Long story short I recently got blood work done with the following results:
total cholesterol: 304 mg/dl
LDL: 210 mg/dl
HDL: 82 mg/dl
Triglycerides: 58 mg/dl
Doc is very worried about LDL levels despite my high HDL and 0.7 ratio of HDL/triglycerides. He’d like to put me on statins and I am very hesitant.
Is my doctor’s concern warranted?
Any good articles on cholesterol levels? I don’t want to mess up my hormones switching to a low cholesterol diet
Currently on a high fat, med protein and low carb diet. Typical day includes lots of leafy green & coniferous vegetables, lean meats, fatty fish, eggs, olive/coconut oil, nuts, avocado and limited grain and fruits. If I had to guess I’ve had 4 eggs a day on average the past year and a half, possibly the culprit?
Search for some of Jonny Bowden’s articles on the subject from his blog. Better yet check out his book the Great Cholesterol Myth (tons of practical advice on food, statins, cholesterol levels…). It is YOUR heart, you should really check it out for yourself.
And not sure whether anyone on here should really comment directly on your doctor’s concerns, but my advice would be to educate yourself then have another conversation with him. No one on here is going to be as informed as your doctor when it comes to things like your personal history, family history, weight gain, etc. If he is unwilling to listen to you and you feel like you aren’t being heard, then you can make a decision as to whether that’s the person you want for your doctor. I think the wrong thing to do is to simply ignore him.
LDL does actually matter, and yours is pretty high.
Thanks Fezzik I appreciate the response and am in agreement. My diet is pretty clean so I’m assuming genetics or stress at work are playing a role here as well.
In terms of training I’m currently on a hypertrophy/strength split with 2 days off (foam rolling and slow airdyne). Maybe I need to back off from that a little more and add in an extra day off.
Download the CV risk calculator app for your phone and enter the values.
The risk guidelines have recently changed, your doctor my be operating under the old criteria.
I would also take the new guidelines with a grain of salt. Going by the letter, nearly half of all Americans over the age of 40 should be on statins, and %87 of men over the age of 60 should be on them.
Perhaps, if they were free and had no side effects whatsoever those would be reasonable recommendations. It would just seem to me that the recommendations wildly overtreat the general population in order to reduce cardiovascular deaths.
I don’t think anyone should be taking statins because there is still no conclusive evidence that total serum cholesterol is a primary risk factor in heart disease and statins carry very real, very substantiated health risks.
I’ve conducted a lot of personal experiments on cholesterol and cholesterol is mainly a reflection of diet and not any valid long term health indicator. Please email me at bryan@healthsatori.org if you’re interested in finding out the details.
In short my recommendation is to go on a 4 week, low fat, low cholesterol diet and then get another measurement. If your cholesterol drops substantially then it’s a reflection that your serum levels are merely temporary due to diet. If your cholesterol does not reduce it could be a reflection something else is going on.
Definitely supp with CoQ10 (doesn’t matter what brand) if you go on a statin. It’s a powerful antioxidant that gets depleted by statins. I think it’s pretty cheap and definitely worth it. Obviously, I’m no doc though, so run it by a practitioner first. Just a thought. Good luck!
Update - Redid bloodwork this past week and the results were incredibly good!
Mind you the only real change in the past 3 months has been removing eggs from my diet. I used to have 4-6 whole eggs per day. I’m not sure what this says about eggs not increasing cholesterol…
That is very interesting. I never read that Eggs don’t raise cholesterol, but that they only raise HDL Cholesterol. Your HDl did drop a little, but still good. I’ll be interested to see my current blood tests because I have been eating more dietary cholesterol including eggs for about a year, however it may also be plausible that its the whites that were the problem. Albumin has been suggested to be harmful to gut bacteria even in small amounts, and who knows what compromising gut bacteria health can do to blood lipids. The LDL drop is a big deal, and I would have expected it to drop if you reduced sugar, omega 6s and improved gut bacteria health.
