I’m sure this has been asked before but as a newbie to LCHF I’m afraid I am going to ask.
Will this plan not increase my cholesterol?
Reason for q I have high cholesterol it is a family trait. After refusing for years at my last face to face with my dr I gave in and started taking statins. Mainly because my hubby has cancer and in need to be healthy to look after him. I have been at least 2 stone overweight for years but since his diagnosis it has crept up and up and I’m now 4 stone overweight.
Do I need to worry about the fats Imam eating! Weight seems to be slowly coming down and I want to continue but I am still being careful with how much fat I eat.
Sorry for the long post!!!
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Twinkle20
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There is no reason to be concerned about cholesterol. Cholesterol is such a vital substance your body will make what it needs if the diet does lacks it. Doctors are woefully out of date linking cholesterol to heart disease but despite a lack of evidence they adopt the 'everybody knows that' attitude.
Remember when we couldn't eat eggs? Well the message now is 'Eggs are not a nutrient of concern'.
Thanks Mike. My doctor won’t discuss good and bad cholesterol he just says it is high and wants me on statins! Might change doctors as I would like a more forward thinking one!
You are a study, with one participant. You know the results apply to you, because you exactly match the study subject 😁
Go on the diet for 2 or 3 months, then visit your doctor. Get the cholesterol test again, but also make sure he checks your weight, waist circumference, blood pressure, and Hba1c. If all of those have improved, which I think they will, you can weigh that against the cholesterol results (which may go up or down, different people respond differently) and make a decision. My understanding is that all those things are very strongly correlated with CVD. The point is, there is not need to ask us, you can and should find out for yourself.
Of course, your doctor may not see it that way. I spoke to a different GP from my regular one a few weeks ago, and she asked "why did you stop taking the statin?" "I never started. But I have lost 17kg, 18cm around my waist and my blood pressure is now normal" She just made a harrumph noise. 🤷♂️
Thanks good point but I have read so many arguments for and against LCHF and cholesterol.
My doctor is not prepared to discuss HDL or familial cholesterol just says it is higher than it should be. I am going to try and get my last blood results and then I can make my own decision.
That's interesting what you said about cholesterol. "which may go up or down different people respond differently". I liked Twinkle20 s question. Interestingly my 76 year old friend has high cholesterol and she had a thing suddenly about cheese and ate a lot more. Then her cholesterol went up. She is active slim no other health issues but now adamantly will not eat cheese cream bacon cakes etc.
I really dont grasp the LCHF diet I e. I thought the fat was supposed to make you feel less hungry and to only have two meals a day. I've had spinach omelette for breakfast then am hungry an hour later.
I will continue to read posts as it is interesting. But as my feet and ankles are swollen and BP high I still am so unsure
I think you are confusing LCHF with fasting/intermittent fasting. They are complementary but you don’t have to do IF AND LCHF.
IF is time restricted eating, e.g 16hrs fasting and 8hrs eating window which is probably where 2 meals are eaten. This is generally easier to do as a lot of time is spent sleeping.
LCHF is just that - keeping your carbs as low as you can/are comfortable with (less than 100 is a good place to start and Not too difficult to do, you can go lower as you progress) and eating good fat higher fats foods and some that have been considered ‘bad’ fats like butter, cream, fatty meat. Carbs generally don’t stay in the system too long (well the fast, white ones) and are turned into glucose quickly which is generally what makes you hungry quite quickly. Fast carbs often have a sweet taste too which is another of their addictive qualities for the brain.
How many eggs in your omelette and did you cook it in butter? I like melting thinly sliced good hard cheese in the pan before gently adding beaten eggs. It makes a crispy crust and is really tasty without the usual gooeyness of a cheese omelette.
High cholesterol isn’t always a bad thing. It depends on the HDL/LDL triglyceride ratio. Research has shown that higher cholesterol in older people is actually more desirable than low cholesterol.
Thanks. No I used olive oil which I read can go rancid at high temps. Thanks I'll try the cheesy bit. Usually 2 eggs. I still get very confused how do I know how much fat protein veg fruit I should eat on this diet. I'm 5'2" not very active and need to lose 3 stone approx. This morning I ate advocado for breakfast. 3 hrs later hungry so downed big handful of pecans which I snack on a lot. Yesterday I also ate 2 plums and some melon.
The attached, if it works, is a “how it works” for the Blood Sugar Diet website. It is for low carb eating in the Mediterranean style and maybe helpful it is a more gentle intro to LCHF.
I think you are quite confused about low carb. When you reduce your carbs, your blood sugar goes down, your insulin goes down, inflammation goes down, lots of biomarkers move in a healthy direction.
It is not in any way similar to suddenly eating a lot of cheese on a high carb diet. I do not think that would be good for anyone.
Your doctor is giving you statins (and is completely uninterested in the evidence regarding their efficacy, or lack thereof) because the NHS pays him a bonus to hand them out. It's as simple as that. About 10% of the adult population are now taking them, which means paydirt for all with their noses in the trough.
