Jan
13

Junk Science? Statins save the world

Chris Woollams Natural Compounds, Uncategorized, Vitamins and Minerals Add your comment
Junk Science Number 6: Statins save the world

A friend went to his UK doctor. The conversation went like this:
Doctor: ‘I recommend you start taking statins.’
Patient: ‘But what about the side-effects?’
Doctor: ‘There are none.’
Patient: ‘Well I heard they can affect your muscles and heart.’
Doctor: ‘No problem, we monitor those for you.’

The research evidence suggests that statins depress coenzyme Q10 levels. A Merck study (1990) showed statins reduce CoQ10 production. Co Q10 is found in the mitochondria – the power stations in every cell in your body. The more active the tissue – muscles, heart, brain etc – the more mitochondria and the more Q10. Co Q10 is also believed to play an important role in the ‘health’ of the mitochondria, not just in its power generating activities. Mitochondria possess the power to cause cell death if something negative arises – for example, in genetic malfunction. In cancer, the mitochondria shut down and lose the ability to cause cell death, making cancer cells virtually immortal.

Co Q10 levels decline anyway as you age.

Statins are a 25 billion dollar world wide business. They are designed to reduce cholesterol levels and reduce cardiovascular disease.

New research links statins to increases in diabetes – Jan 10th 2012
A new study from the Massachusetts Medical School confirms a new and potentially dangerous side effect of statin drugs – diabetes. (Archives of Internal Medicine)

The research report analysed more than 153,000 postmenopausal women who enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative study in the 1990s. None of the women had diabetes at the outset, but 7 per cent were taking statins.

15 years later the women were followed up and nearly 10 percent of women taking statins had developed diabetes, compared to only 6.4 percent in women who took no statin drugs.

Further analysis by Harvard shows that women over the age of 45 are 50 per cent more likely to develop diabetes if they’re taking a statin drug.

Given the already widespread use of statins, and the push to encourage all people over 50 to consider taking them for heart issues and cholesterol problems, this finding is deeply concerning. The impact on Western populations could be huge.

Several reports have made the diabetes connection before – for example, the first in 2008 was a study of the drug Crestor; and in June 2010 a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association analysed five additional randomised trials and concluded the increased risk was small but real for people taking higher doses of any statin.

In 2009 a Diabetes Care a meta-study warned: ‘Although statin therapy greatly lowers vascular risk, including among those with and at risk for diabetes, the relationship of statin therapy to incident diabetes remains uncertain. Future statin trials should be designed to formally address this issue’, such were the mixed results.

But with the new and worrying research findings there seems already to be an attempt to down play the significance.
Dr. Steven Nissen, cardiology chairman at the Cleveland Clinic, who wasn’t involved with the Harvard research opined, “We don’t want these drugs in the water supply, but we want the right people treated. When they are, this effect is not a significant limitation.” ( http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/01/10/study-statins-linked-with-diabetes-risk/)

In the Lancet, volume 375, under the heading of ‘The new risk – diabetes’, Christopher P Cannon states: All drugs have side-effects. Indeed, all interventions (including even exercise programmes) have side-effects. The balance in medicine is to evaluate the benefits and weigh them against the risks. For statins, the benefits in reducing clinical events have been shown in a multitude of trials with more than 500 000 patient-years of treatment. This benefit has led to their inclusion in national guidelines as a key component of both primary and secondary prevention.

So that’s aright then.

At the US National Institutes of Health, diabetes specialist Dr. Judith Fradkin says statins’ benefits outweigh the potential side effect, and that newly developed diabetes won’t harm right away.

So that’s definitely alright then!

Deaths from heart disease are not in decline, and nor is type 2 diabetes. Worse the official website for the American Heart Association says, “Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to have heart disease or a stroke than adults without diabetes.”

According to the American Diabetes Association, there are numerous trials showing a benefit from statin therapy in primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease and mortality. However, their report goes on to say that there is no evidence that statins reduce all-case mortality.

If statins are confirmed as causing a 50 per cent increase in diabetes, it could prove a huge cost to the world, both to patients and government purses.  

The American Medical Association 2009 report on statins and diabetes calculated that one fewer patient would experience a heart attack or other cardiovascular problem for every 155 patients treated for a year – and there would be one additional case of diabetes for every 498 patients treated. So three saved from heart attack for each new type-2 diabetes sufferer.

The final word belongs to Dr. Yunsheng Ma of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, who led the study of postmenopausal women: “The statin should not be seen as the magic pill.”  

It could be a bit late for that.

 

Read also

Links to  liver damage, kidney failure and cataracts ( http://www.naturalnews.com/030317_statin_drugs_liver_damage.html ).
Links to memory loss and depression
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Dec
07

Junk Science? Prostate cancer and testosterone

Chris Woollams General Cancer Information, Natural Compounds, cancer prevention Add your comment

Junk Science Number 4: Prostate cancer – the King has got no clothes on.

