I stopped taking statin pills 6+ years ago when Lipitor gave me liver disease. My cholesterol is low now due to my strict regimen of aerobic exercise and a healthy diet. No pills.A medical study described in the Times pitting exercise against pills should be incredibly troubling to people who take statins:
...The unmedicated volunteers improved their aerobic fitness significantly after three months of exercise, by more than 10 percent on average. But the volunteers taking the statins gained barely 1 percent on average in their fitness, and some possessed less aerobic capacity at the end of the study than at its start...Whoa - statins are bad for your aerobic fitness. That's not what we want to hear.
...This finding joins a small but accumulating body of other studies indicating that statins can negatively affect exercise response. Lab rodents given statins, for instance, can’t run as far as unmedicated animals, while in humans, marathon runners on statins develop more markers of muscle damage after a race than runners not using the drugs...Whoa - statins promote muscle damage in athletes. I felt muscle damage after one week when I took the Lipitor. Blood tests showed that the drug attacked my liver.
Finally, it's wrong that the Times frames this in an article whose title is a question, Can Statins Cut the Benefits of Exercise?, when the article describes a study that demonstrates it is a fact that statins do cut the benefits of exercise - they promote muscle damage - or in plain terms - statins are bad for you.
