Cholesterol and how we screw it up. (Please read and share, i dont often ask but its a big one on the scale of importance) People are often freaked out by their cholesterol no.s, obsessed with them or fear what will happen to them if they go LCHF. Now cholesterol no.s do matter and they dont, so ill try and briefly explain why and how cholesterol gets damaged, how to avoid that and what marker matters the most in a couple paragraphs. I myself have become fascinated with cholesterol because its probably the biggest misconception that high cholesterol is the key marker for cardio vascular disease. Now lets get into this, excess carbs and fructose are shipped to our liver and converted to fat. After a while the liver goes, screw you Im getting rid of the fat so it transports out into the body in the blood as a triglyceride on a carrier or transporter known as VLDL. We also have other transporters coming out of the liver. Our bad(LDL) and good (HDL) friends who really are a bit misunderstood. Now back to VLDL who is shipping around all this triglyceride (fat) in our blood. He bumps into his mates LDL and HDL who like him are transporters, on board they have cholesterol, fat and protein. VLDL says to HDL and LDL, you guys want to swap some triglyceride for your cholesterol ? Oh yeah says LDL and HDL, so they do a swap. This is where things turn to crap, we are left with a transporter (LDL) who is know shrunk because it swapped its cholesterol for some triglyceride. Now instead of being large and buoyant, floating around our body, its small and dense. LDL has gone from being a good bloke to a bastard, hes shrunk and got small mans disease. Why? Because he helped out VLDL by swapping cholesterol for triglyceride. LDL can now get stuck in our artery walls, get inflamed and cause plaque build up, this is bad. Now if you are still with me LDL and HDL would have never turned to be bad boys unless our body did not go and make all this fat in the liver. Remember it turned the excess carbs and fructose to fat. So when we measure cholesterol we are told LDL is bad, our doc says your no.s are high. (LDLc) This really doesnt tell the story, we want to know if LDL is large(good) or small (bad). We want a LDLp test (particle size) which can be expensive. The easiest way to determine or therefore the best way to determine if your LDLp (particle size) is small or large is to check your triglyceride no.s. if they are low (under 1) then there is no swapping of cholesterol and triglyceride going on and LDL will be large and buoyant, which is what we want. So the key is cut carbs, which cuts triglycerides, which cuts VLDL and keeps LDL large and buoyant (good). Hope that makes sense. Lastly your fasting triglyceride (fat made from carbs) levels is your best marker for cardiovascular disease.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 19:13:29 +0000
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