Older readers may remember a song by Danny Kaye which was about a King riding on horse back through the streets in his finery – except that he actually had no clothes on. It took a little boy to start singing ‘the King is in the altogether’, for people to wake up to the fact that he was actually naked.

Why do I always feel like that little boy when people talk to me about Prostate cancer? I could talk about several aspects of its treatment – today I just want to talk about the ‘chemotherapy’ part.

Consider theses findings from research:

1.  An enlarged prostate afflicts most men in the Western World over 50 years of age. The cause is known to be oestrogen – the female sex hormone. In fact, anti-oestrogen drugs like finasteride are prescribed to reduce the enlargement.

2.  Sometimes this swollen prostate gland becomes cancerous. You may not even realize it. According to a study of men killed in motoring accidents, about two thirds of those over 50 years of age were happily wandering life’s path with prostate cancer and had little idea. Most prostate cancers are slow growing.

3.  There are research studies from Singapore, Melbourne and Sydney covered in CANCERactive’s research centre, Cancer Watch, that show you need the presence of both testosterone (the male sex hormone) and oestrogen to develop prostate cancer.

4.  The conundrum was answered when a Dr Thompson of MD Anderson in Texas showed that nice safe testosterone is converted by oestrogen into something very nasty called DHT, and it is that compound which drives prostate cancer.

Now all this seems pretty clear to me. Added research supports it:

5.  Cancer Watch has also covered research that shows 13 chemicals can drive the process – all of them were xenoestrogens, or oestrogen mimics. It is possible that selenium can work to displace heavy metals and chemicals from the tissues – there is German research on the benefits of selenium in prostate cancer prevention.

6. Professor Robert Thomas (former Pfeizer oncologist of the Year) specializes in prostate cancer and believes getting newly diagnosed patients onto a diet of broccoli and tomatoes, plus daily exercise can delay the need for surgery by at least a year. Broccoli contains indole3carbinol, known to denature aggressive oestrogen, while tomatoes contain lycopene which reduces circulating fat levels in the blood and thus reduces the formation of oestrogens.

7 . Women with oestrogen-driven breast cancer are often given ‘Aromatase Inhibitors’ – oestroegen is produced in the ovaries until menopause, but after this time some is still produced in the kidneys and from fat stores in the body. Men produce it this way too. Aromatase Inhibitors aim to cut all this production –in women.

8.  Oestrogen is known to cause cancers. Oestradiol binds with cell receptor sites and creates havoc within the cell; oestrogen can cause stem cells to stay in a rapidly dividing state. I could go on. Even Cancer Research has stated that Oestrogen drives cancers.

SO…. WHY ARE MEN WITH PROSTATE CANCER GIVEN INJECTIONS OF OESTROGEN?

I have 6 friends between the ages of 57 and 63 all with prostate cancer. They all ask me what to do. A couple have had their operations (more on that another time) and their oncologist is now working on ways to CUT THEIR TESTOSTERONE.

You see all of them have been told they have prostate cancer because they have high testosterone. What bollocks is this? If high testosterone caused prostate cancer, every 16 year old male in the world would have it. They’d be dropping like flies. It is completely illogical.

When we conducted an icon (Integrated Cancer and Oncology News) magazine interview with a top Prostate oncologist in London, he confirmed that there were several treatments for men with advance prostate cancer all designed to reduce testosterone levels.

But nowhere is there any research evidence that Testosterone causes cancer in cells, whereas there is a stack of it about oestrogen. I have written a book entitled ‘Oestrogen – the killer in our midst’; I could not even fill a postage stamp for testosterone.

Our intrepid London Oncologist was then asked about this ‘logic gap’ and replied that oestrogen as the driver of prostate cancer was an interesting theory, but he found that using oestrogen as a treatment ‘worked’, so the theory could not be right.

Now I don’t want to split hairs here but it seems to me the key word here is ‘Worked’.

We are told that prostate cancer is a slow growing disease. Why is it then that the 5-year survival rate in the UK for proste cancer in Eurocare 3 was 54 per cent, and this rose to barely 60 per cent seven years later after the new Government Cancer Plan, stacks of money, and all these new treatments (Eurocare 4)? We are one of the worst countries for 5-year survival in Europe. In Eurocare 3 Austria led the field at 83 per cent, now many countries in Europe are between 80 and 90 per cent.

‘Worked’? A healthy body is in a state of homeostasis – it means all your hormones are balanced. Throw one out and they all go out of kilter. But the body tries to get back to how it should be. Swamp the body with oestrogen and, sure, the testosterone levels will fall away. But in the end, they will gradually rise. And do you know what happens in prostate patients treated with oestrogen? Yup, you’ve guessed it – about three years on their testosterone rises. Now they are in real trouble. The testosterone is rising and the body is flooded with oestrogen. There was a test at Barts Hospital, London, on a treatment using natural compounds – the relevant comment from the oncologist there was, ‘Well, in cases of advanced prostate cancer after hormone treatment has failed we have little to offer patients’. That says it all.

