Cholesterol SOS: What All Statin Users Need To Know About The GG Pathway

Introduction and guest background 0:00

Well. Hello everybody and welcome back to reverse heart disease naturally Summit and don't move buckle up because this is gonna be a great interview and maybe a figure you don't know from the medical community, which is eyes exciting but a good friend of mine, welcome to Ivor Cummins. Good day sir. Thanks a lot, Joel, delighted to be here and a few people might have already detected. You sound like Sean Connery. You are in a great country of Ireland. What city are you in? I've been in Dublin actually the capital.

Yeah. Have been a long time. Alright, excellent. Uh and the sheer joy of hearing you talk is half the wonderment we're going to have. The other is your amazing young brain and all that you put in it. So tell people because you are probably I have another engineer that we've interviewed about wearables for the heart but you know, you're most people are medically inclined from the beginning. You made this great transition a decade ago. Tell us just a little biography of what that was all about. What were you doing 15 years ago and what do you do now? Right, Joel.

Well, basically I did biochemical engineering. So I've bio background that was back in 1990 I worked in medical device FDA regulated kind of devices and all. But then I moved into high volume manufacturer of consumer products and essentially for nearly 30 years, I was in a position, always of leading teams and complex problem solving and it culminated as an R and D. Technical Manager for many years and directly people managing And also the corporation would use me to directly lead as a technical person, the biggest, most complex problems that were costing the business money.

So that was my whole history. I had a flair for problem solving, logic and all branches of the science required. That was my corporate career. And it was great. However, 2012 I'll switch quickly. I got some routine blood tests. Three of them were extremely high cholesterol. Our old friend and serum ferret in the iron loading in in the blood and gamma glutamate transfer is a liver enzyme. So the doctor, I didn't understand these in depth but they were standards. So I quizzed the doctor a what are the implications of readings I could see?

I was way outside the normal distributions. So I knew it was meaningful and b what can I do to attack these? You know, what are the root causes that I can apply. And I got very poor answers. And then I went to a family friend who is a very experienced doctor, much older in his fifties and I didn't get really convincing answers there. And I finally went to a professor of medicine whose also connected the family and the same thing. So I got a test for hemochromatosis, the iron loading disease that's common in irish people. It was negative.

I was told he's healthy, whole grains, maybe more for the cholesterol and for gamma glutamate transfer. Maybe I was drinking too much wine, but I wasn't actually really doing that. So it was very disappointing. So long story short I had access to pub med and research gate through my corporation and I started root causing problem solving. Right? That's me. And within a few weeks off, to be quite honest, obsessive research. I had Eureka mo once I discovered metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance syndrome, I. E. Type two diabetes, I realized I was high insulin with severe metabolic syndrome.

That's why I had bad readings and I basically just cut out all processed food breads and sugars and juices. I was drinking lots of juices because they were my five a day. I cut out all the sugary carbs and I went to a more fat-based diet as an emergency measure and

Discovering metabolic syndrome and reversing his own health 3:56

within eight weeks my bloods were all resolved and as a side effect, I was not actually striving for all. I dropped around 32 or £34 in weight and I went down to a very slim physique and I just thought, wow and the reason for that, by the way, in case people are wondering, I began to find that my appetite was under control for the first time in my adult life and I began to literally skip meals with impunity. I was very high energy in that period. So I was skip meals and eating non obese a genic food. And together it was a double whammy and that's why the weight collapsed. So I began to lecture on insulin resistance metabolic syndrome to all the engineers in my corporate, I got support from the senior leadership for that. Some guys video that got on Youtube and the whole career kind of some of your Youtube's have millions of views, don't they? Yeah, I have a million views of my main heart disease. One, which is mostly about the calcium scan and the power of that. Which of course is one of the reasons we met.

And that one's hit a million views. Yeah, but the other is a few 100,000 would be the higher ones. And you know, down to your humble, you're humble, very big reach. You may shock some people. But tell everybody what you're kind of tag name is. I mean it's Ivor Cummins is your birth name. But what's your tag name and your wallets? It's the fat emperor. That sounds arrogant. No, you certainly have reclaimed your health and you look wonderful. We are going to be talking about other approaches to insulin resistance using because in my view, you got to be extreme. You're on one end of the spectrum and it works.

