repeatedly recognized for not bad patient care. But what I really want to achieve professionally is to put myself out of work.
Unfortunately, cardiologists have endless job security. And that's considering nosotros're treating the wrong thing. My waiting room was full of patients whose numbers I had made perfect but who still looked sick and felt terrible. Some even felt worse with all the drugs I had put them on. No cures, but a neverending revolving door of follow-upwards visits. This is not why I went to medical school.
Yet no one seemed to be doing anything about this or fifty-fifty acknowledging it. So I became obsessed with finding a better solution and founded a company that formulates foods to help lower cholesterol, backed by pharmaceutical-level scientific discipline.
At that place may be 30,000 food items in the average grocery shop, only none of them has been subjected to any real scientific scrutiny. They bear all sorts of checkmarks and heart symbols, only that tells merely role of the story. For case, a cereal might comprise fiber -- and boldly tout the ability of this nutrient to lower cholesterol -- but the fine print reveals that a serving of the cereal also delivers the added sugar equivalent of three cookies. Any positive health effect of the cobweb is completely negated. Merely how is the average consumer supposed to know this? They're non. They're simply supposed to like the sense of taste and experience proficient about buying that cereal. My patients may have been trying to "swallow better," but they were getting duped.
Two decades agone, the National Institutes of Wellness cholesterol guidelines mandated that changing diet should be tried for 3 months as the first step in treating high cholesterol, before putting anyone on drugs. Simply today, many of my peers expressed skepticism that a food-based solution could work.
It took more than lxxx,000 hours of grooming for me to become a cardiologist. How much of that time was spent on diet? Nothing.
Treatment guidelines, representing the standard of care, only pay lip service to diet. For example, the American Heart Clan'due south latest cholesterol management guideline is 120 pages long. How much of that is devoted to diet? 1 paragraph. The guideline mostly instructs providers on which patient to put on which drug and at what dose. Children as young equally 10, co-ordinate to the guidelines, can exist started on statin medications such equally Lipitor and Crestor.
In addition, physicians know only the prescription model. They are taught that the only truly valid proof of efficacy is a clinical trial and that everything else is theorize. That's why pharma rules, even though the literature is full of data about the health benefits of various foods. Food does not take "dosing data."
Did you know that doctors are monitored according to whether they prescribe medications? If I don't follow the cholesterol guidelines by prescribing statins, insurers will send letters scolding me. If I don't talk to you near the cholesterol-lowering effects of walnuts and oat bran, nobody cares. Physicians even become paid more than when a drug is prescribed. A medical run across that generates a prescription is considered more complex, which qualifies for higher reimbursement. In dissimilarity, if a md uses some of the very limited time with patients to talk about antioxidants and omega-iii fat acids, they go zip more.
My solution is to give physicians, insurers and especially patients an alternative food-based option for cholesterol lowering that could compete with drugs on every level. These foods sense of taste great and are formulated using only health-promoting ingredients. They are dosed and measured and equally easy to prescribe and use as medications. Almost of import, they yield clinically meaningful cholesterol reductions as confirmed by a clinical trial.
Given that 70 million Americans have high cholesterol, I approached large nutrient companies and investors, naively thinking they would honey my idea and want to assistance. They did not. Food manufacturers thought our ingredients (such as existent almonds, walnuts, pecans and blueberries) were as well expensive. They wanted to supersede them with flavorings, bogus sweeteners and "fruit bits." Investors thought the clinical trial we proposed doing to confirm efficacy was too uncertain. They told us we needed to accept patents so we could charge prices like the pharmaceutical companies. No wonder this had never been washed before. There was simply not enough profit in information technology. Patient health, information technology seems, is not very valuable.
Undeterred, my supporters and I pushed forrard and, supported by grant funding, conducted a trial in two countries testing our foods in statin intolerant individuals. These were people who are candidates for statin drugs just either can't or won't have the medications due to side furnishings, such as musculus aches. The only instruction to the written report participants was: "Swallow these foods twice per day instead of something you're eating already," without making any other lifestyle changes. Literally every bit simple as "take this pill twice per twenty-four hour period."
The result was that 20%, 30%, even close to 40% cholesterol reductions were constitute in many individuals in just 30 days. This information was submitted at an American Heart Association meeting and will exist submitted for publication. These medication-level cholesterol responses were obtained with food, without the need for dietary overhauls or practice routines. They don't just correspond an option for the estimated twenty million Americans who are statin intolerant and accept no other solutions but for millions more who demand to lower their cholesterol but don't demand stains.
As with medications, not everyone's cholesterol will respond every bit to a nutrient intervention. Some people should be on statins even if their cholesterol is perfect. But given that it takes but a month of dietary modify to determine whether you're a food responder, doesn't it make sense to requite people the chance to at to the lowest degree try a validated food intervention before assigning them to a lifetime of pills? Especially since nutrient doesn't have any side effects, just side benefits such every bit lower blood pressure, amend blood sugar control, weight loss and feeling ameliorate.
Food is the comprehensive solution to a circuitous problem. And it just might put me -- and pharmaceutical companies -- out of business.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/08/health/cardiologist-statin-cholesterol-mission/index.html
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