He called his daughter and said “I’m not supposed to take CoQ10 anymore.”
“Why?” his daughter, my assistant S.D., asked.
He said, “My doctors told me.”
S.D.’s father had just had triple bypass surgery and was now taking 7 different medications, including a statin drug.
Isn’t that ironic … here’s a nutrient that your body already makes… it’s impossible to be allergic to because it’s already in your body… you don’t get enough of it because we don’t eat the principal source – organ meat – anymore … and there’s never been a single case of CoQ10 ever hurting anyone.
But they say, “Don’t take it.” Yet they’re fine with him taking seven prescriptions.
Now let’s look at the record of the drugs.
The Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS), where people can report the effects of medications to the FDA, shows that just for 2010, there were 471,291 “adverse” events caused by prescription drugs.1
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What’s worse is that 82,724 people died from taking medications in 2010. And the number of deaths and adverse outcomes has increased every year since the FDA started the report system.
The popularity of heart medications comes back to some basic principles. Cardiologists and doctors like these drugs because it means they have a tool in their hands that seemingly cuts the risk of heart disease. All they have to do is write the prescription.
Drug companies like them because they’ve built their company on the revenues from them.
The public likes them because they can now go to the doctor and get a pill that seems to prevent one of their biggest fears – heart disease.
Problem is, it’s not true. You don’t get heart disease because of a deficiency of heart drugs.
But people who have heart disease are likely to be deficient in CoQ10.
That’s because more than any other muscle or organ, your heart relies on CoQ10 for energy. CoQ10 is 200 times more concentrated in heart muscle than in skeletal muscle.
There have been over 100 studies at major universities and hospitals linking CoQ10 deficiency with heart disease. One famous study by pioneering CoQ10 researcher Karl Folkers proved how much energy CoQ10 gives your heart.
He and his colleagues looked at two groups of people having heart surgery. These were people with already diseased and failed hearts. One group was pre-treated with CoQ10 before surgery, and the other got a placebo.
The study found that the people treated with CoQ10 had significantly stronger heartbeats and pumped blood more powerfully. Not only that, but recovery time for the CoQ10 people was short, with no complications. The placebo group took six times as long to recover and had complications.2
It’s almost a willful ignorance for a doctor almost 20 years later not to know why CoQ10 is so important – and that it’s even more so if you’re on heart medications.
In my experience, CoQ10 has worked better than any heart medication I have ever used. Many cases of congestive heart failure appear to be completely resolved after CoQ10.
Many cases of high blood pressure share a similar mechanism. About half of patients coming to me treated with high blood pressure medications have stopped that medication with nothing more than adding CoQ10.
And one of the reasons heart disease and high blood pressure are so common in America is because we are universally deficient in CoQ10.
Very simply, I recommend everyone take the ubiquinol form of CoQ10. Ubiquinol is the form that already has the electrons your body uses for energy. And it’s eight times more powerful than the old form, ubiquinone.
I suggest you get a minimum of 50 mg of ubiquinol CoQ10 every day. If you have high blood pressure, heart disease, high cholesterol, gingivitis, age-related memory loss, chronic fatigue or are a vegetarian, increase your dose to 100 mg of ubiquinol per day.
1. "AERS Patient Outcomes by Year." Adverse Event Reporting System. www.FDA.gov. Accessed March 5, 2013.
2. Judy, W.V., Stogsdill, W.W., Folkers, K., “Myocardial preservation by therapy with coenzyme Q10 during heart surgery,” Clin. Investig. 1993;71(8 Suppl):S155-61