Lowering LDL and Tris, Raising HDL

[richard]

I’m excited to meet Sikaris in a few weeks at Gold Coast. I’ll definitely be talking lipids with him and I’d like to get his opinion on my research and the larger question of fat-based energy distribution and its impact on cholesterol.

And I am very excited to watch this particular first meeting as @DaveKeto will be totally fanboi’ing and I want to get that on video

[DaveKeto]

And I am very excited to watch this particular first meeting as @DaveKeto will be totally fanboi’ing and I want to get that on video

Fanboi’ing sounds so tame – it will be more like a tween girl meeting one of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show.

(… man, I’m really a geek!)

[Jason_Stevens]

I don’t know what a Small LDL of 1.21 means. I’m guessing it is LDL-C from small LDL particles? Is that right?

LDL 1, 1.93
LDL 2, 2.36
Small LDL
LDL 3, 1.21
LDL 4 0.14

I am still in a calorie deficit trying to lose the last few kilos.

I’ve been committed to keto for 12 month and I had great lipids drawn the week before I started.

It’s a bit scary to think a Proffessor wants me on a statin when I feel amazing and am in the best shape of my life.

I was listening to this podcast with Dom D’ Agostino today http://www.benpakulski.com/podcasts/dominic/2 and at around the 32min mark he mentions he was in a similar position when he got into keto. He reduced his dairy intake to reduce his LDL. I will do the same and introduce some more monounsaturated and then retest.

How long after changing fat sources would it be sensible to retest?

[Jason_Stevens]

@DaveKeto @richard Yeah i’m jealous of you guys heading to the Gold Coast. I didn’t jump on early and now it is sold out.

Hopefully next year.

[PaulL]

@DaveKeto, @richard Newbie here. How dangerous is cholesterol, anyway? Isn’t it one of those things we’ve been sold a bill of goods on? Dr. Phinney says that at least half of people with familial hyperdyslipidemia live perfectly normal lives and die at perfectly normal ages. So aren’t we getting all worked up about what is really a non-issue?

Just for background: I’ve been listening to Low Carb Down Under videos on YouTube, because the speakers all seem to have good scientific credentials (there are enough LCHF people out there who sound like snake-oil salesmen). Also, Gary Taubes, Nina Teicholz, and Dr. Lustig. I do my best to understand the research, but it’s a lot to take in. I only just discovered the Dudes’ podcasts and will get into them when I have time, but right now I’ve been laid low with a serious bout of life. (You know, that thing that happens when we can’t access teh Interwebz. )

[richard]

How dangerous is cholesterol, anyway?

Cholesterol is a building block of all our cells, it is absolutely essential, so much so that all our cells make it (except I believe some in the testes). It’s a lipid so it doesn’t mix in water so it has to be carried around our body in the same lipoproteins that all fats travel. It turns out that the easiest way to count how many of those there are is to spin blood in an ultracentrifuge and because cholesterol has a specific density you can measure how much is in blood by measuring how big the band of cholesterol is when you spin blood very fast. People … including doctors who should know better … conflate cholesterol with the lipoproteins that carry it all the time.

We did a massive big observational study on a town in Massachusetts called Framingham where we counted how many died of various diseases and how many had certain markers in their blood and we found that there is a weak association between Total cholesterol (actually total number of lipoproteins carrying cholesterol) and coronary heart disease.

This is the raw data

See we expected just on the law of averages for 69.4 people with total cholesterol below 210 to have heart disease and only 35.2 did. We expected 71.8 people with cholesterol over 245 to have heart disease, and 120.3 did.

Sounds significant, right? Actually it’s anything but. To be a significant effect in an associational study, you need to have a 2x effect (>200% or <50%). The less than 210 Cholesterol number was close but (69.4-35.2)/69.4 = 49.28% which is not significant.

And look at the data for women. There almost isn’t any correlation.

There have been subsequent studies to try to tease out good and bad cholesterol, and the only ones that appear to have any significance are the associations between small dense cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.

I would listen to this weeks podcast with @siobhan it might be interesting

[PaulL]

I would listen to this weeks podcast with @siobhan it might be interesting

Will do, as soon as I can. Thanks, @richard, for all of that!