May 2026

WHAT THEY DON'T TELL

US ABOUT HEART DISEASE.

The Great Cholesterol Scam and the Dangers of Statins

  

• There is a widespread belief that elevated cholesterol is the “cause” of cardiovascular disease. However, a large body of evidence shows that there is no association between the two and that the real data show lower cholesterol significantly increases one’s risk of death.
• An alternative model (which the medical industry buried) proposes that the blood clots the body uses to heal arterial damage, once healed, create the characteristic atherosclerotic lesions associated with heart disease.
• The evidence for the blood clot model is much stronger than the cholesterol hypothesis and provides many critical insights for treating heart disease.
• The primary approach to treating heart disease is to prescribe cholesterol lowering statin drugs (to the point, over a trillion dollars have now been spent on them).
• Unfortunately, the benefits of these highly toxic drugs are minuscule (e.g., at best taking them for years extends your life by a few days) and the harms are vast (statins are one of the most common pharmaceuticals that severely injure patients).

Within cardiology, one of the most damaging falsehoods is that cholesterol causes heart disease and that taking statins (or their newer lucrative equivalents), which lower cholesterol, are the key to preventing heart disease. This is because, in addition to those “facts” being incorrect, statins are also some of the most dangerous and widely used pharmaceutical drugs on the market.

Cholesterol and Heart Disease

In the 1960s and 1970s, a debate emerged over what caused heart disease. On one side, John Yudkin effectively argued that the sugar being added to our food by the processed food industry was the chief culprit. On the other side, Ancel Keys (who attacked Yudkin's work) argued that it was due to saturated fat and cholesterol.

Ancel Keys won, Yudkin's work was largely dismissed, and Keys became nutritional dogma. A large part of Key’s victory was based on his study of seven countries (Italy, Greece, Former Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Finland, America, and Japan), which showed that as saturated fat consumption increased, heart disease increased in a linear fashion (see The Great Cholesterol Myth on the website under Archives). However, what many don’t know (as this study is still frequently cited) is that this result was simply a product of the countries Keys chose (e.g., one author illustrated that if Finland, Israel, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France, and Sweden had been chosen, the opposite would have been found).

Fortunately, it gradually became recognized that Ancel Keys did not accurately report the data he used to substantiate his arguments. For example, recently an unpublished 56 month randomized study of 9,423 adults living in state mental hospitals or a nursing home (which made it possible to rigidly control their diets) that Keys was the lead investigator of was unearthed. This study (inconveniently) found that replacing half of the animal (saturated) fats they ate with vegetable oil (e.g., corn oil) lowered their cholesterol, and that for every 30 points it dropped, their risk of death increased by 22 percent (which roughly translates to each 1% drop in cholesterol raising the risk of death by 1%)—so as you can imagine, it was never published.

Note: the author who unearthed that study also discovered another (unpublished) study from the 1970s of 458 Australians, which found that replacing some of their saturated fat with vegetable oils increased their risk of dying by 17.6%

Likewise, recently, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world published internal sugar industry documents. They showed the sugar industry had used bribes to make scientists place the blame for heart disease on fat so Yudkin's work would not threaten the sugar industry. In turn, it is now generally accepted that Yudkin was right, but nonetheless, our medical guidelines are still largely based on Key’s work.

However, despite a significant amount of data that now shows lowering cholesterol is not associated with a reduction in heart disease, the need to lower cholesterol is still a dogma within cardiology.

Note: when people are diabetic (which leads to the liver having to process too much sugar) the liver will convert to fat and then create more cholesterol to transport some of that fat. In these instances, many argue the actual issue is an excess of sugar rather than elevated cholesterol levels it causes. Likewise, despite us endlessly being told to avoid saturated fats, the evidence does not show this prevents death. For example, a large 2025 systematic review found there was no statistically significant benefit to reducing saturated fats and concluded: The findings indicate that a reduction in saturated fats cannot be recommended at present to prevent cardiovascular diseases and mortality.

Statin Marketing

One of the consistent patterns within medicine is that once a drug is identified that can “beneficially” change a number, medical practice guidelines will gradually shift to prioritizing treating that number and before long, rationales will be created that require more and more of the population to be subject to that regimen. In the case of statins, prior to their discovery, it was difficult to reliably lower cholesterol, but once they hit the market, research rapidly emerged stating that cholesterol was more and more dangerous, that lower and lower blood cholesterol levels were needed, and, hence that more and more people needed to be on statins. In 2008-2009, 12% of Americans over 40 reported taking a statin, whereas in 2018-2019, that had increased to 35% of Americans. Given how much these drugs are used, it then raises a simple question—how much benefit do they produce? When independent researchers looked at the published trials (which almost certainly inflated the benefit of statin therapy) they found that taking a statin daily for approximately 5 years resulted in you living, on average, 3-4 days longer. Sadder still, large trials have found this minuscule “benefit” is only seen in men. In short, most of the benefit from statins is from creative ways to rearrange data and causes of death, not any actual benefit.

One of the most unfair things about statins is that the healthcare system decided they are “essential” for your health, so doctors who don’t push them are financially penalized, and likewise patients who don’t take them are as well (e.g., through life insurance premiums).

