Part of the reason I went into the doctor was that I felt ‘weird’, and wanted to get a new prescription for my thyroid medication. Hypertension is one common effect of untreated hypothyroidism (”patients with hypothyroidism have triple the risk of developing hypertension” from one source, or this paper listed in PubMed, or a study that looked specifically at the two), so I knew that not being on meds could be a problem. My first goal was to get back on thyroid meds, continue workout out, and continue losing weight. Not being on the medication was itself a gross mistake, one that I really only made because of the hassle of dealing with medical insurance. Moving on — I’m back on thyroid medication.

Strength training has sometimes been associated with higher blood pressure, but most of what I’ve seen in that regard says that it is while lifting weights that one’s blood pressure goes up. Nearly every source I’ve checked says that athletes have low blood pressure, mostly related to cardiovascular health & fitness. I don’t think that building muscle tissue should cause hypertension. That seems weird. So I didn’t stop strength training, especially since I was working on other avenues. Normally when one says “athletes” I think what comes to mind is runners, sports players, cyclists, and the like — people engaged in long-term cardiovascular exercise, who can exert themselves for hours at a sport or exercise. So running should help lower my blood pressure, although I expect that benefit to be slow and gradual as I step up my running.

Blood pressure is also correlated with weight loss. But I’m losing weight (on the paleo diet), so that should also be a continuing benefit, again slow and gradual as the weight comes off.

Of course, the doctor wants to give me pills for the hypertension and then pretend the problem is solved. She didn’t know of any pill that I could take once that would cure the problem, so the “only option” is lifetime medication. Blech! I didn’t want that solution. I want to be healthy, not just have “healthy numbers.” A really high BP reading is actually a serious condition; it’s correlated with stroke. As for the cause… dunno. Does having a high BP cause stroke? Or is the underlying cause shared? Anyway, I didn’t want to take meds and their scary side-effects (which tend to be things like… stroke!).

Thyroid function is harder to restore, I know, as Hashimoto’s is an autoimmune disease. I expect to continue to be on thyroid medication for a long time. Some people have been able to reverse autoimmune diseases after fixing their gut (by removing lectins such as WGA and other stessors from their diet) and eating nutrient-dense food, but all the anecdotes I’ve read about it says that it takes a year or more for your body to restore itself to health. I’m not sure B-memory cells every go away; if the continuing presence of foreign proteins will continue to cause Hashimoto’s, or if I’ve trained my body to kill my thyroid from now until eternity.

Some relief can be found immediately depending on the specific auto-immune disease, but hypothyroidism doesn’t cause pain or other severe effects like some of the others. I would like to restore my thryoid to normal functioning; I don’t want to be on that medication for life. But that depends on how damaged my thyroid is, and if removing antagonists will eventually convince my immune system to leave my thyroid alone.

After eating better and jogging for months, my blood pressure numbers have been coming down. I’m through the pre-hypertension range and into normal, around 110/70. I bought a BP cuff to use at home shortly after the high reading at the doc and I’m using that to track my BP – a few times a day at first, then mostly daily, and now about once a week. Although my diet’s fluctuated in the past year, it’s been mostly paleo. The high BP reading was enough to convince me to be more consistent in my workouts (running every other day, strength training every four — until I started snowboarding, at least, and then until the crash). The high BP has also been a motivator to stay on the diet.

I’ve lost over 60 pounds so far. I figure strength training has helped me put on some lean mass, but I haven’t been tracking body fat % so I can’t really judge that. At some point I’ll post my weight and BP readings, probably in one big chunk, for those that would like to see hard numbers.

Normally, when doing a scientific test, you only want to change one variable at a time. For example, if you change a half-dozen things about your diet and your weight plateaus, what caused your weight to stabilize? It’s much easier to find what works by doing one thing at a time; cut out this food, eat more of that, etc.

