DISCLAIMER: Any application of the recommendations set forth in this

book is at the reader's discretion and sole risk. The information offered is
intended for people in good health. Anyone with medical problems of any
nature should see a doctor before starting a diet and exercise program.
You should never change your current medication methods without first
getting approval from your doctor. Even if you have no known health
problems, it is advisable to consult your doctor before making major
changes in your lifestyle.

Jon Benson is not a doctor. Duane Graveline, M.D. is a doctor, but is

sharing this information only as material to discuss with your personal
physician. Any recommendations made regarding diet, including,
supplements and herbal or nutritional treatments must be discussed with
your doctor. The authors are not liable for past, present or future issues
concerning your health.

© Copyright 2007 All Your Strength LLC and Jon Benson

All Rights Reserved.

Duplication of this material is prohibited without written consent from the

author.
 Hi, it’s Jon Benson here and I am thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Duane
Graveline, or simply Doc, as he prefers to be called. Doc is also known
as the “space doc.” This is due to his work with NASA. Doc was a flight
surgeon for NASA and has worked with the original Apollo astronauts.
He continued his career as a family practitioner until his interest in the
side effects of statin drugs, the drugs used to treat Cholesterol, became
more than personal in nature. Doc is going to tell us today how that story
unfolded and I’m going to let him go into the details here.

Statin drugs almost cost him his memory. That was the catalyst for his
first book, Lipitor: Thief of Memory. Today, Doc is one of the most
outspoken medical advocates for the judicial use of statins and never as a
means to lower cholesterol. That might sound a little shocking but you’re
going to find out what we’re talking about here within the next half-hour.
Now, Doc believes, as many other researchers do, that cholesterol is not
the true problem at all.

In fact, Doc is here to talk a little bit more about the pharmaceutical
industry that is behind statin promotion, which is a multi-billion dollar
industry and it’s being supported primarily on lies and myths. He’s also
going to reveal to us today what his 20-year plus research into the
problem heart disease has shown as well as the real root cause of this
deadly killer and what you can do today to help prevent it.

Jon: First of all, I’d like to welcome you here to this interview and just from our
audience that might not know about your work in the medical field and
your history and background, could you fill us in a little bit about your
history as a physician. I know you worked with the Apollo team and that
you’re also a family doctor, is that correct?

Doc: This is true. I was selected as a scientist astronaut, a NASA Scientist

Astronaut, back in 1965. So, I’ve got that background and I have also
been a family doctor for 17 years, practicing mostly in Burlington,
Vermont. Then I’ve had 10 years as an Air Force Research Scientist and
most of this time was involved in space medicine research.

I was studying deconditioning using bed rest and water immersion. Now
I’m retired but I’m still working with NASA as a consultant and we’re
looking ahead now to the cosmic radiation program that we know we’re
going to face when we return to the Moon and on to Mars.

Jon: This is not to deviate from the conversation but because I am such a
science fiction fan, I am interested in the radiation problem. I’ve heard
this before from other people, saying that radiation would be the number
one problem we would face going to mars.

Doc: No doubt about it. This is our biggest challenge in space medicine right
now because we can’t stop those things without a present level of
shielding technology. The cosmic particles that I’m talking about come in
a sublight speeds and they consist of a nuclei of anything from Hydrogen
 on up to iron. The energies are so great they go through anything like it
didn’t exist.

This is why everybody who went to the moon and the first time was
subject to these things in really deep space, they were subject to these
and they all came back with cataracts; all of our Apollo astronauts came
back with cataracts. Not just a little cataract; I’m talking about advanced
cataract inflammation brought on by cosmic radiation.

They were only on the moon for three days. What this amounts to is the
earth’s magnetic field is an umbrella for us here on earth and within that
we’re protected. But outside, like when you get out 60,000 miles on your
way back to the moon, that’s when you begin to see these things again.

Jon: I’m sure that working with the Apollo team, you’re probably very frustrated
when you hear the naysayers about the “Did we ever go to the moon or
not?” I always thought that was pretty comical.

Doc: Well, I’ll never see it but we are going back, we have to go back; it’s just
in our nature and we will go back. But, I hate to see these delays. Now,
it isn’t going to be 2010, it’s going to be 2014 and, who knows, I may not
even see us get back to the Moon, say nothing about Mars. Of course,
Mars is way off in the future. That’s frustrating, but meanwhile I get my
physicals every year at Johnson Space Center. I’ve just finished several
years of consulting work with NASA and I’m still staying active.

