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?How does it lower your cholesterol?
Just wondering how having a low carb lifestyle lowers cholesterol. I
have heard many stories of this and I just wanted to know exactly how that works. |
#2
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?How does it lower your cholesterol?
Just wondering how having a low carb lifestyle lowers cholesterol. I
have heard many stories of this and I just wanted to know exactly how that works. AFAIK - by weight loss (the most important part I think) - by reducing transfats intake (reduces oxidised LDL) - by reducing glycemic load (reduces triglycerids, which AFAIK leads to increasing HDL and reducing liver synthetised LDL). - by increasing good fat intake (if you care, of course - by increasing antioxidant intake (if you are not JC who thinks that vegetables are not necessary Mirek P.S.: So far, my TC increased |
#3
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?How does it lower your cholesterol?
"Mirek Fidler" wrote in message ... Just wondering how having a low carb lifestyle lowers cholesterol. I have heard many stories of this and I just wanted to know exactly how that works. AFAIK - by weight loss (the most important part I think) - by reducing transfats intake (reduces oxidised LDL) - by reducing glycemic load (reduces triglycerids, which AFAIK leads to increasing HDL and reducing liver synthetised LDL). - by increasing good fat intake (if you care, of course - by increasing antioxidant intake (if you are not JC who thinks that vegetables are not necessary Mirek P.S.: So far, my TC increased This sounds about right. Some combination of the diet/exercise/weight loss really improved my cholesterol levels. |
#4
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?How does it lower your cholesterol?
Here's why low carbing can lower blood sugar. Explanation courtesy of Dr.
Bernstein's book, Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution. When you have high blood sugars glucose bonds to proteins in the blood stream. After 24 hours, these bond can solidify and become permanent. This is called "glycation." One of the proteins glucose bonds to is the protein part of a blood fat (lipid) molecule. This is the part of the lipid that docks with cell receptors. Once this protein becomes glycated, the cells that hook up to it in order to remove cholesterol from the blood stream can no longer recognize it, so the cholesterol isn't removed and builds up. When you lower your carbs very significantly, your blood sugar normalizes, glycation goes way, way down and hence your body is more able to remove the cholesterol from the blood. It is worth noting that if your cholesterol goes down via low carbing, it may be a hint that you are running higher blood sugars than is healthy for you. I discuss this in my article http://www.geocities.com/jenny_the_bean/risk.htm -- Jenny - Low Carbing for 4 years. At goal for weight. Type 2 diabetes, hba1c 5.2. Cut the carbs to respond to my email address! Low carb facts and figures, my weight-loss photos, tips, recipes, strategies for dealing with diabetes and more at http://www.geocities.com/jenny_the_bean/ Looking for help controlling your blood sugar? Visit http://www.alt-support-diabetes.org/...0Diagnosed.htm "*AmBeR*" wrote in message om... Just wondering how having a low carb lifestyle lowers cholesterol. I have heard many stories of this and I just wanted to know exactly how that works. |
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?How does it lower your cholesterol?
"*AmBeR*" wrote in message
om... Just wondering how having a low carb lifestyle lowers cholesterol. I have heard many stories of this and I just wanted to know exactly how that works. I'm not sure, but I think the cholesterol you eat is not as nasty as the cholesterol the body would make to replace it, if you didn't eat cholesterol. Also, I think that just being much less obese somehow causes cholesterol levels to be lower. |
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?How does it lower your cholesterol?
"Cubit" wrote in message . com... "*AmBeR*" wrote in message om... Just wondering how having a low carb lifestyle lowers cholesterol. I have heard many stories of this and I just wanted to know exactly how that works. I'm not sure, but I think the cholesterol you eat is not as nasty as the cholesterol the body would make to replace it, if you didn't eat cholesterol. Also, I think that just being much less obese somehow causes cholesterol levels to be lower. I am not sure, but this is how I think it works..... Cholesterol is a form of a fat, yes? When we eat no or low carbs, the body is then forced to burn fat for fuel. Less fat to end up floating around the bloodstream? -- Evelyn (To reply to me personally, remove sox) |
#7
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?How does it lower your cholesterol?
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#9
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?How does it lower your cholesterol?
Thanks.