Except the problem in diet studies is that food isn’t simple. Eating more bananas (say) means not just getting the potassium and other nutrients from the fruit, but also getting more fructose and more calories. Replacing one food with another is better, but still a non-trivial change. Was the old food good or is the new food bad? Is it calories? Sugars? Micronutrients? Or even something you’re not paying attention to — like the fact that you’re eating breakfast now? Or eating carbs early in the day rather than late?

If you’re working out at the same time, a change in workout or diet might produce a change in body composition — more fat & less muscle, or more muscle & less fat, or maybe you’re gaining water weight, or all that fiber is just sitting in your gut.

Blood pressure is a bit easier. It’s just a number. And my goal is really to get that number to go down.

A few things I’ve learned:

* Taking several measurements throughout the day has shown me how crazily volatile BP is. If I take a BP measurement then wait a few minutes and take it again, that second number can be much lower. I don’t usually take two readings, and I think I’ll start to — and use that to see how the minute-to-minute volatility changes with time of day.

* Taking a measurement first thing in the morning is great for consistency. My morning routine is the most consistent time of my day and I think that reading (even though I’m normally in a rush out the door and don’t have time for a second reading) has been the most consistent.

* I don’t think I’m salt-sensitive, but I might be. I think that’s genetic and runs in African gene lines. Cutting out the salt didn’t have a big effect on my BP, but adding it back in seemed to send it up. So I went very-low-salt again for a couple weeks to check – no noticeable effect.

* Walking on a consistent basis (five or six times a week) has helped my heartrate a lot, and my BP some. Jogging increased the benefit, and long and fast runs pushed the benefit further.

* Alcohol and working out will both push my BP and heartrate up; alcohol for maybe a day, while sometimes just an hour after working out those numbers will normalize.

* Being sick does crazy things to the numbers. I don’t recommend internal trauma.

After a few months from that first reading, at least at home when I can sit down and rest for the few minutes it takes to get a couple readings, my numbers got back into the prehypertension range: around 135/80, plus or minus 10 points for both numbers. My heartrate also come down, from the high eighties to 70, sometimes in the 60s.

After a year, my BP has stabilized to around 110/70, and my heartrate has been fairly stable at 70. I’d like to improve that further but right now recovery takes the upper hand.

I’m going to keep my diet goals the same: no sugar, no grain, no fructose, and walk/run five or six times a week.  It’s worked so far, I’m still burning off weight, and the hypertension is gone!

That’s what I do. Sidelined from snowboarding – I can’t even walk to the store if there’s snow on the ground and danger of falling – I’m spending my day surfing the net, reading, writing, and watching some movies. And cooking!

Yet I’m still burning about 1/2 pound a day. That’s 1750 calories worth of fat, beyond the ~3000 calories a day I’m eating.

The key is to eat right, and that means taking into consideration the hormones that drive fat storage and burning. I’m actually still eating carbs, but non before noon and no caffeine (which means no soda) after 5pm. I figure every 90 minutes that I go without carbs, I burn off another ounce of fat. Thinking of it that way, it’s easy to decide to skip the caffeine with breakfast and just eat my bacon, or eggs, or sausage. Lunch is usually a hunk of meat with a rich sauce (and maybe a coke). Dinner is the same, but without the coke.

Fatty acids are constantly moving from the blood into and out of adipose tissue. The rate of each leg is determined by hormones, primarily insulin and glucagon. For three hours after consuming carbs, those carbs work their way into the bloodstream and cause the pancreas to secrete insulin (but no glucagon). Insulin helps speed the process of storing fat. It’s also a signal to the body to conserve energy; except for the sugar-rush spike after ingesting food, a constant high-carb diet means the body won’t use its energy stores (i.e. fat) to full activity; if you don’t have blood sugar, your body won’t want to do anything. That’s why runners bring carbs with them; their bodies aren’t adapted to using the fuel it already has.

After fasting, blood sugar stabilizes and insulin drops. The pancreas starts producing glucagon instead, especially in response to a high-protein meal. This hormone helps mobilize all that stored fat, ready to be used by cells for energy. Both ketones and glucose can feed into the Krebs cycle that drives cellular energy; your body doesn’t need to convert fat into sugar before it burns it.

