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Anyone else have alternative takes on cholesterol based on personal experience? Some alternative theories I've come across: - There's a theory that cholestero

• elawler24 2y ago
  I do have a fear that staying vegan will have other negative effects, unrelated to cholesterol - esp brain and bone density related. For me that means cutting out cheese, milk, and butter as much as possible. But having fish and lean meats 1-2 times per week.
  • jokethrowaway 2y ago
    I tried going vegan for ~10 years after reading the scientific research, then started getting stomach ulcers and constant diarrhea. Tried with paleo (meat and veggies) as I thought the carbs were the culprit and I decreased the frequence of the accidents. Finally I went carnivore and within a week I had zero symptoms. I was strict carnivore for 8 weeks (lost 8kgs) then I tried reintroducing other food but without great success. These days I eat mainly butter, eggs and steak and I've been good for 2.5 years now (I was eating organs too at first but I don't really feel any difference if I don't eat them). Eating the occasional sweet from a bakery makes me feel a bit bloated. Eating some fruit For 1.5 years eating vegetables would cause the diarrhea to reappear, after 1.5 years I can eat vegetables occasionally without problems. It's like a "limit" got reset or something.
  • nradov 2y ago
    If you're concerned about bone density then why are you cutting out dairy products? Those are one of the best sources for the calcium we need (although it is possible to get enough from other foods or supplements). https://peterattiamd.com/belindabeck/ https://peterattiamd.com/belindabeck/
    • poincaredisk 2y ago
      Personally (not the parent) I'm vegan for moral reasons, so I'm being vegan despite (not for) it's health effects. As every extreme diet, it requires monitoring nutrition intake and occasional supplementation in order to avoid micro- and macroelement deficiencies and health problems.
  • anjel 2y ago
    I was vegan for about ten years but it was socially crippling. These days I am vegan or vegetarian 4 or 5 days a week and have chicken or seafood the other there. A recent angiogram showed my coronary arteries are clear at 62 years old despite higher than acceptable LDL lower than normal triglycerides and an overall cholesterol score of 260
• nradov 2y ago
  Cholesterol by itself isn't harmful. For most people with typical genetics, cholesterol only becomes a problem when arterial plaques form as a reaction to vascular damage. Limiting cholesterol is one fairly effective approach to preventing those plaques, but a better approach is to avoid the damage in the first place. In other words, it doesn't matter if a little extra cholesterol is floating around in your bloodstream as long as it doesn't stick to the walls.
  • profsummergig 2y ago
    What are some no-brainer strategies to avoid the damage please? Thanks.
    • nradov 2y ago
      Don't smoke, keep your blood pressure under control, and don't become insulin resistant.
      • amy-petrik-214 2y ago
        This is all true. And of course let us remember cholesterol is essential. Many hormones are made from it (cortisol, vitaminD, testosterone, estrogen). Being essential (not intending the meaning of "essential vitamin" which means the body cannot synthsize - as a vitamin it would be non-essential) - but being essential for physiology rather than diet, the body can synthesize cholesterol. So there is this axis of people who have low cholesterol super healthy diets.. and their body just makes lots of cholesterol anyway, so now they have high cholesterol and are taking statin drugs for it, because biology and population variation. The other thing cholesterol is used to make, also quite nice to have, is bile. Used for fat digestion and such. A lot of bile. From a lot of cholesterol. Seems like a waste though, to excrete all that finely synthesized bodily chemical. BUt aha, the body realizes this and so resorbs it. THus there is a cycle and recycle of cholesterol and bile. Aha! What if we can trick the body to not resorb it and just release it. Such a drug has been developed. Well, hard to call it a drug. There is no fanciness, no elegant molecular binding to an esoteric receptor, no, nothing of the sort. It's called metamucil, and as the name tells us, it mostly works by being a big chonky mucinous blob of very impressively thick goop. The "magic" of how it works is literally the bile gets trapped in the thick goop and excreted. And thus we've bled off some bile from the cholesterol recycling loop, and thus, cholesterol. And that's why this weird blobby old person fiber supplement is cholesterol magic.
• profsummergig 2y ago
  I just remembered something: Pregnant women have extremely high cholesterol (ridiculously high). - There's a theory that if evolution designed pregnant women to have high cholesterol, then cholesterol cannot be the poison it's made out to be.