Excellent piece of information, there are threee points of vagueness for me. 1) HDL, what is considered an HDL and where does it comes from. The term HDL only figures in the explanation when describing the VLDL B-100's absorbing existing HDLs. But there is no explanation of where/why the HDL exists or what created them. HDLs have the B100 identifier which passes to liver creating VLDL B-100s, which will become bad LDL. At first I thought HDLs were simply the new fat-stuffed chylomicrons. But the presnece of B100 means that as they reduce they would become an VLDL B100, same as liver produced VLDLs. 2) Cholesterol. Does all Chylomicrons-B48s from the gut have cholesterol or does it depend upon diet. Does evey liver produced VLDL-B100 have cholesterol--is it produced there by the demand of converting sugar to fat? 3) VLDL and LDLs have cholesterol in them. VLDL are "absorbed" or used by the liver. What happens to the cholesterol in them? Waste, clogged arteries, recycled back into the blood stream? If every lipoprotein has insoluble cholesterol (is that a requirement?) then there is a concern of what happens to it when the VLDL is absorbed. (LCer09) wrote: This was interesting. It gets to the technical bits at the end. http://www.redflagsweekly.com/ WHY THE ATKINS DIET IS HEALTHY By RFD Columnist Malcolm Kendrick MbChB, MRCGP (email - ) I was idly watching a programme on the Atkins diet last night which, to my surprise, was reasonably balanced. Yes folks, the Atkins diet has crossed the pond to reach the United Kingdom. Although, in reality, all it is doing is returning. After all we invented it nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. A man called Banting promoted a diet pretty much indistinguishable from that of Atkins in 1863. In fact, the verb to bant is used in Sweden as a term for going on a diet To find out more about the Banting diet (now known as the Atkins diet) go here Anyway, reasonably balanced or not, on this programme there was still an unquestioned view that, even if the Atkins diet did help with weight loss, it was still damaging to health. It would cause kidney disease, and osteoporosis and heart disease. Various professors of nutrition were wheeled out to condemn the Atkins diet as dangerous nonsense. Ignoring the kidney disease and the osteoporosis for now, the nutritional professors made the usual statements. For example, It is known that saturated fat increases the level of blood cholesterol and causes CHD. They didnt quote any evidence for this. As far as they were concerned it is just a known fact. Well, what is the evidence that a diet high in saturated fat raises your cholesterol level? Where does it come from? The Framingham Study? That world famous study that is quoted by medical experts around the world. "In Framingham, Massachusetts, the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower people's serum cholesterol... Dr William Castelli 1992 (Director of the Framingham study) So the evidence obviously didnt come from Framingham. What about studies in children? These poor vulnerable imps, where the damage is first being done? Just to get a bit of genetic diversity into the equation, lets look at Chinese children first. Children in the intervention group were fed with low-cholesterol and low-saturated fatty acid diet, and the control group with normal diet. The duration of intervention was three months. Compared with the control group, serum cholesterol levels of children under intervention were not significantly changed. Total cholesterol: 4.64 (186dg/ml) vs 4.68 (188dg/ml) mmol/L LDL: 2.66 (107dg/ml) vs 2.62 (106dg/ml). Zhu WL et al Zhonghua Liu Xing Bing Xue Za Zhi. 2003 Sep Then children in the UK: Unexpectedly, significant inverse associations were found between the dietary content of saturated fatty acids on the one hand and the serum concentrations of cholesterol on the other. Samuelson G et al Br J Nutr Mar 2001 The reality is that, in many different studies, it has been shown that the more saturated fat you eat, the lower your cholesterol - although the difference is not that great. Of potentially greater importance is that a high fat diet has a more significant effect on raising HDL and lowering VLDL. Which is supposed to be very healthy indeed. Consider this extract from the University of Pennsylvania: The Atkins Diet limits carbohydrates but permits unrestricted amounts of protein and fat. Compared to a conventional, high-carbohydrate, low-calorie approach at one year, the Atkins dieters had significantly greater increases in good cholesterol (HDL) and greater decreases in triglycerides (VLDL). Im sorry that I cant present you with anything much from PubMed (the bible of mainstream medical research) about this. But as others may have discovered, any paper that supports the Atkins diet has no abstract attached in PubMed you just get blanks. Did someone use the word censorship? Not me your honour. I would never dream of saying such a thing. Now, anyone who has read my scribbles before will realise that I dont think the level of any lipid in your blood makes the slightest difference to the rate of CHD. But most other people do, so I think it is worth explaining why a high fat diet will automatically raise HDL and lower triglycerides. A fact, by the way, that seems to have created stunned surprise amongst many researchers when results from the Atkins diet were published. Which just shows that they need to go back and read their textbooks again. In order to understand why a high fat diet should, and does, raise HDL levels and lower VLDL levels (and may also lower LDL levels), you need to understand a bit about fat and sugar metabolism and the role of lipoproteins in your blood. Starting here. When you eat fat it is absorbed by the gut and stuffed into very large lipoprotein known as a chylomicron. The fat in a chylomicron is almost all stored in the form of three fat molecules attached to a glycerol molecule, a structure known as a triglyceride. Three fats and a glycerol = tri-glyceride. By the way, cholesterol also sits in chylomicrons as a co-passenger. (Anything insoluble in water/blood, such as cholesterol, has to be carried around in a lipoprotein)Chylomicrons are then