Speaker 1: I get a team Craig Anthony Harper reporting in It's
Speaker 1: four oh two, it's bloody, it's New Year's Eve, it's news.
Speaker 1: I don't even know why we're recording today. Well I
Speaker 1: do because I asked David and he's got no life
Speaker 1: and I've got no life between the two of us,
Speaker 1: los as we went. Fuck it, let's record an episode
Speaker 1: of the Year project. Happy New Year, mate?
Speaker 2: How are you?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Good? How are you?
Speaker 2: I'm good?
Speaker 1: You don't I could get in trouble saying this, but
Speaker 1: fuck it, I'll say. You don't strike me as the
Speaker 1: super festive type. Am I right or wrong with that?
Speaker 1: I think you're probably right. I don't tend to go
Speaker 1: in for celebrating things. I guess yeah.
Speaker 3: I'm also just quite happy if people ignore my birthday
Speaker 3: and things like that too.
Speaker 1: What, yeah, is that a personality thing with you? Is
Speaker 1: that just a personal preference? Where have you always been
Speaker 1: like that?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: I can't ever see you despite the fact that you
Speaker 1: have a profile and you're very public in a way,
Speaker 1: you seem you don't seem like an introvert, but you
Speaker 1: definitely seem like somebody who doesn't want to be in
Speaker 1: the middle of a crowd or be the center of
Speaker 1: attention at all, unlike a lot of other public figures.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've well, I guess maybe it's just laziness. I
Speaker 3: think being the center of attention takes a lot of
Speaker 3: work and is unnecessary for a lot of what I
Speaker 3: have to do, in the sense that all the things
Speaker 3: I've written about are really about providing people with knowledge
Speaker 3: and the tools to do something about something in their lives.
Speaker 3: Like I don't bother writing books, you know, clutching our
Speaker 3: pearls and wringing our hands about climate change even though
Speaker 3: it's very real and very dangerous and so on, because
Speaker 3: I can't think of a way to write a book
Speaker 3: that results in someone being able to meaningfully affect it.
Speaker 3: And it's sort of something that I follow with everything
Speaker 3: I write. The person has to be able to put
Speaker 3: the book down and immediately implement something at a personal
Speaker 3: level that changes something about their lives. And I guess
Speaker 3: that doesn't need me to be an Instagram star to
Speaker 3: do that. It just needs me to be accurate and constant.
Speaker 3: And like I said, probably all boils down to laziness
Speaker 3: in the end, because to be an Instagram star, I'd
Speaker 3: have to do all sorts of things I quite frankly
Speaker 3: wouldn't be comfortable doing, you know, tiktoks and videos and
Speaker 3: unboxings and all that sort of crap.
Speaker 2: Maybe yeah, I just think for you though, like.
Speaker 1: I know, you've got a profile and you you know,
Speaker 1: I guess if I asked ten people, have you heard
Speaker 1: of David Gillespie, the author you know, Sweet Poison, blah
Speaker 1: blah blah all that, I don't know. I think maybe
Speaker 1: three or four ossies might have heard of you, compared
Speaker 1: to none out of ten for me, which I'm fine with.
Speaker 1: But I just think for you, the bigger the bigger
Speaker 1: your social media presence, the more awareness around your messages,
Speaker 1: Like if you had a million followers on Instagram, not
Speaker 1: because you're dancing like a fuck with at a train
Speaker 1: station or unwrapping a fucking you know, a high def
Speaker 1: TV or I don't know.
Speaker 2: Look here's here's my breakfast. Hey everyone, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot of that, But I just think,
Speaker 1: like for you, I actually get frustrated because your writing
Speaker 1: is so brilliant, and I just think enough people don't
Speaker 1: see it, and there's so much shit out there. There's
Speaker 1: so much poor writing and poor information and misinformation that
Speaker 1: is overexposed, you know. Yeah, And I guess I guess
Speaker 1: I live in hope that you know, there's an old
Speaker 1: saying and I can't remember who said it, probably Mark Twain.
Speaker 3: He comes up with all the best ones. You know,
Speaker 3: if it's really news, it'll find you. And I guess
Speaker 3: I live in hope that if someone really needs to
Speaker 3: hear anything I've got to say, there's enough of my
Speaker 3: stuff out there in various places that they will find it.
Speaker 3: And m I just you know, I'd love to have
Speaker 3: a million followers on something, because, as you say, a
Speaker 3: lot more people would read what I had to say.
Speaker 3: But I'm not prepared to get into the churn that
Speaker 3: is required to make that happen. So yeah, like I said,
Speaker 3: it comes back to laziness.
Speaker 2: Well, I think, yah, maybe maybe wisdom.
Speaker 1: I think sometimes I put a fair bit of effort
Speaker 1: into my Instagram, only my Instagram, not really Facebook or whatever.
Speaker 1: And I've got across Facebook and Instagram over one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand followers, which is a few, but it's not bizarre, right,
Speaker 1: But sometimes I think for the time, effort and energy,
Speaker 1: and also what's funny is sometimes I will write something
Speaker 1: that is, you know, as close to profound.
Speaker 2: As I'm going to get.