The system is complex, and it takes a while to stabilize on one method or another. The human body is full of homeostatic systems – that is, systems that try to maintain balance. If you’re not used to burning fat as fuel, you’re going to spend a couple weeks fuzzy-headed until your brain figures out how to burn ketones. And your digestive system, too, might not be ready for it. Fatty diets are best eaten in meals, not by grazing; eat two or three times a day, not more. Once a day works, too.

Probably the best way to burn 5000 calories a day is to get sick. I spent five days in the hospital recently after my spleen ruptured, and I didn’t eat at all the first 48 hours, and only barely after that. In addition to my normal metabolic needs, my body also needed some heavy-duty repair – and that means energy. Recovery, too, is best fueled with fats. I was in misery for nearly a week, and that’s damn good motivation to eat better. If you’ve suffered from any of the ailments of Western Civilization, avoiding its foods – grain, sugar, and frankenoils – is the best medicine.

Rice Kernels

Raw rice is first milled to remove the chaff, the outer husks of the grain. What remains is brown rice, what might be called “whole rice”. If the brown rice is further milled to remove the bran and germ, it produces common white rice. Most of the nutrients in rice are in the bran, however, so two common methods are used to add those nutrients back: parboiling, which moves some of the nutrients into the grain itself, and fortification, which is common in the US.

Antinutrients

The antinutrients in rice are also mostly in the bran. Although rice in a non-gluten grain, the bran does contain phytate, trypsin inhibitors, and various lectins.

Phytate is a common antinutrient in grains. Phytate binds to minerals, preventing them from being absorbed during digestion. Hence the stats you might read at NutritionData or on a food package aren’t the bioavailable amounts. Does it matter to you how much calcium is in your stool? Don’t be fooled; if you can’t absorb minerals into your bloodstream, it doesn’t matter how much is in the rice.

Like phytate, trypsin inhibitors are also present in other grains. Trypsin inhibitors are chemicals that bind to trypsin, an essential enzyme in human nutrition. Most proteins are huge, and digestion is generally a process of breaking down such huge molecules into bits small enough that they be transported across the intestinal wall into the bloodstream. (Amylase is the enzyme that breaks down starch into sugar molecules, and the absence of a similar enzyme for cellulose is why humans can’t digest cellulose.) The inhibitors in rice that block trypsin, therefore, block the uptake of protein. Luckily, the trypsin inhibitors in rice are in the bran, and polishing rice into white rice removes that bran and hence the inhibitors. I would guess that parboiling brown rice moves not just nutrients but also antinutrients into the grain itself, hence parboiled rice would contain more trypsin inhibitors than non-parboiled white rice.

The presence of tryspin inhibitors introduces another anti-nutrient quality: the blockage of trypsin can lead to an over-production of the enzyme and the loss of the sulfur-containing amino acids needed to produce the enzyme. Furthermore, the inhibitors themselves are typically sulfur-containing – and aren’t digested. Trypsin inhibitors don’t just block protein uptake; they also lead to a higher demand for protein.

Rice bran also contains the protease-inhibitors oryzacystatin I and II. The chemicals act similarly to trypsin inhibitors, but they block a specific class of proteases – cystein proteases. (Trypsin is a serine protease.) Although I’ve seen mention of oryzacystatins as antinutrients, cystein proteases are typically non-digestive in nature, involved in apoptosis, inflammation, and cell mobility. Although I’m including mention of oryzacystatins here, I’ve found little discussion of their effect on digestion and nutrient bio-availability.

Possibly the worst antinutrients to be found in plant foods, lectins, are also present in rice. Rice lectin, like many plant antinutrients, is concentrated in the bran but also present in the grain itself.  Lectins are one source of allergies; although not common in the US, rice allergies are found in countries where there is a lot of rice consumption. Lectins interfere with digestion by binding to intestinal villi, and cause immune reactions if they are admitted into the bloodstream.