My other three friends with prostate cancer? Well they listened to me. None had an operation, none receives drugs, all are on a strict diet, supplements and exercise. And at their hospitals they are on ‘Active Surveillance’. They have been in a balanced state for three years – as I said at the start, prostate cancer is slow growing. But then they didn’t throw bucket loads of oestrogen on the fire.

Does the sun spin round the earth, or the earth spin round the sun? You decide.

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Nov
21

Junk Science 2: the EU prune juice, water and rehydration

Chris Woollams Natural Compounds, Uncategorized, Vitamins and Minerals Add your comment
Junk Science Number 2: EU ‘Scientists’ defy common sense.
The EU has ruled that drinking water doesn’t stop dehydration, and eating prunes and drinking prune juice do not stop constipation. No it is not April 1st.
As you may know, in Europe voters in member states elect EuroMP’s to a European Parliament. At this point democracy ends. Un-elected commissioners actually decide who will be the next President of Europe, the next ‘Foreign Minister and whether decisions made in the European parliament by elected representatives can or cannot become law.
For example, when EuroMP’s voted overwhelmingly to list 1000 or so ingredients in everyday products that did not appear safe and to encourage their replacement, they were asked to reconsider by a solitary unelected EU Commissioner.
Often these commissioners hand out work to what you or I would call a quango. So more un-elected but highly paid people decide that common medicinal herbs should be treated like drugs and banned from the high street because they might not be safe even after 2,000 years of use, while it is totally permitted to buy cigarettes, cocktails of medicines from the pharmacy (anti-histamines, ibuprofen, laxatives and cough mixtures can all be consumed simultaneously without any comment made and on top of your prescribed statin and heart medication), and formaldehyde (a class A carcinogen) in a variety of products in your supermarket. Laughably, officials make claims that this is ‘safe’.
But in the future you will not be able to claim that water prevents dehydration, or that prunes and prune juice prevent constipation, because EU scientists say there is not enough evidence.
What a load of highly paid wasters. We have gone back to the Middle Ages. Democracy and common sense have been replaced by vested interests, committees and nonsense at a completely new level.
No wonder the Euro is in trouble – these blithering idiots do not even know enough to drink water when their body says it needs it. You couldn’t make this sort of rubbish up. Worse, anyone advertising such claims in future could get 2-3 years in jail.
As usual the 21 or so scientists who made these important decisions, couldn’t have a conference call on Skype, but met in an expensive location to come up with this drivel. Oh that common sense could shine through. 
Every day some piece of idiocy seems to come from the EU on a health matter. As always they want us to believe that the sun spins round the earth. Well, it doesn’t. They are in the wrong. It’s just junk science.

For accurate information on vitamins and natural compounds click here http://www.canceractive.com/cancer-active-page-link.aspx?n=181

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Dec
08

Micronutrients can prevent mutation and cancer

Chris Woollams Natural Compounds, Uncategorized, Vitamins and Minerals, cancer prevention 9 comments

A paper (J Nucleic Acids 2010 Sep 22; pii 725071 and also in the prestigious peer reviewed Pubmed) from the Nutrition and Metabolism Center at the Children’s Hospital, Oakland, California (Ames B N ) has summarised three of their recent research studies and concluded that optimising micronutrient intake will in turn optimise metabolism, decrease DNA damage and result in less cancer as well as other degenerative diseases associated with ageing.

The three studies looked at

The delay of mitochondrial decay through ageing and free-radical damage could be minimised by supplementation with lipoic acid and acetyl carnitine.
How even modest micronutrient deficiencies (common in much of the population) accelerate molecular aging, including DNA damage and mitochondrial decay. This work included an in-depth analysis of vitamin K that suggests the importance of achieving optimal micronutrient intake for longevity.
The finding that a loss of enzyme function can result from protein deformation and loss of function due to an age-related decline in membrane fluidity or mutation. The loss of enzyme function can be compensated by a high dietary intake of any of the B vitamins.

Researchers concluded that ‘optimising micronutrient intake could have a major effect on the prevention of cancer and other degenerative diseases of ageing’.

Ed: Short, but sweet. So, with this in mind I urge readers to be more aware of the weakened levels of vitamins allowed in your High Street, EU-approved supplements – like B complex; then there´s the increasiing usage of synthetic copies of the natural, real compound; the common Western population deficiency in vitamin K levels (due to low consumption of ‘greens’ and low levels of beneficial bacteria in the gut); and the EU-mandated restriction of key trace minerals in mass market supplements.

This constant ´dumbing down´ of supplements on the High Street by the EU flies in the face of the latest research, as you can see for yourselves in the above example.

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