Speaker 1: Like, it's quite deep and thoughtful, insightful, and potentially if
Speaker 1: somebody would turn that theory into behavior.
Speaker 2: It might be really valuable. And it'll get out of ten.
Speaker 1: Let's say it gets a one response, and then I'll
Speaker 1: put up I'll write on my whiteboard, don't be a
Speaker 1: fucking idiot, and that'll get a nine.
Speaker 2: Right. It's like the.
Speaker 1: Stuff that is so base and so and it's almost
Speaker 1: like the more I swear, the greater the response. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's not. It's not like it is. There's a direct correlation.
Speaker 1: And in fact, I think you've discovered.
Speaker 3: You discovered Ricky Gervais's secret success.
Speaker 1: Then I think I discovered before him. I mean, my
Speaker 1: second book had fuck on the front cover, and that
Speaker 1: was twenty ten, so that was fifteen years ago. And
Speaker 1: that my subsequent book to that, which Penguin saw that
Speaker 1: was just called stop Fucking Around thirty Principles for Blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. Right, And Penguin saw that book and reached
Speaker 1: out to me, which I know is not the normal
Speaker 1: kind of protocol, and said, we had a look at it,
Speaker 1: we liked it, and I sold a lot, right, I
Speaker 1: sold a lot of that book, as you know, like
Speaker 1: I think in Australia ten thousand is the best seller,
Speaker 1: and it was way way, way more than that, with
Speaker 1: no distribution, no publisher, al self published, no interviews, right,
Speaker 1: And so they went, we want.
Speaker 2: You to do a big version of that and.
Speaker 1: Anyway, so I spent I got paid to write a book,
Speaker 1: as you do, and.
Speaker 2: Then I had to deliver it within one hundred and
Speaker 2: eighty days, which I did. But blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: I did all this stuff and then they named it
Speaker 1: pull Your Finger Out, which I fucking hated. Right the
Speaker 1: first one stopped fucking around, and this was meant to
Speaker 1: be the bigger, better version.
Speaker 2: I'm like, and I said to them, that's a terrible name.
Speaker 1: And they're like, oh, you know, we've done all the whatever,
Speaker 1: the testing out, you know, and it really tested well,
Speaker 1: and I just said, it absolutely won't work. And I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've ever done this, but I went
Speaker 1: into Penguin and I sat down in a boardroom with
Speaker 1: like ten people who worked on it and marketing and
Speaker 1: branding and market research and all the you know, look
Speaker 1: and feel and color and vibe, and which was great,
Speaker 1: and they were great. Everything was great except the title,
Speaker 1: and then that book, which was a much better book
Speaker 1: in my opinion. I wrote both it it was outsold
Speaker 1: by the first one six to one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just because it's a shit title, you know.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, and you will have discovered that it doesn't
Speaker 3: matter what you think of the title. If you signed
Speaker 3: a standard Penguins publication contract, they have entire control over
Speaker 3: the title to cover everything that's on the front and
Speaker 3: back cover, and you they ask you, out of courtesy
Speaker 3: what you think of it. But if you it's a
Speaker 3: pr exercise. If you say it sucks, I want something else,
Speaker 3: they'll say, well, thank you for your input, and go
Speaker 3: ahead and do what they were going to do.
Speaker 1: Anyway, I told them like I sat in the boardroom
Speaker 1: and they literally had this reveal where they had an
Speaker 1: a frame with the book on the cover right so
Speaker 1: that all the artwork, and they pulled off a sheet essentially,
Speaker 1: and my first words were I hate it, and everyone
Speaker 1: looked at me like, apparently you're not meant to say that,
Speaker 1: But anyway.
Speaker 3: I'm having a similar experience at the moment with the
Speaker 3: title of my next book, which but I look, I
Speaker 3: come from the position of I think, never having successfully
Speaker 3: given a good title to anything, and so I have
Speaker 3: no confidence in my ability to be any better at
Speaker 3: it than they are. So, you know, no matter what
Speaker 3: my opinion of their title, I doubt anything I would
Speaker 3: come up with is any better. You know, I find
Speaker 3: that even when in writing an article. You know, at
Speaker 3: the end of writing an article, I have to think
Speaker 3: of a title for it, and I'm usually pretty stumped
Speaker 3: about what to call it. And I doubt I've cracked
Speaker 3: the magic. You know, this is highly clickable if you
Speaker 3: just call it this title. You know, for starters. I
Speaker 3: don't use the word fucking any of the titles of
Speaker 3: any of my pieces or books.
Speaker 1: Well, you've gone okay, So I don't think, well, who knows,
Speaker 1: I mean, you got you are going okay.
Speaker 3: But maybe I should, Yeah, maybe I should. Do you
Speaker 3: know there's that new thing on substack where they do
Speaker 3: the what are they called the ab testing, where you
Speaker 3: can give it alternate titles, and it spends the first
Speaker 3: hour dividing up your audience with various titles and then
Speaker 3: picks the one that worked the best. Maybe I should
Speaker 3: try a few profanities and see what happens. Huh.
