I eat cheese every day, mostly because it’s cheap and easy to eat with a toast.

Wondering if changing my regular dairy and cheese for low fat versions would be enough.

3 points

It may not. I’d look into other spreads than cheese, like a nut butter.

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15 points

Talk to a dietician, dairy is far from the only source of cholesterol. You’ll need to write down a detailed food-diary and log every meal, snack, beverage etc. to receive an informed answer.

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21 points
*

Recent research has shown cholesterol levels aren’t really caused by dietary fat intake.

It’s largely influenced by genetics, and by other things, especially glucose instability.

When blood glucose levels vary wildly - e.g. eating a high carb meal spikes it, which causes the pancreas to release a lot of insulin at once to cope with the sudden glucose increase, which then signals EVERY cell to “use glucose!”, including fat cells which are very efficient at storing glucose as fat. Since carbs are metabolized quickly, glucose levels drop quickly because of that initial insulin spike.

Those sudden high blood glucose levels apparently cause vascular injury, and cholesterol is used to basically form a patch on the artery wall so it’s protected while it heals. Keep cycling glucose levels, and you’ll have high cholesterol levels as the body heals the vascular system. Looking at the last 40 years (starting in the 80’s), what’s the dietary advice been? Less fat, more carbs. And we wonder why we’re seeing more diabetes and cardiovascular disease?

Also, high cholesterol on its own is only a single metric (just like blood pressure - there’ve been Olympic athletes with high cholesterol and high blood pressure…) - there’s lots more going on, and it all needs to be considered. Franky I don’t worry about cholesterol, as the single thing we can all do that has major impact to every system in our bodies, is to eat in a way to keep glucose levels stable.

I say this as someone with Type II diabetes in my immediate family, I have hypoglycemia, and Type I in the extended family. I’ve had to study up a lot over the last 20 years to keep family and myself healthy and safe.

A good intro on these things is a book by Barry Sears called “The Zone”, published in about 1994 (ignore all other Zone books, they’re marketing garbage). He’s a chemist who saw heart disease in relatively young people in his family, and went back to school for a biochemistry doctorate because he didn’t want to die young.

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5 points

It seems the Zone diet is not scientifically proven though? based on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_diet

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2 points

My cholesterol ratio was becoming of-concern a couple of years back.

I replaced most of the animal fat in my diet with olive oil and the like, and a year later all my levels were acbsolutely fine.

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4 points

I went vegan and had no change in my cholesterol. I have never had a diet that was high in fat, so that didn’t surprise me. My doctor told me I need to give up alcohol for any change to occur. There’s definitely a genetic component as well, my dad and his dad seriously struggled with their cholesterol levels.

I had to abstain from alcohol over the summer because I started a medication that is hard on the liver, and I just had a lipid panel today. So I’ll find out early next week if my doctor was right lol

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4 points

Would love it if you commented in a week to share if there’ve been any changes. Good luck.

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2 points

My triglycerides fell a little over 50 points! Almost to a healthy level now.

My cholesterol total fell a little over 20 points, with small drops in hdl and ldl.

That’s about four months of abstaining from alcohol with no change from my normal “vegan” diet.

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1 point

Yep, trimming down the alcohol certainly helps as well. Also helps keep the beetus at bay.

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4 points

They replace fat with carbs so there’s that. I had a very bad experience with low fat subs.

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