Forget Cholesterol – Think Heart "Inflammation"

If you listen to all the Lipitor drug ads, fighting cholesterol is all it takes to fight heart disease. “NOT SO” say the most learned minds on the subject.

According to all of the latest research, the real danger it turns out is inflammation in the form of two frightening compounds found in the blood of heart attack victims:

  • Homocysteine
  • C-Reactive Protein

And you don’t get these compounds from certain foods – your body makes them in response to other substances.

Why don’t doctors know about all this? If they do, why aren’t they telling us?

And you don’t need a drug to control Homocysteine and C-Reactive Protein.

Checking your Cholesterol is so Last Century!

For much of the 20th century, doctors and patients tracked the ups and downs of cholesterol levels to determine the risk of having a heart attack. But the evidence supporting the link between high cholesterol and heart disease has been, from the start, pretty flimsy. Certainly, people with extremely high cholesterol levels or familial hypercholesterolemia do have a higher risk of heart disease. But elevated cholesterol levels appear to be more of a symptom than a cause – a sign that something, somewhere is awry.


In the late 1990s, researchers at the Harvard Medical School were on the trail of a new, and more likely, factor in coronary artery disease (CAD). Paul Ridker, MD, and his colleagues suspected that “inflammation” was a key player in heart disease. They developed a test for “high sensitivity C-reactive protein” (CRP) that was able to detect chronic low-grade inflammation, something missed by all other medical tests.

Lipitor-Statin Drug Madness

In the 1990s, to hoodwink the public at large, drug companies introduced cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, such as Lipitor, practically cementing the largely unsubstantiated link between cholesterol and heart disease. That began a high-pressure sell to get both consumers and physicians interested in using statins to lower cholesterol levels, and Lipitor alone now accounts for $13 billion in yearly sales.

But nearly everyone seems to ignore a key fact: half of people with heart disease have normal cholesterol levels. So there must be other big risk factors, but what are they? C-Reactive Protein and its kissing cousin, Homocysteine.

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