There is a new push to give statins to diabetics. If you’re diabetic, the American Diabetes Association wants you to take a statin drug. It doesn’t matter if your cholesterol is normal, and it doesn’t matter if you have the disease under control. Under new guidelines, they want you to take the drug anyway. But cholesterol-lowering statins can interfere with how your body uses insulin. In non-diabetics, that can actually cause the disease. And if you already have it, that could lead to a disaster. In addition, statins can block nutrients that are essential to heart health, such as coenzyme Q10, and come with side effects such as muscle pain and memory loss. If you’re diabetic, there are much better ways to protect your heart than chasing a paper cholesterol target. Focus on your health as a whole – focus on diet, lifestyle and nutritional factors and you can slow or even reverse the disease itself. And that, in turn, will protect your heart more than any drug ever will. To read more about how Dr. Stengler approaches the issues related with diabetes, please visit our page here.