Speaker 1: I did a just tongue in cheek, completely ridiculous. You know,
Speaker 1: how you develop scales and then you get scales validated
Speaker 1: over the time. So for my PhD I developed a scale,
Speaker 1: but just for fun, I did another bullshit scale called
Speaker 1: called the fuck scale, which is friendship, understanding, caring, and kindness.
Speaker 1: And it was an emotional kind of investment scale friendship, understanding, caring,
Speaker 1: and kindness and fuck was an acronym for those four words,
Speaker 1: and it was like how many one to seven fucks
Speaker 1: on a like art scale, like how many fucks do
Speaker 1: you give?
Speaker 2: Right? Anyway?
Speaker 1: And it was just complete, Well, that went nuts my
Speaker 1: actual scale that I put up, which is a psychometric
Speaker 1: evaluation like a real one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, whatever sounds boring this other one, you know, the
Speaker 4: fuck scale, Oh my god. Anyway, it's what happens before
Speaker 4: we talk about our actual topic, which will take.
Speaker 2: Six minutes knowing you and me or more. I wanted
Speaker 2: to ask you how would you label How would you
Speaker 2: label your.
Speaker 1: Books or your writing? Would you call it would you
Speaker 1: call it self help, would you call it education? Would
Speaker 1: you call it something else? Or would you call it
Speaker 1: a synthesis of a few things?
Speaker 3: It's education sound like I'm trying to lecture to people,
Speaker 3: which I'm not. I really really hate Ritchie self help books,
Speaker 3: you know, it did really really turned me off. I
Speaker 3: sort of think of it more of you as invested
Speaker 3: investigative journalism with some self help stuff or how to
Speaker 3: apply this at the end of it. You know, so
Speaker 3: this is all terribly interesting, but what does it mean
Speaker 3: to you and me? And I don't like to just
Speaker 3: do the research and not be able to do that,
Speaker 3: and so it's yeah, it's mostly yeah, it's that it's
Speaker 3: not education. Sounds a little bit creachy, like I'm trying
Speaker 3: to teach you something, like like I know it and
Speaker 3: you don't, and I've got to teach you. And usually
Speaker 3: in my books, I don't know the answer before I start.
Speaker 3: I just have a sense that there's something wrong in
Speaker 3: what we're being told about how something works, and I
Speaker 3: like to dig in, and the book ends up being
Speaker 3: the documentation of what I found. And there's been many
Speaker 3: starts at books where I find, actually what we're being
Speaker 3: told about this is the sum of our knowledge on this,
Speaker 3: and there is no other evidence. And so there really
Speaker 3: is no point writing a book that says, well, you know,
Speaker 3: everything the Heart Foundation says is absolutely correct.
Speaker 1: You know who's buying that, yeah, yeah, or a book
Speaker 1: that says, hey, the other books were right, You're welcome
Speaker 1: the next time.
Speaker 3: The less boat into it. I have looked into it
Speaker 3: and they were right.
Speaker 1: I can I can confirm your honor. Yeah, I for me,
Speaker 1: one of them consider I was going to say battles.
Speaker 1: It's not a fucking battle. But one of my constant
Speaker 1: considerations is like, even like I did a gig recently
Speaker 1: for actually for a supplement company down here, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't We didn't talk about their supplements. It's just an
Speaker 1: education night for blokes, you know, in that health, fitness, wellness, performance, aging,
Speaker 1: anti aging, just general stuff, you know, food, exercise, lifestyle, sleep, stress, anxiety,
Speaker 1: self management, all that stuff. And I'm constantly going, so,
Speaker 1: here's something that's worth thinking about, or here's some information,
Speaker 1: here's what we know, here's a bit of research. But
Speaker 1: then I've kind of got to go so what can
Speaker 1: we do about that?
Speaker 2: Though? So that's all well and good, but now what
Speaker 2: does that mean to do to you? And what can
Speaker 2: you do with that? Because I think as well as
Speaker 2: presenting potentially information and problems and current flowared thinking or
Speaker 2: dodgy science.
Speaker 1: You've still got to say. You've still got to give
Speaker 1: them some hope or direction or information or some answers
Speaker 1: that they might be able to, at the very least say, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to try this because what he spoke about,
Speaker 1: I'm dealing with that. So starting tomorrow, I'm going to whatever.
Speaker 1: I'm going to walk for fifteen minutes a day for
Speaker 1: the next hundred days and see what happens.
Speaker 2: You know, just so people have got a little bit
Speaker 2: of an.
Speaker 3: Action plan at least that applies generally except for the
Speaker 3: topics like the one we're going to discus today, which
Speaker 3: is about drugs. And you know, I don't want anyone
Speaker 3: to be asking me, like you, for example, at the
Speaker 3: end of what we discussed today, so what does this
Speaker 3: mean we should do? Because my answer will be talk
Speaker 3: to your doctor, because I don't want to get into
Speaker 3: a space where I'm telling someone to take a drug
Speaker 3: or not take a drug. In this particular space, what
Speaker 3: we're talking about is what is the evidence actually say?
Speaker 3: And I guess what does it say about us? Given
Speaker 3: the evidence?