In addition to doctors being forced to follow these guidelines, patients often are too. Doctors often retaliate against patients who do not take statins (similar to how unvaccinated patients were denied essential medical care during COVID-19). Employers sometimes require cholesterol numbers to meet a certain threshold for employment (although they never did anything on the scale of the COVID-19 vaccine mandates placed on workers around America). Similarly, life insurance policies often penalize those with "unsafe" cholesterol numbers.

Worse still (as the processed food industry intended by creating the war against cholesterol) even if we disagree with this dogma, it’s difficult to boycott it as the entire food supply has replaced healthy saturated fats (e.g., from animals or coconuts) with unhealthy vegetable oils. Fortunately, after decades of work, we’ve managed to bring enough attention to this subject (especially with RFK’s recent support for returning to saturated fats) that market pressure is at last emerging to make seed oil free foods become more widely available to consumers. Likewise, statins are well known for having a high percentage of patients discontinue the drugs due to their side effects (e.g., one large study found 44.7% of older adults discontinue the drugs within a year of starting them, while another large study of adults of all ages found 47% discontinued within a year).

Cholesterol

Cholesterol has a few different essential functions in the body. These include:

• It is the precursor to many different hormones, i.e. Vitamin D and testosterone, for example.
• The brain’s synapses (which, among other things, form memories) require cholesterol to function. Since cholesterol is too big to enter the brain, glial cells (support cells of the nervous system) synthesize it within the brain. Statins, unfortunately, inhibit glial cell production of cholesterol.
• Cognition, in turn, is highly dependent upon cholesterol. For example, one study found that minor cognitive impairment could be detected in 100% of statin users if sufficiently sensitive testing was done (which again illustrates how minor injuries are more common than severe ones). Likewise, a variety of more severe adverse effects on cognition are also observed such as amnesia, forgetfulness, confusion, disorientation, and increased senility.

In addition to cognitive impairment, numerous studies have found a significant association between low or lowered cholesterol levels and violence. Likewise, statin dementia is often characterized by aggression.

CoQ10

CoQ10 is an essential nutrient that both the mitochondria (which power the human body) and the stability of our cell walls depend upon. CoQ10 deficiency caused by statins is generally considered the most common cause of their side effects. This is really sad because those side effects could have been prevented if CoQ10 had been given with the statin. Unfortunately, this is unlikely ever to happen, as doing so would be equivalent to an admission statins could cause harm.

Some of the common energy-related side effects of statin CoQ10 deficiency include:

• Mitochondrial damage
• Lack of Energy 
• Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
• Congestive Heart Failure and Fluid Retention
• Shortness of Breath
• Gout

Some of the side effects of statin CoQ10 deficiency weakening cell wall integrity include:

• Hepatitis (interestingly, the enzyme threshold needed to diagnose statin-induced liver damage was significantly raised after this issue began being commonly reported following statin usage).
• Pancreatitis
• Rhabdomyolysis (rapid breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue)
• Tendon and ligament inflammation and rupture.

Two of the most common consequences of statins’ CoQ10 depletion are myopathy (muscle pain, tiredness, weakness, and cramps) and peripheral neuropathy (numbness, tingling, or burning sensations, particularly in hands and feet). Although myopathy is the most commonly reported side effect of statin usage, much of it (e.g., myositis) goes undetected. This is because the symptoms are often not accompanied by blood work showing muscle enzyme elevations and can only be detected by biopsies (which are rarely done relative to blood work). In many cases, this condition is permanent (one expert in statin injury found it was permanent for 68% of her patients, while another found it was for 25% of his). Sadly, in some cases, like statin neuropathies, the myopathies will continue to progress even if the statin is stopped.

One of the sadder things about statins is how aggressively they are pushed on diabetics (under the logic that since diabetics have an increased risk of heart disease, it is critical they take a statin to prevent them from having a heart attack). To highlight the absurdity of this, statins are well known to significantly increase your risk of diabetes (multiple studies have found this), which is likely due to the statins impairing mitochondrial function. 

The Causes and Treatments of Heart Disease

• Most cardiovascular disease is a result of the blood vessel lining becoming damaged (due to the atherosclerotic lesions) and losing the ability to perform the normal functions (e.g., nitric oxide secretion) that allow it to protect the circulation.
• Inflammation and periods of prolonged and severe stress (e.g., from mental illness, cigarettes, or extreme social oppression) frequently damage the endothelium and hence contribute to heart disease.
• Heart attacks are due to blood clots (which frequently are a result of damaged endothelium) interrupting a critical blood supply to the heart.

Note: statins also to some extent have anti-inflammatory effects and increase endothelial nitric oxide. In turn, it is very likely that many of the (small) benefits attributed to statins are a result of these effects rather than their lowering of blood cholesterol.

Sadly, as you cannot sell drugs for any of these causes of heart disease, they rarely get mentioned and instead almost all of the research and discussions on heart disease are directed at cholesterol.

Pierre Kory, MD, MPA For more information, read: Statins, Cholesterol, and The Real Cause of Heart Disease; A Midwestern Doctor