Cooking breaks down many of these anti-nutrients, but not all of them. Definitely don’t eat raw brown rice. But even cooked white rice will contain some antinutrients. The question, then, is: What is the benefit of eating white rice?

Nutrition

Rice is colloquially considered a nutritious food. I’ve asked friends about it, and a common answer is that rice is “good for you,” and that there are “a lot of nutrients in brown rice.”

There are nutrients in brown rice, especially in the bran. However, these nutrients are not as bioavailable as they could be due to the presence of anti-nutrients. They’re also not present in great quantity; potatoes, starchy vegetables (e.g. beets and squash), berries, crucifers (like broccoli) and green leafy vegetables all have more vitamins and minerals. Not to mention animal-based superfoods like liver! Compared to these other foods, white rice has very low mineral and vitamin content, and is handicapped by the residual presence of the antinutrients mentioned above.

Summary

If you’re eating low-nutrient food, it crowds out higher-nutrient food that you could be eating instead. The carbs in white rice come with very little to recommend them; more colorful veggies & berries provide much more bang and also don’t carry the caloric load. Rice generally isn’t very flavorful, either. It’s used as a filler; something to keep starving people from dying, or to provide energy to people engaged in intense physical labor.

1. “Eat filling foods that are low in calories.” Because calories are calories, the body is a closed system, and our digestive system is identical to a bomb furnace, right? They suggest grains and legumes, because lectins are a health food, of course.

I’ve tried to completely avoid grains and legumes. The only legumes I’ve had since November is a bit of hummus, before I sat and thought about the fact that it’s ground garbanzo beans. Maybe some soybean oil in fast-food condiments, such as mayo and salad dressings. Unfortunately I’ve had a few pieces of bread: one sandwich, some breaded chicken nuggets (curse you Mickey Ds), and a brat in a bun. I need to stop doing that.

2. “When you eat meat, cut out fat and cut down portion sizes.” Hah! My last meal in Austin was a pound of steak. It was quite yummy. I try and get as much fat as I can, and I think I’m just not getting enough. I need to start adding more butter to the food I eat.

3. “Avoid fried foods.” Makes good sense, since most food is fried in vegetable oil, possibly including soy, peanut, and trans fats. As for losing weight, I don’t think this matters at all. Again, they’re trying to say “reduce calories,” and it’s easy to get a lot of calories from fried food.

4. “Use low-fat or nonfat dairy foods.” Cuz, you know, fat soluble vitamins are over-rated. This is part of the “fat makes you fat” mantra, which Taubes addressed directly in a “What if it’s all been a big fat lie” article in the NY Times Magazine and GCBC. Finding full-fat dairy is difficult. Raw milk cheeses are usually full-fat, but yogurt? Forget it. Out of the hundreds (no joke) of brands and flavors of yogurt at the local grocery store, there were maybe five that were full-fat; the rest reduced or nonfat. Yogurt is a good food if it’s made from raw milk. What’s the point of pasteurizing milk, then adding bacteria back in? Wtf? Of course, it’s what you have to do if your milk is ass. Frickin’ ass milk.

5. “Avoid fast food.” Tom Naughton addresses this well in his documentary. Fast food isn’t great on the paleo scale, but if you avoid full-sugar cola and strip the buns of the meat, it can be a part of a weight-loss diet. There’s low-carb options at tons of fast food places, especially if you’re willing to toss buns away. Stay away from their salad dressings, unless they’ve got a good oil and/or vinegar dressing.

6. “Avoid high-calorie, low-nutrient snacks.” I came to Paleo via the Weston A Price Foundation, which is high on nutrition, so I’m very much a high-nutrient guy. (They also tend to be pro-whole wheat, which is where they diverge from the rest of paleo crowd; see Kurt’s post on the subject.) There’s not much that’s high-calorie and low-nutrient, unless you eat potato chips, candy, fruit, or grain-based snack bars. They recommend nonfat yogurt (see above), hummus (see above!), baby carrots (nature’s candy bar), and pistachios (one out of four ain’t bad for a mainstream publication). I recommend not eating when you’re not hungry. And if you are hungry, eat a big, fatty piece of meat. With butter.

