Hi Maria,
There's a lot of reading to do to sort out the issue of cholesterol, but it's worth doing. It has skewed medical approaches to diabetes and heart disease for 40 years, because it has become a sacred cow. The subject is usually approached completely wrong, in my view.
To get the big picture without too much detail, try the Australian lipid specialist Ken Sikaris on Youtube, perhaps
this one.
Then for a bit more depth, the Malcolm Kendrick book mentioned above, The Great Cholesterol Con, is good. It's a contentious subject, but he is a reliable critical voice. He's a British general practitioner who has a research specialism in heart disease. Don't be put off by his jokes, which I find quite annoying: his stuff is good and reliable.
Then once you really want to get into the ultimate detail, go to the Peter Attia blog and work through his nine posts on cholesterol, or else just read
the last one which recaps the others. Attia is a surgeon who with Gary Taubes founded the Nutrition Science Initiative.
In outline, when you go low carb, for the first nine months or so your cholesterol will rise. This happens when you go ketotic or when you lose a lot of weight. It doesn't last. Your HDL will also rise, and your trigs will fall - both outcomes that you *very* much want. Your LDL, the cholesterol that spooks people, will initially rise, as above, but will then go down a lot.
OTOH, some people on low carb find that their LDL stays high (as well as their HDL and trigs staying excellently high and low, respectively). If the numbers aren't dramatic, sometimes people choose to stick with low carb and assume, as they could verify if they went to the trouble of having a private test, that this is the benign pattern of relatively large LDL particles (rather than the nasty small oxidised sort). It usually is. But people who really want to know can have an Apolipoprotein-B test in the UK, which will tell them how high their levels of LDL particles is, which is the true factor that identifies risk of heart-disease or not. The number of particles (LDL-P) is more informative than the overall LDL-C number, which anyway is usually only a guess.
For those (about a quarter) who turn out to have consistently high LDL scores and want to know what to do about it, I recommend these two sources:
Peter Attia, but start at the paragraph beginning 'Contrary to what some of you might think' ...
and
Franziska Spritzler at Low Carb Dietitian .
Thomas Dayspring is also brilliant on this subject. In essence, if it bothers you, switching from sat to monounsat fats can bring the LDL-P score down.
Oof!
.
