It was only early last year when I realised that I was a low carber or my life as I had thought I was just a moderate eater. I had previously put down chronic pains in my legs and hips due to statins and had tried every statin all with same pains that would start again.
So, when analysing My foods I realised that the majority of my fat only came from my copious coffees with semi skimmed milk.
I added more fat in to our diet and my hubby cut his carbs. I initially lost 10lb that I didn't need to lose and my hubby has lost 3stone last year with a stone previous year by just doing more exercise.
First 6 months my cholesterol stayed the same. Hubbys went down. Including the breakdown of all- everything was improved for hubby. Mine, no different.
One year on both our cholesterols have shot up. Now I haven't got a clue what to do.
For the last year we ate more eggs..we had more fish (i never ate fish before), we had cheese (not everyday but between 5-7 thin slices if we wanted to) and a creamy coffee every night and full fat milk and coconut oil.
Our dinners are always salad or veg and rarely puddings. We don't eat potatoes, pasta or rice. We don't have bread..(me never)
I thought hubbys had raised last week when he got his results back because he'd had a few sandwichs at work from mid Dec til now.
Then yesterday I got my results. They stupidly only tested total and triglicerides on mine. My trig results gone from 0.4 to 0.9 though.. And my total gone from 5.1 right up to 6.5. I have never had any readings in the 6's ever....
My leg pains have gone and my body myscle tone especially my legs are brilliant. I'm size 8/10 and hubby is a waist 32 and 12 1/2 stone max.
He was also taking my statins that I couldn't take.
His levels are now chronic...wheras before he came just in the normal range with breakdown of the cholesterols. His trigs have gone up, his ldl and hdl both gone in the wrong direction.
Any thoughts please as now I just do not know what to do besides ditching the fat...(we never did low fat anyway) just had butter and semiskimmed milk.
After hubbies weightloss I really don't want him putting weight back on from feeling hungry..and going back to his horrible weight. The extra fat does seem to have contributed thought to both of us getting hugely increased bad cholesterol..
Are we both just unlucky that we both can't tolerate more fat? It just seems that its odd.
Any advice welcome...
Hi
@donnellysdogs , What news with your cholesterol and your non-sat-fat regime? I too tried to swap out some of the sat fat I was eating for non-sat, and laid off the butter coffee, for the same reasons.
Result:
Total cholesterol 7.7 Jan, 5.9 now.
HDL 2.6 Jan, 2.4 now.
LDL4.7 Jan, 3.3 now.
Trigs 0.8 Jan, 0.6 now
Trigs/HDL 0.3 Jan, 0.25 now.
I'm still thinking about what Peter Attia said
here about LCHF, being in ketosis, and saturated versus other (eg olive oil) fat. All the following is a quote from him:
"some readers may interpret the data I present to mean it’s perfectly safe to consume, say, 25% (or more) of total calories from SFA [saturated fats]. I realize I may have to turn in my keto-club card, but I am convinced that a subset of the population—I don’t know how large or small, because my “N” is too small—are not better served by mainlining SFA, even in the complete absence of carbohydrates (i.e., nutritional ketosis). Let me repeat this point: I have seen enough patients whose biomarkers go to hell in a hand basket when they ingest very high amounts of SFA. This leads me to believe some people are not genetically equipped to thrive in prolonged nutritional ketosis.
In one particularly interesting case, a patient in self-prescribed nutritional ketosis presented to me with an LDL-P of more than 3500 nmol/L (i.e., more particles than could be measured by the NMR machine so the report simply said “>3,500 nmol/L”) despite feeling, performing, and looking great. Based on his through-the-roof desmosterol and cholanstanol levels, and a curb-side consult from the Godfather I mean Dr. Tom Dayspring, I decided to try an experiment. You see, the logical thing to do in this setting would have been to start two drugs immediately (a potent statin to address the hypersynthesis and ezetimibe to address the hyperabsorption) or tell him to abandon ketosis altogether. But this patient was adamant about staying in ketosis given the other benefits, though obviously worried about the long-term coronary implications. So, we agreed that for a 3 month trial period he would reduce SFA to an average of 25 g/day (vs. about 75 to 100 g/day) and make up the difference with monounsaturated fat (MUFA). Parenthetically, we also reduced his omega-3 PUFA given very high RBC EPA and DHA levels.
So, on balance, he consumed about the same number of calories and even total quantity of fat, but his distribution of fat intake changed and he heavily swapped out SFA for MUFA.
The result?
His LDL-P fell from >3,500 nmol/L to about 1,300 nmol/L (about 55th percentile), and his CRP fell from 2.9 mg/L to <0.3 mg/L (and for the lipoprotein cognoscenti, both desmosterol and cholanstanol fell).
Pretty cool, huh? So, my point is this: while I believe the population-based guidelines for SFA are not supported by a standard of science I consider acceptable, it does not imply I believe SFA is uniformly safe at all levels for all individuals.
Some of you may be wondering about me. It turns out I’m in the group (recall: I have no idea how large or small this group is) that seems to do well—at least by the tools we have available to assess risk—with large amounts of SFA in my diet, if and when I elect to. Even when I was in ketosis, eating 4,000 kcal/day (literally getting 40 to 45% of my calories from SFA alone) my biomarkers—cardiovascular, insulin resistance, inflammation—were excellent. Better than they ever were or even are today. Though, my point still stands: there are some people who do not appear able to safely consume massive amounts of SFA.
One last point I’ll make on this highly charged topic. I realize there is a contingent within the LCHF community who argue that traditional biomarkers of coronary risk—such as LDL-C or its superior cousin LDL-P—“don’t matter” if one is on a low carb or ketogenic diet. Maybe they are right. I guess time will tell. But I am not convinced, at least not yet. As a doctor I can’t look a patient in the eye and tell them a sky-high LDL-P is ok because they don’t eat carbohydrates. So if you’re following such a diet, and your LDL-P goes through the roof, I’d urge you to consider a variation of the diet."
Lucy