  • Aurornis 2y ago
    > Pregnant women have extremely high cholesterol (ridiculously high). Cholesterol levels rise during second and third trimesters, but it’s not true at all to say that all pregnant women have “ridiculously high” cholesterol. Around 24% of women who have normal range cholesterol will go over the normal range for a few months, but it’s not accurate at all to say they all have “ridiculously high” cholesterol Here is a good overview: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4989641/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4989641/ Cholesterol metabolism is related to hormones that change during pregnancy, so downstream fluctuations in cholesterol aren’t surprising. Do not mistake this for intentional evolutionary pressure to increase cholesterol. > if evolution designed pregnant women to have high cholesterol, then cholesterol cannot be the poison it's made out to be. This is an incredibly pseudoscientific way of thinking. Pregnancy puts many pressures on the body, not all of which are good. Did you know that blood coagulability also rises during pregnancy, which is clearly linked to cardiac events. There is an increased risk of cardiac events during pregnancy. Saying “X happens during pregnancy therefore X must be good” is an extremely unscientific and uninformed take. I’m not surprised it’s being leveraged by the cholesterol truthers, but it’s wrong. This is the level of reasoning that seems to appeal to people on TikTok and Twitter who consume feel-good science in 15 second clips, but it makes anyone who has read any actual research on the subject depressed at how susceptible people have become to bad science that is dangerous to their health.
  • exe34 2y ago
    do you know how many women died during pregnancy before modern times?
  • EasyMark 2y ago
    pregnancy tends to be a limited time thing to me and the body quickly goes back to "normal levels" after it's over. Few women are constantly pregnant.
• adrian_b 2y ago
  I do not know how much truth exists in the theory that an excess of saturated fats is harmful, but I have acted based on this theory and it was very beneficial for me. A few years ago, I have been diagnosed with incipient atherosclerosis. This was an unpleasant surprise for me, so I have immediately made serious changes in the food that I eat. At that time, I was eating very high quantities of dairy, which has a high proportion of saturated fat. Because I could not see any other factor that could cause the atherosclerosis, I have eliminated dairy from my food and I have changed completely the composition of the fats contained in my food. I eat only food that I cook myself, so I know exactly which is the composition of the fat contained in it. Nowadays, at least 90% of my daily intake of fat comes from a combination of oils that I use when cooking food (typically 60 mL of extra virgin olive oil + 20 mL of cold-pressed sunflower oil + 10 mL of cod liver oil + 1 drop of an oil containing D3 and K2 vitamins). Instead of any other kinds of dairy, now I use only a cheese substitute that looks and tastes like melted cheese, but it is made from whey protein concentrate (which has almost no fat) mixed with some vegetable oil and a few other ingredients for better flavor. After changing completely the fatty acid profile of my fat consumption, after a year the symptoms of atherosclerosis have disappeared and there have been also other very noticeable signs of improved cardiovascular health. For instance, previously, I had cold feet and when sleeping I had to take care to keep them warm. Some months after changing the diet, they had become warm (presumably due to improved blood flow) and I have no longer needed any protection against lower temperatures. So my diet change has very certainly improved a lot my health in a relatively short time of no more than a year, and that has persisted for the last three years. I cannot know if this is really caused by the change in the fatty acid profile, but I cannot see any other significant difference, except if the abundant dairy that I was eating before contained some other harmful substance or if the significant increase in the amount of eaten EV olive oil and cold-pressed sunflower oil has provided some benefits beyond the better fatty acid profile. Logically, it is plausible that a reasonable amount of saturated fat, which is correlated with the amount of physical work, should not have any harmful effect. As long as you burn enough calories daily to use all the fat intake for energy, it should not matter if that fat is saturated fat. However, when the fat is not completely used and some of it is deposited, then it is plausible that it is preferable if oleic acid (mono-unsaturated fatty acid) is the most abundant in food, because in normal conditions this is the most abundant fatty acid in the human reserve fat. When other fatty acids are much more abundant than oleic acid, they must be processed and converted before storage and the capacity for the conversion may be overwhelmed. The negative connotations for "seed oils" are not applicable to all seed oils, but they refer only to the seed oils where linoleic acid is the most abundant acid. Linoleic acid is an essential nutrient, but the need for it can be satisfied with 15 to 20 mL per day of a suitable seed oil, like sunflower oil. A greater daily intake than that can cause problems, because the excess linoleic acid must be converted into other fatty acids and also because some of its derivatives have physiological roles for which an excess quantity is not desirable. Given these, it seems plausible that some fat composition is preferable to others. Like I said, I have acted on this assumption and it has worked very well for me, even if the real mechanism cannot be known, at least not yet.
• fmajid 2y ago
  There’s almost no correlation between cholesterol ingested as food and your own blood serum cholesterol. It’s almost as if we have a digestive system to break down nutrients into their constituents rather than release them unmodified into the bloodstream.
  • reissbaker 2y ago
    Yup, ingesting cholesterol doesn't lead to higher blood serum cholesterol. Although in this case the article was about ingesting saturated fat leading to higher blood serum cholesterol (in my personal experience this is true, and switching to a low saturated fat diet dropped my LDL cholesterol and triglycerides). In general it matters what you replace the saturated fat with, though: you should replace it with unsaturated fat. Replacing it with carbs/simple sugars can apparently elevate LDL cholesterol and triglycerides: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2943062/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2943062/ Olive oil is good, candy is bad. (News at 11.)
