Lower Cholesterol?

muckety

Whats the best diet to lower cholesterol? (Or links to good info on this) - what I've learned so far is - reduce redmeat and all meat fat, reduce fats generally, increase fruit & veg. Does carbohydrate have any effect (other than too much sugar being converted to fat!)?

corkcomp

muckety wrote: »

Whats the best diet to lower cholesterol? (Or links to good info on this) - what I've learned so far is - reduce redmeat and all meat fat, reduce fats generally, increase fruit & veg. Does carbohydrate have any effect (other than too much sugar being converted to fat!)?

obviously we cant give medical advice here but if you know your HDL + LDL cholesterol readings it may help to post these up .. You are probably going to get a string of responses saying that fat doesnt cause high cholesterol etc but IMO you need to reduce saturated fat, make sure most of the fat you consume is from fish, olive oil, nuts and seeds etc ... Avoid too much processed sugar and other junk food that may contain transfats ... you shouldalso increase fibre intake - fruit, veg, porridge, whole grains etc ..

MeatProduct

Going vegan is your ticket to normal cholesterol levels. I recommend "The Rave Diet". There is a dvd that comes with it with a number of doctors that explain the reasons behind it and their successes. People reducing their cholesterol back to normal levels with months by diet alone.

The primary dietry source for cholesterol is animal products. Tackle it at the source and be done with it.
Your body produces its own cholesterol to repair micro perforations in your blood system. Once excessive cholesterol is taken in it reduces the passage ways increasingly, reducing blood flow and increasing the pressure on your heart.

Simplest advice, don't have cholesterol products in your diet.

Nick

El_Dangeroso

Depends what type of cholesterol you want to reduce.

If you want to reduce the type associated with increase risk of plaque on your arteries and subsequently heart attacks then you want reduce small-dense LDL or sdLDL, standard cholesterol tests don't measure it, in fact they don't even measure LDL full stop, it's calculated by the Friedewald formula which is inaccurate when triglycerides are greater than 150 mg/dL or less than 100 mg/dL.

But what we do know from standard cholesterol testing is HDL and triglycerides. You want HDL to be as high as possible and trigs to be as low as possible. When HDL is high and trigs are low there is a very good likelyhood that your LDL will be the big fluffy protective kind.

An oft-ignored but equally potent measure of cardiac health is lipoprotein(a), or Lp(a), which by itself is the most aggressive risk factor known (it's not in popular usage as they haven't developed a drug that can reduce it yet) - combine that with sdLDL and you are more than likely headed for a cardiac incident

So how do you do that with diet?

Niacin - increases HDL, reduces small LDL, and reduces Lp(a)

Elimination of wheat, cornstarch, and sugars - Best for reducing small LDL and triglyrides, less potent for Lp(a) reduction

High-fat intake - counter intuitive I know but like niacin, effective for all three risk factors

High-dose fish oil - Higher doses of EPA + DHA north of 3000 mg per day also can positively affect all three, especially Lp(a).

Also, get your blood levels of vitamin D, 25(OH)D3 tested and supplement to get into the 30-50 ng/mL range. Low vitamin D levels are as equally potent as blood lipids in predicting cardiac events.

I'd recommend the book 'Track your Plaque' by doctor William Davis. He has an excellent blog and is a great advocate of evidence based medicine.

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/

El_Dangeroso

MeatProduct wrote: »

Simplest advice, don't have cholesterol products in your diet.

BTW it was thought that dietary cholesterol increase serum cholesterol but this has since been disproved. The original experiments were done by giving oxidised cholesterol to rabbits, and rabbits, being complete herbivores have no biological mechanism for correctly digesting cholesterol, humans do. Also, any oxidised lipid is going to cause oxidative stress and contribute to inflammation and heart disease. Subsequent experiments on humans showed no association.

corkcomp

nearly all (fasting) lipid profile tests done by GP include hdl, ldl, vldl and tri ... If your only looking at total cholesterol it is possible that a high HDL (desirable) reading may push the total above 5 ...


going vegan would probably reduce cholesterol considerably but do you really want to do something so extreme + unsustainable???

MeatProduct

corkcomp wrote: »

going vegan would probably reduce cholesterol considerably but do you really want to do something so extreme + unsustainable???

Interesting comment about sustainability. Meat is, by far, the most resource intensive food on the plant. It uses 50% of the fresh water in the US. If you want to talk about sustainability all meat/dairy products are not part of the equation.

Nick

Edit: fixed typeo

MeatProduct

Temple_Grandin wrote: »

BTW it was thought that dietary cholesterol increase serum cholesterol but this has since been disproved. The original experiments were done by giving oxidised cholesterol to rabbits, and rabbits, being complete herbivores have no biological mechanism for correctly digesting cholesterol, humans do. Also, any oxidised lipid is going to cause oxidative stress and contribute to inflammation and heart disease. Subsequent experiments on humans showed no association.

I'd love to see an article on that if you have it handy.

Nick

El_Dangeroso

MeatProduct wrote: »

I'd love to see an article on that if you have it handy.

Nick

Here you go, so rare I find myself agreeing with Ancel Keys, the father of the lipid hypothesis but in this case he's right:

http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content/abstract/59/1/39

MeatProduct

Temple_Grandin wrote: »

Here you go, so rare I find myself agreeing with Ancel Keys, the father of the lipid hypothesis but in this case he's right:

http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/content/abstract/59/1/39

Thank you for the link. Unfortunately the funding source is highly dubious:

The results reported here were obtained from studies aided by a grant from the National Dairy Council

Also, I would need to know exactly what the diets consisted of and duration of these diets. All too often I have seen studies like this that are funded by the dairy industry to get the results they want.

If you have more details I'd be very interested to look at them. I simply can't believe that overall cholesterol levels remain the same if the very source of cholesterol is removed from the diet.

Nick

El_Dangeroso

MeatProduct wrote: »

Thank you for the link. Unfortunately the funding source is highly dubious:

Also, I would need to know exactly what the diets consisted of and duration of these diets. All too often I have seen studies like this that are funded by the dairy industry to get the results they want.

If you have more details I'd be very interested to look at them. I simply can't believe that overall cholesterol levels remain the same if the very source of cholesterol is removed from the diet.

Nick

Unfortunately it's the sad state of nutritional research today that you won't find many studies that don't have a vested interest in the results one way or the other.

But it's generally accepted in the science community that dietary cholesterol doesn't increase adversely affect serum cholesterol.

Any cholesterol you consume, along with lipids, is packed into a lipoprotein called a chylomicron in the small intestine. The chylomicron travels via the bloodstream and looses the lipids to cells for energy or storage, becoming a chylomicron remnant. The chylomicrom remnant is absorbed by the liver, thus delivering dietary cholesterol to the liver.

In the liver , lipids produced by the liver and cholesterol is packed into a Very Low Density Lipoprotein. The VLDL loses the lipids to cells in the same way as a chlyomicron, eventually becoming an LDL. If cells require cholesterol they will have a receptor enabling the LDL to be absorbed into the cell. The cholesterol can then be utilised by the cell.

When cholesterol is being transported or stored it is in the form of Cholesteryl Esters, that is it is combined with a fatty acid. It has the fatty acid removed so as to become free cholesterol again when it is utilised.

The liver synthesises most of the body's needs for cholesterol. Reducing dietary cholesterol will only result in increased production by the liver. This is synthesised from Acetyl CoA.

Eating no cholesterol just means more work for you liver.

http://www.rpi.edu/dept/bcbp/molbiochem/MBWeb/mb2/part1/lipoprot.htm