I can’t stand retirement. But, I want to tell you about how I got into this,
my present field, this field of statin drug side effects. This started in 1999,
six weeks after Lipitor was begun by my NASA flight surgeons. The
following year when I was asked to restart my Lipitor, this time at half
dose, this time instead of having transient global amnesia for six hours, I
had an episode for 12 hours long. During this entire 12-hour period, I was
a 13-year-old high school kid.

When they told me I was married with four children and was a medical
doctor, I just laughed. Twelve hours later, my memory returned
spontaneously. So, I’ve had two episodes, both of them associated with
starting Lipitor six weeks earlier. NASA has sort of brought this on me, in
a manner of speaking, because it was part of my annual astronaut
physical program.

So, this got me very interested in the statin drugs and the side effects,
especially when every doctor and every pharmacist I talked with, even
after my second episode, they still said statins don’t do that. So, this is
why I began some six years ago to study these effects and I’ve since
written two books on the subject, one of them is Lipitor: Thief of Memory,
that was my first book when I was still focused on memory and Lipitor.

After some research, I soon realized that this was far more than memory
and it was far more than Lipitor. All the statin drugs do just about the
same thing. This is why my second book was called Statin Drugs: Side
 Effects and the Misguided War on Cholesterol. This is really a second
edition but it gets away from that emphasis on cognition in my first book.

Jon: Now, apart from the side effects which some doctors will recognize; most
will not. What are the other side effects that can come with statin drugs?

Doc: Okay, the first one 40% of all side effects reported are cognitive in nature.
So, this is a big factor—cognitive side effects. This includes the amnesia
and this includes forgetfulness, disorientation, confusion, that sort of
thing, increased senility if it pre-existed. These all come under the class
of cognitive side effects.

Now, in addition to cognitive, we have a neuromuscular form of side effect

consisting of various neuropathies; sensory loss, and numbness and
tingling, burning sensations in your extremities or anywhere, and pain or
shrinkage of muscle, weakness of muscle. The problem with this class of
side effect is that it frequently does not go away after you stop the drug.

So, we have a growing sub-group of statin victims who now have

persistent, and even increasing, neuromuscular disability because of the
statin they were taking. In addition, even back to cognitive, some of that
is permanent because some of these people, in addition to having these
episodes of confusion and disorientation, even like me having amnesia;
they have permanent loss of short-term memory.

They can’t remember things that just happened, no matter how hard they
try and that doesn’t come back except very, very slowly. One of our worst
cases was a former CEO and, when he finally finished with his bout with
Lipitor, he was no longer employable. He had to be helped with
everything he did.

He had to constantly have someone on his elbow; he could no longer

drive or do any of these things. He has slowly come back but it’s been
years now. He is one of many with that complaint. So, cognitive can be
permanent and the neuromuscular, many of these are permanent, as
many as 20% of our neuromuscular evolve into a permanent thing where
after three years, they still have the problems.

Two of my astronaut friends were placed on Lipitor in the same program

I’m on by their NASA flight surgeons and in a couple of months, they both
had aches and pains they’d never had before and they both naturally
stopped the drug but they both wound up in the same sub-group where
they’re permanent. Here we are two years after they stopped the drugs
and they still have aches and pains they’ve never had before.

These men are now angry about this. Now, the other class has to do with
behavioral side effects. We’re seeing now a very strong association
between statin use and such symptoms as aggressiveness, hostility,
irritability, paranoia, homicidal and suicidal ideation, and depression.
We’re seeing all of these in people taking statins.
We now feel that there is also a whole spectrum of behavioral side effects
and we now think we even understand the mechanism for these. We
have one group of side effects like the cognitive, apparently due to
excessive lowering of cholesterol. Whereas, your second group, the
neuromuscular, appear to be due to excessive inhibition of CoQ10. Now
we have this third group which appears to be due, this behavioral group,
to dolichol inhibition, dolichol and CoQ10—both of what we call collateral
damage.

