Chris Masterjohn

So there's just no way around that statins will decrease your mitochondrial function.

So

I think by not thinking about mitochondria first,

Instead, you take these people with mediocre mitochondrial function, their LDL in their blood would get taken into their cells.

You would do valuable things with it if the state of abundance was present because not only does all the signaling say do something with the cholesterol, but the way you can actually get cholesterol into the cell is to burn through a bunch of ATP with motor proteins that actually move it from outside the cell to inside the cell in order to facilitate that turnover.

So we've got a situation where we know that everyone could improve their mitochondrial function, but instead of doing that and then saying, okay, do we really need a statin?

We just say, oh, go straight for the statin.

And now you're hurting the mitochondrial function even more.

And you're saying, well, the ROI is good enough because I'm lowering their cholesterol and they won't get heart disease.

And yeah, their mitochondria aren't doing as great, but that's okay because we lowered the cholesterol.

I think that's totally backwards.

You should always be trying to optimize mitochondrial function first.

You should always be doing that with natural foods before you try anything else.

And then move on.

Just set the foundation.

Set a good foundation and then build your house on top of it however you want.

I'm not saying never use any pharmaceuticals.

I'm just saying if you're going to build your house out of pharmaceuticals, do it on a good foundation.

The first thing is you actually want enough food and you want good mitochondrial conversion of the food to ATP, but there's other things that could be important to having good thyroid function as well, like having, if you just look at what is thyroid hormone.

So thyroid hormone is made from the amino acid tyrosine, which you get from the protein in the food that you eat, and then you add iodine to it.