Speaker 1: All right, well, let's jump into it. We're talking about writing.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about some of your writing from a substack.
Speaker 1: So this went up two days ago. It's called the
Speaker 1: statin delusion. Everyone, So if you don't follow galspo and substack,
Speaker 1: it's free and it's a great resource, so you should
Speaker 1: definitely do that, all right, tell us about the statined delusion.
Speaker 1: We are trading the remote possibility of a heart attack
Speaker 1: for the certainty of metabolic decay.
Speaker 2: Is the kind of subheading.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, and I start with an analogy in the
Speaker 3: article and can read that. Go ahead, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I think that might set it up nicely for people.
Speaker 1: Imagine taking your car to the garage for a road
Speaker 1: worthy certificate. The mechanics circles the vehicle and hums. He
Speaker 1: admits the engineers in pristine. The engine is pristine, and
Speaker 1: the car runs perfectly, but he insists on replacing the transmission.
Speaker 1: This is not because is broken. It is because a
Speaker 1: complex algorithm suggests a four percent chance it might shudder
Speaker 1: in two thousand and thirty two.
Speaker 2: That's funny. You'd call the police. You'd call him a
Speaker 2: fraud and a thief.
Speaker 1: Yet we thank doctors when they do the exact same
Speaker 1: thing with our cardiovascular system. We then head to a chemist.
Speaker 1: This is the state of modern medicine in Australia. We
Speaker 1: are witnessing a monumental act in pharmaceutical theatrics. Health is
Speaker 1: treated as a deficiency of medication.
Speaker 2: All right, I could go on, but I'll let you
Speaker 2: jump in.
Speaker 3: So this is about statens and the interesting thing about
Speaker 3: that so well, first of all, what are staturns. So
Speaker 3: statins are the most prescribed drug in Australia today, the
Speaker 3: most prescribed drug, and I think the stats are pretty extraordinary.
Speaker 3: I think it's something like half of everybody over the
Speaker 3: age of sixty five and a significant proportion of those
Speaker 3: under the age of sixty five in Australia are on statins.
Speaker 3: If a person is over the age of sixty five
Speaker 3: and also has type two diabetes, they've got an eighty
Speaker 3: percent chance of being on Staaten's in Australia. So statins
Speaker 3: are handed out like lollipops at the fate. You know
Speaker 3: this is this is a drug that is massively prescribed
Speaker 3: in Australia. Australia is, by the way, the world leader
Speaker 3: in the prescription of statns. There is no one who
Speaker 3: prescribes more of them on a per capita basis than Australia,
Speaker 3: and we've.
Speaker 1: Just sorry for the ten people who are going, what
Speaker 1: are they They treat high cholesterol, right.
Speaker 3: So what they do. What they do is reduce the
Speaker 3: level of LDL cholesterol, which is theoretically the bad cholesterol.
Speaker 3: And we could go into why I say theoretically and
Speaker 3: you're imagining parenthesis around the bad bit there, and we
Speaker 3: might or we might not. We might leave that for
Speaker 3: another show. But what they do is they do definitively
Speaker 3: or a lot of people, not everyone, but for a
Speaker 3: lot of people, lower the level of LDL cholesterol. And
Speaker 3: if you've ever been to a doctor and had a
Speaker 3: blood test, they'll they'll show you a print out that
Speaker 3: will give you a level of LDL cholesterol. It will
Speaker 3: give you sort of total cholesterol, also give you ld
Speaker 3: old cholesterol and sometimes HDL cholesterol, which is theoretically the
Speaker 3: good cholesterol. And Staton's lower for many people the number
Speaker 3: LDL cholesterol. And for a long time now, the accepted
Speaker 3: science has been that that's a good thing. That if
Speaker 3: you lower people's ld OL cholesterol, it should present prevent
Speaker 3: them having fatal heart attacks or any heart attacks, or
Speaker 3: you know, should reduce the number of heart attacks they're
Speaker 3: likely to have or reduce their risk of heart attack,
Speaker 3: or any number of ways of spinning it, but in general,
Speaker 3: the theory is that if you lower LDOL cholesterol, you
Speaker 3: should have less cardiac events in your life. And initially
Speaker 3: these drugs were used when they first sort of hit
Speaker 3: the market in the nineteen eighties or late nineteen eighties
Speaker 3: early nineteen nineties, they were initially used to give to
Speaker 3: people who had already had a heart attack, so they've
Speaker 3: had their first cardiac event, often young, younger people sort
Speaker 3: of around you, under fifty or so, and they were
Speaker 3: given to them as a way of presenting preventing further
Speaker 3: cardiac events. And there were some early studies that suggested
Speaker 3: that they were reasonably effective at that and honestly, those
Speaker 3: studies have not to my knowledge, been debunked in any
Speaker 3: great degree since then, despite some of the problems I'm
Speaker 3: about to discuss with the studies. But the what has
Speaker 3: happened though, is that the drug companies have taken that
Speaker 3: glimmer of success. And you might imagine that people under
Speaker 3: fifty who've had a heart attack, well it's actually only
Speaker 3: men under fifty who've had a heart attack. The studies
Speaker 3: didn't show any definitive benefit for women, but men under
Speaker 3: fifty who've had a heart attack is a relatively small market,
Speaker 3: and it's certainly not getting you anywhere near the numbers
Speaker 3: I just gave you before. You know, with six out
Speaker 3: of ten people over the age of sixty five taking
Speaker 3: a drug every day of the week, you're not getting
Speaker 3: near that. So the drug companies managed to convert that
Speaker 3: glimmer of success into over the last thirty years, a
Speaker 3: widespread program of everyone being given or as many people
Speaker 3: as possible being given these things as a preventative measure.
