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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

I'm early 50s. In my mid 40s, I had terrible cholesterol and was obese. I have a family history of heart disease, and I got scared. So I started exercising (running, then switched to alternating rowing and lifting) and lost 70lbs and reached my ideal body weight, but I didn't change my diet. My cholesterol improved, but was still not good. My doctor was talking about putting me on a statin.

Two years ago, I started dating a vegan and slowly became vegan myself and I now eat a plant based diet.

Between the exercise and the diet, my cholesterol numbers have totally turned around. My doctor commented last month at my physical that she's never seen anybody turn their cholesterol around like that without drugs.

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That is awesome, congratulations on a remarkable turnaround!

Funnily, I'm kind of the opposite story -- mid-40s and fairly athletic. I run around 14 miles every other day at sub 7 pace, play other sports, and am generally in good shape and have been my whole life. My diet is mostly vegetarian without much alcohol. Trying to do everything right to live a healthy lifestyle, but my cholesterol was terrible... LDL around 240.

My doctor chalked it up to bad luck with genes. After a few months on a statin it was at 90. Since I didn't have much room to change lifestyle, I'm very thankful for drugs!

There's a big difference between "mostly vegetarian" and vegan diets, especially when it comes to cholesterol, due to the eggs, milk, and whatever else it let through in that "mostly".

edit: form those disagreeing, please let me know the flaw in my statement.

I'm interested in the effects of milk and eggs because I love both. I've cut 'pointless' sugar out of my diet the last three years and eat less meat than I used to, but I'm not ready to go vegetarian (or even vegan) yet - although the people I know who have, rave about how much better and more energised they feel.

Eggs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2989358/

Dairy: https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/4-ways-to-eat-yo...

Exactly! A friend of mine said there is nothing you can do about type 2 diabetes and I told him many people are just unwilling to come to grips with obesity and poor diet. A well planned vegan diet can prevent and manage type II diabetes by controlling your weight and sugar levels.

Being vegan or not is mostly irrelevant to diabetes. Research has shown that the most effective way to put type-2 diabetes into remission is with carbohydrate restriction. That can be done with or without eating animal products.

https://www.virtahealth.com/research

Why is a vegan diet better for diabetics? Sugar is vegan after all...

Surprisingly, white sugar is not.

TIL

> White sugar (and some brown sugar) produced from sugar cane may be refined using bone char by a few sugar cane refiners.[2] For this reason white sugar from sugar cane may not be vegan. Beet sugar has never been processed with bone char and is vegan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_sugar

It also says beet sugar is fine. Depending on where you live, beet sugar is the default "white sugar" that you get.

It also says some is processed that way.

Where does it say that? The complete paragraph is

>White sugar (and some brown sugar) produced from sugar cane may be refined using bone char by a few sugar cane refiners.[2] For this reason white sugar from sugar cane may not be vegan. Beet sugar has never been processed with bone char and is vegan.[3]

which pretty definitively say that it's only cane sugar that might be processed that way, and beet sugar is "never" processed that way.

> sugar cane may be refined

Am I wrong to read that to say that _some_ white sugar is vegan?

EDIT: Oh, I see the confusion. I didn't mean any beet sugar was processed that way. I only meant to dispute the claim further up that white sugar is not vegan.

Good on you and cringe on your doctor's part, how can doctors be so clueless?

She wasn't clueless. She just said that in her experience, nobody actually takes her advice to exercise and change their diet seriously and they wind up on statins.

I've met people who do this exact thing. They were clearly overweight, and we're complaining that the doctors were "offending" them my telling them they were overweight. They kept seeing different doctors, and told the same thing. They just could not find a doctor who could tell them what they wanted to hear.

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