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Statins Cause Killer Workouts – Literally!

May 1, 2012 by admin in Pharmaceuticals with 484 Comments

Statins are in conflict with one of the most important heart-healthy habits: exercise. The more you exercise while taking statins, the more likely you’ll suffer fatal effects.

Statins and exercising can be a deadly combination.

One of the best things you can do to decrease the risk of heart disease is exercise. However, for people taking statins, exercise can be dangerous. Statins are known to have cytotoxic effects. Those poisonous effects are multiplied with exercise, and can even lead to death.

Statins are symptomatic of modern medicine’s penchant for treating people who have no disease. People with no signs of heart trouble are being put on statins simply because they’ve reached a certain age or because they’re found to have a marker for heart disease—in spite of the fact that most people who suffer from heart attacks don’t have those disease markers, making the suggestion of cause-and-effect obviously nonsense.

A recent study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology has documented that rats given statins are less capable of exercise. The statin-drugged animals became exhausted from treadmill running far more quickly. Oxidative stress, a strong indicator of cell damage, was found to be 60% greater in statin-drugged rats. They were unable to store as much glycogen or carbohydrates in muscles, which would strongly impact exercise ability. The function of mitochondria, the energy-production plants in every cell, was harmed, causing energy output to drop by 25%.

Another study published in Lipids in Health and Disease discusses the case of a healthy man who was a running and track athlete. As the result of a routine blood test, he was put on statins. He soon reported muscle aches. His white blood cell count went up, which is an indication of tissue damage. When he had influenza, his muscle pain was worse than usual with the disease, and his recovery time was longer.

A point that must be considered is that muscle damage from statins does not always heal after stopping the drugs. It can be permanent. Therefore, you must not assume that you can simply stop taking them if you develop problems, because it may be too late by the time you know.

Statins also put extra stress on the kidneys and can lead to kidney failure, which can end in death. Even the official Lipitor (atorvastatin) website acknowledges this:

LIPITOR can cause serious muscle problems that can lead to kidney problems, including kidney failure.

The risk of muscle damage increases dramatically, as much as 75%, when athletes take statins. Thus, the best thing you can do to prevent heart disease, exercising, could be proscribed if you take the drug that so-called experts think everyone over the age of 50 should be taking. They have even suggested treating the drug like a condiment and handing them out at fast food joints!

Your Choice—Not the Doctor’s

Too many people think that anything their doctors tell them i equivalent to orders. But the fact is that your doctors are not the experts they claim to be. They even follow fads in their treatment and advice:

The massive use and misuse of antibiotics is a fad, and it’s resulted in new and much more virulent diseases. E. coli was not a disease until about 1983. Before that, it was never anything but a benign bacteria that lives—which we require—in our intestinal tracts. This overuse was always a fad, with even minor self-limiting ailments being treated with them “just in case”.
Hormone replacement therapy was a fad—one that was pressed on nearly all women as they approaced menopause. The number of women who’ve been killed by that fad hasn’t been totaled.
The routine treatment of children entering a hospital with shock is still to give them fluids intravenously, in spite of the fact that it provides no benefit in such cases and literally kills 3 out of 100. Such a treatment that was never examined and only presumed to be beneficial can only be called a fad.

Statins are also a fad, supported only by junk science, not by legitimate research. So, it’s up to you to decide what’s best.

You can either go along with what your doctor orders, or you can take a holistic view of your health. Take statins, with all the risks they entail and their nearly-complete lack of benefit, or you can undertake a more healthy lifestyle. Excercise. Eat a good diet*. Learn to manage your stress. Remember that health doesn’t come from a pill, though doctors’ and pharmaceutical companies’ profits certainly do.

Finally, remember that the only person who lives inside your skin is you. No one else will live with the results of your health decisions.

*Even if they were trained in nutrition, with their track record on just about everything else health-related, it’s hard to imagine how doctors could be good sources of diet information. Follow their dietary advice at your own risk.

Photo by Ambro (filter applied)