Speaker 3: So you might feel perfectly well. And this is why
Speaker 3: I use the mechanic analogy. The start, you might feel
Speaker 3: perfectly well. It might you might look perfectly well. There
Speaker 3: might be nothing wrong with your heart to you know,
Speaker 3: the casual observer or the medical observer, but you never know,
Speaker 3: you know, just in case, just in case, take this thing,
Speaker 3: and you know it'll it'll reduce your risk of ever
Speaker 3: having a heart attack.
Speaker 1: Well, based on that logic, I should wear my motorcycle
Speaker 1: helmet on and off the motorbike. I should wear that
Speaker 1: around the house pretty much, same logic, exact same logic, Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is you just never know. And even though you've
Speaker 1: never had a heart attack and you don't seem to
Speaker 1: be at risk of having a heart attack, why not
Speaker 1: And if these and if the drugs that we're talking
Speaker 1: about were completely harmless, like if I was talking about
Speaker 1: here was a sugar pill.
Speaker 3: And it made people feel better to take one every day,
Speaker 3: to you know, you say, oh, you know, I've said
Speaker 3: my three hele Mary's and I've taken a sugar pill,
Speaker 3: So I'm definitely not having a heart attack today. That's
Speaker 3: that would be fine. People can believe what they want
Speaker 3: to believe, but these are not harmless. Their mechanism of
Speaker 3: action is to shut down the liver's production of something
Speaker 3: which is used to produce cholesterol called coenzyme Q ten.
Speaker 3: So coenzyme Q ten you might have heard of before
Speaker 3: if you've ever seen any cosmetics commercials, because it's often
Speaker 3: touted as being something that you want to rub on
Speaker 3: your skin or something. I've never quite followed the logic
Speaker 3: of that, but it's it is actually a pretty handy
Speaker 3: thing to have in your body. It's it's kind of
Speaker 3: regarded in medicine as the starter motor for your cellular metabolism.
Speaker 3: So it's it's the spark that gets cells producing the
Speaker 3: right level of energy, and it's all. It does some
Speaker 3: other things as well as as always the body never
Speaker 3: just does one thing with anything, you know, and some
Speaker 3: one of the others is that it is a very
Speaker 3: very powerful antioxidant. So, and antioxidants are pretty handy. You
Speaker 3: will recall from how many discussions about cancer that antioxidants
Speaker 3: are a big part of stopping that happening because they
Speaker 3: reduce the potential for oxidation within the system, particularly when
Speaker 3: you take things that oxidize easily like seed oils. But
Speaker 3: that's a little bit of the side So the mechanism
Speaker 3: of action for Staton, though, is that they shut down
Speaker 3: the production of coenzon q ten. So, as you might imagine,
Speaker 3: there could be side effects, and the side effects have
Speaker 3: started to become really quite apparent. There's a significant increase
Speaker 3: nine percent increase in the incidence of type two diabetes
Speaker 3: because apparently coinzon q ten is pretty handy in the pancreas,
Speaker 3: and so there is a significant It's so much so
Speaker 3: that the FDA and the United States now requires a
Speaker 3: warning on statins to say that to say that there's
Speaker 3: also many people who take statan's report muscle pain, and
Speaker 3: it's often the reason that people stop taking them. You know,
Speaker 3: much of the spare of the medical profession. You know,
Speaker 3: they call that non compliance. Well, a big reason for
Speaker 3: non compliance is that people experience muscle pain. Some of
Speaker 3: the studies have shown that it's around twenty percent one
Speaker 3: in five people taking statin's experience study experience muscle pain.
Speaker 3: There's some interesting new evidence that suggests that they also
Speaker 3: increase the incidence of stroke, which is a bit ironic
Speaker 3: because you know, it's sort of training avoiding heart disease
Speaker 3: and acquiring a risk of stroke. And these are all
Speaker 3: quite concerning things for something that you may not need
Speaker 3: to be taking at all in the first place. And
Speaker 3: the problem here is with the evidence. Now there's precious
Speaker 3: little objective evidence about the effectiveness of statins, and that's
Speaker 3: because of a really peculiar arrangement between the drug companies
Speaker 3: and the research group who are responsible for I think
Speaker 3: it's twenty seven out of twenty eight of the major
Speaker 3: statin trials analyzed and reported on by something called the
Speaker 3: Clinical Trial Service Unit, which is part of the University
Speaker 3: of Oxford. It's a joint thing between the NHMRC in
Speaker 3: Australia and the University of Oxford, and so almost all
Speaker 3: the data we have on the efficacy of statins comes
Speaker 3: from this group, which in itself isn't necessarily a problem
Speaker 3: except when you start to digging in a little about
Speaker 3: how they're funded. So they're funded essentially by the companies
Speaker 3: and they which once again you'd say, okay, well, that's
Speaker 3: a cause for concerns, So we need to be a
Speaker 3: little bit careful about anything that they say, particularly when
Speaker 3: what they say seems to be at odds with the
Speaker 3: few independent studies that have been done. But maybe that's
Speaker 3: a coincidence, So you need to dig a little bit
Speaker 3: further than that. And one of the big concerns about
Speaker 3: this group is that they never publish the original data,
Speaker 3: the raw data that is being used in the trials,
Speaker 3: So they'll publish their interpretation of the data, but never
Speaker 3: the actual data, so other scientists can't look at the
Speaker 3: data and see if they agree with the conclusions that
Speaker 3: they've come out.
