Day 3 on the low-cholesterol diet, and I just spent 10 minutes watching a video about the process of churning butter in France. So that’s how that is going.
Watching the Butter Churn
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
Day 3 on the low-cholesterol diet, and I just spent 10 minutes watching a video about the process of churning butter in France. So that’s how that is going.
Clarissa's Blog 
Good luck with the low cholesterol diet.
Do not let them put you on statins. The common side effect are headaches, nausea, increase in sugar levels and muscle/joint aches. It was the muscle/joint aches that finally got to me, they became sever almost totally disabling.
Eat more beans and a lot of whole grains is the best advice I can give you. I might add that a lot of walking will do you some good also but that is an even harder habit to obtain than staying on a diet.
I was taken off satins on 24 February 2012 and put on fish oil for a number of years then about 6 years ago quit that. Since coming off the statins my total cholesterol numbers have been over the magic number of 200 but the ratio numbers have been good.
LikeLike
Why low cholesterol??
Having high cholesterol is just a proxy marker for high blood glucose and inflammation. It doesn’t come from food.
LikeLike
Cholesterol is a part of the lipid complex in food. It forms plaques in blood vessels and impacts risk of strokes and heart attacks. You can have excellent blood glucose and no inflammation markers, but you can absolutely still have a heart attack due to cholesterol plaques. High blood pressure paired with high cholesterol measurements usually lead to that guideline. It’s exceptionally difficult to follow, though, because many foods have higher fat contents than you would expect.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have high sugar, too. It’s all my own fault. I’ve been eating very disorderly recently. First, I was sick, then I was also sick, then there was too much work, then I was a YouTube star. I created this problem for myself, so serves me right.
LikeLike
if you cut back on sugar your cholesterol will improve. It has nothing to do with eating saturated fat.
check out Dr Malcom Kendrick
avoid statins but if you must, use water based not lipid based.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, this is absolutely the simplest thing you can do. High sugar causes high cholesterol.
Next most effective and simple thing: cut all your fat intake down to, like, animal fats, coconut oil, and butter. Sparing with olive oil, but only if you can find a source with stellar credentials, becaus the olive oil market is so rife with fraud that any time you buy it at the store there’s like a 90% chance it’s been adulterated with other vegetable oils. It’s too hard to test for the fraud, and too lucrative to engage in, for suppliers to resist.
LikeLike
But the whole dietary cholesterol leads to blood cholesterol thing was debunked like twenty years ago! There are, possibly, a handful of genetic mutants out there for whom dietary cholesterol directly leads to higher blood cholesterol, but that is not actually true for normal people.
I know it takes at least ten years for new discoveries to make it into the med schools, and then some years after for all the previous doctors to die and be replaced, but… dang, can’t they install an update every now and then?
LikeLiked by 1 person
What are you saying, though? What should I be doing? I’m very open to suggestions and not close-minded on this issue. I’m not going to take the statins, that’s for sure but what should I do?
LikeLike
You’re smart and you read fast: do what you did during COVID and read the studies on it.
We live in a bizarre world where non-doctors giving medical advice is prosecutable, so I can’t give you medical advice.
But there are a few places where I find the most fascinating and wonderful information on these things, and you might find some interesting stuff too if you go out there on, say, yandex rather than any google-dependent search (even duckduckgo has been compromised, probably by aggregating data from other search engines that are censored), and look for things talking critically about the “cholesterol heart hypothesis”… which AFAICT was manufactured wholesale by margarine companies and vegan lobbyists.
Jason Fung is a nephrologist who has done some fascinating work on kidney health (which is tightly correlated with blood sugar control) and medical fasting. He’s definitely worth a read, and may point you to some of the relevant studies. Also good for people who don’t read studies so much, as he’s good at translating it all into plain English.
Robb Wolf is a biochemist and fitness guru and shameless self-promoter who has, nonetheless run a couple of fascinating small-scale programs with police and fire departments, looking at improving overall health, with good results. It’s worth checking out his recommendations, he’s sort of one of the godfathers of the paleo diet fad, but afaict he’s a smart man, intensely curious, and didn’t really get stuck in it as dogma: he still asks interesting questions, and reads interesting studies– and you can probably read those studies too!
