I’ve heard eating dietary fat does not raise your cholesterol. If that’s true, why does cholesterol go up on Keto?
Statins don’t remove cholesterol from your blood, they suppress your liver from making it. Why would I want to prevent my liver from doing what it’s trying to do. Is it producing too much cholesterol? If so, do I have a liver disease that’s being treated? Sounds like a liver disease epidemic if millions of people are on statins.
Lastly, if a person wanted to do Keto but ate only plant based fat that had no cholesterol like coconut oil, nuts, etc., would that prevent the spike in cholesterol so many of us see?
lipoproteins(fat transporter) on keto go up because they are the same as glut(glucose transporters) on a carb diet. The problem is mixing fat with carbs, especially grain carbs as they cause inflammation, but a high carb/low fat diet isn’t doable long term. There’s nothing wrong with high lipoproteins in the absence of inflammation and high blood sugar.
Consuming grains isn’t natural by any means and the result is human foie gras.
My libido is higher when eating walnuts than it is eating fatty fish but I still eat fish because it’s healthy.
Watch out for the aflatoxins on nuts including walnuts/pecans/pistachios.
I doubt it and like I said. Cholesterol isn’t the problem in the absence of inflammation and high blood sugar.
These are great questions. I’d love to hear some more answers. I was also musing that if lipoproteins are needed to transport fat from the blood to the other tissues for energy, of course they should go up on keto. But fats are triglycerides, which do not go up in the blood on keto. So what exactly is happening with lipoproteins in our blood??
Mark, my total cholesterol is 360’s right now. It jumped dramatically after I started Keto. I’ve heard from several sources that the fat you eat doesn’t make your cholesterol go up, but it mine did.
It’s not just you, it’s many people. What we eat has an effect, but (usually) not too much of it is from our diets. Some people don’t follow that the same. The biggest noticeable jump is what you first start, typically after 6mo or so it’ll go back down to normal. 360’s is something though! How’s your breakdown?
I went from 145 to 129 pounds. I would have to dig around for my past lipids but I believe what put my on a statin was a 232 reading about 8 years ago. It stayed down enough to satisfy my doctor because he never mentioned an increase. I even remember once my total was about 100. It all makes sense as to why I have struggled with brain fog to the extent that I wasn’t functioning at work. I even started telling people the older I get the more IQ points I’m losing because I had no explanation and I turned my embarrassment into a joking matter. I have no doubt the statin was causing it. I just stopped taking it a week ago, and it could be mind over matter but I’m already feeling better. Until recently I didn’t know anything about the other numbers in a cholesterol panel. I started Keto June 2019.
December 2019:
Total Cholesterol - 304
Triglycerides - 69
Cholesterol HDL Ratio - 3.9
HDL Cholesterol - 78
Non HDL Cholesterol - 226
LDL (calculated) - 212
VLDL Calculated - 14
Numbers in Feb 2020:
Total Cholesterol - 213
Triglycerides - 62
Cholesterol HDL Ratio - 2.7
HDL Cholesterol - 79
Non HDL Cholesterol - 134
LDL (calculated) - 122
VLDL Calculated - 12
Numbers July 2020:
Total Cholesterol - 369
Triglycerides - 87
Cholesterol HDL Ratio - 4.2
HDL Cholesterol - 89
Non HDL Cholesterol - 280
LDL (calculated) - 263
VLDL Calculated - 17
OK are you water-fasted before the blood is being take for these tests and how long for? All these things can have an impact. Cholesterol is pretty dynamic so levels can do all sorts of things for various reasons.
I’ve always stopped eating at 10pm the night before the test and I go in at 8am. When you say water-fasted, do you literally mean do I drink plenty of water prior? I don’t drink anything. I can tell you my Dec. 2019 made me very nervous and my doctor said it had to be a mistake so he retested me in Feb 2020 and I ate macadamia nuts the day before just to see if it would do anything and you can see everything dropped. In July, everything was elevated again. I asked for an NMR and I’m awaiting the results. I fasted for 14 hours and at macadamias for 3 days prior, so we’ll see what happens.
I usually try and fast for 12-14 hours before the blood is taken with only water being consumed.
PaulL
(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?)
#14
This question assumes that a rise in cholesterol is a bad thing. That has never been shown, and there is decent evidence to suggest that higher cholesterol levels may actually have a protective effect. For more information, visit www.cholesterolcode.com and www.thefatemperor.com.
In any case, dietary fat has a diverse effect on the lipid panels of people who embark on a ketogenic diet. Often what people experience is a short-term rise in so-called “bad” that panics their physician, but re-testing at the six-month mark generally tends to show higher HDL, and lower triglycerides and LDL, which makes most physicians quite happy.
Statins actually interfere with the mevalonate pathway in various cells, causing them to take in more cholesterol than they otherwise would. What the liver does is to package cholesterol into lipopoteins, in order to send it around the body in the bloodstream, to be used in constructing cell walls, making vitamin D, testosterone, progesterone, etc.
No. Cholesterol levels in the diet have no effect on cholesterol levels in the blood. Ancel Keys was one of the first researchers to show that, back in the 1950’s or 1960’s, I believe.
PaulL
(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?)
#15
Given that your ratio of triglycerides to HDL is consistently under 1.0, when anything under 2.0 is considered extremely healthy, I don’t think you need to be worrying about your cholesterol.
Everything you said is exactly how it went down. Cholesterol goes up, doc gets concerned, he gets me nervous and makes me question everything I’m doing. I really think this NMR will put this cholesterol anxiety to bed. I’ve conquered a lot in my Keto journey but the cholesterol thing has lingered. I’m working on it