And the science is there. But there are people doing more of the 80 10, 10 very high complex carbohydrate. Obviously they both share no processed food, no ultra processed food, no added sugars. Uh, there there are different approaches and it's, you know, it's interesting to know how adaptable our human biochemistry is to getting junk out of the diet. And then there are two ways to approach it. So uh it's good for everybody to hear it. But let's shift to calcium scoring. Although again, it's a topic that's gonna come up a few times on this heart disease reversal summit. Where did you first encounter the heart calcium ct scan of which you're very famous for promoting, You know, get one, get one early detection, early detection.

You you can't reverse heart disease if you don't detect it. So we have to detect it early. So where did that come in your life in just a few minutes riff on that, right. And actually very clear answer there. David Bobbitt is one of Ireland's wealthiest entrepreneurs. He runs a 600 million turnover business, which he 51% owns. So that's David Bobbitt, remember the name. And he set up a charity irish heart disease awareness. And the reason briefly is he got a calcium scan I think in the Cooper Clinic randomly he was 52 years old, he was top 10% of fitness for his age. He aced his treadmills and the doctor said you're bulletproof and he could wear his kind of prom talks slim as a Whippet running four times a week. Got a calcium scan, 930 in the following days and weeks, He began to research it and realized how extreme his risk really was.

And he became so passionate about it. He wanted to save the world from heart disease by letting people know there's a scan. If you're a middle risk person it will tell you how big a problem you have and you can take action. And he found me basically in 2015 I was still in my corporate and he said, look I can send you around the world to speak, going to your conferences. And he began to fund all my expenses, no pay. But he would fund me to go all over the world. And that extended my reach. But of course as part of that I discovered the calcium scan.

He told me all about it in our initial phone call two hours long and I was skeptical. I thought how can he have discovered this amazing technology And I didn't know about it. But I had never looked up Joel diagnostics too much. I was into the metabolism and he sent me a four inch thick folder on calcium scanning by

How calcium scoring changed his mission 8:36

motorbike courier folder he built and within an hour I was just thinking, oh my God, this test is unbelievable. And that's how I got into it. Right? And it was is he behind the wonderful documentary? The Widowmaker movie which was out of Ireland yeah, he funded that. It was a couple of million dollars of his own money and he spent a couple of million more on on the rest of his mission. But the widowmaker movie was pretty high budget, relatively high budget and had Gillian Anderson narrated and it's very professionally done by professor documentary team and I put a one hour version of it and the bridge version on Youtube and that one we can put the link in later. You can watch the one hours long enough.

You don't need the full two hours. And for anybody listening. Although it was funded by this irish heart foundation, most of the interviews are out of the United States where the technology was identified way back in 1990 and then this amazing story and I won't blow it for people who haven't seen it about this legislator in texas and how he took on as a mission like you've taken on and I've taken on spreading the word about heart calcium ct scanning. What's the status in Ireland? How likely is it that a primary care team is going to recommend it?

How expensive, how accessible is it to somebody 50 years old with an elevated blood pressure, elevated cholesterol. Right. Ireland's a little better than a few years ago. But it's still the case that practitioners will not recommend it and they'll scratch their head if you ask for it because the whole medical industry as explained in the widowmaker movie has been steered for 40 years to not like it without data of course. But they all feel that way. So you can get it in many independent clinics it's around $300 roughly.

And some insurance companies the good news is are beginning to cover it a few years ago. They really didn't have the code to cover it. So it's not bad. But you need to be your own kind of author of your own destiny. You need to push for it and you need to go and get it. The system won't won't push it to you. Not much different here in the states. It's after literally in many cities 25 years it's been available the prices dropped but the utilization has not been explosive. Primary care teams are not likely still to recommend it. And sometimes they're talking patients out of it. What's it gonna really do to change when we know that Not just you and me but the American Heart Association, the national libit Association. They've all put in the power of a zero calcium score into their algorithms. Who needs treatment statins and other everybody needs lifestyle we know that but who needs prescription drugs.

And obviously it harms the pharmaceutical industry to put in an algorithm that you don't need pharmaceutical agents. So it just hasn't been picked up. We did talk to Matthew booed off our mutual friend professor and chief of medicine cardiology at U. C. L. A. Um He just wrote an editorial making another plea that the insurance companies in the state should now Given it's about a $75 $250 test in the states uh pay cover for the test, although it's within the reach of most people. And of course there was just recently out of I wanna say Denmark, that Dan Cavett's trial, but at least in that one niche age 65-69 is now a proven fact that liberal use of the calcium scoring another screening test of asymptomatic men has an outcome benefit. That's always been the you know, the maybe the weak spot in the argument proved to us that it makes a difference.

