Statins slow down aging and delay chronic disease development because of the same science we have been reviewing over the last seven posts. Sure, statins provide some benefits by lowering your high cholesterol level. But like everything else we have discussed; statins are antioxidants that work to keep you healthier longer.
Statins block an enzyme (HMG CoA Reductase) that increases your bad cholesterol but also produces higher oxidant levels in your blood. That is why statins are powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory medications. Statins also interfere with EGFR activation and downstream signaling to produce beneficial effects in colon and breast cancer patients that are on EGFR inhibitor treatments. Statins inhibit EFGR to slow down heart enlargement in congestive heart failure. Statins also switch on the master metabolic survival switch AMPK. In the last post, we discussed how losartan and eplerenone block oxidant production to protect cells and organs. Statins work in the same way as you can see from the diagram.
By now, you should be seeing a pattern. Losartan and eplerenone provide benefit because they lower the blood pressure, but they provide even more benefit to protect every cell and organ in the body. They block the fundamental origins or high blood pressure and the complications of heart attack and stroke. They are antioxidants and anti-inflammatories that work to prevent heart attack and stroke. Their antioxidant effects reduced epidermal growth factor signaling to activate mTOR and deactivate AMPK.
Every lifestyle and medical intervention that helps you stay healthier longer tamps down mTOR and ramps up AMPK. That is the common denominator. That is the story we have been building. Our current model says it is all about lowering the risk factor. It is about lowering blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol. Here is the takeaway lesson. Lowering risk factors is important, but the way we lower them is even more important. The famous heart failure specialist Dr. Milton Packer underscored this point in explaining how Jardiance dramatically slows down chronic kidney disease and reduces hospitalizations for heart failure. “…it is now critical for physicians to reconceptualize SGLT2 inhibitors (like Jardiance) as organ-protective agents rather than glucose-lowering drugs. The antihyperglycemic action of these drugs represents a tiny fraction of their broad portfolio of effects, which (when fully exercised) cause an adaptive reprogramming of stressed cells in a manner that promotes homeostasis and survival.” Jardiance works by directly activating AMPK. Moving to that new paradigm is required to keep you healthy and younger longer.
You just lost me by pushing statins and demonizing cholesterol. You didn't say anything about the known side effects of statins, of which there are many. And these are just the ones they admit to. I think you might want to take a deeper dive into statins and cholesterol levels before writing stuff like this.
Once more, I think the language here is misleading.
Feels like it's trying to a condense a complex topic with a lot of unknowns into an accessible hot take, using terms like antioxidants which average people naturally associate with vitamins, fruits, vegetables and various OTC supplements. This is not really the same meaning he's using with losartan. It's confusing.
As far as I know neither losartan or statins are prescribed clinically as "antioxidants". Perhaps I'm mistaken but my impression is antioxidants have virtually no formal role in medicine at all.
There is some hypothesised extra role statins play, one of which may be some oxidant reducing effect in specific tissues.
I'm not anti-drug by any means, but if you took Dr Bestermann's articles on this literally, everyone should be on rosuvastatin and losartan and probably metformin, regardless of risk status. Because these drugs are so great right ?
Everyone should be avoiding exercise and protein to keep mTor down and AMPK up and taking as many antioxidants as possible, because that = disease and aging and everyone agrees on this and knows exactly how this all works now.
I don't believe that's what Dr Bestermann is intending to say, as it's so obviously incorrect, but it does read like that.