Hi everyone. Nice forums! I’m Rick (46 years old) and have been ketoing since September. I’m down 43 pounds (289 to 246) but would love to see one-derland some day.
So I had an exam for life insurance a few day ago. I knew they’d be checking cholesterol (among a bunch of other stuff), and since keto usually elevates blood cholesterol during the active weight loss phase, I did a little experiment by eating oatmeal for 4 days leading up to the blood draw. Not oatmeal + keto. Just oatmeal. No sugar, no salt, no butter. Just four boring days of oatmeal. I also drank a gallon of water a day for several days leading up to the test. My thinking was that a good flush of the system would be good too. I won’t get the test results for a few days yet, but I’ll report back. KCKO!
Insurance exam
I’ll be very interested in seeing if this works, as well! Have not heard of eating just oatmeal prior to an exam. Wonder what that does to your triglycerides…
Folks may want to check out 2KetoDudes podcast #38, Hacking Cholesterol with Dave Feldman. It’s excellent!
Also, there’s Dave’s blog. Fascinating stuff!
Jimmy Moore brought his total and ldl down a big number by an extended fast. I’ve also heard that ingesting a lot of O6 polyunsaturated oil will do the same thing (warning: this inflammatory approach will raise your cardiovascular risk at the same time it makes your numbers look good)
I’ve heard also that eating chia seeds daily will also reduce ldl-c. It will be interesting to see the results of your oatmeal test.
Hi @bibletoter - yes, I actually dropped my cholesterol massively by upping my total dietary fat, and actually wrapped this experiment around the first presentation of my data. Here’s an infographic I made on it.
I’m very interested in what your oatmeal-only effect will be. Unfortunately, it will be hard to parse out the comparison with your previous blood test without it being closer to when the experiment began (ideally right before) and not knowing how much de novo lipogenesis is taking place from the higher carbs relative to your keto diet (carbs being converted to lipids, usually for storage, but upping total cholesterol as they ride along with trigs in LDL-P)
If this doesn’t work, you may want to try my cholesterol drop protocol which was modeled around my experiment. I’ve now had a handful of people write me back that it worked for their insurance test while on Keto, but again, I don’t know about results from stepping off Keto.
https://doc.research-and-analytics.csfb.com/docView?language=ENG&source=ulg&format=PDF&document_id=1053247551&serialid=MFT6JQWS%2B4FvvuMDBUQ7v9g4cGa84%2Fgpv8mURvaRWdQ%3D
Perhaps send the above document from Swiss Insurance, they might realise how wrong they are
So I actually got my results early! I realize that there is no real baseline for me, or my pre-exam oatmeal experiment, but these results are interesting to me:
Cholesterol 207 (tiny bit high)
HDL 37
LDL 134 (tiny bit high)
Triglycerides 180 (hmm, a bit too high?)
A1c 5.3 (nice!)
What do the experts think? I say not too bad for losing 43 lbs and eating lots of bacon and butter!
I reckon if you do daves protocol of 5000kCal/day of mostly fat your trigs will plummet, your HDL will go up and your LDL cholesterol will drop. I’d do it privately to make sure before exposing your insurance premium to the results … but I know it worked for me, and a few other people reporting back to dave that it worked for them too.
BTW nice HbA1c - no diabetes there 
What @richard said X1000. Your scores seem very typical for a carb centric diet, especially the lower HDL. It would’ve been interesting to have seen what your glucose levels were through out the oatmeal only days. I do hope you actually do a follow up private test while keto ( and preferably soon for comparison value ), as it would definitely give a lot more research data to the community.