It’s called the LDL, and so we’ve got these drugs that lower the “bad” cholesterol because nothing “bad” should be in your body. Now all of a sudden, researchers are so worried that these drugs have successfully lowered bad cholesterol so much that it might lead to Parkinson’s disease! Now, will Michael J. Fox soon begin doing television commercials for trans-fats — i.e., healthy eating? This is striking. This is just another example of how we have this panic-oriented health culture where every week we get a new discovery, a new claim, “do this and do that,” it becomes household conventional wisdom. “Bad cholesterol is bad! If you have too much of it, you die! The plaque causes heart attacks. Clean it out of the arteries and go in there and do all this stuff, stents, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. So lower it. Diet, exercise, and take this,” whatever the drug is, and now all of a sudden… (tapping desk).
I know there are bad things in the body, but normally the bad things in the body get passed out by the body via the two means by which waste is eliminated, and I know that there are poisonous toxins running around the body, but they are taken care of by human organs in there, the kidneys and the liver and other things. We’ve had to believe that cholesterol, the LDL, the bad cholesterol, is a killer, that we were created with a natural substance that’s going to kill us for whatever reason. Now all of a sudden we find out that if we start tampering with that we might get Parkinson’s. (sighs) The thing to do is just enjoy your life, folks, and understand you’re mortal and that when your time’s up, your time’s up, and the real thing to do is try to get the most out of every day you have that you can, rather than sitting and fretting over this little adjustment you can make and that little adjustment. You become anal.
How many anal people do we have out there, just constantly micromanaging every little speck of whatever they breathe, eat, drink? “Yeah, make sure you jog on the grass. Don’t jog on the street. No, no, no! It can wreck your knees.” You get so paralyzed with these things that enjoying life cannot possibly result from all these things that you do designed to improve your life! Let’s see. The name. Researcher here is Xuemei Huang. It’s Chinese, I think. “Xuemei Huang and colleagues found that patients with low levels of LDL cholesterol are at least three and a half times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than those with higher LDL levels,” the bad cholesterol. “Writing in the journal Chemistry & Industry, they said they plan a bigger study of patients taking statins…” They’re saying: Wait, we don’t know about this! This is just some surmise that we’ve gotta get through research and so forth. Don’t start dropping the drugs yet.
Now, if you’re out there on a drug to lower your bad cholesterol and you’re listening to this report and you’re concerned about getting Parkinson’s disease, now what do you do? Now, what do you do?