To anyone out there with the ‘i can eat whatever I want without getting fat’ idea, yeah it’s not quite like that. Cholesterol and visceral fat are killers. So yeah, eat as much as you like but the healthy food factor applies to us all.
Your concept of cholesterol is well outdated.
The ancient idea: cholesterol is bad
The old idea: there is low density cholesterol which is bad and high density cholesterol which is good
The current idea: there is low density cholesterol which is returning unloaded high density cholesterol which is good; there is high density cholesterol which is good; there is small dense cholesterol which is bad. That’s all really hard to test for, so get a coronary calcium score instead
Cholesterol carries fat around your body for energy. If you eat too much carbohydrate too often you never give your body any chance to use the fat…
(your body burns energy from most dangerous to least: alcohol immediately as it’s a literal poison; sugars (the main energy in carbohydrate based food) second as too much will destroy nerves - excess is converted to fat and stored to prevent too high concentrations until or unless that system is broken (type 1 diabetes) or over used (type 2) - ; then fat (excess fat is evacuated via faeces or vomit); then protein (protein tastes bad after you have had enough, so it’s hard to overeat))
… and so the cholesterol fails, breaking up and spewing out its load of fat. So the blood test that actually gives useful cholesterol information is high cholesterol with high free fatty acids (FFA) because the FFA is high because of the failed cholesterol
That’s a simplified version and isn’t quite technically correct, I’m not a scientist in that area so I’m not good at recalling the full detail.
We evolved in an environment where most of the year there was mostly meat to eat, along with whatever perennial plants can be found in winter. In summer for a few weeks whatever fruit grew near you was available.
We haven’t had time to adapt to eating grass seeds (wheat, rice, corn, barley, etc). We have only had those in any large amount for 10 000 years which is a blink of an eye evolutionarily. The native Americans of the Great Plains ate only buffalo, eating it fresh during mass kills in summer, and preserving tons of meat and fat as “pemmican” a 50/50 blend of pounded dried meat with melted buffalo fat, sewn into buffalo skins for the rest of the year. When Europeans first saw them they described them as more fine nude than a noble in his finest clothes, tall and built like Adonis. Learning all this I changed to eating only animal products (beef and eggs) and found my health improve incredibly. It helped that I’m allergic to many grasses, including lawn, bamboo, and wheat, and cutting wheat out of my diet, along with all processed foods could only be good
You are correct on excess visceral fat. It’ll kill you. Those broken cholesterol molecules - the small dense cholesterol - is the stuff that collides with blood vessel walls and accumulates calcium. Chronic carbohydrate consumption gives you coronary artery disease.
TLDR; too much carbohydrate too often breaks the body’s fat transport system making the newly discovered bad cholesterol which causes heart disease