I have been so appalled by the recent news that the American Academy of Pediatrics is now recommending that children be put on statin drugs that I have been rendered temporarily speechless.
What part of "Statins do not prevent heart attacks in anyone but middle aged men who have already had heart attacks" don't these doctors understand?
What part of "Statins cause cognitive deficits--some of which are permanent" escaped them? "Cognitive deficits" is fancy lingo for "Makes you stupid." To give a drug that makes people stupid to an eight year old child whose brain is still developing is, simply stated, criminal. Cholesterol is used all over the brain. Lower it in the brain and that brain won't work properly. Lower it while the brain is being constructed and you have damaged a person for life.
The drug companies don't care. There are millions of fat eight year old kids out there and they are an "exciting new market." Stockholders applaud.
Obesity in children is right up there with transgendered frogs as a sign that the pollution of our environment with chemicals, plastics, and pesticides has reached the point where it is causing genetic damage. Genetic damage always shows up most clearly in offspring. To blame childhood obesity on "lifestyle" choices is absurd. Children in my youth in the 1950s ate enormous amounts of crap--ice cream every day all summer, three candy bars every time we went to the movies, pastries full of lard every day at lunch, mounds of potatoes at every meal. We did not walk miles to school every day. We rode the bus. We watched plenty of TV after our homework was done.
But in those days, if you said, "The fat boy" or "the fat girl" everyone knew who you meant because there was at most one in every class. Obesity was very rare.
The reasons why were not hard to find: We played with sheet metal toys, not ones leaching organic compounds into our skin. We drank from glass not plastic, wore clothes that had not been dosed with flame retardants, and our moms cooked our dinner on steel or aluminum pans, not cookware coated with flurine compounds (a.k.a. Teflon) that leach into our bodies and once there cannot be removed. There were not detectable amounts of estrogen and mood altering/insulin resistance-causing SSRIs in our water supply the way there are now.
Something has changed, and it is not that kids haven't been taking enough drugs. Which reminds me of the other ugly truth about what has changed with our kids--a fact that isn't getting any attention in the media. The number of kids nowadays who are on psychiatric drugs that increase insulin resistance--SSRIs and other mood and behavior changing drugs is scandalously high. Statins, in case you missed my earlier blog post also increase insulin resistance.
If your pediatrician tells you to put your kid on a statin, find a new one, and let your former pediatrician know why you left his practice. If adults want to waste their money on expensive, dangerous, largely ineffective drugs that change surrogate markers (LDL levels) without improving health, that's one thing. To foist such a drug on a child--a drug that could damage their brain for life, is something else--something that in my humble opinion constitutes child abuse.
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