That's now a proven fact. So I hope all your hard work and my champion the heart calcium ct scan in my own clinic. I mean the majority of the people I see during the week, that's why. And you I cannot guess thin body decent labs and they have a high score. But then when you go deeper you might find like you said, metabolic syndrome, lipoprotein, a unexplained inflammation, other genetic factors. So, so um we've mentioned the pharmaceutical industry a few times. You're quite an expert on statins, the cholesterol lowering medication.

And you have some really interesting understanding of the biochemistry and the liver. Let's talk a little bit just off your head. Uh tell us a bit about the mev Olynyk acid or mev annihilate pathway the production system and the liver for cholesterol, the good, the bad, the side branches just share with us what you know,

Statins, the mevalonate pathway, and side effects 13:23

which is a lot. Yeah it's it's been a while since I've done the deep biochem and that probably six or seven years but I still remember the key things. So the validate pathway is fascinating because it's such a fundamental branch of of life and biology for humans mammals in general. But the reason it got really interesting is because it's where the statin drug class Its action takes place and it basically cuts off the branch. The navalny pathway by all means makes your cholesterol which is vital to life. No no one questions.

That cholesterol is the most important molecule for life. Your brain is 25% cholesterol even though it's only 4% of your body weight and every cell can make its own with some exceptions. So cholesterol is vital and it can become corrupted. But the statins cut off a branch of the navalny path the way that that fabricates cholesterol. Hence they lowered and we suspect lower oxidized cholesterol as well and damaged cholesterol particles. So the benefits may come from there. But the sad thing is that in this pathway there's many branches and the one that's hit by the statins.

It also is very important to enable K to metabolism and we know vitamin K. Two is very important for balancing calcium metabolism. And also it is a pathway that unfortunately gets hit that produces polyp peptides from muscle function and also it's the pathway that produces co Q 10 and many people may be familiar with statins you may need to supplement CO Q 10 and there's one more, it escapes me at the moment because I know there's four key ones K two muscle peptides relation, testosterone, testosterone, testosterone and other hormones and the CO Q 10. That that's the basket.

So all of these crucial life enabling or health enhancing and longevity producing things sadly get hit by the statin because as Professor Barry Tan said, it's an indiscriminate blunt instrument, it knocks out the pathway for the cholesterol which is the target but it knocks out everything we've just discussed. So that's where you get a lot of muscle aches and pains and some of the neurological problems experienced by people. And CO Q 10 is lower. There can be links to heart failure type problems over time and etcetera etcetera.

And it's unfortunate but as you know now there is a way of counteracting that problem, at least one that we know of and it's quite recent but based on very old science. Right? So I like that you know that you know in those that there still are clearly patients that have a very high cholesterol and a genetic or lifestyle basis and perhaps they're not willing to change your lifestyle cardiologists use statins widely family practitioners. Um you know I use them less than most cardiologists and only in people with established disease but we're not getting out of this life by eliminating the statin, pharmaceutical industry which is largely now generic. It's not an expensive drug class anymore.

There are new cholesterol drugs that are extremely expensive but not the statins. Uh but but like you said, it's a shotgun when you use a statin to block an enzyme to lower cholesterol production, you're also lowering good guys. We got bad guys and I don't call cholesterol a bad guy, It's just excess. And oxidized cholesterol may be a bad guy and some people, but we're knocking down the good guys. So you mentioned the name Dr Barry Tan T. A. N. Not everybody is going to be familiar with. You have a wonderful interview on your website that I would recommend people, you know spend the time to see how excited Dr Tan is about the discovery that something in the amazon can really make it the best of both worlds.

You lower your cholesterol but you don't lower these four key accessory uh metabolic products, testosterone co Q 10, vitamin K two MK four and the muscle protein print elation pathway. So tell us a little about what DR Tan discovered in this plant. Yes, so he discovered, oh decades ago at this plant, an extraordinary vivid kind of pink seeded plant. And it was on his travels. And he thought because he was chinese background that he would find things of real interest from the natural plant world for health in china. But it ended up, as you say more Amazonian.

And he was there incidentally and he took the seeds of this plant and he brought them back and he realized that there was something in them that stopped them. Oxidize powerfully stopped um oxidizing and if you remove that component they would darken in his test tubes. But long story short he discovered that taco trying als and very briefly vitamin E. People take vitamin E. But it's a bit of a double edged swords because there's taco for all form of vitamin E and there's taco try anal form and taking excess talk off roles may actually be even problematic. And it has been published on vitamin E and most vitamin E is dominated by alpha roles. But he discovered the other part of vitamin E. Taco try anal I think gamma and delta had massive antioxidant properties and really was truly beneficial in studies.