Speaker 1: How is that I mean as and I know, I
Speaker 1: know we've established that psychology is not real And my
Speaker 1: PhD is essentially analogous to getting a Barista qualification.
Speaker 2: We've sorted out.
Speaker 3: But you can make more money with it though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I know, I know, hello, Barista school, it's ups.
Speaker 2: But how is that even a thing?
Speaker 1: Where like, how in twenty twenty five can we have
Speaker 1: companies that have got an extremely huge financial interest in
Speaker 1: the outcome of the research fund the research, knowing that,
Speaker 1: with the academic institution knowing that should they produce data
Speaker 1: that doesn't align with the wants of the bank, the
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical bank, then they're going to get funding cut. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just like that. Just isn't how science. I mean
Speaker 1: to me, that's not science at all. There's no objectivity
Speaker 1: there like that just and I don't just mean with
Speaker 1: pharma college or pharmaceutical industry, but with all of it.
Speaker 2: Like, if something's.
Speaker 1: Funded by a group that has a financial interest in
Speaker 1: the outcome of the science, who's going to believe that?
Speaker 2: And why is that still a thing? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well, a good question. This is probably the most egregious
Speaker 3: example of it, but it is rife. There are enormous
Speaker 3: numbers of trials that are covertly funded by Coca Cola
Speaker 3: and Pepsi and some on that come to the conclusion
Speaker 3: that there's nothing wrong with sugar. And you know, they
Speaker 3: don't say this is Cooke's trial on this this is
Speaker 3: you know, it comes from a reputable university, and the
Speaker 3: fundings come from something called ICSI. I can't remember the
Speaker 3: acronym stand for, but it's an international research thing, and
Speaker 3: you have to dig pretty hard to find out who's
Speaker 3: actually paying for it. And you have to really understand
Speaker 3: the study to understand how they've bent the rules a
Speaker 3: bit to make sure that they get the result they want.
Speaker 3: And on that point, one of the big criticisms of
Speaker 3: the studies that these folks produce is that they use
Speaker 3: a way of measuring the results which is not standard.
Speaker 3: So in a normal trial, you just go head to head,
Speaker 3: you say, right, we've got a thousand people taking the drug,
Speaker 3: we've got a thousand people taking the placebo. Let's measure
Speaker 3: the outcomes. You think that would be the That's called
Speaker 3: an intention to treat trial, and that's the way most
Speaker 3: science is done if you want a placebo controlled trial,
Speaker 3: which is what you do with the drug, right, But
Speaker 3: that's not how they do it. So what they do
Speaker 3: is they report their results based on the degree of
Speaker 3: responsiveness to the drug. So the amount that the person's
Speaker 3: LDL was reduced, and they put them in one group
Speaker 3: and the people whose LDL wasn't reduced in another group.
Speaker 3: And these crossover both of the people with the perceibo
Speaker 3: and the non perceivo on. Because you can't see the
Speaker 3: original data, you don't know which is which, and they're
Speaker 3: just saying, of the people whose LDL was reduced, we
Speaker 3: report that they had, you know, ten percent lower incidents
Speaker 3: of maya cardial events ten years later or something like that.
Speaker 3: And because you can't look at the original data and
Speaker 3: you can't essentially do what any study would do, which
Speaker 3: is just put the people who took the perceibo versus
Speaker 3: the people who took the drug side by side and
Speaker 3: see the outcomes, you've just got this muddy in. And
Speaker 3: there is a strong suspicion amongst many researchers that the
Speaker 3: reason it's done that way is to make it that
Speaker 3: you get a positive outcome for statins from their trials
Speaker 3: that otherwise would not be there. So it's that's why
Speaker 3: there's concern in this area. Now there are studies done
Speaker 3: by independent groups. There are independent groups of scientists who
Speaker 3: have looked at as much data as they can find
Speaker 3: on this. Have tried to work back from the data
Speaker 3: that is published about this and have come to the
Speaker 3: conclusion that there's by and large no real preventative benefit.
Speaker 3: They would agree there is a benefit to people who
Speaker 3: have already had a heart attack. There is a benefit.
