This ‘heart healthy’ vitamin causes heart attack

This vitamin has long been hailed as a cholesterol lowering miracle and recommended by thousands of health practitioners.

Now, however, a new study published in the journal Nature Medicine reveals that this ‘heart healthy’ vitamin causes heart attack.

The Cleveland Clinic scientists started by looking at blood samples from 1,162 people who were being evaluated for heart problems. They didn’t really know what they were looking for. They expected to find that cholesterol was responsible for most cases of heart disease.

They used a method called untargeted metabolomics analysis, which is basically a process where they test blood samples for a wide variety of substances to see which ones were common in heart disease cases.

They found that it wasn’t the usual suspects like high cholesterol that were pointing to an increased risk of heart attacks or strokes.

Instead, it was something to do with how our bodies break down vitamin B3.

This is a vitamin that’s often added to cereal and other processed foods and has become popular as an over-the-counter cholesterol treatment.

Specifically, they noticed two by-products of the breakdown of vitamin B3—2PY and 4PY—that seemed to spell trouble. People with more of these in their blood seemed to have a higher chance of facing serious heart problems within three years.

To confirm this, the researchers checked their findings against two other groups of people, one from the US and another from Europe, adding up to more than 3,000 participants.

The result was the same. Higher levels of these vitamin B3 by-products were linked to a bigger risk of heart attack, stroke, and other heart problems.

To test how this worked, they performed an experiment on mice, focusing on the 4PY by-product. They found that 4PY could directly cause inflammation in the blood vessels, setting the stage for plaque buildup, which ultimately causes heart attacks and strokes.

That’s in fact the most interesting finding of this study. It proves that it’s not LDL cholesterol that’s the main cause of heart attack. It’s another kind of cholesterol, which directly causes inflammation in the heart and therefore heart attack.

Learn how to avoid this heart attack causing cholesterol here…