But also has me wondering if chickens fed a lot of grains have eggs with unhealthy fat profiles. Still 4 eggs is just 18 grams of fat. No cooking oil?
Also to be honest, there are Paleo nutritionists out there who would say that given a good ratio, 166 is below optimal for health. A lot are recommending 200-250 for males given a ratio of less than 3.5.
I have always assumed that whole eggs raise LDL levels but if you just eat the white you should be fine (ie the yolk is what contains all the cholesterol).
[quote]mertdawg wrote:
That is very interesting. I never read that Eggs don’t raise cholesterol, but that they only raise HDL Cholesterol. Your HDl did drop a little, but still good. I’ll be interested to see my current blood tests because I have been eating more dietary cholesterol including eggs for about a year, however it may also be plausible that its the whites that were the problem. Albumin has been suggested to be harmful to gut bacteria even in small amounts, and who knows what compromising gut bacteria health can do to blood lipids. The LDL drop is a big deal, and I would have expected it to drop if you reduced sugar, omega 6s and improved gut bacteria health.
But also has me wondering if chickens fed a lot of grains have eggs with unhealthy fat profiles. Still 4 eggs is just 18 grams of fat. No cooking oil?
Also to be honest, there are Paleo nutritionists out there who would say that given a good ratio, 166 is below optimal for health. A lot are recommending 200-250 for males given a ratio of less than 3.5. [/quote]
I added in egg whites to oatmeal on occasion during the 3 month period. My sugar intake, especially refined sugars, is already very low and wasn’t really changed. Now that the total numbers have gone down I’ll probably go back to 1-2 eggs per day which should get me in the 200-250 range. Could be a good idea to pay the extra money and get cage free eggs as well.
Wow! That’s a hell of a change! I once ate about 4-6 eggs a day for about 6-8 months. At the end of this period I had my cholesterol checked (unfortunately this was a long time ago and there was not the awareness of the HDL/LDL ratio): it was 220.
Yes, the albumin protein in egg whites deactivates the enzyme responsible for deactivating histamine in the body: thart’s why eggs are often associated with food sensitivities (it’s NOT an allergic reaction as many people assume). Everyone is different in terms of their tolerance to histamine, but once you cross your personal tolerance level you get all sorts of nasty side effects that are often impossible to differentiate from an allergic reaction–because the process is basically the same!
Histamine in the diet comes from the breakdown of the amino acid histadine. Histamine, if the load is high enough, will DEFINITELY cause gastro-intestinal issues. In fact, histamine affects nearly every tissue in the body. Also if histamine levels in the diet are high enough they will disturb the balance of intrestinal flora, which then WILL lead to all sorts of additional problems.
I suggest that everone take a high quality pro-biotic, as our bodies are constantly under stress from exogenous substances that can affect the ballance of intestinal flora. I personally take KIRKMAN’S Pro-Bio Gold caps: these are very high quality pro-biotics that are DNA “fingerprinted” to insure that the correct strains are present in the correct quantities (21.25 billion colony forming units per cap). I order them from iHerb, who only ships them Mon.-Wed. in an ice pack in order to minimize the time they are sitting in trucks and warehouses.
I recently found that my intestinal flora had become totally out of wack as evidenced by months of very bad gastro-intestinal problems (brought about by some dietary choices and the use, I believe, of “gear”–especially liver toxic oral AAS–in the past). At any rate, your gastro-intestinal system is VERY important in the functioning of your immune system. I had a persistent soar throat, hacking cough, and extremely swolen lymph glads in my neck for months (along side the gastro-intestinal issues). Within 4 days of taking the Kirkman’s my lymph nodes were completely back to normal, and my soar throat and hacking cough were gone! I’ve since added a soluble fiber supplement (as a “pre-biotic” to feed the pro-biotics), which has enhanced my gastro-intestinal health.
Finally, I would suggest anyone considering taking statins to also take coQ10