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<p>Answering this question would go beyond the constraints of “Weight Loss for Dummies”. However, I would point out that cholesterol-lowering statin drugs are the biggest selling (and most profitable) drugs in the world and that the sales of these drugs could not have reached these levels without a concerted effort to convince everyone that they should be worrying a lot about limiting cholesterol.</p>
<p>LOL YDS!!
Similar issue here, though not much cookng involved… My low fat cheese, fresh fruit, etc are all getting snarfed up.</p>
<p>Well, they’re too lazy to wash lettuce for a salad, but once I do a head, they’re all over it. Plus, they want my sugar-free Jell-O, grilled chicken to put on the salad, meaning I’ll have to cook more for myself later in the week. :)</p>
<p>Just picked up some shrimp/crab salad at the store (fresh area). Appears (and according to ingredients) to be pretty much just shrimp, snow crab meat and some other stuff (less than 2%) it says of mayo (it’s not saucy at all), spices etc. </p>
<p>Had maybe an 1/8 cup for a snack with some raw veggies. Good or bad snack???</p>
<p>^^^
I think it sounds like a good snack! But whadda I know?</p>
<p>Yumm! Sounds good to me!</p>
<p>Thanks for the information on dietary cholesterol, ubcalumnus and Momlive. </p>
<p>Idad, there are two questions here: (1) does eating cholesterol-laden foods raise blood cholesterol and (2) does lowering “high” blood cholesterol reduce the risk of heart disease. The sales of those drugs depend on a belief that (2) is true. I don’t know whether this is the case or not. My question was (1), as I don’t now have high blood cholesterol. I am certainly still swayed by the prevailing dogma, as I can’t bring myself to eat a lot of fat, even though some people have found that eating fat but not eating carbs leads to improved lipid profiles.</p>
<p>Both (1) and (2) depend on individual variation. Also, with respect to (2), lowering LDL (or at least small dense LDL) and VLDL / triglycerides is helpful, while raising HDL is helpful.</p>
<p>LDL that is mostly small dense (most dangerous) tends to be associated with high VLDL / triglycerides, and low-carb advocates who like to eat fatty red meat like to claim that saturated fat primarily increases large buoyant LDL (less dangerous) while VLDL / triglycerides stay low. But there is individual variation here – some people have small dense LDL even though they have low VLDL / triglycerides.</p>
<p>Twenty years ago I worked with a woman who was very, very thin, and who ate broiled chicken breast or broiled or poached fish every lunch and dinner, oatmeal or All-bran for breakfast, and some fruits and vegetables, bread but never butter, and nothing that would ever be considered high fat, and she treated eggs like they were an allergen that could kill her. Her cholesterol level was north of 300, and her father and uncles had all died of heart disease before age 50. Just as clearly, it wasn’t diet that was driving her cholesterol. </p>
<p>And my step-grandfather – one of those half pound of bacon, three eggs, and two or three slices of toast or some of my grandmother’s coffee cake every morning washed down with a gallon of coffee, followed by generous supplies of grandma’s cookies or a hunk of cake in his lunch box every day – his cholesterol level was below 150 when he was 75. </p>
<p>Genetics matter. Some folks got a sucky deal on the cholesterol genetics, some folks have blood cholesterol that seems impervious to dietary cholesterol, and the rest of us probably fall somewhere in between.</p>
<p>I wish there were simple answers, but there aren’t.</p>
<p>First, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a study (and lord knows, the drug companies have done lots of studies on this!) that shows much of a difference in expected death rates for people with high cholesterol and low cholesterol – except in very high risk populations (i.e. men who have already had a heart attack). In fact, when you look at the flip-side – what about people who have heart attacks? – it’s split pretty evenly among people with high cholesterol and low cholesterol. In particular, lowering cholesterol has no demonstrated benefit whatsover for women, outside of very high risk groups. </p>
<p>None of the existing studies have looked a diet and cholesterol. The studies are all based on lowering cholesterol with drugs, which may or may not be the same as lowering cholesterol through diet and exercise. For example, there is a higher rate of diabetes among people who take cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, whereas the things you would do to lower various cholesterol measure through diet and exericise (losing weight, etc.) would all tend to reduce the odds of diabetes. The drugs are clearly working in ways that lowering cholesterol through diet and exercise does not. So, it’s debatable whether the two are even comparable in the least, even though both could produce lower cholesterol numbers.</p>
