High Cholesterol = Panic!

[WuTwo]

@Guzzler - I can't take statins so once (before I knew better) they made me take those plant sterols. I got suicidally depressed and in the end my husband threw the sterols away and we had to get medical help for the depression! (Luckily I went for CBT, drug free).

 

[Brunneria]

Isn’t the fat in pork pure saturated fat ?

Nope.
There is a great deal of misinformation given out about fats and saturated fats, and that is a common misunderstanding.

Personally, I am looking primarily for high mono and omega 3, high saturated, low polyunsaturated, not processed, and I want the 3, 6 and 9 in proportion.

Which means that I have butter and olive oil on my kitchen countertop, and then cook with meat fats too.
I don't buy seed oils, soya bean, or rapeseed (including mayo), because of the processing and their polys. which are often very out of proportion.

Having said that, when we eat out, the source of the fats on my plate is a much lower priority than the carb and gluten content, so I just go with the fat flow then.

 

[Guzzler]

@Guzzler - I can't take statins so once (before I knew better) they made me take those plant sterols. I got suicidally depressed and in the end my husband threw the sterols away and we had to get medical help for the depression! (Luckily I went for CBT, drug free).

I wanted to give you a hug and a trophy for your hubby too.

 

[WuTwo]

I wanted to give you a hug and a trophy for your hubby too.

Thank you

 

[Guzzler]

.... Pls point me to related info for self education thanks!

There is a tonne of information here but you may need a week to go through it. Courtesy of Bulkbiker.

https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/cholesterol-and-statins.156985/

 

[Tsang33]

I have an old note on my file that remnant cholesterol is 46% of the triglycerides (using UK measurement units).

Coincidentally, or deliberately, it is 46% of the trigs (UK) that are added to the LDL and HDL to arrive at the total cholesterol.

So someone is saying that 46% of our trigs (UK) is remnant cholesterol and corresponds to the small dense particles in our LDL. Amazing how one size fits all. Where does the 46% come from? Some juggling in the air?

This cholesterol-thing has so many fingers-in-dePie in terms of "perspectives" of interest over its bio-chem-medical complexity that average guy like me just find it hard to understand enough to apply to self healing. The informative lectures (c. 2014) from Prof Sakaris talk about the debris / residual / remnant sdLDL particles as orphan-like bad-guys that can't recycle back to the liver and I think he concluded that the science of its nature and life cycle are still to be researched. So maybe for now drugs and dietary intervention are the only suck-and-see solutions. btw, my wife just got her cholesterol results that show a "prefect" score against the referring ranges, even my (bestMatchings of) triglycerides / HDL are still behind by a few points down. The question about how meaningful those referring ranges is in order, I feel. My research is that they are set respectively to the middle of the range within which a great majority of human's numbers fall into. So, if one's LDL is at the high-end or over while some others are v.good then am I close to an impending disaster ? Common sense will rationalize and answer NO because there're other risk factors that are just as important at work @the same time in our body system, perhaps as well as those external risks around us. And in the clinical setting I think the doctor is probably super in making the right decision.

 

[Tsang33]

There is a tonne of information here but you may need a week to go through it. Courtesy of Bulkbiker.

https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/cholesterol-and-statins.156985/

thanks

 

[bulkbiker]

The length of fasting is fairly important - I once turned up for a morning blood test and was asked how long I'd been fasting. At that stage it was 16+ hours and they told me to go away and come back on a day where my fasting was 10-14 hours and no longer.

I'm guessing you have already seen Dave's new discovery about fasting for more than 12 hours causing his trigs to collapse whereas they were still quite high at 10 hours... if I ever get round to getting a home cholesterol kit that's the first thing I'll be checking..

 

[Tsang33]

.... and btw my wife's "perfect" cholesterol scores comes with the backdrop of some thyroid problems present for a while. Howz' that reverse connection.... just makes me keener to study your link, thanks.

 

[Guzzler]

.... and btw my wife's "perfect" cholesterol scores comes with the backdrop of some thyroid problems present for a while. Howz' that reverse connection.... just makes me keener to study your link, thanks.

I do not know your wife's age but just a little factoid is that for post menopausal women a higher cholesterol number has been found to be beneficial.

 

[kitedoc]

Is that also the case in walnuts and whole olives ? Isn’t the fat in pork pure saturated fat ?

