By Daniel Klein 

I read this for my book club (The Mules) in October and (very) briefly reviewed it then here on the blog. It’s part “Dummies’ Guide to Western Philosophy” and part a casually philosophical memoir about finding fulfillment in old age.

Daniel Klein’s thesis is that there is a time for everything in life, and old age is a time for slowing down, embracing the simple pleasures (like an Epicurean would), and preparing for the inevitable. He eschews the modern tendency to resist this natural stage of life by trying to look and act like you did and could when you were 20 and 30 years younger.

What I Liked About It: I liked the attempt to define Epicureanism and to bring in the ideas of other philosophers, which made for a more interesting read.

What I Didn’t Like: I agreed with Klein that a man my age should accept with equanimity the fact that he cannot do everything he once could and should learn to enjoy the many wonderful things that life still offers. But I did not buy his idea that to do the former, one needs to abandon ambition and the hard work it takes to achieve ambitious goals. The right balance in life – and I think this is especially true for people who have accomplished a great deal in their careers – is a mixture of both.

PostScript

This is a great 20-minute explanation of five common habits that will age you quickly. It’s an AI script. And the person might be an avatar. But it’s a very good and concise summary of the topic – the best I’ve ever found.

For years, I’ve been writing about how uneasy I feel about my doctor’s recommendation that I take statin drugs. As you probably know, I’ve been in the alternative health publishing business since the early 1980s, so I’m very much aware of how unpopular statins are with doctors and scientists who are, like me, suspicious of many of the established protocols favored by mainstream medicine. And the doubts we have are not based on some vague preference for “natural” remedies, but on hundreds and hundreds of published scientific studies that refute or cast doubt on many of the “facts” that mainstream medicine holds to be true.

Statins are promoted to the public as drugs that prevent heart disease and extend life. Most patients come away believing that if they take a statin, lower their cholesterol, and follow instructions, they will live longer.

That promise dissolves when you look carefully at the data. Statins reliably improve bloodwork numbers, especially LDL cholesterol. They do what they are designed to do in that narrow sense. What they do not reliably do for people using them for primary prevention is extend life in any meaningful way. In many large trials, the average life extension amounts to days, sometimes a few weeks, and rarely more.

Did you get that? Those are the facts. (I checked with Nigel, and he is predisposed to mainstream medicine!) Isn’t it insane?

So, you must be thinking, “If that’s so, then why did my doctor write me a prescription for statins? And why do thousands of doctors write prescriptions for millions of Americans to do the same?”

The answer is logical and depressingly obvious once you hear it. Doctors recommend statins because they would be foolish to do otherwise. They operate within professional protocols that opine on “best practices” for treating health issues. Those protocols come from the American Heart Association, the AMA, the CDC, and similar bodies. And once a protocol becomes the standard of care, deviating from it carries legal and professional risk. So even when a doctor knows that they don’t prolong life and do cause adverse side effects, so long as those side effects are not crippling or life-threatening, it would be stupid for them NOT to recommend them.

And why do those major public agencies recommend statins? There are several reasons that all have the same root cause: They rely heavily on population-level statistics and relative risk reductions. A 25% relative reduction sounds impressive. A 2% absolute reduction does not. A recent study comparing American and Japanese patients made this gap visible. When people were shown what statins deliver in absolute terms, most concluded the benefit was not worth the commitment.

But patients are routinely NOT given that information. If they were told that the statins would – at best – extend their life by a week or two while causing all sorts of undesirable side effects, most of them would say, “No, thanks, Doc. I think I’m okay going with alternative solutions, like losing weight and stopping my smoking, etc.”

But the size of the worldwide statin market is between $14 billion and $17 billion annually. And if 80% of all those given this information decided not to take statins, Big Pharma would suffer bigly.

In Short…

Statins do what they are designed to do – lower LDL cholesterol. But that does not reliably translate into meaningful life extension for healthy people. When you look at absolute benefit numbers, the effects are small. In many cases, hundreds of people have to be treated for years to prevent a single event or death. Meanwhile, reports of muscle complaints, metabolic changes, and other side effects are not trivial. For people without existing cardiovascular disease, the decision to take a statin deserves honest, absolute-risk conversation, not marketing spin.

Just the Facts 

Statins Lower Cholesterol but Do Very Little to Prolong Life in Healthy People
* In large-pooled trial data for primary prevention (people without known heart disease), statins showed only very small or non-statistically significant reductions in mortality. Absolute mortality benefits are tiny (about 0.1–0.4% absolute difference). Meaning hundreds of people must be treated for years to prevent one death.

* In low-risk individuals (e.g., <10–20% 10-year cardiovascular risk), statins do not significantly reduce all-cause mortality. Some meta-analyses found relative risk close to neutral (RR ≈ 0.99) for serious illness overall.

* All-cause mortality in low-risk groups generally shows no statistically significant reduction or a reduction on the order of <0.5% over years of treatment.