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<p>As for food and lifestyle, you have to break it down in the three key measures of cholesterol. **Triglycerides<a href=“basically%20fat%20in%20the%20bloodstream”>/B</a>, **LDL<a href=“bad%20cholesterol%20which%20contributes%20to%20plaque%20in%20the%20arteries”>/B</a>, and **HDL<a href=“good%20cholesterol,%20which%20sweeps%20up%20LDL%20out%20of%20the%20blood%20for%20removal%20by%20the%20liver”>/B</a>. </p>
<p>Here’s what is pretty solidly confirmed:</p>
<p>**Trigycerides: **Eating more carbs increases Triglycerides; eathing fewer carbs decreases Triglycerides. Period. End of story. Sugar and simple carbs (white flour) are huge players in high triglycerides. In fact, Trigylcerides are fat molecules made in the liver and released into the bloodstream by the metabolism of sugar and carbs.</p>
<p>**HDL good cholesterol: **Exercise, losing weight, and increasing the consumption of good fat (Omega 3 from olive oil, fish oil, etc) increases HDL. Low fat diets decrease HDL.</p>
<p>**LDL bad cholesterol: **Eating fats in general, especially saturated fats from animal products tends to increase LDL cholesterol. However, losing weight tends to lower LDL.</p>
<p>You can see that there are some contradictions. If you want to increase your HDL good cholesterol, you must eat more “good” fat. But, that will also increase your LDL cholesterol. A low carb diet will have the benefits of increasing HDL good cholesterol, reducing triglycerides, and losing weight. However, it will typically not reduce LDL (bad cholesterol) and may even increase it. Eating meats and animal fat is a mixed bag. For example, beef and pork have a lot of “good” fat and a lot of “bad” fat. It’s not all “bad” fat as the popular press would have you believe.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, if you want to lower your LDL choleserol, then losing weight and a low fat diet, high in carbs, with minimal animal products is a pretty sure bet to lower your LDL cholesterol. However, that diet will send your Triglycerides through the roof and reduce your HDL good cholesterol (two markers that perhaps best corolate with coronary artery disease risk).</p>
<p>It gets even a little more complicated because it turns out that there is good LDL bad cholesterol and bad LDL bad cholesterol, so the raw LDL numbers may not tell you anything about the risk of coronary artery disease – even though LDL numbers and total cholesterol numbers are what sells statin drugs.</p>
<p>So, at the end of the day, it just boils down to a) whether you think cholesterol numbers make any difference at all and, if so, which ones?</p>
<p>Here’s an admittedly low-carb perspective on the cholesterol jihad from Michael Eades, MD – author of the best-selling book, Protein Power. He’s an excellent writer and this is a fun take-down of the infamous 1984 Time Magazine article that started the cholesterol scare (and the sale of billions of dollars of statin medicines annually).</p>
<p>[You</a> Bet Your Life: An Epilogue to the Cholesterol Story](<a href=“http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/cardiovascular-disease/you-bet-your-life-an-epilogue-to-the-cholesterol-story/]You”>http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/cardiovascular-disease/you-bet-your-life-an-epilogue-to-the-cholesterol-story/)</p>
<p>Whether you agree with Dr. Eades or not, it is certainly enough to make you adapt a very skeptical eye to blockbuster health pronouncements in the popular press, especially when there are billions of dollars at stake with a successful PR campaign to establish fear about something that – surprise, surprise – can be “cured” with a miracle drug that will only cost hundreds a month for the rest of your life. Without the PR campaign to establish cholestrol as the root of all evil, there’s no multi-billion statin drug market.</p>
<p>Genes - coincidentally there are a study published this week on this topic. You can be thin and still be susceptible to heart disease and diabetes. My physician recently told me - ‘you can’t outrun your genes but you can stack the deck in your favor’ by exercising and watching your diet. Sadly, we had two very fit dads right under age 50 at my son’s school die of sudden heart attacks within a 18 months period of time. One during his daily run and one within a few minutes of finishing his run. Being fit and thin didn’t help either of these men - in fact, I often wonder if it doesn’t sometimes lead to worse consequences because they and their doctors assumed they couldn’t be at risk for a catastrophic cardiac event. Whereby, there has been some research indicating that people who have noticeable risk factors (high cholesterol, overweight, etc) and are treated aggressively often live longer.</p>
