Growing evidence that Statins or cholesterol meds makes exercise more difficult. Why take something to make you less fit and healthy? The growing case against statins is undeniable, yet nationally, millions of people have been convinced they need to obsess about their cholesterol numbers. Cholesterol meds or statins damage vital organs such as the liver, increase the likelihood of dementia and the latest news reported by the NY Times is that they damage muscles and interfere with your ability to exercise. While cholesterol is only one of 18 risk factors of a heart attack, millions of active people have been convinced out of fear to take this drug which makes them feel poorly out of fear. While we all have an expiration date and none of us know when that is, taking Statins out of fear after a heart attack or other event that took years to develop does not change the inevitable, yet, millions believe it will. Many of our patients on these drugs have many difficulties with the side effects and need to be monitored by their doctors closely to make sure the drug is not killing them. What are we doing? Many of those same patients have difficulty walking stairs because of the effects on the muscles. Isn’t exercise good for our health and why would we want to put someone on a drug that inhibits fitness, something that improves our longevity? In 10 years, we will examine this current cholesterol fad, and the damage and costs to the system it produced and say “what were we thinking”? You can do this now and live a better and healthier life. Knowledge is power. Those who do not know or understand make their health decisions out of fear which is rarely a good for a healthcare consumer. Check out this article below: Do Statins Make It Tough to Exercise? By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS, Columnist For years, physicians and scientists have been aware that statins, the most widely prescribed drugs in the world, can cause muscle aches and fatigue in some patients. What many people don’t know is that these side effects are especially pronounced in people who exercise.To learn more about the effect statins have on exercising muscles, scientists in Strasbourg, France, recently gave the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor to a group of rats for two weeks, while a separate control group was not medicated. Some of the rats from both groups ran on little treadmills until they were exhausted. It was immediately obvious that the medicated animals couldn’t run as far. They became exhausted much earlier than the rats that had not been given statins. The differences were even more striking at a cellular level. When the scientists studied muscle tissues, they found that oxidative stress, a measure of possible cell damage, was increased by 60 percent in sedentary animals receiving statins, compared with the unmedicated control group. Continue reqading here