The "MacStatin": Fast food with some ketchup, salt, and a statin to go
AUGUST 13, 2010 |London, UK (updated) - Pushing the envelope of primary prevention to a point few doctors are likely to be comfortable with, a group of British cardiologists are proposing a rather radical strategy to neutralize the risk of cardiovascular disease caused by unhealthy eating habits.
They suggest that fast-food restaurants, such as McDonald's, offer customers a statin to go with their meal, one that could be found alongside the salt, sugar, ketchup, and mayonnaise. The statin, they say, could be sprinkled atop customers' Quarter Pounders, into their milkshakes, or onto their supersized French fries to offset the mounds of fat found in these unhealthy meals [1].
Consider the irony that you can have harmful condiments provided free of charge, in unlimited quantities, and yet people think this one simple, potentially protective additive would be crazy to add.The "mischievous" strategy, outlined in the August 15, 2010 issue of the American Journal of Cardiology, is not intended to encourage individuals to think they can eat unhealthily because the statin, which the authors dubbed the MacStatin—slogan: "I'm neutralizing it!"—is a panacea for all risks. Instead, they stress that medical direction should continue to place drug therapy behind lifestyle interventions, such as healthy eating, smoking cessation, and regular exercise.
"I am not crazy, and I do not tell my patients that they can eat unhealthily and get away with it," Dr Darrel Francis (Imperial College London, UK), senior author of the report, told heartwire. "We're simply providing a calculation for the medical community to think about the size of the effect of a statin tablet vs an unhealthy meal and to also consider the irony that you can have harmful condiments provided free of charge, in unlimited quantities, and yet people think this one simple, potentially protective additive would be crazy to add. And I don't know why they would think that."
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