So he extracted that amazing thing but to get to the validate pathway. Many years later there was another pale yellow compound he had extracted, which he wasn't sure what it was and it's actually part of the taco train all, it's kind of the tail and it's called neuronal neuronal G. And after many years of work and research he discovered that that is the crucial node in the marvel in a pathway that enables all the good things we talked about and he realized that because the statin knocks the whole pathway and hits G node also if you replace the G.

G. You can counteract all the bad problems with the statin class while leaving it. Still reducing the cholesterol pathway which is the desired thing for that drug. So that was kind of the the kind of amazing road to Damascus. He realized G G would be really helpful and helpful because it declines as we age. Like many things so really healthy to take it and supplement it. But most crucially for the countless millions who feel they need to take the statins or they're the type that can benefit, you could negate the negative effects, you could fix the things that are broken that are just an unfortunate shotgun effect.

So that was it. G. G. Pure is the product from extend life I think you know warren my body in New Zealand provides dr Tan's top quality raw material and I'm almost I'm not sure anyone else's really realizing this. I'm not sure there's G. Is available generally like other supplements. I think you just talked about maybe the hottest, you know promise in the wider use without complications of statins statins, cholesterol lowering

Dr. Barry Tan, annatto, and GG Pure 21:08

medication. So we're talking about a plant from the amazon and I've seen pictures of it. It looks a little bit like a pomegranate like you said beautiful pink red kernels or seeds called the annatto plant. And you can extract from it the highest quality form of vitamin E. Or vitamin E. Called Tokyo tribunals. But then this discovery that you can extract it entirely different. Although biochemically related compound called G. We'll call it G. G. And you can take your Lipitor, take your Crestor take your Zokora obviously the generic form but you can take G.

G. Pure with it and get your cholesterol lowering and still support the limb of that pathway that seems to you know be involved with health and well being. And I learned in medical school um about the biochemistry of taking a cholesterol lowering statin medication and the anticipation. You're gonna block coenzyme Q 10 production. It's just biochemistry. You have to and who would volunteer to get their CO Q 10 block. Now we know it's more than coenzyme Q 10. It's protein testosterone vitamin K two MK four.

Who would volunteer to have that? It's bad enough to get old but you don't want to have a pharmaceutical agent accelerate what may be an aging process. Probably a vascular aging process. Like talk a little bit. We do know that people on statins. We know this frankly from our mutual friend Matthew Budanov's work and others that statins lower cholesterol and may in some subsets promote avoidance of heart attacks and hospitalizations but they do increase calcification of arteries? There's our friend vitamin K.

Two. Do you do you think it's that G. G. Pathway blockage that's resulting in that. And now we might actually be able to lower cholesterol without accelerating artery calcification. I think that's my assumption. And again the problem with the statins increased calcification is it is associational data and it's quite consistent but it's not a proven kind of R. C. T. And sometimes people say oh people who take start maybe less careful with their diet and that maybe the association it's confounded but for me it was always the antagonism Haitian or antagonizing of the K. Two pathway which I knew about long before G.

I suspected that that was the most likely culprit. And then of course Gs action D antagonizes that K. Two pathway and therefore you would expect that you could very well see the excess calcification via statin. Whatever the route calls be ameliorated or mitigated that would be the expectation. But I think we all know that there's myriad pathways they all interact, there's feedback loops were highly complex machines. So the fact that G. G. Enables the key hormones, testosterone, the friend relation, muscle protein sentences and the K.

Two, you know to have all of them being tackled together. They're kind of be a holistic benefit and I'm sure that would convert into many forms of better health including of course vascular deterioration being improved. Yeah that would be the O. And they did do one at least one barry has a load of papers. But one specific human experiment they gave Staten know. Staten NOg NOg and the damage biochemically measured from the statin which we discussed where they saw the markers moving in in the way you might expect not a good way with the G added into the other group that was canceled.

And in the non statin group, G G versus placebo also saw an improvement in these various measures. So it's not a full RCT with outcomes. But the science is coming in now to actually validate all of the hypotheses. You know Again we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater is very exciting topic. You know if you open a package insert of a drug like generic Lipitor generic Crestor it'll say from our F. D. A. Be aware of muscle aching, be aware of blood sugar elevation, be aware of cognitive issues. Brain fog, memory. Because medical science studies have shown these are issues and some people I doubt we're going to get a 10,000 patient trial of statin plus G. G pure versus statin alone because after all these years we hardly have a co q 10 plus statin randomized study to look at.

