| The table on the left displays my HDL cholesterol for the last 32 years. Okay, I’m a compulsive record keeper, but sometimes that’s a good thing. Anyhow, talk (i.e. advice) is cheap; but lab reports are evidence, and mine are worth taking a look at. There is definitely a ‘takeaway.’ I was 39 years old when I first had an HDL test in 1980. My HDL was 42, just above the border line “bad” of ≤ 40. Eleven years later (on my 50th birthday) my HDL was just 41. Of the first 10 HDLs (blue) recorded, 7 out of 10 were under 40, and the average and mean were both 39. Not good. This is the time in my life when I ruined my metabolism, or rather, by this time I had already ruined it. I was diagnosed a Type 2 in 1986 (using the OLD criteria)! For the next 16 years I went on eating as before, gaining weight and taking more and more diabetes meds. Before I started on Atkins in September 2002, my baseline HDL was 48. My doctor, an internist/cardiologist, had departed from “the standard of practice” by recommending Atkins. But everything else he had asked me to try in my repeated attempts to lose weight had failed. Because I was a heavily medicated Type 2 diabetic when I started Atkins, he decided to see me every month for the first year. My average HDL for the next 12 months (yellow) was 47. Atkins had no benefit on my HDL. It did, however, have a marked benefit on my weight and blood sugar control. During the first nine months of that year, all on Atkins Induction (20g of carbohydrate a day) I lost 60 pounds and stopped or reduced virtually all of the 3 oral diabetes medications that I had used in ever larger doses over the years. The rolling average of the last 10 HDL lab reports (red) is now 81. Still, over the last 10 years my HDL average (oldest 10 vs. most recent 10) went from 39 to 81, more than doubling. That’s the hard evidence. My diet is 5% carbohydrate, 25% protein, and 70% fat, including saturated. Last year, my doctor (who reads this blog looking for tips and “practice pearls” – just kidding doc -- suggested, “Foods that Raise HDL” as a topic for this blog. I thought that was a great idea, so I wrote a column about it (#34) last January. It didn’t occur to me at the time that my doc was curious about the dramatic improvement in my HDL and perhaps looking for a way to improve his own. No kidding, doc. Was it? The problem is I don’t know what foods raise HDL. So, my answer to the question “What foods raise HDL?” is A VERY LOW CARBOHYDRATE diet – and I mean VERY low carbohydrate (see above). It is this Way of Eating as a whole that has produced the HDL improvement for me. One thing for sure: there is no “magic bullet,” no pharmacological solution to raising HDL the way there is for lowering LDL. You can’t just write a script to raise HDL, the way you can to lower LDL with a statin. You have to do it by choosing the foods you eat, VERY carefully. |
23 Eylül 2012 Pazar
The Nutrition Debate #67: HDL Cholesterol and the Very Low Carb Diet
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