The Great Cholesterol Myth by Jonny Bowden

Author:Jonny Bowden
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Rockport Publishers
Published: 2012-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

COENZYME Q10: THE SPARK OF LIFE

Coenzyme Q10 is a vitamin-like substance found throughout the body and made in every cell. Among the many important things it does, CoQ10 helps create energy from fuel (food) in the human body, just as a spark plug creates energy from fuel (gasoline) in a car.

A CoQ10 deficiency affects your heart as profoundly as a calcium deficiency would affect your bones. We create less of it as we age, making it all the more important to supplement with CoQ10 as we grow older.

Here’s how it works: Your body uses a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, as a source of energy (which is why ATP is nicknamed “the energy molecule”). Much like gasoline is the fuel that allows you to actually drive a car to any of a million destinations, ATP is the fuel that allows your body to perform any of a million activities, ranging from cellular metabolism to doing bench presses to dancing the tango. The body makes ATP by stripping electrons—tiny subatomic particles that carry a negative electrical charge—from food and then delivering those electrons to oxygen, which is an electron receptor. CoQ10 is one of the carriers of these electrons, so it essentially helps the cells use oxygen and create more energy. Bottom line: CoQ10 has the ability to increase the body’s production of the energy molecule ATP, and this is a very good thing indeed.

Just as a gasoline engine can’t work without spark plugs, the human body can’t work without CoQ10. It’s an essential component of the mitochondria, which is command central for the production of cellular energy (ATP). Not coincidentally, the heart is one of the two organs where the most CoQ10 is concentrated (the other being the liver). The heart never sleeps, and it never takes a vacation. It beats more than one hundred thousand times a day, making it one of the most metabolically active tissues in the body, so it’s very dependent on the energy-generating power of CoQ10.

A CoQ10 deficiency affects your heart as profoundly as a calcium deficiency would affect your bones. We create less of it as we age, making it all the more important to supplement with CoQ10 as we grow older. (Although it’s present in food, the only foods that have any CoQ10 to speak of are organ meats such as heart and liver. It’s also easily destroyed by too much heat or overcooking.)

As we’ve said, one of the biggest problems with statin drugs is that they significantly deplete CoQ10 levels. You may recall from the previous chapter on statins that the same pathway that produces cholesterol (the mevalonate pathway) also produces CoQ10, so when you block that pathway at its virtual starting gate (as statin drugs do), you not only reduce the body’s ability to make cholesterol but you also interfere with its ability to make CoQ10.

We’ve said this before, but in case you missed it the first time, it’s important enough to repeat: If you are on a statin drug you must, repeat must, supplement with CoQ10.

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