released into the bloodstream and travel through the body losing chunks of triglyceride all the while as they pass fat cells. (Fat cells attack chylomicrons with a lipase enzyme, chopping bits off). As this happens chylomicrons shrink, turning into Very Low Density Lipoproteins (VLDLs), which are otherwise known as triglycerides. How confusing is that? In fact, the nomenclature in this area must be the most confusing in all of medicine. LDL is known as bad cholesterol HDL is called good cholesterol VLDLs are named triglycerides Its little wonder that most people havent the faintest idea what anyone is talking about in lipid metabolism. Chylomicrons, VLDL, HDL and LDL are all lipoproteins. I wish that people would stop calling them things like cholesterol and triglycerides, and good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. It really doesnt aid understanding. Anyway, moving on. Apart from chylomicrons, the gut also sends out VLDLs de-novo, and the VLDLs do pretty much the same thing as chylomicrons, dropping off triglycerides here and there (mainly into fat cells) and shrinking. Quite what the difference is between a shrunk down chylomicron and a VLDL is, I dont know. (By the way, just in case youre wondering, VLDLs also contain cholesterol as a co-passenger. All lipoproteins have cholesterol in them) Not all chylomicrons and VLDLs travel round dropping off triglycerides. Some go straight to the liver where they are absorbed, broken down, and unpacked. And their contents are used to make other things the body needs. However, wherever they go, all of the fat containing chylomicrons and VLDLs produced by the gut drop off their fat load, shrink, are then absorbed and completely disappear. So a few hours after a meal they are gone. And if you were to measure VLDL levels a few hours after a high fat meal they would have returned to normal. Whatever normal may be. Thus, if you eat a high fat meal, almost all sign of it will have disappeared in a relatively short space of time. And there will be no change in any lipid level. Or at least not any lipid level that anyone can be bothered measuring. However, if you eat a high carbohydrate meal, the metabolism acts in a very different way. Carbohydrates are absorbed and transformed into sugars in the gut, from whence they go straight into the bloodstream, same as fat. But because sugars are soluble in water they dont need to be carried in a lipoprotein, so there is no immediate effect on lipid levels from a high carb meal. You just get a sharp rise in blood sugar level. A certain amount of the sugar will be absorbed into fat and muscle cells, and then stored as glycogen. But if you eat a big carbohydrate meal, the fat and muscle storage cannot cope, and the excess sugar has to be absorbed by the liver to prevent the sugar level getting too high. However, the liver cannot store that much sugar, so it starts to convert it into fats, in the form of triglyceride. At which point, the liver then packs this excess triglyceride into a VLDL and sends it out into the bloodstream - along with some cholesterol. (Unlike with sharks, the liver in humans is not an energy storage organ) So you get a kind of delayed VLDL rise after eating carbohydrates. But there is a key difference between the VLDL made by the guts, and the VLDL made by the Liver. The VLDL made by the liver, unlike that made in the gut, shrinks into a low density lipoprotein (LDL). The dreaded heart disease causing lipoprotein the one they call co-lest-erol. Why does this happen to liver manufactured VLDL, when it doesnt happen to the VLDL made in the gut? Well, as liver manufactured VLDL leaves the liver, it interacts with an HDL molecule which transfers its proteins to the VLDL molecule. One of the proteins transferred is apolipoprotein B-100. And the apo B-100 molecule is the unique LDL identifier. On the other hand, VLDL made in the gut has apolipoprotein B-48 attached to it and this VLDL doesnt become an LDL molecule as it shrinks. Now, if you are not already completely confused, I will explain what this means. Rewind. If you eat fat, it is absorbed from the gut, packed into chylomicrons and VLDL B-48s, and transported around the body and then got rid of. Gone. So immediately after a high fat meal you will have a very high triglyceride level, made up of VLDL B-48, but this will fall relatively rapidly. Importantly, there can, and will be no effect on HDL or LDL levels. And so if you measure the lipid levels in the fasting state (which is when such things are measured) you will find nothing at all after a high fat meal. On the other hand, if you eat a high carbohydrate meal, the level of VLDL B-48 will not rise. But some time later, the liver will start converting excess sugar into fat and sending this out in VLDL B-100 molecules. And this process can go on for many hours after a meal. So the VLDL level may still be high when you measure it. In addition to finding a high VLDL you should also find a low HDL. Because, for each VLDL the liver makes, an HDL hands over its proteins and disappears. So the more VLDL the liver makes, the less HDL you will have. Cause and effect. Also, as you may have noted. If the VLDL B-100 all ends up as LDL, the more VLDL the liver makes, the higher the LDL level is likely to be. Therefore, if someone is on a high carbohydrate diet, they should automatically have a raised VLDL level, a reduced HDL level and quite possibly a raised LDL level. Golly gee whiz. A high fat diet reduces VLDL, raises HDL and may even lower LDL. And a high carbohydrate diet does the exact opposite. In short, the metabolism does exactly what you would expect it to. So you see. Atkins was right all along. Even if he didnt appear to know why. LCing since 12/01/03- Me- 265/226/140 & hubby- 310/248/180 DiGiTAL_ViNYL (no email) 350/328/200 Atkins since 1/12/2004 |
#10
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?How does it lower your cholesterol?
Thanks.
Excellent piece of information, there are threee points of vagueness for me. Whoa. I read it and thought it was interesting. I didn't write it. LOL! LCing since 12/01/03- Me- 265/226/140 & hubby- 310/248/180 |
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