<p>[“Lean</a> gene” ups risk of heart disease and diabetes - Health - Heart health - msnbc.com](<a href=“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43540603/ns/health-heart_health/]"Lean”>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43540603/ns/health-heart_health/)</p>
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<p>I could not agree more and had started to write a post about this eariler but couldn’t quite put it into words. We ALL need to be skeptical of this. Perfect example, the ‘sudden’ Vitamin D deficiency we all now have. For what I can tell, there is no real science behind this - at all. But to hear it told, Vitamin D will cure cancer, autism, heart disease, stroke, etc.</p>
<p>[The</a> Miracle of Vitamin D: Sound Science, or Hype? - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/the-miracle-of-vitamin-d-sound-science-or-hype/]The”>The Miracle of Vitamin D: Sound Science, or Hype? - The New York Times)</p>
<p>These are the folks driving the Vitamin D deficiency train:</p>
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<p>I would say the jury is still out on this but hopefully, after 5 years of randomized clinical trials, we will have a better idea.</p>
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<p>I wouldn’t bet on it. Unfortunately, the drug companies largely dictate what studies get done and (more subtly) what results come from those studies. For example, you and I may or may not find that a low carb diet works for us, but there is no denying that low carb diets have been popular and many people have seen good results for thirty years now. Yet, because the health policy has been so focused on “low fat”, there have been essentially no funded low carb studies for most of that thirty years. It’s crazy. But, there are powerful stakeholders in the low-fat/low cholesterol plotline, including pharma (with the statin drugs) and agriculture (corn being the big beneficiary of the “eat more carbs” campaign).</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. I don’t think doctors who prescribe statins are evil. It’s just that, once the train is rolling, it’s hard to bring it to a stop or change directions.</p>
<p>You really see it with smoking cessation. These days the entire effort is essentially just a sales campaign for pharma nicotine (patches, gum, etc.) despite the fact that there is little or no evidence that it works. There is zero funding for any smoking cessation research that doesn’t involve demonstrating new ways to expand the sale of pharma nictoine. Zero. It’s a shame, especially when you consider that over 90% of all ex-smokers actually quit cold turkey.</p>
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<p>One thing to avoid is trans-fats from hydrogenated oils, which raise LDL and lower HDL. These are typically found in margarine, solid shortening, and processed foods.</p>
<p>Note: olive oil does not have much omega-3, or any polyunsaturated fat. It and canola oil are predominantly monounsaturated fat. The biggest sources of omega-3 polyunsaturated fats are fish and flaxseed oil (though some other nut and plant fats have some as well, and eating huge volumes of green vegetables and algae gets some as well). Most plant oils with polyunsaturated fats contain mostly ometa-6 polyunsaturated fats.</p>
<p>Of course, you can play the game all ways – choose fats which are unsaturated and not hydrogenated, and choose carbs in fibrous whole foods.</p>
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<p>While stuff like high fructose corn syrup is obviously sourced from subsidized corn, if low carb becomes popular, it will be good for the corn farmers. Most livestock raised for meat (the favorite food of many low carb dieters and advocates) is fed corn, and it takes a lot more corn to produce a meat meal for human consumption than it does to produce a meal of corn (tortillas, corn on the cob, etc.) for human consumption.</p>
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<p>That is one of three rules that everyone agrees on:</p>
<p>a) Cut out all trans fats (basically any manmade fat product that is solid at room temperature, such as margarine).</p>
<p>b) Cut out sugar, especally sugar beverages.</p>
<p>c) Cut out refined grains (white flour, etc.).</p>
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<p>But, trans-fats are a perfect example. Margarine has been sold to us for decades as a “healthy” alternative to butter. Turns out that margarine is much worse than butter and that using some butter in moderation is OK, far preferable to margarine transfats.</p>
<p>Wo. While I appreciate the impressive depth of knowledge here, let’s remember this is the Dummies thread. We’re trying to keep it short and sweet. Idad, your last post was is what we’re aiming for.</p>