Twenty years ago when the scientists first began to really work on this
and discovered reductase inhibition step and designed the first statin,
they didn’t really know all the problems they’d get into, but they found this
one simple biochemical step called reductase step in the mevalonate
pathway and it led straight to cholesterol production and they found that
they could easily inhibit that, so they did. They were tremendously
successful and everybody was patting each other on the back.

They just ignored the fact that the mevalonate pathway, which included
the cholesterol synthetic process, also includes the process for CoQ10
and dolichols and a few other things that are equally important, but I’ll
focus just on those two things. So, the side effects, especially from the
dolichols and the CoQ10, we call that collateral damage.

We were accepting of these 20 years ago when they first started showing
up, 15 years ago especially. We were accepting of these because we felt
it was the price we had to pay to get our cholesterol down. Now, in the
last five years, we realize that cholesterol isn’t even the problem. The
problem of atherosclerosis is not cholesterol; cholesterol is irrelevant to
atherosclerosis, it’s an innocent bystander.

Atherosclerosis, everyone now knows is an inflammatory problem; it’s an

inflammatory process and cholesterol does not enter into this. We found
out just about five years ago that statins work their effectiveness, not
because of what they do to that reductase step but because of their ability
to inhibit this inflammatory cascade. They do this through a process which
is known scientifically as nuclear factor-Kappa B inhibition.

Now that’s a big word scientific, forget it right away, but that’s the whole
mechanism of action and we just stumbled onto that. Twenty years ago,
we had no idea that statin drugs were going to turn out to be nuclear
factor-Kappa B inhibitors. It just so happens that one transcriptase,
nuclear factor-Kappa B, is the essence of our entire immunodefense
system.

This is why this drug works; there’s no disputing statins do work, so now
we have a mechanism of action for statins that we just stumbled on, we
just stumbled on it and only in the last five years have we fully
appreciated statins work exclusively at cholesterol-lowering and they work
because of nuclear factor-Kappa B inhibition. Here we just stumbled onto
that what we call “serendipity,” because we don’t even know how we did
it.
 But we do know we’ve got a drug that’s extremely powerful in this
respect. But we also know because of the last four decades of being
focused on cholesterol, we are still pushing cholesterol as an etiologic
factor in atherosclerosis and we’re still urging cholesterol control and
we’re still selling the drugs for cholesterol reduction when we know that
cholesterol isn’t even involved.

Therefore, we’re getting into the mechanisms of side effects and this
collateral damage; we’re getting into that, even though we don’t really
need that aspect of it anymore. We do need and appreciate the nuclear
factor-Kappa B. This is part of the hypocrisy of our present system. They
can’t afford not to sell cholesterol-busters and use cholesterol as the
boogey-man. They can’t afford to stop this now because billions of
dollars are at stake. They can’t afford to tell the truth!

Jon: Right, and that’s the problem; I’m about to get to that. It’s going to be a
lot more difficult to go out and say, “Well, the real benefit to this is
something that you could get through natural supplementation, you could
get through a lot of other things,” and we’re here to talk about that, about
how you can lower the inflammatory responses naturally. I’m going to
shorten that to NFKB, it’s a lot easier to say.

Doc: I understand.

Jon: NFKB being the real catalyst here for what’s causing the effects they’re
seeing with statins. I’m curious to see what your take is on this because
I’ve read a lot of research that’s pointing to the fact that, even with this
lowering the inflammatory responses that statins can lower, we’re not
seeing a drastic lowering in mortality; our mortality rates are still climbing.

Doc: Okay, yes, this is true. In many studies, they’re showing that people,
even though they may not be dying of their stroke or heart attack, they’re
still dying prematurely of other causes. Now, this is happening, there’s no
doubt about that and it’s because of the fact that statins are a two-edged
sword.

They’re not just lowering inflammation and reducing inflammation, they

also are curtailing our other elements which are extremely important to
body function. Also, this immunodefense thing has bothered us from the
very beginning—this ability to manipulate our immunodefense mechanism
has bothered us from the very beginning.