We're not supposed to give medical advice here, but I've studied statin pharmacology well enough to be pretty confident about this: throw them in the trash and give your doctor an earful for being incompetent, lazy, and venal. Then get another doctor.
I'm also pretty confident about saying this: the evidence suggests that LCHF will give you more healthy years with your husband than low-fat diets, and it may well do him a lot of good too (read up on keto diets as an adjunct for cancer therapy).
Apart from anything else, LCHF will most likely "improve" your blood lipid panel (to the extent that it's possible to improve readings that are all-but-meaningless). Specifically, your HDL-to-triglycerides ratio will normalize. HDL:TG is the only value that's known to have some modest correlation with future CVD risk. If your doctor doesn't care about that, that's his problem (and his other patients'), not yours.
It's an opinion piece, but there are some facts in here:
While googling for stuff, I found this golden quotation from Prof. Rory Collins, who is one of the prime motive forces behind the UK's obsession with statins:
“Whereas most of the side-effects can be reversed with no residual effects by stopping the statin, the effects of a heart attack or stroke not being prevented are irreversible and can be devastating,” he added."
Think about that for a bit. You'll LOL when you see it.
Well ... I don't see any implication in that article that Dr Malhotra endorses statins for familial hypercholesterolaemia - he's merely pointing out that lipid markers for CVD behave somewhat differently in those cases.
To answer your question, though: yes, I'm sure. There are several aspects to this.
- "High cholesterol" is either the proximate cause of heart disease, or it isn't. If the cholesterol hypothesis is true, then we can make several predictions which can be tested scientifically. For example, we can surmise that people with high cholesterol suffer more CVD (it turns out the opposite is true, especially for older people). We can predict that lowering cholesterol by X% ought to reduce incidence of CVD by X%. This isn't even close to what happens in practice - the modern cholesterol-lowering drugs are incredibly effective, but they still have almost no impact on QALYs in normal people. It is therefore highly unlikely that the hypothesis is true, which means that if people with familial hypercholesterolaemia are more prone to developing CVD (which they are) then the reason is not to be found in their blood cholesterol.
- Statins don't work nearly as well for people with familial hypercholesterolaemia (that is, they don't have much effect on either TC or LDL). High doses are therefore prescribed, with all the attendant risks. Statins at normal doses cause intolerable side effects in about 30% of users, so a risk-benefit analysis would suggest caution even in FH cases.
- The genetic malfunction involves ineffective removal of cholesterol from the bloodstream; cells lack the machinery (with some variants in the failure mechanism) to capture LDL. Although the obvious observable outcome is a higher level of circulating cholesterol, a more subtle issue is that cells are being 'starved' of cholesterol and will therefore have to upregulate their internal synthesis. I have absolutely no idea what the consequences of that might be, but reducing circulating cholesterol doesn't seem a smart idea in those circumstances.
- People with FH are at higher risk of dying of CVD, but their all-cause mortality is about the same as the general population. It's true that a certain number of them die very young from heart attacks, but it seems that in many respects FH is protective in certain ways - specifically, people with FH die less often of infections. This strongly suggests that if someone with FH avoids Metabolic Syndrome, they'll probably be just fine.
- It's fairly safe to assume that all the research on familial hypercholesterolaemia has been done on people consuming "healthy" high-carb low-fat diets - either because they've been advised to, or because that's the default in their country of residence. The number of experimental subjects eating LCHF must be vanishingly small, and I'm not aware of any interventional study that has prescribed an LCHF diet for FH subjects. I'm certain that any such experiment would be struck down for ethical reasons (ie., "how can you possibly consider giving these people fat?"). It is impossible to tell, therefore, how many deaths are due to poor diet exacerbated by some as-yet-unidentified feature of FH.
I can recommend David Diamond's video, which describes his own personal experience of FH.
I'm not concerned about Cholesterol. I eat healthy fats including double cream and butter every day. As the many stones came off I felt 10x healthier and fitter.
This is a paper discussing the changes to the US dietary guidelines in 2015. The UK hasn't caught up (yet). Maybe print it off to give to your GP next time?
"In the new DGAC report, one widely noticed revision was the dropping of dietary cholesterol as a “nutrient of concern.” This surprised the public, but is concordant with scientific evidence demonstrating no appreciable relationship between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol or clinical cardiovascular events in general populations. The DGAC should be commended for this evidence-based change."
"A far less noticed, but more momentous, change was the new absence of any limitation on total fat consumption. The DGAC neither listed total fat as a nutrient of concern, nor proposed any limitation on its consumption."
You may well find your cholesterol/lipid profile ratios improve in time on LCHF, I know mine have (triglycerides greatly decreased, and HDL greatly increased).
I am now suffering from a diverticular attack so beginning to wonder if my body can cope with LCHF. I’m usually on a low fat diet and have been for years I think it is in shock!
Anyone switching from low fat to higher fat will have gastric distress. I have experienced that personally, and my digestive system was in good order at the time.
Your body might not be able to handle it with your condition (just been reading about it 😲), but I think suddenly eating a lot more fat was always going to be an issue.
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Great results this week
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