The idea that saturated fat is bad for your heart and should be avoided to prevent heart disease is misguided to say the least.

There’s no telling how many people have been harmed by this dangerous advice, as scientific evidence shows that a lack of healthy fat actually increases your cardiovascular health risks, but the number is likely significant.

Adding insult to injury, cholesterol-lowering drugs (statins) have become the go-to “preventive medicine,” despite ever-mounting evidence showing that these drugs can do far more harm than good as well.

Taken together, a low-fat diet and statins is a recipe for chronic health problems, and I cannot advise against falling into this trap strongly enough.

One in four Americans over the age of 45 currently take a statin drug, despite the fact that there are over 900 studies proving their adverse effects, which run the gamut from muscle problems to increased cancer risk—not to mention an increased risk for heart failure!

Questions have also been raised about statins’ potential to cause amnesia and/or dementia-like symptoms in some patients. According to Scientific American,¹ hundreds of such cases have been registered with MedWatch, the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) adverse drug reaction database.

Statin Guidelines May Hurt Millions of Healthy People

In November 2013, the US updated its guidelines on cholesterol,² focusing more on risk factors rather than cholesterol levels—a move estimated to double the number of Americans being prescribed these dangerous drugs.

According to the highly criticized new guideline, if you answer “yes” to ANY of the following four questions, your treatment protocol will call for a statin drug:

   1.     Do you have heart disease?
   2.     Do you have diabetes? (either type 1 or type 2)
   3,     Is your LDL cholesterol above 190?
   4.     Is your 10-year risk of a heart attack greater than 7.5 percent?

Your 10-year heart attack risk involves the use of a cardiovascular risk calculator, which researchers have warned may overestimate your risk by anywhere from 75 to 150 percent—effectively turning even very healthy people at low risk for heart problems into candidates for statins.

The guideline also does away with the previous recommendation to use the lowest drug dose possible.³ The new guideline basically focuses ALL the attention on statin-only treatment, and at higher dosages.

The UK followed suit in July 2014, recommending statins for otherwise healthy people with a 10 percent or greater 10-year risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). As in the US, this was a dramatic change in recommendation, raising the number of Britons eligible for statins by about 4.5 million.