7. “Watch what you drink.” The only area that we agree, except for their recommendation of fat-free milk. At home I drink water; if I’m out, I drink unsweetened iced tea.

So this guide is mostly useless for weight loss. If you want to lose weight and be healthy, here’s my seven tips:

1. Eat fatty foods, such as meat and dairy. Add butter or bacon to every meal.
2. Avoid lean meat. It won’t be filling, your body is unlikely to process that much protein, and you’re skipping all the great fat-soluble vitamins.
3. Fast every so often. 24 hours a few days a week, or maybe 36 hours a couple times a week.
4. Cook with butter, not vegetable oil. If you’re lactose intolerant or want to stay away from casein, ghee or coconut oil are good options.
5. Avoid carbs. Your body burns way less fat when you’ve got an insulin spike. If you do eat carbs, only eat them once a day; you won’t be burning any fat for 3-4 hours after you ingest them.
6. Eat nutrient-dense food (such as pastured meat, eggs, and dairy), and avoid anti-nutrients (such as in grain and beans) and low-nutrient foods (such as potatoes or high-fiber veggies).
7. Avoid soda; drink water when you’re thirsty. Contemplate quitting caffeine, or switch to hot or iced tea.

I lost 8 pounds in December, and 14 in January. February is a short month, but I’m hoping for another 14 pounds.

His post focuses on the sanction that such cheats give to the offending item; how a cheat now and then might give the impression that you still eat cake, etc. That avoiding cake isn’t a central part of your diet. I was coming at it from the effect it has on you, the cheater: eating fake pasta and sugar-free cookies is still pretty bad, and only one step removed from the real (bad) thing. That accepting that it’s OK to eat bread as long as it is gluten-free might lead to an occasional gluten-loaded bun now and then.

I did cheat last week; I ate a bun. It came with bratwurst, which is a favorite of mine, although I acknowledge that’s not an excuse. I’m not happy about the bun. I’m mentioning it here cuz I’d rather admit my failings then fake it (har). Plus mentioning it, writing it down, is a way of cementing the event in my mind, and remotivating myself to not do that again. I don’t want wheat, I don’t want cancer, I don’t want autoimmune diseases and gut distress.

Anyway, I was shopping today, and I thought of buying some rice noodles so I could make pasta, because … hmm, nostalgia? I used to make a lot of pasta. Pasta sauces are easy to make, and it’s easy to put whatever you want in to them. Pasta dishes are also hefty and filling. But… I don’t eat pasta, and although rice is probably the friendliest of the villainous grains it’s still a villain.

That got me thinking about diet soda. Diet Coke is a lot like gluten-free bread, or rice noodles, or candy cigarettes. Despite the flowery advertising for diet colas, I don’t think there’s anyone that would voluntarily drink them if it wasn’t for a desire for the non-diet versions, whether that desire comes from carb cravings or nostalgia or habit or whatever.

I think they’re fine as crutches; if you’re trying to transition to paleo, I think gluten-free bread, rice noodles, and diet coke are great. Some people do great quitting cold turkey, and if that’s you, then you can really skip this whole conversation. But I’ve had persistent problems with cheating. Carbs are cheating for me, and it’s the easiest thing to cheat on, because I’m eating low-carb to lose weight, not strictly to avoid disease. Wheat, however, is something I want to avoid 100%. I’d like to be wheat-free for a year, two years, a decade…. I’ve been aluminum and flouride free for years. Somehow that was a bit easier, mostly because those purchases (deodorant and toothpaste) are made rarely enough that I just need to be strong like once every six months. Cake.

Food, however, is something I eat daily. There are constant temptations to cheat. Convenience, social pressure, carb cravings that lead to bad food choices, etc. I don’t drink diet soda (choosing tea whenever I’m at a restaurant where I’d otherwise feel pressured to drink soda), and I’ve been 99% bean-free since last April. I still eat factory meat & eggs near daily, but 80% of my cheese is unpasteurized. I just need to … remember. Thinking about it before I down that hot dog bun would help. Gah.