Speaker 3: It is not a huge one, but there is one. Yes,
Speaker 3: But they would say there just isn't data there to
Speaker 3: support the notion that people taking these things as a
Speaker 3: prophylactic you know, or you you with your motiviing helmet,
Speaker 3: it just makes any difference whatsoever There might even be
Speaker 3: There might even be an argument depending on who's taking it.
Speaker 3: You know, somebody with no history of anything, who's relatively
Speaker 3: fit and healthy and forty years old, the risks might
Speaker 3: be greater than the potential benefits even well, exactly because
Speaker 3: of the risk that I outlined before. So we're talking
Speaker 3: about things like hemorrhagic stroke, type two diabetes. So those
Speaker 3: type two diabetes incidences are relative increase over a person
Speaker 3: who would never have gotten it before. So this is
Speaker 3: a brand new disease that they would not have been
Speaker 3: likely to get prior to taking the drug. And this
Speaker 3: has been established beyond doubt in the research. So you know,
Speaker 3: hemorrhagic stroke, type two diabetes, massive incidents of muscle pain
Speaker 3: one in five with muscle pain that is significant. There's
Speaker 3: some evidence of cognitive decline making dementia worse, so you know,
Speaker 3: it's there are certainly a list of things that we
Speaker 3: should be a bit concerned about with these things, which
Speaker 3: is why I say these are not lollies, these are
Speaker 3: not placebos. It does matter if you take it if
Speaker 3: you don't need to take it. And then besides all
Speaker 3: of this, we've also had a persistent moving of the
Speaker 3: goalposts in terms of what is the target level of LDL.
Speaker 3: So and I put a bit of a history of
Speaker 3: this in the in the article where they you know
Speaker 3: where the goalposts have been moving. The target started at
Speaker 3: three point five and has moved so that these numbers,
Speaker 3: by the way, are the standard numbers that appear on
Speaker 3: Australian you know, blood reports. So when these drugs first
Speaker 3: came out, if you had a total cholesterol count of
Speaker 3: six point five million miles per later you were given
Speaker 3: a clean bill of health and cent on your way.
Speaker 3: But then they said they started moving the target on
Speaker 3: once they discovered LDL and started to be able to say, oh,
Speaker 3: this is the magic thing that needs to be fixed.
Speaker 3: They started at the target of you want to get
Speaker 3: it at three point five, and then it moved to
Speaker 3: two point five, then to one point eight, and today
Speaker 3: it's one point four. So each movement of this target
Speaker 3: increases the number of people in the population who the
Speaker 3: target would suggest need to have this thing right, and
Speaker 3: so steadily, not surprisingly, the number of people in the
Speaker 3: population being prescribed to these things has increased very rapidly,
Speaker 3: until now we are, as I said, top of the
Speaker 3: league in the OECD, We now prescribe more statons per
Speaker 3: person than anyone else in the world. Yes, so, and
Speaker 3: that's a direct result of you know, the well meaning
Speaker 3: GP down the road he sees the official target. Oh,
Speaker 3: it was three point five and now it's one point four.
Speaker 3: I guess before I barely had any patients that were,
Speaker 3: you know, needing to have these things, and now they
Speaker 3: now suddenly all of them do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I was just as you were talking, I was trying
Speaker 1: to find I don't know if you've seen you don't
Speaker 1: look at social media much, but it came across my
Speaker 1: or it came to my attention this these papers, that
Speaker 1: these I think it was two guys wrote based purely
Speaker 1: on fraudulent data and fraud, like the whole thing was bullshit.
Speaker 1: So they wrote these papers on these stupid topics, but
Speaker 1: really well written. They are academics, really well written. And
Speaker 1: these papers there was I think it was like nine
Speaker 1: of them got published in like Tier one and two,
Speaker 1: which for my listeners is kind of the gold standard
Speaker 1: Tier one anyway, papers journals, and I just wonder how
Speaker 1: much stuff. And I was just looking then at some
Speaker 1: of the stuff I was trying to find. I was
Speaker 1: trying to find those I can't, but I wonder how
Speaker 1: much just fabrication and kind of you know, I don't know,
Speaker 1: bending bending of the rules, but bending of the truth
Speaker 1: goes on in trying to put these papers together. And
Speaker 1: like I know, one of my friends is going through
Speaker 1: this thing now where they're looking at the data and
Speaker 1: the data is not telling him a lot with his research,
Speaker 1: and so they because he has to produce a paper,
Speaker 1: and he's desperately it's not me, by the way, but
Speaker 1: desperately trying to find something to write a paper on
Speaker 1: and to find some kind of correlation between A and.
Speaker 2: B, because sometimes there's sometimes it just tells you fuck all, Well.
Speaker 3: There's nothing more boring than you have a hypothesis that
Speaker 3: you know, if you do a then B happens, and
Speaker 3: then you go and measure it all and you find
Speaker 3: out that it doesn't, and then your paper consists of, well,
Speaker 3: I guess I was wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, essentially essentially.
