Most nutrients are not only safe in high amounts, they’re necessary — because too many people simply don’t get nearly enough of the essentials from diet alone.

But it’s also possible to get too much of a good thing, and a new study shows one of the risks of going overboard with iron. This essential mineral, so crucial to your health, could actually contribute to Alzheimer’s disease if you get too much.

In a series of experiments, lab rabbits given a high-cholesterol diet saw increases in their levels of iron in the brain. And as the iron built up, so did the amount of amyloid-beta plaques linked to dementia.

Amyloid-beta alone is a huge red flag, but it wasn’t the only dementia risk factor that cropped up. At the same time, a neuron protein called tau began a process called phosphorylation.

I don’t want to get too technical here, but that’s another big warning sign of dementia.

That’s the bad news.

Here’s the good news: When the bunnies were given the same exact treatment we give humans for excess iron — chelation, in this case with a chelating agent called deferiprone — blood levels of both cholesterol and iron fell and the amyloid beta and phosphorylated tau began to disappear.

Brain levels of iron didn’t fall — only levels in the blood, which is to be expected. And apparently, that alone was enough to do the trick.

Now, I treat people — not bunnies. But I test all my patients for excess iron because you don’t have to have floppy ears and a love of carrots to face the risks. Too much iron over time can cause or contribute to any number of conditions, including heart disease and cancer.

And while you’ve probably heard of iron deficiency anemia, most people have never heard of hereditary hemochromatosis — a genetic disorder in which the body stockpiles iron, allowing it to build up to dangerous levels.

It’s a lot more common than you’d think.

Have your holistic doctor check your own levels of iron — and if they’re too high, make like a bunny and seek a treatment that involves regular blood draws.

I’ve diagnosed a number of patients with this condition the past 18 years, and I can’t tell you how grateful they were since it resolved their fatigue and joint pain, both common symptoms of this condition.

It greatly reduced their risk of complications like early heart disease and cancer.

One of the most common mistakes I see people making is that they take iron supplements or multivitamins with iron, thinking it will help their fatigue. This is a mistake. Don’t take iron unless you’ve been diagnosed as being iron deficient via a blood test.

You don’t need to be in alternative medicine to know that statin drugs are a bad idea.

These days, even the doctors who once gave them out to nearly everyone are waking up to the fact that cholesterol drugs do plenty of harm and very little good.

And now, “mainstream” doctors are turning to what was once dismissed as “alternative” medicine to bring cholesterol levels down — including the simple lifestyle changes that I’ve been advocating from the beginning.

It’s not exactly a radical idea, but I’m glad to see the rest of the country catching on — and some are even bragging about their results in places such as the Journal of the American Medical Association.

One recent series of editorials there was a debate between two competing mainstream teams trying to treat a hypothetical 55-year-old patient with high cholesterol levels who was otherwise healthy.

A decade ago, I’m sure they all would have said “statins.”

Today, a set of doctors who said they’d use that approach were practically booed right out of the journal — with one team of doctors correctly pointing out that they’d have to treat 100 patients like that hypothetical man for five years to prevent even a single heart attack.

And if that’s all that happened — a heart attack was prevented — maybe it would be worthwhile.

But, as Dr. Rita Redberg and Dr. William Katz of the University of San Francisco, California wrote in the journal, at least one of those 100 patients will end up with diabetes because of those meds and a whopping 20 percent will experience the notorious statin side effects (and other studies like the Jupiter trial have shown risk closer to 25 percent).

Those include serious and debilitating muscle pain, fatigue, memory problems, cataracts, and even sexual dysfunction.

Now, I don’t know if this means these mainstream docs have gone alternative or if I’m suddenly mainstream. To be honest, it doesn’t matter to me — all that matters is that patients are finally getting the common-sense approach to cholesterol control they should have been given all along.

Better late than never.

For the most advanced cardiovascular testing contact the Stengler Center for Integrative Medicine at 760-274-2377.

I’ve got some exciting news this morning. As you’ve probably noticed, there’s a new name at the top of this email. Dr. Mark Stengler is one of the nation’s leading holistic doctors and the author of 17 books on natural healing, including three best-sellers.