And certainly not a big one. It would have to take uh quite uh an enormous amount of money. It won't happen. But you know will we be able just clinicians making observations. Uh a patient that uh isn't thriving on a stat and that now is put on uh nutritional support and that's what I would call the annatto plant and nutritional biochemical support G. G capsules. Are they going to resolve some of the detriment and to be able to stay on the medication safer and better. I'll tell you in my clinic I see a lot of people on the first visit doc I just got discharged from the hospice six weeks ago I had three stents small heart attack. I'm on 80 mg of atorvastatin which is a typical discharge protocol by research for 30 days. But nobody ever questions it.

So they end up on these massive doses for a long term and I'll draw a blood test and it's a blood level of CO. Q. 10. Now I don't get that test back for 10 days but I usually tell the patients you know you need to supplement with coenzyme Q. 10. If you're gonna stand that kind of dosage when the blood work comes back they have nearly undetectable blood CO Q. 10 levels. It's biochemistry. It's not a surprise I didn't discover this. It's in the medical literature. I haven't published the papers and you know and I'm certainly glad that I put them on supplemental Co Q. 10. What's really an interesting question is do we now add CO Q. 10 and G. G.

Pure or maybe do we just add G. Pure Journal? Journal G. And will that support and I'm gonna do that on somebody is just put them on GGp your recheck the serum level of CO. Q. 10 because we do know for certain disease conditions for high blood pressure. A blood level of CO. Q. 10 of two and above supports more normal blood pressure. So it acts almost like a pharmacologic agent and in congestive heart failure, a blood level of three or greater uh in CO Q 10 supports resolution of some of the symptoms and even arise and ejection fraction.

So we don't want to walk around with pharmaceutically induced low CO Q 10. I mean age does that to us. We don't need to add to age. Age is tough enough on most of us. So this G. G pathway that dr Tan discovered and again I urge people to look up your fairly recent interview with him. So you said the product GgP your I think it went quickly but extend life dot com if I remember X. T. E N. D. Dash life dot com and people can read about it, tell us where people can find more about your Youtube, your work, your fascinating interviews. Right?

Practical use of calcium scans and closing remarks 28:38

Thanks Joel. Yeah. Oh and just one quick thing I'll say on G. And in general what you alluded to, people sometimes think oh well nutraceuticals are expensive and and they kind of trust pharmaceuticals more. But you know an irony for me for many years now the statin comes from a fungus is taken from Plant World, you know and you get a patent on it, whatever you might tweak it. But the pharmaceuticals overwhelmingly come from Plant World proteins and substances that are tuned or trimmed and patented and they're huge money but you can go to nature like in this case of G and many other things and extract these Fascinatingly beneficial molecules but because they're not patented with big trials, you know, they're not respected as much. So I just thought I'd mention that you know, it's all coming from the same place, you know, Metformin from lilacs, aspirin, from willow trees, G. G pure from the annatto plant.

I know there's many, many, many others of course that of course, but you can't patent a natural product. You can't you can't patent uh you know a lot of the vitamins out there but of course you can modify them and make them patentable and call them a pharmaceutical agent. So and you know the funny thing is I used to come in many, many years ago just make a joke of it. You basically get a natural plant world compound that will do X. But your compound just needs the spin of an electron and one atom in a big molecule changed in order to let you get a patent can be the exact same thing.

But now it's done a trial and it's a pharmaceutical. But there you go. But on that question yet I think if you just search my name, Ivor cummins very quickly up the top you'll hit my twitter and youtube and facebook and they're the main platforms I go out on particularly youtube all the videos. I haven't really had time to get into insta yet. So it's mainly those three and my blog, the Fat Emperor dot com. I blog occasionally as well, instagram would be for pictures of your five Children. And if you have if you have any pets, I don't find scientific posts and instagram do extremely well even though I persisted that but and I do post a lot about the calcium scoring.

So anyways, I wanna thank you from everybody at this heart disease reversal summit. You bring a breath of fresh air from across the atlantic and uh exciting times. And this G. G. Pure is really exciting. So we so appreciate you explaining it to us and we'll catch up soon. Thank you sir. Excellent. Thanks so much, Joel till next time.