It’s your life, so you’re allowed to question your doctor.

Your checkup last year revealed a high level of LDL cholesterol, and so to minimize this “bad” cholesterol and encourage the HDL – good – kind, your doctor prescribed a statin. Now you’re taking Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor, or any of a variety of generic statin drugs. And your cholesterol is showing better numbers.

Problem is, your muscles ache sometimes. Your digestion isn’t so good. You don’t seem to be thinking clearly. You’re not a doctor, so you don’t see any connection.

But your physician does, especially when the annual blood test this year showed a bit of liver damage. Those are all symptoms linked to statin use, and we’ll describe them further in future blogs to help you recognize them.

Because your doctor’s first concern is for heart attack or stroke, he or she doesn’t take you off the statins that treat those problems. Instead, the prescription is for an alternate brand. All statins work alike: they block a substance your liver needs to make cholesterol, and that in turn causes your liver to remove cholesterol from your blood.

Medicine is a physician’s training and profession, so you can be met with resistance if you ask him or her to try something other than a medical prescription. But it wouldn’t hurt to suggest you be placed instead on a cholesterol-reducing substance that is wholly natural. There are several products made of natural ingredients that promote lowered cholesterol, but we’re here to talk about the one we’re familiar with: Cholesterade©.

Cholesterade© contains soluble fiber from Acacia gum, an excellent source of dietary fiber that has been recommended by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics to promote good digestion and colon and intestinal health. Independent studies show that soluble fiber from Acacia gum produced the following effects on the cholesterol levels in human plasma over an 8-week period:
• Triglycerides were reduced by 50 percent;
• Total Cholesterol was reduced by 17.9%;
• LDL went down by 21.4%;
• HDL increased by 21.4%, and
• The HDL/LDLC radio increased by 44 percent.

Delivered through your system by a technology called Go-Somes, Cholesterade© is released over a period of time (think time-release capsules) in order to achieve maximum benefits.

Next: How to recognize the side effects of statins.