* A recent evaluation found that statins might prevent one major adverse cardiovascular event per 100 people treated for 2.5 years, but no clear mortality benefit in adults without existing disease.

The Takeaway: The drugs reliably lower LDL (“bad” cholesterol), but that does not translate into longer life for people without existing cardiovascular disease.

(Source: Systematic reviews of primary prevention trials)

Cholesterol Counts Are Poor Predictors of Longevity in Healthy Populations
* LDL cholesterol reduction is the primary biochemical effect of statins, and guidelines focus on lowering LDL levels. However, clinical outcomes do not always mirror surrogate marker improvements.

* Lowering LDL does not necessarily produce meaningful longevity benefits in people without pre-existing disease. In large primary prevention groups, lowering LDL often changes numbers without clinically significant increases in lifespan.

* Some older cholesterol-raising drugs (e.g., niacin) improve HDL but do not reduce all-cause mortality or heart attacks, underscoring the fact that modifying surrogate lipid markers doesn’t always change real outcomes.

The Takeaway: Cholesterol metrics are useful in research but are not reliable standalone predictors of longevity, especially among healthy middle-aged people.

(Source: Large clinical trial biomarker data)

Statins Can Cause Significant Side Effects
* Muscle symptoms: Statins are associated with a range of muscle-related complaints (myalgia, cramps, weakness). And while large trials sometimes underreport them, real-world analyses and observational data show these effects occur meaningfully among patients.

* Myopathy and rare serious muscle damage (rhabdomyolysis): These are uncommon but recognized potential effects, increasing with higher doses.

* Diabetes risk: Statin therapy has been associated with an elevated risk of new-onset diabetes mellitus in some analyses.

Moreover: Adverse event rates vary, and large meta-analyses sometimes find little difference between statins and placebo for specific symptoms. But the reality of side effects remains clinically relevant, particularly in patients who do not clearly benefit.

(Source: Pharmacovigilance data and observational cohorts)

Putting the Numbers into Context
If you treated 100 people without cardiovascular disease with a statin for 5–7 years:
*~1 person might avoid a major cardiovascular event.
* Most will experience no clear improvement in lifespan.
* A non-trivial percentage (5–20%) might report muscle complaints.
* A small subset may develop impaired glucose metabolism.
* A very small number could face serious adverse effects.

Summary
* Statins reliably lower LDL cholesterol, but cholesterol levels are an imperfect surrogate for lifespan. Improvements in lipid numbers do not necessarily translate into meaningful longevity benefits in healthy populations.

* Randomized evidence shows minimal mortality advantage in primary prevention, especially for low-risk individuals.

* Statin side effects – especially muscle symptoms and metabolic changes – are real and can be significant for many patients, even if some large trials underreport them.

By a happy coincidence, I received this video link last week from regular contributor Joe Seta about Peter Atia, a doctor/ internet guru who initially impressed me with his vlogs and blog posts. Watch it to get a very credible explanation of how Atia was wrong about statin drugs and a suggestion as to why.

Health and Human Services Breaks with CDC Recommendation for the COVID Vaccine 

It happened in May. I somehow missed it. But the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will no longer be recommending that children, teenagers, and pregnant women get the mRNA jabs.

Studies showing that the COVID vaccine fails to protect infection or spreading of the virus have been publicly available for four years. But in the last year, dozens of studies have also surfaced that demonstrate a correlation between the vaccine and serious heart damage among the general population. The risk/reward ratio for everyone – not just children, teenagers, and pregnant women – is just impossible to ignore.

Is Monkeypox Going to Kill Us All? 

Have you heard about Monkeypox?

Monkeypox (Mpox) is a virus. It emerged several years ago (nobody seems to be exactly sure when) in Africa, in the Democratic Republic of the Conga. Government health officials tried to constrain it but failed. By 2022, like Ebola, it had spread into neighboring African countries, including Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda.

Last week, the WHO declared the current strain “a public health emergency of international concern,” saying that “the potential for further spread within Africa and beyond is very worrying.”

The facts are alarming. For example:

1. The current strain of Mpox (clade I) is more serious than the type we saw two years ago (clade II). Clade I spreads more easily and could kill up to 10% of people who contract it. On the other hand, more than 99% of people who caught the clade II version in 2022 survived.

2. It was presumed at first to be transmissible only by sexual contact, but now researchers are saying that it is spreading by any sort of human contact. During the global outbreak of Mpox in 2022, gay and bisexual men made up the vast majority of cases and the virus was mostly spread through close contact, including sex. But with this outbreak in Congo, a majority of cases and deaths are in children. The reasons for the difference aren’t entirely clear. It could be because kids are more susceptible, says Dr. Boghuma Titanji, an infectious diseases expert at Emory University. Social factors, like overcrowding and exposure to parents who caught the disease, could also be at play.

