Health Alert 261
Dear Subscriber:
One thing’s for sure, medicine is still behind the eight ball when it comes to heart disease. The newest ‘breakthrough’ they’re touting in newspapers everywhere is C-reactive protein or CRP for short. The big news is that CRP is more important in dictating heart disease and atherosclerosis than cholesterol. Of course, if you’ve been a long-term subscriber you already knew that from Health Alert 214…
The fact is, CRP is nothing new at all. Why all the attention now? Because pharmaceutical companies are using CRP as a new way to push statin drug therapy.
But the truth is, you don’t need statins to lower your CRP levels or even lower your cholesterol. Today I’m going to reveal what you really should be focusing on if you want to protect yourself from heart disease.
C-reactive protein is a protein secreted by your liver when there’s inflammation in your body. Studies show those with the highest levels of CRP are more than twice as likely to suffer from heart disease, heart attack and stroke, despite whether their cholesterol is high or low.1
I used to measure CRP as a laboratory technologist 25 years ago. Pharmaceutical companies have known about the connection to heart risk for over a decade. But, they kept it under wraps to push cholesterol as the problem.
They’re only promoting CRP now as if it were "new" because they have discovered that their statins can lower CRP too. One of the recent studies (sponsored by Pfizer the maker of the statin Lipitor, of course) shows high doses of statins can lower CRP by 36%.2
This is probably the reason statins lower risk of heart disease since it seems to have nothing to do with the amount of cholesterol lowering. Great news if you’re willing to take on all of the risks associated with statin use– studies link them to liver damage, brain impairment, muscle aches, cancer and even death.3 Fortunately, there’s a much better alternative.
Three doctors at the Cardiovascular Health Center at the Ochsner Clinic Foundation in New Orleans took 277 patients already suffering from coronary heart disease– men and women most doctors would put on statins in the blink of an eye. Instead, these doctors put them on Aerodyne cycles. The results were incredible…
After just three months, these patients experienced significant fat loss and an improved exercise capacity. (What statin can do that?) What’s more, they all experienced a significant decrease in CRP, on average 41%4. Greater than the drop achieved with high dose statins! So before choosing statins for heart health try exercise first, all it takes is just a few minutes each day. Here are some guidelines to get you started:
- Never exercise hard for more than 15 minutes straight– it’s not good for your heart or your waistline. Short bursts will use energy from carbohydrates stored in muscle rather than from fat. Carbs are capable of burning energy at a much higher rate. You then burn much more fat during the recovery period as you replenish the carbs.
- Focus on intensity–that little bit extra you do this week that you didn’t do last week. It can be pace or distance in the same amount of time. It can be resistance, slope or weight. You can begin very light as long as you gradually add resistance or pick up the pace as your capacity increases.
To Your Good Health,
Al Sears MD
Sources:
1. Obesity is the Cause of Most U.S. Liver Damage: Risk of Disease Fourfold Higher in Obese. Mitchel L. Zoler. Family Practice News. July 1, 2004.
2. Sears, A. The Doctor’s Heart Cure Book. Dragon Door Publication: Minnesota. 2004.