More importantly, he’s also been my go-to guy whenever I have tough questions.

And just last week — as he was explaining why the next wave of cholesterol meds will be even worse than the statins I’ve been warning you about — it hit me.

“YOU should be writing House Calls!” I said.

“I’d love to,” he answered. “What’s the catch?”

“Well,” I said. “It’s a lot of hard work. There are a lot of readers who count on it. And the newsletter is completely free.”

He looked me in the eye and repeated, “What’s the catch?”

That’s when I knew I found the right man for the job. So it’s my honor to hand the keyboard over to him.

Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Stengler, and I believe that what makes my practice unique is the fact that I don’t think in terms of “alternative” and “mainstream.”

I’m not interested in playing semantics or choosing sides. As you’ll see in House Calls, I’m only interested in the safest and most effective treatments for my patients — and one of the areas where I combine the best elements of mainstream research with safe and natural alternative medicine is cholesterol control.

It’s absolutely clear to me that LDL levels are an important marker of cardiovascular health, and you do need to keep them under control — but you don’t need statins or any other drugs to get there.

And you certainly won’t need the next generation of cholesterol meds making their way to the market right now. The experimental meds, which are injected as infrequently as once a month, can slash LDL levels by almost two-thirds.

They’re called PCSK9 inhibitors because they inhibit the protein (PCSK9) that prevents the liver from pulling cholesterol out of the blood. Once that protein is blocked, the liver starts gobbling up all that LDL — to the point where even patients who already take statins have seen reductions of 60 percent or more.

That might sound great… but there’s just one little problem here: Who on Earth needs to lower cholesterol by 60 percent anyway?

Answer: Practically nobody.

Mainstream targets for cholesterol have been set way too low. So low, in fact, that they’re almost impossible to reach without meds. And sadly, I think that’s the real goal here — to sell more meds.

It’s certainly not for better health, because the research clearly shows that the current targets actually come with more risks than benefits.

Since this is my first House Calls, I want to keep talking about cholesterol — including some of those risks you’ll face by bringing your levels down to meet guidelines.

Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of taurine. Most people haven’t, and that apparently includes Microsoft since it’s not even in my spellchecker.

It’s an amino acid found in the tastiest part of the chicken, aka the dark meat you’ve been told not to eat.

Well, go ahead and eat up — because a new study finds that some women with high dietary levels of taurine have a lower risk of a heart attack.

Researchers from the NYU Langone Medical Center in New York checked the records on more than 14,000 women between the ages of 34 and 65, and found…almost nothing.

Not at first, anyway.

But once they started to break the numbers down, they found that high blood levels of taurine slashed the risk of heart disease by 60 percent in women with total cholesterol levels of more than 250 mg/dL.

The study doesn’t prove that taurine lowers heart risk, nor does it indicate why that connection would even exist. But let’s take a stab at it here and guess that women with higher cholesterol AND high taurine came by their cholesterol levels honestly.

They’re eating natural meats and dairy — all great sources of taurine — and if their cholesterol levels happen to be a little elevated by mainstream standards, they’ve really got nothing to worry about.

And thanks to that healthier diet, they’re probably going to have a lower risk of a heart attack anyway.

Women with high cholesterol and low taurine, on the other hand, might be getting their chicken from a greasy paper bucket and other nutritionally empty sources — and that’s the best way to ensure you’ll experience heart problems eventually.

Again, that’s just a guess. And since this is just one study, I wouldn’t rush out to stock up on taurine in any case (but feel free to grill up some chicken thighs).

When it comes to protecting your ticker, stick with the tried-and-true. And for some tips on the best tried-and-true nutrients out there, I turned to one of the nation’s leading experts on natural health.

Dr. Mark Stengler, a California naturopath and author of multiple best-selling books on natural cures, says there are four supplements everyone interested in cardiovascular health should be taking: fish oil, coenzyme Q10, L-Carnitine and magnesium.

If you’re missing out on any of these, do your heart a favor and add them to your supplement regimen today. They’re inexpensive, easy to find and they could save your life.