Newbie to the site here boys, caught the T-rone booth at the Arnold and was really impressed. I’ve been looking into supplementing with some of the products featured here but had some questions that hopefully you guys can answer. The Methoxy-7 label claims to have 513% of the daily allowance of cholesterol. The product review claims it is basically “HDL”. I’m aware of cholesterol’s role in the structure of cholesterol, but how much is too much? I’m a 6’ 205 21 yr old, 4 yrs in looking to make some serious gains before resulting to cycling. Any suggestions or info?
The whole issue of cholesterol and blood lipids
is one that doctors have let themselves become
horribly confused on, due to semantic error
and not understanding the details; and in turn
the public has become very confused.
It is as if we called alcohol “liquid” and we also called water “liquid.” And high alcohol levels were found to be bad… could impair
driving skills and so forth… so we tell people not to drink “liquid.” Liquid is bad!
So people stop drinking water.
Sounds stupid? Well, LDL and HDL are not
cholesterol, just as water is not alcohol.
However somebody some time ago decided to
call LDL and HDL “blood cholesterol.”
Actually, LDL and HDL are a completely
different class of compound (lipoproteins)
than cholesterol is, and are not made from
cholesterol. Cholesterol BINDS to them
but they are not cholesterol.
Dietary cholesterol, if that’s the only
thing changing, does not seem to have any
adverse effect on blood lipid profiles.
For example, the American College of Sports
Medicine did a study a while back looking
at athletes who ate eggs vs. those who did
not… turned out that the more eggs athletes
ate, the BETTER their blood lipid profiles
were, up to the maximum level studied which
was 12 eggs per day.
However, try convincing the public that
cholesterol intake – the steroid molecule –
is not going to make “blood cholesterol”
– the lipoprotein molecules – worse. C’mon,
consuming cholesterol has got to make “blood cholesterol” worse, right?
So this is a marketing problem we’ve had to
face with Methoxy-7. It is understandable
that people worry about it. We are studying
means of changing the formulation so as not
to use cholesterol, not because anyone here
actually thinks the product will be safer by
substituting something else, but because it’s a losing battle trying to
tell people that cholesterol does not equal LDL (which is bad) or HDL (which is good) but is a different substance.
Am I saying that in the general population cholesterol rich diets may not be correlated with bad blood lipid levels? No, often they are, but in my opinion it’s because the rest of the diet is bad.
By the way – though even if this weren’t so, it would have nothing to do with LDL – the body makes 10 times more cholesterol than what you eat, and if you eat more, it just produces less, or if you eat less, it just produces more.
Bill, thanks so much for the prompt response.