3. Literally just one day after the WHO classified the Mpox outbreak in central Africa as a “public health emergency concern,” a case of the new mutant strain was confirmed in Sweden. And when asked about the chances of the disease being in the UK already, Professor Paul Hunger, a microbiologist from the University of East Anglia said that it almost certainly is.

It is not in the US right now. More to follow as it is reported.

Another Impressive Thing About Japan 

A study was just published that answered a question I was about to research as a follow-up to my series on Japanese culture. The question: “Why does it seem that Japanese people are healthier than Americans… and why have I heard that they live longer than we do?”

The researchers collected data on the world’s most developed countries: Germany, the US, the UK, Austria, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Sweden, Australia, Switzerland, and Japan. And guess what they discovered?

The US spends, by far, the most (at $12,800 per capita) for health products and services. Yet the life expectancy for Americans, at 77.5 years, is the lowest in the world.

And what about Japan, my new favorite foreign country?

Japan, at $5.3K, has the lowest per-capita spending on health. And, with an average of 84.1 years, the longest life expectancy of all the countries studied!

This would have surprised me six months ago. Not now.

Big Change in AHA Statin Recommendations 

I’ve written about statins several times in the past few years – the cholesterol-lowering drugs that, contrary to popular belief (even among many doctors), do not seem to give those that take them the benefit they want. They don’t extend life expectancy. And though they may reduce the likelihood of spending several years of your life incapacitated by a stroke, that is not even certain.

In any case, according to a press release GM sent me, new American Heart Association guidelines could reduce the number of adults eligible for statin therapy from 45.4 million to 28.3 million, potentially improving public health by decreasing unnecessary statin use.

Click here.

Less Fat, More Prescriptions, and Much More Money for Big Pharma

It seems that every formerly fat person I know is slimming down – significantly – by taking Ozempic or one of its cousins. After decades of failed weight-loss nutrients, medications, diets, and exercise programs, the new drugs do seem miraculous.

But it’s not just weight loss. It’s the other health benefits of going from obesity to an average weight. One of my boys, who had long suffered from abnormally high blood pressure, has seen his counts come down to the normal range. And one of my nephews saw all his markers that were pointing to adult-onset diabetes drop into the healthy range.

Here’s another benefit: Using these drugs to lose weight is also, apparently, a fantastic way to cure sleep apnea. Click here.

Another “Crazy” Idea?

A visitor looking at “In America: Remember,” a temporary art installation on the National Mall commemorating Americans who have died of COVID-19. 

When I continue to express the view that the most important “misinformation” that came to us about the COVID virus came from the WHO, the CDC, the NIH, and our government, my friends and family members no longer think I’m entirely crazy. That’s because they are now repeating the talking points of those very same sources who have been, bit by bit for the past year or so, walking back their most egregious statements by saying they were “following the science available at the time.”

For the past six months, though, I’ve been doing it again – convincing them that I am indeed crazy. Because now I’m repeating what they consider to be the most absurd of the conspiracy theories about the whole COVID fiasco. I’ve been saying that a good deal of evidence is piling up suggesting that not only were the vaccines ineffective in protecting against infection, spreading infection, or even diminishing the fatality of infection, they were causing all sorts of serious side effects. Some of which may be fatal.

I’m going to touch on this latest “crazy” idea by mentioning something I discovered just today…

Early this year, Michigan State University Professor Mark Skidmore submitted a study concluding that at least 217,000 Americans died in 2021 because of the COVID vaccine. Not the virus. The essay appeared and then was retracted. And the university commenced a seven-month investigation into possible “unethical behavior” on the part of the professor.

Earlier this month, he was exonerated of all charges. And his findings were incorporated into a revised paper that, among other things, concluded this:

“With these survey data, the total number of fatalities due to COVID-19 inoculation may be as high as 289,789. The large difference in the possible number of fatalities due to COVID-19 vaccination that emerges from this survey and the available governmental data should be further investigated.”

Click here to read the entire paper.

Three New Takes on America’s COVID Response 

* He Doesn’t Sound Like a Conspiracy Theorist! Dr William Makis, who has been labeled by Big Pharma as a conspiracy theorist, and whose essays on the mRNA COVID vaccines have been criticized as fallacious by “Fact Check” (a bought-and-paid-for Leftist lobbying group), talks here about increased reports of the harmful side effects of the vaccines. I don’t know enough about this hot, new argument. But, judging by his demeanor and his presentation, he doesn’t seem like a nutcase to me. What do you think?

* Professor Denis Rancourt on All-Cause Mortality. This research scientist has been questioning the information we’ve been getting from the government since the beginning of the COVID outbreak. Here, he talks about all-cause mortality rates and how they help us understand the debate.

* Diary of a Vaccine Devotee. If you are a big believer in the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines, you won’t find this funny. But if you have doubts, you might enjoy it, as I did. (If you don’t know anything about the vaccine debates, be prepared. You may find this disturbing.) Click here.