We know that certain bacteria that we have been fighting off for eons and
viruses utilize this mechanism. So, nuclear factor-Kappa B is involved in
cancer prevention and is involved in infection prevention and has been for
millions of years. Now, we find that we’re messing that system up and we
can’t help but be looking for evidence of increase in certain infections and
increase in certain cancers.
 So, this has been our big concern. But there is no doubt that we are
finding that people, if you start out with 10,000 people and you lower the
death rate from heart attacks, you’re still going to wind up about the same
number of people dying as usual because the others are dying of cancers
and other problems that were completely unexpected. So, the impact is
not that great. However, even though we still have these problems,
there’s no doubt that the statin drugs do help.

I think one of our major problems is we’re dosing the statins way too high
and we’re using cholesterol-lowering doses when cholesterol is not even
the problem. We should be using anti-inflammatory dosing and this is
something we have yet to come to grips with, but it is far less than the
dosage used for lowering of cholesterol.

So, if a person comes to me and they’re high risk, they’ve had a heart
attack or their family history is strongly positive, I will always tell them to
continue the statin, but I will tell them at a vastly reduced dose. So,
instead of taking 80mg or 40mg, they’re now taking 2.5mg.

Jon: Wow, that’s a drastic reduction.

Doc: You see, you don’t get any of these collateral side effects at that really
low dose, but you still retain the anti-inflammatory thing that you’re
looking for, especially if you give it in conjunction with your Omega-3,
Coenzyme Q10 and the other things I mentioned.

Jon: Right and the study just came out a few weeks ago that talked about
combining fish oil with statins was remarkably more effective at lowering
inflammatory responses so I would think that would be part of your
strategy would be to radically lower the statin dosages and include
Omega-3 fatty acids in the form of fish oil or Krill oil.

Doc: No doubt about it. That’s a big thing. I think if you take fish oil,
Coenzyme Q10, a few of the other things, maybe a buffered baby Aspirin
and add them all together and their effectiveness is roughly equal to a 25
to 30mg dose of Lipitor. Then, if you add a 2.5mg dose of Lipitor on top
of what I told you, then you have a really good picture.

A lot of people are surprised when they say, “Doc, what are you going to
do for me. My Lipitor’s killing me; I’m going to die of a heart attack!” I tell
them, I said, “You go on a 2.5mg dose, combined with all these other anti-
inflammatories, you’re going to have a very appropriate and valid and
effective program.” But they’re really surprised that I will still stick to
these token dosages of statins and they’re not token.

I’ve done enough research so I know that even at the low levels of 2.5mg;
I know that they’re effective. Look what 5mg did to me; it made me into a
13-year-old high school student again for 12 hours. So, I’m biased
naturally to the low end. When I say 2.5mg, I’m still giving you a
significant dose, but 5mg just about crippled me.
Jon: But people are prescribing 80mg routinely, right?

Doc: Yes, routinely. This business of side effects, we know how many side
effects are going to happen. If you put 10,000 people on 80mg, I already
know how many cases of cognitive side effects you’re going to have, I
know how many neuromuscular and yet these doctors are saying, “No
significant side effects,” or “Compared with placebo, no significant
difference.” That is pure baloney. I don’t believe that for a minute.

Jon: Do you think that some of that is tainted by greed, by big pharmaceutical
companies?

Doc: Yes it is because many of these studies are funded by the pharmaceutical
industry and I’m sure they put a heavy hand on editing. I just think there’s
a lot of that in it. After all, billions and billions of dollars are at stake and
you’re not going to tell the truth.

Jon: Let’s talk briefly about CoQ10 and I’ve been a fan of CoQ10 for a long
time. I actually did an interview with Peter Langsjoen, M.D., who I believe
you know as well, one of the first guys to actually have a way to test the
levels of CoQ10 so we know exactly what happens to this critical enzyme
that’s stored in the heart primarily, what happens to this enzyme when
statin doses are too high, it depletes rapidly, sometimes within four days.

That’s not a good thing, if we just leave it at that pretty much. When it
comes down to using this as a preventative measure towards
atherosclerosis, toward treating heart disease, we’re looking at a very low
dose statin, say 2.5mg, how much would you recommend someone
taking CoQ10 and fish oil, those two supplements in particular in
combination to get the best anti-inflammatory responses?

Doc: Okay, the Omega-3, I recommend 2400 a day. CoQ10, I personally take
200mg and if a person’s never had any problems with any aches and
pains, and maybe they’ve been on a statin already for six month to a year
with no problems, but they still want to know what they can do to be safe,
I’ll probably tell them 100mg.