Hi @Freema,
Per 100 g:
Olive oil, recommended in the Mediteranean diet: satd fat 13.8 g. Monounsatd 72.7 g, polyunsatd 22.7 g
Pork sirloin raw satd fat 3 g, monounsatd 5.6 g, polyunsatd 1.4 g
Walnuts - unsatd fat 7.2, monounsatd 9 g, polyunsatd 47 g
Olive - satd fat 0.1 g, monounsatd 0.3 g, polyunsatd 1.1 g
I hope that helps!

 

[Colin of Kent]

Hi @Colin of Kent, you appear unscathed by your encounter with all things lipid, and that is wonderful!

If you were to subscribe to zoeharcombe.com you woukd read that LDLcholesterol is a result caculated from other measurements such as HDL cholesterol. LDL cholesterol reads higher than expected when on low carb diet and lower than expected when on high carb diets.
Whilst your triglyceridesvto HDL cholesterol ratio is in range, i was just wondering if you have been checking your ketone levels to see if you are in ketosis most of the time?
And are you counting 50% of protein intake as carbs? Plus having a balanced salt and magnesium intake as per dietdictor.com?
And what total carbs per day is giving such results ?

Yeah, well, after reading 'Cholesterol Clarity' by Jimmy Moore and Eric Westman, and 'The Great Cholesterol Con' by Malcolm Kendrick, together with Dave Feldman's excellent work, his LMHR Facebook group, and Prof Sikaris, I calmed down a bit after the initial panic. However, I've recently discovered I have a significant lesion in my left anterior descending coronary artery (a.k.a. the 'Widowmaker'). So I've been spurred into further reading, and just discovered Ivor Cummins. His podacst last week with Patrick Theut has come at just the right time for me. I will check out ZH next!

I did buy some blood ketone strips. I don't know if timing matters when testing, but I was usually in nutritional ketosis (> 1.0), sometimes dropping to, say, 0.6 or 0.8.

I'm not counting 50% protein as carbs. When my wife and I started keto, we tracked everything religiously via MyFitnessPal, and we got all the ratios dialled in. Since the, I tracked it all once more for a few days to make sure it was all in the right proportions, and it was. We find it quite intuitive now, and we follow a few keto recipes by Martina Slajerova, which clearly give you the macro breakdown. I haven't looked at Mg yet, but that's just come onto my radar thanks to Ivor Cummins. We do eat plenty of leafy greens, but I'm a runner and I do get mild calf cramps at night sometimes.

My TG:HDL ratio indicates a low number of sdLDL. And I have seen the study that says that LDL may be overestimated in LCHF patients due to the calculation method used here in the UK.

I'm now seriously considering statin treatment as a precautionary measure. I clearly have a lot of inflammation still, despite 14 months on keto now, and there's no doubt I have endothelial damage, so those nasty little LDLs may well be getting in where they shouldn't.

My current thinking is to try and reduce the LDL count (a) by fasting more; if that doesn't get me far enough, (b) by switching to primarily mono fats (fish, avocado, XVOO).

At some point I may have to fork out cash for an NMR lipid profile, but on a low income, I can't really justify doing it several times over, so want to get the numbers as low as possible first by diet and fasting alone.

I also would like a CAC scan, hsCRP test and a DNA profile to see if I'm one of those APOE4 wotsits...

Thank you all for your input!

 

[kitedoc]

Please read ZH first about low carb, statiins etc. as according to her the statin studdies are statistically flawed.
She also agrees that on low carb diets LDL is overestimated.
From my reading of her blog the anti-statin view includes the idea that it is high bsls which contribute to the initial damage to the endothelial or smooth inner lining of our blood vessels leading to blood clotting, and cholesterol is really just the bandaid applied to deal with those cracks and gaps in the otherwise smooth lining. Whilst studies of populations cannot prove that cholesterol causes heart disease ( not even the clinical studies did) neither can they prove that statins increase it -- but reading ZH, she has looked at WHO data of 192 countries in 2008, plotting cholesterol levels vs firstly death from CVD (cardiovascular disease) and separately against all causes of death and charted these separately for males and females.
These charts in her blog show that the lower your total cholesterol is, the higher your risk of death from CVD and for all causes of death. Statins increase risk of infection, risk of accident not just cause muscle problems.
But again please note that her graphs are about association of the two things on each graph, not cause.
But whose total cholesterols readings will tend to be lower in a population? May be those who are very unwell from maybe cancer, but how often woukd cholesterol be neasured in such people? We know the statins first became available in something like 1989. And for those taking them at high enough doses cholesterol levels do fall. Something to think about.