I think the dietary cholesterol == bad thing is just totally wrong. Sample size of 1 but i eat about 4 eggs a day and steak almost every day but it's not processed fast food and my cholesterol, blood pressure, etc. are all _excellent_
There is about 10x more unesterified (absorbable) cholesterol secreted into bile than one typically eats in a normal day.
> Eating cholesterol has very little impact on the cholesterol levels in your body. This is a fact, not my opinion. Anyone who tells you different is, at best, ignorant of this topic. At worst, they are a deliberate charlatan. Years ago the Canadian Guidelines removed the limitation of dietary cholesterol. The rest of the world, especially the United States, needs to catch up.
https://peterattiamd.com/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol-pa...
The only caveat I would is that there is weak evidence for a "dietary cholesterol hyperresponder" phenotype that is more sensitive to dietary cholesterol than the general population.
I probably have (heterozygous) familial hypercholesterolemia, so my diet (even saturated fat) unfortunately doesn't influence the (very high) levels I have anyways. I'm envious of people like you, for sure.
High sugar in blood is bad. High sugar and high fat in the bloodstream is worse. Also, recent studies seem to show that cholesterol limits are arbitrary and don't mean much in a vacuum: there seem to be a correlation between high LDL levels and longevity—i.e. people that live longer tend to have higher levels of LDL than average recommendations. Go figure.
The important levels for health are: stable glucose/insulin system, lower triglycerides, lower trig/HDL ratio. Everything else is too noisy a signal, including just measuring dietary cholesterol.
From what?
I also had this diet for many years. Wait till you get older. This is a diet will run your cholesterol through the roof.
As you mentioned, eating whole, healthily prepared eggs and meat makes a difference. If you were getting that much egg and beef from McDonald’s you would likely be buried in the ground by now.
I used to eat like you and my blood work was horrifying, though. I’d say I was eating around 95% whole foods by volume, though I had a weakness for rice noodles and fermented sausages. I stopped that diet though and now my blood work is excellent, too.
This is a contentious but super interesting thing. There are some factors here I suspect matter a lot, but haven’t been properly proven out yet. I do think in the next decade or two we will start to get a good grasp on it.
One is gut flora and enzyme production. Essentially, where is that food broken down and what’s present as it happens? This is a big science experiment with significant variance across individuals. One common variable that’s becoming very obvious though is that people who adopt “western diets” tend to lose a staggering amount of gut flora diversity. I think this matters a lot for anecdotal but also research-oriented reasons.
I had a chronic bacterial illness which required nuclear-grade antibiotic regimens and that completely crushed me. I was burping up the most putrid gases, getting awful cramps, and having bizarre GI motility issues for over a year after; I’d never had troubles with food in my life. I’ve wondered often if I’d done my blood work before that, when I didn’t feel like garbage eating that food, if it might have looked good like yours. I really wish I started doing blood work sooner. Regardless, I wonder if gut flora can protect us from the harms that the greater body of evidence implies high amounts of saturated and trans fats can cause.
I’m totally plant-based now, and I meet countless people who say “I can’t eat like that because I just feel like shit all the time”. And I think yeah, I did too. I had to do all kinds of stuff to build my guts back up and now I’m a plant crushing machine. Had I eaten like this when I ate a lot of meat, I’d be bloated and miserable all the time. There’s no way I could handle so much fiber and sheer bulk. What your flora and system is accustomed to seems crucial to both what you’re able to eat, what you want to eat, and how well it supports your health.
As for enzymes, we know various foods stimulate enzyme production and in their absence that enzyme will reduce or even vanish — sometimes permanently. What you eat with your eggs and steak, whether it’s with the meal or 12 hours later, very well could protect you from what harms others. This kind of thing is researched and there’s growing evidence for its importance, but it isn’t clear who/when/what happens since nutrition is so incredibly diverse. I can’t wait until we understand protective mechanisms (enzymes or otherwise) better. I suppose the best known is antioxidants, but there must be so many more.
Finally, there’s the genetic factor question. We know there are hyper responders to saturated and trans fats. Are there hypo responders? I haven’t read up on that. If so, the greater body of evidence would indicate that most people are not hypo responders at all, and that saturated fat intake (animal or plant) can easily become excessive and harmful.
All of this is to say that I doubt there’s a one size fits all in any case, but since saturated fat appears to become harmful in most populations, I think people should be careful and if it’s an option, so regular blood work. I’m also not aiming to be contentious or argumentative; I find this stuff interesting as hell and love to discuss it (and learn things — I’m by no means an expert and I don’t have all the data).
>If you were getting that much egg and beef from McDonald’s you would likely be buried in the ground by now.
This is my hunch too, when i really got serious about my diet and health I was worried eating all these eggs and meat was going to cause issues so made sure to get blood tests etc. This sort of started me down the rabbit hole of realizing that almost every single thing I had ever been told about nutrition was either misleading or just flat out wrong.
The gut biome stuff is fascinating to me and it feels like it's so underexplored. Can't wait to see what kinds of things we learn about it.
One reason I don't think i'm as optimistic as you is that it feels like society doesn't want us to understand this stuff. Between the billion dollar companies influencing regulations, massive marketing budgets of these food-poison companies, and then even the populace doesn't want to know the truth. Everyone just wants to cope and complain and do stupid fad diets instead of learn or change anything.
There are so many internal and external forces pushing us to take the immediately gratifying path of least resistance.
We already know (and have known for decades) that a diet including mostly whole foods based around mostly plants seems to yield populations with far less disease and longer lifespans. It may not fit everyone, but it would certainly work for most people currently suffering. We don’t need to know more about gut flora and protective enzymes to help them; we need to stop hurting them with an overly permissive health industry and sabotaging food processing industry. We’ve had generations of normalizing this stuff. We have intelligent people talking about how statins are game changers and various weight loss drugs are revolutionary. It’s a sort of tragedy to me that we aren’t focused on making these things redundant and eliminating the root problem. It’s like we’ve simply accepted excess and the innate self-abuse of our lifestyles.