by Suzy Cohen, R.Ph, Author of The 24-Hour Pharmacist, Diabetes Without Drugs, and Drug Muggers: Keep Your Medicine from Stealing the Life Out of You
Statins are popular cholesterol-lowering drugs. They work in the liver by preventing your body from making cholesterol. When you eat meals that have starches and sugar, some of the excess sugar goes to the liver, where the liver stores it away as cholesterol and triglycerides. Now stay with me — when you have a statin on board, it’s like a message to your liver saying, “No! Don’t make any more cholesterol, please stop.” So your liver sends the sugar back OUT to the bloodstream.
Many statin users come back to see their doctor for a routine visit and find that their cholesterol may be better, but now they have high blood sugar. It’s entirely possible that some physicians mistakenly diagnose their patients with diabetes when in fact they just have hyperglycemia, the result of a medication that was prescribed to them months earlier.
It’s entirely possible that what you actually have is a known side effect of the most widely prescribed classes of medications in the world, and I personally think that this is one of the reasons now that millions of people think they have diabetes.
Obviously, there’s more to the story that you can sink your teeth into, so below are 3 links explaining exactly the mechanism of action. It’s not something that is discussed freely in the media (they keep it hush hush). It’s like the best kept secret.
Sources:
Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology May 1, 2004; 18(7): 805-815
Journal of Investigative Medicine March 2009; 57(3): 495-499
About.com February 20, 2010
