.
I don’t want to go through all the calculations for an entire day’s worth of food on a Standard American Diet (SAD) and a low-carb diet (or #LCHF, if you prefer), so I’m going to use a typical lunch as the proxy for an entire day.
![[IMG]](https://proteinpower.com/drmike/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/07/Big-Mac-and-fries.png)
If you’re on a SAD and you waltz into a McDonald’s for a quick lunch, you may end up with a Big Mac, an order of fries, and (I’m giving the SAD a break here) a non-sweetened ice tea. If you go to to the
USDA National Nutritional Database, search for these items, and figure out the calories, fats and carbs, you’ll come up with the following numbers:
- Total calories = 941
- Fat calories = 459
- Carb calories =376
Fat calories = 49 percent of calories.
Which is much higher than the 30 percent to 35 percent most nutritionists recommend. To them, 49 percent of calories is a lot of fat.
Now, let’s go through our low-carb dieter’s selection. Our hero orders the Big Mac without the fries. And has the unsweetened iced tea. He then gets rid of the Big Mac bun and scrapes off as much of the Big Mac sauce as he can because it’s filled with added carbs and nasty vegetable oils. This #LCHF meal ends up sporting the numbers below:
- Total calories = 350
- Fat calories = 234
- Carb calories = 60
Fat calories = 67 percent of calories.
Call an ambulance! Immediately! Heart attack waiting to happen. 67 percent of calories is more than
double the amount most nutritional experts would recommend.
But wait.
There’s more to the story.
I didn’t show the actual amount of fat in the first whole hog Big Mac lunch nor did I show it in the #LCHF version.
Let’s take a look.
The regular Big Mac lunch with all the sauce and the fries contains 51 grams of fat.
The #LCHF version (emphasis on the high fat) contains a mere 26 grams of fat, just about half the fat of the regular Big Mac meal.
Most low-carb diets are like this. They are low-fat diets when compared to the SAD. And they are low-calorie diets as well. Compare the calories in the full Big Mac meal to the #LCHF version. Way less than half.
So, if, as Dave Feldman’s data show, eating fat is what makes your cholesterol levels go down, you can see how going on a low-carb diet could end up making your cholesterol go up.
Since I’ve used the example above, I’ve got to digress for a bit to tell you something that always slays me. Have you ever noticed that if you go out to lunch with friends and have the whole hog Big Mac meal with fries and everything, no one really says anything to you? But if you don’t order the fries, and you throw away the bun and eat only the patties and the little lettuce, tomato, and whatever comes with it, people say, Oh, you’re on one of those crazy low-carb diets. Don’t you know those will wreck your kidneys, and all that fat will clog your arteries? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard it.
Okay, digression over.
LDL particle number
The LDL particle number (LDL-P) as contrasted with the LDL cholesterol level (LDL-C) is maybe a term some of you aren’t familiar with.
Since the medical mainstream, especially that part of it that makes statin drugs and that part of it that promotes them, is so convinced that cholesterol is the driving force behind heart disease, they keep looking for more and more ways to slice and dice cholesterol. I’m not sure, but it’s probably all in an effort to find the Holy Grail of cholesterol measurements, the one that absolutely correlates with heart disease, and is found to be causal. None of which has happened yet.
One of these numbers is simply the number of LDL particles in a given volume of blood. If you divide the LDL-C by the number of particles, you can determine the size of the particle. Generally, the larger the LDL particles, the better. So, if you don’t have a lot of LDL particles and you have an average amount of LDL-C, then dividing them as described results in your having large LDL particle size.
One of the problems with the high-carb, low-fat diet is that people following those diets tend to have their LDL-particle size get smaller, which is not a good thing. Their LDL-C usually goes down (but not always – see Jane Brody’s case above), while their particle number stays the same, resulting in smaller, denser LDL particles. A bad thing.
Some lipidologists now consider LDL particle number to be the most important measurement, so it’s reassuring to know that Dave Feldman’s data show that consuming extra fat decreases the LDL particle number as well.
Does the Feldman approach work with the Standard American Diet as well as it does with the ketogenic diet?
We don’t know. He’s tested it only with the baseline being the ketogenic diet. So, there is no data that I know of showing what would happen were you just to go face down in the extra fat while already on the SAD.
There are some old studies out there kicking around showing that people who fast actually drive their cholesterol levels up, which goes along with Dave’s theory as to mechanism. During a fast, the liver is sensing no fat coming in, so really needs to package some and send it to the tissues.
But no real studies I’ve seen about what happens when you add the extra fat to the SAD. (There may be such studies, but I’m in a plane somewhere over the Atlantic and can’t search for them right now.) Dave keeps up with all this on his site
cholesterolcode.com, so I would encourage you to go there and look at the data. If you do try this on your own and do the Feldman protocol, be sure to send your results along to Dave to add to his growing database.
And keep me posted as well. I would love to hear your experience.
In case you’re interested, I had my own cholesterol checked a couple of years ago, and here are my numbers. I suspect they reflect the low-fat, low-calorie nature of my regular #LCHF diet. I’m going to load up on fat before my next labs to see what happens. But I already have a pretty good idea.
![[IMG]](https://proteinpower.com/drmike/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/07/Mikes-labs.png)
Cholesterol, fat, and statins
The take home message I want to leave you with is how rapidly changeable cholesterol values can be. Dave Feldman’s data has shown that eating fat three days before can markedly alter your total and LDL cholesterol numbers. Eating fat five days before can bring about huge changes in your LDL particle number.
Given that cholesterol levels and particle numbers can change dramatically in just a matter of a few days, why in God’s name would anyone want to go on a statin because of a cholesterol reading that is a little high? Depending upon what you eat, it may drop like a rock in a couple of days.
Statins are not benign drugs. They come with a host of side effects, occasionally fatal ones. You end up having to have your liver monitored closely, which requires extra trips to the doctors. Which are expensive. And that doesn’t include the expense of the drugs. You risk developing diabetes (females in particular) muscle aches and pains and memory loss. Plus, at this stage, no one knows what the long-term overall effects are on cholesterol-dependent tissues such as the brain, for instance.
And how many people are taking them right now based on just
onesingle cholesterol reading that was a little high.
It’s a choice you’ll have to make along with your physician. I just think you need to have all the facts at hand before you even consider taking the statin plunge.
Click to expand...