Speaker 3: I mean, and we've seen a bit of that in
Speaker 3: the in the in the research on and this comes
Speaker 3: back to this point about the importance of being able
Speaker 3: to see the underlying data. So there was a massive
Speaker 3: study done back in the days when governments did spend
Speaker 3: a lot of money on this sort of thing because
Speaker 3: of the heart disease was absolutely peaking in the late
Speaker 3: nineteen sixties in the United States, the massive rates of
Speaker 3: increase of heart disease. We now know that that was
Speaker 3: because of the massive rates of smoking. But even to
Speaker 3: this day, no one's going to admit that they still
Speaker 3: want to pin it with saturated fat. But they did
Speaker 3: these huge studies where they Minnesota County Experiment for example.
Speaker 3: I can't remember how I think it was close to
Speaker 3: one hundred thousand people were enrolled in it. I can
Speaker 3: you imagine the cost of doing something like that for
Speaker 3: years on end, where they were having half the people
Speaker 3: were eating a normal saturated fat diet and the other
Speaker 3: half had a lower fat diet or eating seed oils
Speaker 3: instead or things like that, and they measured and their
Speaker 3: hypothesis was that the people who were eating the lower
Speaker 3: fat diet and the polyon saturates, etc. Would have less
Speaker 3: coronary events than the people eating the normal the butter,
Speaker 3: the cheese, the milk, et cetera. And it turned out
Speaker 3: it didn't, and so they never published. So this thing
Speaker 3: went on at enormous expense for I think four years,
Speaker 3: huge numbers of people involved, large, you know, and they
Speaker 3: put out a paper that essentially said nothing, so essentially
Speaker 3: didn't publish at all. Recently, the National Institutes of Health
Speaker 3: reinvestigated that and had access to the original data, so
Speaker 3: they went back into the archives, they dug up the data,
Speaker 3: and they did their own reanalysis of it without all
Speaker 3: the preconceptions of the people who were running it in
Speaker 3: the first place, which was to find that eating saturated
Speaker 3: fat cause heart disease. What they found was in fact
Speaker 3: the opposite. What they found was that when you properly
Speaker 3: analyze the data, the people who had more heart disease,
Speaker 3: and in fact the people who died more often. So
Speaker 3: the higher mortality rate was with the people who were
Speaker 3: not eating the standard saturated fat diet, the people who
Speaker 3: were lowering the cholesterol, the people who were having less
Speaker 3: fat and on actually had not just a higher rate
Speaker 3: of cronary events leading to death, but a higher rate
Speaker 3: of all causes death, meaning usually that is another way
Speaker 3: of saying a lot more of them died of cancer
Speaker 3: as well. So you know, we talked some other time
Speaker 3: about why that was. But that's why having access to
Speaker 3: the underlying data is really important, so that other scientists
Speaker 3: can go back and have a look themselves and do
Speaker 3: their own analysis and see if they agree with what
Speaker 3: you came up with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well that makes Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wish we could get that kind of second review
Speaker 1: on a lot of research.
Speaker 2: And being dependent on trusting.
Speaker 1: People who have a ender, who have a financial incentive
Speaker 1: to produce certain outcomes.
Speaker 2: It's not like it doesn't work, just doesn't work.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's going to go away anytime,
Speaker 1: because I know funding for research is not abundant and
Speaker 1: institution's financial Academic institutions have got to stay afloat, so
Speaker 1: they're never going to stop taking money but I don't
Speaker 1: know what the solution is, so that other solution.
Speaker 3: The solution is government money. It has to be fund
Speaker 3: You have to have governments that are prepared to invest
Speaker 3: in research and you know, truly independent money that doesn't
Speaker 3: care about the outcome, that is prepared to pay, you know,
Speaker 3: for agencies like the CSIRO for example, to exist. And
Speaker 3: it always, you know, frustrates me every time I hear
Speaker 3: that the CSIRO's funding is being cut yet again, because
Speaker 3: what inevitably happens there is they have to go and
Speaker 3: seek funding from the private sector. If they have two choices,
Speaker 3: they either start firing people or they get funding from
Speaker 3: the private sector. And the private sector is only going
Speaker 3: to give them money if they produce the results they
Speaker 3: want to see.
Speaker 1: Hmmm, yeah, one hundred uh. The article is called the
Speaker 1: Statin Delusion. His name is David Brian Kevin Patrick Gillespie.
Speaker 1: It's on substack.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You can also get to it from Facebook or just
Speaker 3: from my website. Just go to David Gillespie dot org
Speaker 3: and you can get to it from there too. One
Speaker 3: thing I want to say about this article, and I
Speaker 3: mentioned it at the top, and just just to stop
Speaker 3: you and I being sued Craig is. This is not
Speaker 3: medical advice. I am a lawyer. Craig is whatever he is,
Speaker 3: but he's not a doctor and this is not medical advice.
Speaker 3: Before you do anything, assuming you want to, about taking
Speaker 3: statins or not taking statins, you have a conversation with
Speaker 3: your doctor and ask them about this.
Speaker 2: Spoken authorized by David Gillespie, lawyer. Lawyer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just for the record, but I disagree with
Speaker 1: everything he said.
Speaker 2: Just fucking with you, mate.
Speaker 1: We'll say goodbye affair as always, but for the minute,
Speaker 1: thank you again and happy New Year Champ.
Speaker 3: Yeah, having new you to you too.