Brilliant idea. Let’s also put statins in the drinking water.
Outlets Should Offer Free Statins With Junk Food Say UK Researchers
MedPage Today
13 Aug 2010
Imagine this: order a cheeseburger and fries, and pick up a free cholesterol-busting statin tablet along with the other free condiments, that’s what a group of UK researchers suggests you should be able to do at fast food outlets as a way to offset the increase in heart attack risk from eating junk food.
You can read how the team from Imperial College London arrived at this suggestion, which at least one group of experts says should not be taken literally, in a study published this week in the American Journal of Cardiology.
Senior author Dr Darrel Francis, from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, told the media that:
“Statins don’t cut out all of the unhealthy effects of burgers and fries. It’s better to avoid fatty food altogether.”
“But we’ve worked out that in terms of your likelihood of having a heart attack, taking a statin can reduce your risk to more or less the same degree as a fast food meal increases it,” he added.
However, experts from the British Heart Foundation say that “McStatin” is not the antidote to junk food. Their medical director, Professor Peter Weissberg, said in a statement that:
“The suggestion that the harmful effects of a junk food meal might be erased by taking a cholesterol-lowering statin tablet should not be taken literally.”
Statins are widely used drugs that reduce the amount of unhealthy “LDL” cholesterol in the blood. A mountain of evidence, much of it from clinical trials, claims they are highly effective at lowering heart attack risk.
Statins also have one of the best safety profiles of any medication, the researchers said in a statement. Very few regular statin users experience side effects: 1 in 1,000 report problems in the liver and 1 in 10,000 in the kidneys.
One statin, simvastatin, is already available in low dose form (10 mg) over the counter, ie you can get it from a pharmacy without a doctor’s prescription. The others, which are only available on prescription, have fallen in cost so dramatically, that the cost of seeing the doctor is more than the cost of the tablet.
Francis said it was ironic that we are free to consume as much unhealthy food in fast food outlets as we want, but we have to get our statins, which are beneficial to heart health, via a doctor’s prescription.
In their paper, Francis and colleagues calculate that the reduction in cardiovascular risk offered by a statin is enough to compensate for the increase in heart attack risk from eating a hamburger with cheese and a small milkshake.
They used data from a previous large cohort study to quantify the increase in heart attack risk that a person incurs with their daily intake of total and trans fat. They compared this to the decrease in risk calculated for various statins from a meta-analysis that pooled data from 7 randomized controlled trials covering a total of nearly 43,000 patients. (Source)