Any kind of carnivore/lowcarb/LCHF/VLC/etc diet forum will yield a lot of coocoo-bananas orthorexia sufferers who think diet is gonna save them from the judgement of God. They’re easily ignored. If you’re good with search terms, those forums will also yield genuinely scientific-minded people who track their numbers after conducting various dietary and exercise experiments, and post their lab results. If you look at a bunch of them, you’ll probably notice certain trends, such as that many people find that fasting for just a couple of days will bring their cholesterol numbers down from “way high” to within normal healthy parameters. It’s the equivalent of an intense study session the night before a test, to pass. How does that work? Why does that work? What can you do to get those results on a more regular basis?
Another really fascinating person who reads interesting studies and then talks about them is Petro Dobromylskyj, at the blog: https://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/ He has a weird personal backstory, in that he is a veterinarian by training, loves animal studies, and also had a bizarre inflammatory condition called ankylosing spondylitis, which he got into remission through radical changes in his diet. Obviously that doesn’t mean everyone should go on his diet, but he’s very interested in questions of metabolism and health, and does a lot of deep-dives on the scientific literature.
Malcolm Kendrick has done a lot of the footwork on this subject, he’s written a lot, and he’s worth checking out, even though he was virtually silenced by the UK courts for a few years (he’s gradually winning out on that, through lawsuits). His website, compiling a lot of his writing, is here: https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/
There are a bunch of other people who have written extensively on the problems– and possible solutions. I can dig up more if you want, but those guys could keep even speedreaders busy for some time!
LikeLike
It was only partially debunked. For some people (of whom my grandfather was one), dietary cholesterol can absolutely have a giant impact. He was an otherwise healthy man who had a widow maker in his 40s and had another after. His change in diet absolutely contributed to his lowered cholesterol.
If you want to get deeper into it, you look at the liver. There’s something called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease that is caused primarily by high-fat, high-cholesterol diets. NAFLD decreases the efficiency with which the liver produces bile, which results in an increase in cholesterol. So the relationship is largely indirect, but it still exists. Any liver damage can cause similar issues, and it’s relatively easy to damage the liver with long-term diet.
LikeLike
If you’re having a heart attack at 40ish, that’s maybe a sign you *are* one of the weird genetic mutants for whom it matters.
However.
There’s been a huge, huge rise in NAFLD in recent years. Any broad change in such a large population in such a short time is by definition *not* genetic but environmental. Genetic changes don’t happen that fast, in a large population, all at once. I made an enemy of an average-IQ salesperson at the orthodontist this week by trying to explain this one. Sigh. Don’t bring it up in polite conversation, but it *is* an important concept. Stuff that’s gone up exponentially in the population in the last fifty, eighty years… cannot be primarily genetic. Genes have been the sexy research funding magnet for twenty years, but they haven’t returned much that’s useful. Genetic change doesn’t happen exponentially (now apply to fun things like dental crowding, autism, diabetes, obesity, kidney disease, cancer, heart disease, Senile dementia, MS…). It’s environmental, either causally, or by increased diagnosis for reasons of increase in *being able to diagnose* (how many cancers would never have been diagnosed if people weren’t being scanned for them all the time?).
So for example, if you look at diabetes, there are probably at least twenty separate types of diabetes. Before 1900, the vast majority of cases of diabetes were *probably* autoimmune type 1, MODY, FPL, and LADA. Those are all pretty rare, and they still occur in the population now at about the same rate as they did before 1900, because the causes are either genetic or… whatever it is that sets off autoimmune stuff. So because we’ve seen an increase in all autoimmune disease, there’s been a commensurate increase in rates of T1D, but… rates of increase you’d expect in an environment where all autoimmune disease is on the rise. And then, there’s Type 2 diabetes, which has completely exploded in the population. That’s not genetic, because genetic stuff doesn’t change that fast! That has to be environmental. Do we know what the environmental change *was*? Maybe, maybe not. This is keenly interesting to me, because my family has one of the weird varieties that’s *not* T1 or T2, but the crazy prevalence of T2 means we’re usually misdiagnosed.