One day at a time? I haven’t had any wheat today. It’s been five days since I last ate wheat.

I’m still buying basic supplies. Just today I bought EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil), which I don’t cook with of course but used to brush on some caprese. I don’t have a crock pot and I haven’t made stock, but I plan to soon. Sadly, I was a bit rushed on the day that I left Texas, and I forgot all my cooking stuff – my good knife, handy utensils, and the cookbooks. I felt the need for sugar today; we hosted a potluck here and someone prepared fried bananas, and I wanted to mix up some rum and sugar. But luckily that desire passed, and the bananas are gone so I’m not tempted with them any more.

I stopped at Mickey D’s this week to satisfy a french fry craving, buying a McDouble and stripping off the bun. But the tea sucked. Like day-old, bitter, nasty-tasting bark. I would have complained but instead I’m remembering it as a lesson to not go back. I had a similar experience at a restaurant up near the mountain, another incentive to eat out less.

I priced some grass-fed beef today. It could double my monthly food budget but at this point I think it’s the thing to do. I’ve got about eight pounds of frozen meat (of various flavors) atm, so not quite yet. I’ll prolly make stock first, then switch to grass-fed. I’m eating raw-milk cheese and taking my D3 and K2. I want to do more. Moving here was a life reset, so it’s a great time to establish new habits – like pastured meat and eggs, less fructose, etc. I’m even worried about solanine, despite having bought five pounds of potatoes for a buck (yay for the grocery circular!).

I do enjoy cooking. I find it very relaxing, even if I’m preparing food for a party. When I start cooking interesting stuff, I’ll post my results here.

I’m thinking Tuesdays will be food/cooking post days, and I do plan on doing snowboarding progress reports every ten days on the snow. The rest of the posts will continue to be random.

Every day that I’m on the mountain, there’s tons of people eating bagels, candy, breakfast bars, etc. They gotta take lunch, they gotta eat breakfast first, they gotta snack when they’re on the mountain… I really don’t feel it. Fasting is cake. But then, I’m on a 100% fat diet — burning off body fat the whole time.

IF is easy. I don’t feel hungry when I’m riding. I’m losing weight – is it the fasting, or the fact that I’m calorie-deficient?

But I think the notion is dangerous. I don’t want to eat cake, or pasta, or bread. I tried gluten-free pizza, and it’s just not the same. I’m not going to eat buckwheat pasta just so I can have pasta. Eating those foods is a way of refusing to acknowledge reality. Wheat is evil. Don’t eat wheat. Everyone else eats wheat, but so what? I don’t want to return to the “good old days” of my ignorance.

Besides, the fake stuff tends to taste like ass.

A friend of mine advises to go zero carb cuz that way you don’t have to count; eating is very simple: if it’s a carb, don’t eat it. I appreciate his point of view but that’s not for me. That sort of strict rule doesn’t tend to work with me for some reason; I can’t keep to a rule if I know it’s arbitrary.

To me, eating fake food is breaking a more important rule: don’t eat poison (like gluten, lectin, etc). I can stick to that rule, and eating fake food means that sometimes I can eat “bad” food. I’m much happier treating all breads, even if they’re gluten-free, as bad.

By not choosing fake foods, I also get to eat other stuff, which tends to taste better, too. Beef & butter for dinner!

Donuts are bad on three fronts: carbs (simple ones at that), wheat, and veggie oils. Definitely the sort of crap I shouldn’t even be near.

I was talking with my boss, with whom I’m planning to do contract work next year, when the donuts showed up. I felt like Marshall in this week’s episode of How I Met Your Mother: eat the donut with the boss to get on his good side.

I guess mostly I’m posting about it to reinforce (to myself) not to do that kind of thing next time. I avoided eating a bun with my burger today (and nearly always); and I’ve skipped the kolaches and donuts at the office before. I think writing goals down makes them more real. It’s like hearing something three times.

