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Comment by chmod600 | Hacker News Reader

What are the implications for a vegan diet?

A lot of people do fine on a vegan diet, many improve because they eat less sugar. But a lot of people are hurting themselves with fat free or vegan diets but it’s totally overlooked. Anyone who says vegan might be unhealthy is ignored and called insane.

Study after study has shown that all-cause mortality drops the more plant-based a diet is, up to and including vegan. Ditto for drops in cardiovascular disease.

> hurting themselves with fat free

Yes, if you drop below the minimum fat intake level required to sustain life, you will have health problems. No one disputes that. But a diet that low in fat is very difficult to maintain.

If the body produces enough you ought to be fine. But that depends almost entirely on genetics. Some people have high cholesterol without consuming a drop of it.

One of the selling points or main assumptions of the keto diet is that dietary cholesterol doesn’t contribute to circulating cholesterol. Not saying I defend that argument, but it can’t be both safe to eat endless amounts of cholesterol because it never affects your cholesterol levels and the lack thereof causing low cholesterol (probably/these are chaotic, nonlinear systems we’re taking about.)

Having said that, correlation is not causation. Maybe people with depression have a correlation with other things that also correlate with factors that lower cholesterol (ie poverty and poor food choices).

Most cholesterol in the body IS synthesized de novo. This is biochem 101.

Cholesterol is essential for the brain. But it's also essential for muscle function.

Is there a reputable source for this? Like for an outsider to grasp what the literature knows about affecting cholesterol.

Well that got me thinking about my blood test results. I have higher than norm cholesterol but I also have higher than normal muscle mass.

Will get into reading about it, because I was stressing about my cholesterol result. When in reality it might be just like BMI which does not really work well for people with bigger muscle mass than average.

IIRC in the USA, the food guidelines were recently updated to no longer recommend keeping intake of eggs and shrimp low. The reasoning was that those are pretty much the only foods high in colesterol but low in saturated fats, and had been lumped in with the “raises blood cholesterol” group of other animal products that are high in saturated fats. This change being the US gov’t agency in question essentially saying that it now seems it’s the saturated fats that are a problem, not dietary cholesterol, the two just mostly come in the same package.

There's a guy out there, I haven't been able to find him again, but he measured his cholesterol daily and carefully controlled his diet. The results were incontrovertible, when he ate things like eggs and meat, his cholesterol went down, these were the objective results.

Either this guy is lying, or that's how it works for some people. But beware, this guy claims it's not the same for everyone, so don't assume that your body responds the same way his does. Ask your doctor or make your own observations.

Unfortunately good and detailed cholesterol tests are expensive.

I wanted to be a fly on the wall when this guy showed his doctor that his advice to avoid eggs resulted in higher cholesterol, clear as day.

B12 deficiency.

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