So, let’s just say 100 to 200mg of CoQ10. I have people who come to me
with statin-associated myopathy severe or maybe neuropathy severe and
I will place them on dosages up to 500 to 600, even 1000mg for a period
of time to observe the effect. Even though that doesn’t always help, it’s
still the first direction to go because we know that if you’re on a statin, that
they advertise reduction of cholesterol by 52%, they’re going to reduce
your CoQ10 by 52%; it’s inevitable because of the mechanisms.

You cannot affect the one without affecting the other by an equal amount
because we’re girding the mevalonate pathway at the very base. It’s like
the trunk of a tree, we’re girding it at it’s base and we’re hoping to get just
a cholesterol branch—baloney, we get all the branches—including
dolichol and CoQ10 and if we’re getting a 50% rate of effect on
cholesterol, you’re going to get a 50% rate on all of the other branches.
 So, that’s a very substantial loss of ability for energy production and anti-
oxidation and for cell wall integrity. CoQ10 plays such a vital role in just
maintaining the cell wall stability. When you have a 50% drop-off of that,
you can imagine the instability or like we say, lack of integrity of cell
wall—it’s a big factor and probably behind most of hepatitis myopathies
and neuropathies and even rhabdomyolysis, you know it’s a factor there.

Jon: Wow, I just want to cover two more things here real quickly, Doc, and that
is first of all somebody does not want to go the pharmaceutical route at
all. You would get pretty much close to that dosage if you were taking
something like Red Yeast Rice or something like that, as far as a local
statin.

Doc: Yes. Red Yeast Rice is a statin, it’s identical to Mevacor, it is Mevacor, or
call it Lovastatin; they’re the same, one’s generic, and one’s trade. Each
of the 600mg red yeast rice contains 2.5mg of Lovastatin, or call it
Mevacor. So, this puts it roughly equal to Zocor 10 or to Lipitor 10,
because those three drugs—Lipitor, Mevacor, Zocor—are all in the same
class of moderately strong statin drugs.

So I think a 2.5mg will give you a significant anti-inflammatory effect, but

the chances of a 2.5mg giving you myopathy and all the other problems
are quite small. Now, as you probably already know, there have been
people on just red yeast rice who have gotten into not only myopathy
problems, but also one case of rhabdomyolysis, but it was not fatal.

This is because the usual dosage written on the package is one to two
twice a day and that means you’re taking 600mg which contains 2.5,
you’re taking two of those twice a day which means you’re getting a 10mg
dose of Mevacor and that’s why they’re getting myopathies. If I were on
that, that’s why I would lose my memory.

So, you have to watch out; I’m telling these people don’t go on the basis
of what it says on the side of the box, I don’t want you to take any more
than one of these. But a lot of people think if one is good, two, three or
four is better—so, you can get into trouble.

Jon: What we’re seeing here and through a lot of research and from what
you’re sharing with us, are that the combination of a lot of—these are
naturally-occurring nutrients—that the combination is targeted to one
specific goal and that is lowering the inflammatory response to the body.
I think that it’s pretty much safe to say that’s the root cause of most, if not
all, heart disease. Would that be an accurate statement?

Doc: Very true. That is the actual event taking place in the endothelial walls—
inflammation. Now, the triggers are varied. Homocysteine is one of the
major triggers. Trans fats is big trigger, Omega-6 is another trigger.
Infections in your teeth, infections, periapical abscesses, gingivitis,
periodontitis are all subtle, but extremely effective at causing
 atherosclerotic changes. This is a sleeper because we haven’t really
been pushing on this one, but hidden infections are a big factor.

Jon: Can we reduce plaque? I’m talking about the soft plaque. I know hard
plaque is a lot harder to deal with. For example, someone has a
sonogram, they do a carotid artery sonogram and they find out they have
some plaque in one of their carotid arteries or what have you. Is there
anything they can do about that?

Doc: I don’t think so. In terms of backing it off, I know there have been a lot of
studies but it’s hard to convince me. When you’re trying to make
measurements of hardly 2 to 3 microns in difference and you’re using the
mechanisms that I know exist in today’s world, I think a lot of this
apparent benefit that you’re getting where you’re having a slight decrease
in actual size and obstruction of the plaque, I think a lot of this is wishful
thinking.