    • KempyKolibri 2y ago
      Technically speaking it does, but only if you’re starting from a point of very low dietary cholesterol intake or you’re genetically predisposed to have high sterol absorption. So if you’re, say, a vegan with very little cholesterol intake then adding some would result in significantly higher serum cholesterol. However, for most people in western populations, they’re already above the point where the effect tails off, which is why dietary guidelines generally don’t focus on dietary cholesterol anymore.
    • EasyMark 2y ago
      Shouldn’t that be “sugars and simple carbs” tho?
• Aurornis 2y ago
  > Some alternative theories I've come across: > - There's a theory that cholesterol is good for you. It's necessary for brain functioning. Low levels of "bad" cholesterol have been linked to depression. These aren’t alternative theories, they’re just reductive takes that try to ignore the big picture. Reductive takes are really seductive for people who want to reduce everything into “good” or “bad” categories, but the body doesn’t work like that. The part that confuses people is that the message has been simplified to “cholesterol bad” for so long that people are confused to discover that cholesterol is actually used by the body. Upon discovering these facts, reductive logic switches from “cholesterol bad” to “cholesterol good”, which is just as reductive. The truth is that cholesterol is useful within the body, but that doesn’t mean that more of it is better. Despite all of the proponents of alternative theories trying to spin a different story, the bottom line is that cumulative lifetime LDL exposure is still correlated with heart disease. That is the only thing you need to know about the debate if you want to reduce it to something simple. More LDL over time means more heart disease. A lot of people will try to “well actually…” various things around this, but it’s true. Even the comments below are trying to tell you your own observation is impossible (that diet can’t affect cholesterol levels) when that’s clearly not true. Cholesterol has become a hotbed of alternative medicine that doesn’t follow the science but sells well on social media. Don’t put too much confidence behind “alternative theories” when we have decades of evidence that excessively high cholesterol levels over a lifetime are correlated with heart disease.
  • KempyKolibri 2y ago
    Just want to say you have solid takes. You're getting all my upvotes. Thanks for fighting the good fight against this kind of nonsense.
  • perrygeo 2y ago
    > excessively high cholesterol levels over a lifetime are correlated with heart disease You're talking about blood cholesterol levels. Yet we're talking about dietary cholesterol. Totally different things, it's now well known that they're unrelated. The cholesterol in our bodies is produced by the liver by a completely different process. The old science is pretty foolish for assuming dietary -> blood cholesterol, as if we didn't have a digestive system. If your point was "stick to the settled science and don't believe the alternatives" you couldn't have picked a worse example. To the original topic, dietary saturated fat does appear to increase the risk of heart disease by increasing LDL cholesterol. In other words, blood cholesterol is a problem but it's driven, at least partly, by saturated fat intake. High dietary cholesterol food like eggs do not increase serum levels, unless you deep fry them in butter.
• deleted 2y ago
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• stefantalpalaru 2y ago
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• exe34 2y ago
  > They shot up after I started eating a lot of non-veg food. And after they shot up, I stopped having depressive episodes. do you know the parable of the drunk gentleman looking for his keys under a streetlamp at night? a policeman asked him where did he drop his keys, he pointed at a dark alleyway further away, so the policeman asked why he didn't look there instead, he replied "well there's no bloody light over there". is it possible that you were deficient in some other nutrient, possibly even a trace one like some metal ion or maybe just some amino acid, and that's what caused the improvement in symptoms when you started eating flesh again? is it possible that you simply enjoyed the taste and then felt better about yourself? or any number of other changes in your life at the same time - taking more time cooking your meals, learning new recipes, trying new spices with it, etc?
• hereme888 2y ago
  Cholesterol is a necessary part of every cell in our body. It allows flexibility of cell membranes despite variations in temperature, and also converts into steroid hormones. LDL doesn't mean much, but rather the ratio of HDL:LDL. Low cholesterol is bad for the brain. Of course these are oversimplified statements. There are known cases of older men with low testosterone level and high LDL, who after testosterone replacement therapy experienced a significant decrease in LDL. It's thought that the liver kept churning cholesterol in attempts to synthetize enough testosterone to no avail. I believe that depression and cognitive dysfunction is a side-effect of too low cholesterol when people take statins, especially older folks, but excessive LDL also accumulates in arteries and lead to hypertension and/or diminished blood flow to organs, which itself leads to dementia, heart attacks, etc.
  • EasyMark 2y ago
    Unless research has changed since I las tread, about 75% of your cholesterol is manufactured in the human body and not ingested, so ingested cholesterol is of limited in fluence. I suspect the overall health of the body affects it more than eating saturated fats.
• EasyMark 2y ago
  There’s lot of evidence that excess sugar intake like modern humans do causes issues, especially diabetes, over a long time in a large percentage of people. There’s very little about seed oils though and that’s 90% internet hype
• davebrown10 2y ago
  I suggest you Google - Dave Feldman Cholesterol.