The first lipid test I had was 2 years ago, I was at the tail end of a ~2 year HFLC period. My doc flipped his lid at my numbers, esp the first two:
Tot Chol - 6.83 mmol/L (264 mg/dl) – uber high
LDL - 4.65 (180) – uber high
HDL - 1.82 (70) – fabulous
Chol Non HDL - 5.0 – uber high
Chol/HDL risk ratio - 3.75 – fabulous
Tri - 0.77 (68) – uber fabulous
Just by coincidence, soon after that I started training to race again and switched to a HCLF diet. My lipid test a year later resulted in what my doc called a “Herculean effort” to reduce my chol profile across the board, said most people can never do that. I’ve yet to inform him of my dietary flip. Don’t have those numbers but I do believe they are all in the “normal” range.
Doc just gave the ok for my annual test but I’m going to wait a couple months just to see what happens with my crazy diet this time around.
I’ve read a TON about cholesterol (and the various drugs) in the last couple of years…it seems to me that most of it is uncertain and therefore the medical community resorts to using a shotgun to kill a fly.
The elephant in the room being that the standard lipid test is used because it’s fast and it’s cheap but it gives a wholly incomplete, and possibly incorrect, picture of what’s going on. It’s kind of like taking a wide angle aerial shot of traffic and exclaiming that there’s going to be a lot of accidents because there are a lot of red cars on the road.
Regarding statins and mitochondria…don’t forget that the heart has the most mito by a huge margin…so long term, not sure that reducing mito efficiency is a great solution to “curing” heart disease et al.
Regarding saturated fat being the cause of CVD, I recently read an article which stated that by itself, SF is most likely innocuous in terms of disease; however, when sugar is added to the mix…that’s when things turn ugly. SatFat is the smoking gun, sugar is the trigger was the conclusion. This is something I’ve thought for a few years, also in terms of fuelling – perfectly fine to run on either fat or sugar but not both!
If someone is genetically linked to having high cholesterol, unfortunately, there’s not much you can do about it. No amount of dieting will over-write DNA. That said, it was totally diet which pulled my levels back to Earth…that said, was my “outrageous” cholesterol really a danger (4% Framingham Risk)?
I’d give a rundown of what my current standard diet/supplement regimen is but I wouldn’t want to weird you out! 