Anyway, NAFLD is much the same phenomenon (and Kendrick IIRC talks about it a lot, I think it may be his primary area of expertise). Even before 1900, there were some rare cases. These days, though, NAFLD is quite common, and that increase over the genetic-mutant baseline… that’s environmental. So you’re looking at a certain small baseline level of people who are going to get that disease because they lost the genetic lottery. And then ALSO a whole bunch of people who don’t need to have it, but got it because of… the magic of American life. Probably our sorry food supply, plus medication side effects, chemical exposures, etc. etc. One of the primary culprits seems to be dietary fructose, which is promoted as “low glycemic” but the reason it’s low glycemic is that it’s processed by your liver instead of becoming glucose in your blood right away. And it is basically as rough on your liver as being a chronic drunk. It goes to your liver, and if you don’t need it for energy right now, your liver turns it into stored glycogen. Fat. In your liver. Keep doing it, without ever cleaning out the storage closets, and you build up quite a lot of fat in your liver. That’s probably not the only contributor but it’s a big one.
If you *are* one of the unlucky genetic mutants, you’ll probably have noticed others in your family, the progression of the disease will likely be quite unusual (eg heart attack at 45). It’s important to evaluate for that possibility! To go back to the diabetes example, the wacky genetic diabetes mostly look very clinically similar to T2… but with some key differences. With the familial types, you tend to have not just one or two relatives who have it, but LOTS of relatives who are diabetic. They tend to get diagnosed much younger, and while they are still a normal to low bodyweight. And the reason it’s important to be aware of it (though most clinicians aren’t), is that for some variants, the most safe, common drugs that work for T2D (such as metformin), will, at best, not work, and at worst, will kill you. Almost lost a cousin to Ozempic just last year. Metformin doesn’t work for any of us.
So… more than you wanted to read I’m sure.
If it’s a case of, you’ve been diagnosed with, or from family history and careful examination of disease features, it seems likely that, you have the familial version of a disease, then your prognosis and appropriate treatment are going to be *different* from your prognosis and appropriate action if you have the more common (in recent years) environmental version.
Does that make sense?
(I have to ask. When I try to do this in person, people glaze over and start twitching)
LikeLike
I agree with methyl. Dietary cholesterol has zero correlation with blood cholesterol. I’m diabetic and I eat 4+ eggs per day and my cholesterol is excellent.
People get scared about cholesterol and artery blockage. It’s just that cholesterol is what’s needed to build cell walls so if there’s damage or inflammation, of course you’re going to see cholesterol build up to repair that damage, but then people mistake that as causal. I heard this analogy that made sense. Say a road has damage and construction workers arrive to fill up the potholes. That might lead someone to correlate the presence of workers with road damage and conclude that it’s the workers who are creating the potholes.
“That’s the only time I see the workers!”
I think low carb diets are better. Especially if you’re diabetic and have fatty liver (excess carbs get converted to fats).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Low carb is important, but food quality is also important.
Industrial vegetable oils are low-carb, but they will also turn all your blood test markers to shite because they cause massive inflammation.
LikeLike
Plus, there are some really weird things out there you’d never think of, that’ll screw with your test results *even if your numbers are totally normal*, such as biotin supplements. Biotin is good for you, it seems so inoccuous, it’s in all the “Pretty hair and nails” vitamin supplements, and if you take enough of it, it will scribble all over your blood test results like a toddler with a sharpie marker! It doesn’t affect everything, but if you take it, you need to figure out how long to quit, before you get any labwork.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is one of the reasons why I prefer to get my nutrients from food instead of supplements. Food evolved with us! So spinach for example, has just the right combination or vitamin A, zinc, copper, whatever. Supplements that provide like 200% RDA of every nutrient don’t take into account. Too much copper inside you will fuck with the absorption of zinc or something. Get too much calcium might mess with manganese. There are tons of interactions like this and you’d go crazy tracking them.
Maxxing out every individual nutrient in isolation just cannot be good for us.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“10 minutes watching a video about the process of churning butter in France”
A few weeks ago I clicked on a short that showed up in my youtube feed and now I get a whole series of suggestions of Southeast Asians (Thai and Cambodian AFAICT) deep frying massive pieces of pork fat or whole fish or chickens or eggs (in the shell) in woks etc…. strangely addictive.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My mom has discovered these, and also finds them oddly fascinating. Which is funny because she is a longtime vegetarian.
LikeLike