❤️🩹 Before You Take Your Next Statin, Watch THIS (New Research)
Your cholesterol pill was made from a mold that evolved to kill bacteria – and 50 years later, someone FINALLY checked what it does to the trillions of bacteria in YOUR gut. What they found involves a hormone you know from Ozempic, a lizard from the Arizona desert, and a 1,300-year-old remedy made from bear bile.
If someone you love takes a statin, send them this video.
In February 2024 a team published a study in Cell Metabolism that should have been front-page news.
They followed 30 patients starting atorvastatin 20mg and 10 similar patients who chose not to, for 16 weeks. The cholesterol numbers did exactly what they should: total cholesterol and LDL dropped within a week. But A1C rose by week four and stayed up. Insulin resistance rose. And GLP-1 – the hormone that popular weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy were built to imitate – dropped significantly, still falling when the study ended.
The mechanism is the strange part. Statins came from a mold, and molds evolved these chemicals to suppress bacteria. In the statin patients, gut bacteria called Clostridium started vanishing after one week – the exact bacteria that convert a liver bile acid into a finished product called UDCA. Fewer bacteria → less UDCA → less GLP-1. They confirmed it in mice, wiped out the mice’s gut bacteria and the effect disappeared, then transplanted stool from human statin users into ordinary mice and gave those mice insulin resistance – then reversed it two ways.
The buried finding nobody reported: mice on a high-fiber diet never developed the blood sugar problem at all. (Mice, not people – but fiber feeds the exact bacteria the drug suppresses.)
Then context. A 2024 Oxford analysis of 123,000 people across 19 blinded trials confirmed the effect is real – and sized it. On a standard dose, average A1C rose six hundredths of one percentage point: roughly one extra case of diabetes per 1,000 people per year, against roughly five heart attacks or strokes prevented. Both measured in the same people at the same time.
CAUTION: Nothing here is a reason to stop a medication. I’m not a clinician, but a caregiving researcher. Talk to your doctor.
These are a reason to say no. But they are reasons to ask better questions – especially now. In March 2026 the AHA, ACC and ten other groups released a new cholesterol guideline widening risk assessment from ages 40-75 to 30-79. An analysis published in July found 87.5 million American adults now qualify for a statin, 21.5 million of them newly – including over 90% of adults in their 70s. If you’re over 60, this conversation is already happening or about to.
SOURCES
- She J, et al. “Statins aggravate insulin resistance through reduced blood GLP-1 levels in a microbiota-dependent manner.” Cell Metabolism, Feb 6, 2024.
- Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ Collaboration (Oxford). Statins and HbA1c: 19 double-blind trials, 2024.
- 2026 ACC/AHA Multisociety Dyslipidemia Guideline + JAMA statin eligibility analysis (July 2026).
- Akira Endo, Lasker Award 2008. John Eng, Exendin-4, 1992.
ABOUT Neal K. Shah is a Johns Hopkins- and NIH-funded caregiving researcher and CEO of CareYaya, and has helped thousands of families navigate aging, dementia, and serious illness. This channel breaks down the health and caregiving news that actually affects older adults and the people who care for them. Please share this with someone that is on statins or considering them. They may want to learn more. DISCLAIMER: Educational content only, not medical advice. I’m a researcher and innovator in caregiving, not a physician. Never start, stop or change a medication without consulting your doctor or pharmacist. UDCA (ursodiol) is a prescription drug; online supplements with similar names are not the same thing and were not what was tested.
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