It also got me thinking about cheating in the mornings. It’s possibly the worst time to cheat; consuming carbs shuts down fat burning, and I’ve got the whole-body fat-burning thing going after an overnight fast. Skipping breakfast extends the fast, while a zero-carb breakfast would at least maintain fat burning. If I get some carbs with lunch an afternoon cheat would turn straight into fat, but a morning cheat means I’m not burning fat and lunch now has a good chance of being ’stored for future use’ too.

So, no more donuts. Not gonna happen.

thread title courtesy of morrisey and marr

“it is still important to limit the amount of cholesterol you eat” – Harvard School of Public Health

“a diet high in cholesterol can contribute to elevated blood cholesterol levels” – Mayo Clinic

“The jury is still out on whether there is a direct link between dietary cholesterol, which is found in the foods we eat, and blood cholesterol, which is manufactured by the body” – about.com

Association

Early studies found that high blood cholesterol levels are associated with heart disease. But association is not causation. Does high cholesterol cause heart disease? Does heart disease cause high cholesterol levels? Or are they both caused by some separate, third factor?

The message got out: high cholesterol levels are associated with heart disease. But the caveats, caution, and confusion did not. Many people relied on reporters to interpret the dense scientific jargon of research papers and distill it to something that you could rely on when shopping at the grocery. The media filled with the simple message to avoid eggs, red meat, and other cholesterol-rich food. My family switched from butter to margarine, as did many Americans in the middle of the 20th century.

Studies

In the scientific community, after the initial association was identified, scientists set off to find out what causes what. And that’s when the simple model broke down. Cholesterol turned into Good Cholesterol (HDL) and Bad Cholesterol (LDL), and then that broke down too. Now there’s light, fluffy LDL and small, dense LDL and … bah! Life was just easier when we could avoid eggs and everything would be OK.

Strangely, Ancel Keys (who kickstarted the whole hatefest on saturated fat) authored a study claiming no link between diet and serum cholesterol. The oft-cited Framingham study also produced such a study, although it was never published. A 1976 study in Michigan found no link between food (not just dietary cholesterol) and serum cholesterol. Ravnskov links to a whole bunch more studies.

One thing to note is that these studies found no correlation with the ranges of their study population. Maybe everyone in each group already ate so much cholesterol that more didn’t matter? Maybe the range of nutrients in the diet wasn’t enough to effect a change in cholesterol? Yet the cholesterol values did vary widely; something was causing spikes in cholesterol, but it wasn’t anything that the researchers measured. It could be genetics (such as hypercholesterolemia), an untracked element of the food, etc. One Finnish study found that reducing saturated fat and cholesterol intake led to higher serum cholesterol, and studies on indigenous hunter-gather populations such as the Masai indicated that ultra-high-fat-and-cholesterol diets themselves didn’t lead to CVD.

Homeostasis

The body is replete with homeostatic systems, that is, systems that try to maintain a constant level of some hormone or enzyme or other protein or chemical in your body. Cholesterol is one such homeostatic system. The liver produces cholesterol as part of a complex balancing system. Cholesterol is a precursor to dozens of hormones, including Vitamin D and the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen; it’s used to build cell walls; and insulates nerve fibers. It also plays a role in inflammation, such as repairing damaged tissue after trauma or disease. It’s a critical molecule, and your body will manufacture about 3000 mg of cholesterol each day — that’s the equivalent of over a dozen eggs.

Why would a bit of extra cholesterol in the diet lead to catastrophic disease? Our bodies are built to use cholesterol, not to expel it like a waste or toxin.

The Myth

Yet somehow the myth was born. Perhaps from a confusion between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol, maybe a mistake made by news reporters. The myth persists, if not in research than at least in the public consciousness.

Although carefully controlled, short-term trials have found that eating cholesterol raises serum cholesterol values, that raise is just a blip. No correlation has been found in long-term studies. Your body regulates cholesterol levels in response to disease and trauma in addition to the daily needs of living. The cholesterol in your diet won’t kill you.