I just don’t believe it and I don’t think that should be the way we go. I
think we’re stuck with these plaques. Once they form, I don’t see most of
them backing off because that represents an established build-up of scar
tissue made of fibroblasts and smooth muscle all wound together with
calcium and with cholesterol and a few other things.

It’s basically a scar. I don’t see that you backing that off any more than
you would with a scar on your body. I think the focus there is, “Yes, I’ve
got a scar. Now I’m going to be on a strong anti-inflammatory protocol
the rest of my life.” That makes sense.

Jon: So, let’s conclude here by basically saying if you had to give just a couple
of one-two-three suggestion points to our listeners, to what they could do
to increase the health of their heart, to lower their chances of getting heart
disease and I want to touch briefly just on nutrition here because I know
that dietary fat has been a villain of the media for a long time and, like me,
you don’t buy into it.

Doc: Let’s start with diet and then I’ll cover those things. First of all, diet. I
want to tell you that I am back now after 40 years, I am finally back to
eggs as many as I want, to butter instead of margarine (which I’ve
consumed for 40 years), I’m now back to fresh butter and I’m drinking as
much whole milk as I desire. Formerly, I was on skim milk for 40 years
and I raised my family on that and I am so ashamed of myself.

To boil down diet, it’s now all the eggs you want, it’s now whole milk and
it’s now, “Buddy, you can forget your margarine.” But the basic diet is
carbo-restriction. This is the only diet that makes any sense to me, a
carbo-restrictive diet. That’s very easy, there are a lot of good ones
around, and any of them work.

It’s just that you can’t eat all the starchy food, you don’t eat your white
bread, you don’t eat your potatoes, you don’t eat your pasta and all that
stuff because it’s too easily converted. We want complex carbohydrates
 and this is why we say a “carbo-restrictive” diet. If you really apply that
with vigor like I do, now my wife slips, she’s all the time needing that
potato and she likes that pasta, but I refuse.

I will just have the meat if she makes a spaghetti sauce, I’ll pick out the
meat. But no, it’s not that bad.

Jon: Doc, can I ask you something real quick about that? Coming from a
nutritionist background, this is interesting to me, especially since I’m also
into body-building and sports and I’ve been on a low-carbohydrate regime
for years. My body naturally thrives on it.

Doc: Okay, me too.

Jon: Just curious, when you say carbo-restrictive, you’re not saying like a zero
carbohydrate or a low carbohydrate diet, are you, or is that what you’re
personally leaning toward?

Doc: Oh, I’m sorry, yes, I see what you mean. No, when I say carbo-
restrictive, I mean simple carbos are out to the best of your ability. If you
want whole-grain bread, whole-grain cereals, of course you can have
those.

Jon: Okay, exactly, exactly. That, to me, makes the most sense. I usually do
really well on 100 grams of carbohydrates a day and I’m 215 pounds. So,
if I can do 100 grams a day, most people probably don’t need much more
than that unless they’re very, very active, unless they’re marathoners or
something.

Doc: No doubt in my mind this is a main element of a good program. I think all
of us need as much Omega-3 as we can take in comfortably, anywhere
from 1200 to 2400 would seem reasonable. Of course, the reasoning for
this is that the diet of most of us based upon common foods that we eat is
way deficient in Omega-3 so our ratio between Omega-3 and Omega-6 is
way off and everything’s working against us and we’ve got to get that ratio
back.

We can only do this by pretty robust enhancement of Omega-3 intake.

We’ve got to do this consciously. Coenzyme Q10, all of us as adults
begin to fall off and after about the age of 30, we don’t produce enough to
handle our daily needs; we have to have supplementation. It so happens
that the average diet of most of us does not meet the needs for daily
supplementation after the age of 30 to 35.

So, if you’re in that bracket, you better be supplementing Coenzyme Q10

because that’s what makes your body tick and you can’t make it, you
can’t get it from foods sufficiently. The other elements of what I
recommend are your Vitamin B6, B12 and Folic Acid. This is all based on
Homocysteine as a factor in the inflammatory process.
 Homocysteine has been proven, Kilmer McCully did a really good job of
this, and even though a few people have tried to shoot him down with
grossly inadequate studies, there’s no doubt that 30 to 40% of all heart
attacks are related to Homocysteine elevations above a certain desirable
range.

