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February 1st, 2006 | Issue 50 |
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7 Tips For Lowering Your LDL Cholesterol
To avoid a heart attack, more and more research is finding that your #1 strategy is getting your LDL (bad) cholesterol not just down, but way down. Striving for LDL levels of 100 and below is good, but dropping to 80 and lower may be even better
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THE SECRETS TO LONGEVITY
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LDL levels of 81
The latest research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), involved 8,800 European patients. All had previously suffered heart attacks. The trial found that those who reduced their LDL levels to an average 81 with high-dose statins significantly reduced their risk of major coronary events like heart attacks and strokes at the 4.8 year follow-up compared to patients who reduced their LDL to 104 on usual-dose statin therapy.(1)
“Lower is better.”
In a JAMA editorial accompanying the study, Christopher P. Cannon, MD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School wrote that aggressive LDL lowering is the ideal – “lower is better.”
The JAMA study’s findings echo those of another large 4,162-patient study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2004. It concluded that LDL cholesterol levels of 62 were even better than levels of 95 at preventing death, heart attacks, and other cardiovascular-related problems in people with heart disease.(2)
Drugs’ negative effects
In both studies, mega-doses of statins (a doubling and tripling of regular doses) drove LDL levels way down. But in both studies, mega-doses also caused problems. Suffering from adverse side effects like muscle pain, memory loss, and elevated liver enzymes, patients on the high doses stopped taking their medications at twice the rate of patients on regular doses.
Muscle pain, also called myopathy, occurs in 2% to 11% of people treated with statins, recently reported investigators at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in Madison, and although the pain usually subsides once the statin is discontinued, it can take several months to do so. Like previous studies, the Wisconsin scientists also found that the negative side effects of statins increased as dosages increased.(3)
Medication-free alternatives
“That’s why drug-free alternatives like the Pritikin Program are so important,” advises Dr. William McCarthy, UCLA School of Public Health and member of the Pritikin Scientific Advisory Board.
“For people who cannot tolerate maximum doses of statins, or for those wanting to minimize their dependence on drugs, the Pritikin Program of diet and exercise – or a combination of low-dose statins plus the Pritikin Program – offers a much safer option for lowering LDL cholesterol to levels significantly below 100.”
In research on more than 4,500 men and women following the Pritikin Program, LDL levels plummeted 23%, and in just three weeks.(4)
39% drop in LDL
And in a study by UCLA scientists in conjunction with the Nathan Pritikin Research Foundation, men and women doubled their reductions in cholesterol, averaging a 39% drop, when they supplemented regular-dose statin therapy with the diet-and-exercise lifestyle of the Pritikin Program.(5)
7 Dietary/Lifestyle Tips
To dramatically lower your LDL cholesterol levels without resorting to high doses of statins (and maybe even eliminating the need for statins altogether), the doctors and dietitians at the Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa recommend these 7 dietary/lifestyle tips, listed in order of importance: ...
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Copyright 2006 Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa. All rights reserved.
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Pritikin Perspective - Healthy Living Made Easier
Pritikin Perspective is a publication for Alumni of the Pritikin Longevity Center. It is dedicated to helping people make healthy changes in their lives. The articles in this publication should not be considered specific medical advice, as each individual circumstance is different. You are strongly encouraged to seek medical advice before beginning a program of diet and exercise.
Editor/Writer: Eugenia Killoran.
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