The Medical Advisor

In the U.S. alone, 40 million adults take statin cholesterol-lowering medications in the mistaken belief that this will reduce their risk of heart disease (1). But lowering your cholesterol is not the panacea to heart health that you’ve been led to believe. On “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Dr. Aseem Malhotra, an interventional cardiologist consultant from the U.K., speaks out about the overprescribing of statins for heart disease — and the widespread myths about cholesterol and your heart that still permeate modern medicine (2). Only Extremely High Levels Were a Problem The Framingham Study, which began in 1948, involved 5,209 people from Massachusetts (3). It was instrumental in starting the myth that high total cholesterol is a major risk factor for heart disease, but what many people don’t realize is the correlation only existed if cholesterol was over 300 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl). “Very few people have total cholesterol that high,” Malhotra says (4). Further, he believes, y

The American Heart Association developed updated guidelines with a new equation to calculate risks of cardiovascular disease in today’s population. Around 40 percent of the people currently advised to take statins would not be if they were assessed using a new criteria, according to a study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. In 2023, the American Heart Association developed a risk assessment to evaluate a person’s risk of heart disease. The assessment, PREVENT, significantly reduces the number of people who must take statins to prevent heart disease. “We don’t want people to think they were treated incorrectly in the past. They were treated with the best data we had when the PCE (a cardiovascular risk calculator) was introduced back in 2013,” Dr. Timothy Anderson, lead author of the study, said in a news release. “The data have changed,” he added. Dr. Anderson noted that a person’s risk of developing atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease can change over time. “For a patient w

Stem cells are special cells in the body that are capable of developing into different cell types such as brain cells, muscle cells, among many others. In addition to that, they also have the ability to repair damaged tissues.    If you search online for  stem cell supplements ,  you’re bound to find a long list. Figuring out what to make of all of these supplements can be pretty daunting, as each claims to be the best. You need to be careful with supplements and health claims and especially stem cell supplements. Why? Generally, the process of creating a new supplement is pretty simple. You go online, find some studies that seem to fit what you’re looking for, create a master file, choose your ingredients, and you’re off. Meaning, no original lab or clinical research is performed. For example, to create a stem cell supplement, you could focus on the different ways that stem cells get impacted by supplement ingredients, like proliferat