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Very interesting article in Scientific American this month that addressed this. The article was mostly about the need to use the existing data we have to figure out what works instead of running expensive new studies, but it also talked about how difficult it is to convince doctors of the truth. New always seems like it should be better.</p>
<p>Had a great dinner today - from Bittman’s current series in the NYT Magazine. I’m working through his 12 ways to cook white fish. This one was terrific. </p>
<p>Basically you cook 2 fennel bulbs and an onion in a tb. of olive oil for 5 minutes. Then you add, 1 cup tomato, 1.5 pounds or so of white fish (we used cod), a cup of water, and a pinch of saffron. Bring it to a boil, put a lid on it. Turn off the heat and let it poach for ten minutes. I thought the pinch of saffron could have been bigger and it needed a bit of salt and pepper. But it was very tasty and sooo simple. If you have fish stock or clam juice that might make for a more intense flavor.</p>
<p>Here’s the link to the recipe: <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03Eat-t.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03Eat-t.html</a></p>
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<p>Heart attack rates have definitely been shown to lower for low cholesterol populations vs high cholesterol populations. In other words, elevated cholesterol has been pretty firmly established as a risk factor for heart attacks. This relationship was first established by the famous Framingham study (which also first proved that high blood pressure is also a heart disease/heart attack risk factor).</p>
<p>[The</a> Framingham Heart Study: Background Information](<a href=“http://www.framingham.com/heart/backgrnd.htm]The”>The Framingham Heart Study: Background Information)</p>
<p>Excerpt:</p>
<p>"From the Study: Major Risk Factors for Cardiovascular Disease Identified</p>
<pre><code> Today, managing cholesterol levels, high blood pressure and diabetes to mitigate heart and vascular disease and stroke is fundamental to good medical care. In fact, it’s hard to remember a time when these and other risk factors were not considered to be significant problems by many physicians.
But, before Framingham, the role of serum cholesterol in the evolution of cardiovascular disease was not widely understood or accepted by physicians as a major contributing factor. The study established a relationship between the levels of cholesterol and risk for disease. Further, the study established a strong positive association of LDL cholesterol with coronary heart disease as well as a powerful inverse and protective effect of HDL levels."
</code></pre>
<p>mathmom, thank you for the link to the fish recipe. I love Bittman. I just made an enormous batch of minestrone from his “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” cookbook - part of my resolve for this week was to cook huge quantities of minestrone and lentil/tomato soup for this week and for the freezer. One down, one to go.</p>
<p>His minestrone is excellent and, as are most of his recipes, very flexible. His ingredient list includes “hard vegetables” and “soft vegetables,” to be added later, both with lists of suggestions.</p>
<p>I guess we are getting awfully information-dense here - and I’m to blame, having asked the initial question, but I enjoyed reading the Eades article, and plan to look at Momlive’s links tomorrow.</p>
<p>^^^
It’s okay, NYMom. Questions are great. I’m just afraid we will lose some of the threads followers who are counting on it being a simple thread (me included!) :)</p>
<p>As I understand it, the Framingham Heart Study showed a very weak correlation between high cholestorol and coronary artery disease, so weak that the researchers did not even include the statistics in their report. In addition, there were flaws such as basing the results on a limited non-random sample of autopsies. If high cholesterol were such a clear risk factor, there should be considerable evidence of a strong correlation with coronary artery blockage.</p>
<p>On lowering the risk of coronary disease through diet, the recent Woman’s Health Initiative, studying 49,000 women eating the recommended low fat diet pretty much put that to rest. The government spent a tone of money on this one to prove the link between the recommended high carb low fat diet and heart disease. They came up empty:</p>
<p>[Fats</a> and Cholesterol: Out with the Bad, In with the Good - What Should You Eat? - The Nutrition Source - Harvard School of Public Health](<a href=“http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/fats-full-story/index.html]Fats”>http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/fats-full-story/index.html)</p>
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