Homocysteine, to be properly metabolized in the body, depends upon

these three vitamins: Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12 and Folic Acid. Many,
many people are born with genetic defects and many of us don’t have the
Vitamin B12 or many of us don’t have the Vitamin B6. Many of us don’t
have enough Folic Acid. As a result, we’re not able to hold our
homocysteines down to the ideal level.

So, we have a lot of people with genetically pre-ordained deficiencies in

Vitamin B12, B6 and Folic Acid. We have a lot of people with acquired
deficiencies in these due to certain diseases. But anyway, that’s what
this is aimed at to decrease your Homocysteine and keep it, whatever’s
basal for you. The only other thing is a buffered baby Aspirin. All those
things I’ve mentioned are over-the-counter and not terribly expensive.

I’m really upset about Coenzyme Q10 being the cost it is because I know
I single-handedly have increased the consumption in the nation of CoQ10
a thousandfold just in the last five years and the price is still right up
there. They’re really raking us over the coals on that one and
something’s got to be done about that.

Jon: Yes, Coenzyme Q10 is one of the most incredible nutrients you can take
but, unfortunately, it is extremely expensive and it’s also extremely hard
to find a good quality CoQ10. I know that Dr. Langsjoen talks a lot about
that and so you do the best that you can. I just want to conclude by
saying before I ever spoke to Doc; this is almost my exact regime.

I don’t do the Aspirin because I had a history of gout, but except for the
Aspirin my exact regime is I take Red Yeast Rice, I take 600mg of that
twice a day. I combine that with 200mg of CoQ10, the equivalent of 3 to
4 grams a day of fish oil through Krill oil. That’s what I’ve been doing
here to be protective. We don’t have a history of heart disease in my
family at all.

My father died in his sleep at 82 of natural causes, my mom is still alive at

81, but our cholesterol levels have all been sky-high, much higher than
normal. We have, as you know what Familial Hyperlipidemia is, that
definitely runs in my family. My cholesterol level of 400 to 500 is
considered normal for our history. The doctors freak out when they see
that; they’re completely flabbergasted.

Doc: Your family history for heart disease is not that bad?

Jon: None at all.

Doc: Okay, that’s a really good thing to know. The only comment I have on
your protocol is you could reduce your 10mg, see right now you’re taking
5mg of a statin drug. You’re taking two capsules of Red Yeast Rice
which is giving you 5mg. Neither 2.5 nor 5mg is going to do anything for
cholesterol, whether you’re 550 or 500 or 450 makes no difference at all.

This amount of statin in your system could theoretically be making

dolichols less available and also be theoretically making CoQ10 less
available in that slightly higher dose. That is why I personally recommend
2.5mg. You’re on a good program, I can’t argue with that. I think in your
case it’s probably ideal, but that’s the only thing I would question.

Jon: It’s always great to get some advice on that, so that’s no problem. We do
want to state that everything that we’re talking to you about today should
be passed by your physician. Hopefully, your physician is very well
educated.

Doc: Oh, I never tell people to check with their doctor. Oh no, I can’t because
the doctors and I are so much at variance with respect to statins.

Jon: Yes, I know, but legally I have to—which is a real drag. I try to put
caveats in there, I try to say, “Check with your doctor and hopefully he or
she isn’t an idiot!”

Doc: Nope, can’t say that.

Jon: (laughs) Okay Doc, can you tell people how they can find your book? I
think this book needs to be on every bookshelf.

Doc: Go to my website, www.spacedoc.net. That will get you either of my two

books and that will get you about two weeks’ worth of reading of my
papers that are free on my website. I’ve got more than 200 papers on
different aspects of this problem.

Jon: Well, Doc, I want to thank you so much for your time today with us.
Really, it’s been completely eye-opening I’m sure for a lot of people
listening to this. They’re going to say, “So that’s why my muscles feel like
I’m dragging all the time, my legs are dragging.” That’s a common
complaint I hear. Perhaps they can take this and more adequately tailor
the dosage to what they really need to attack and that is inflammatory
conditions.

Doc: It was a pleasure to talk with you Jon, and you sound like you’re really
knowledgeable in this and a good man to write “Fit Over 40” and your
other nutrition books as well.