This is an introduction to my second discussion of a Plant Positive (PP) video. The subject material presented is huge. In order to discuss this without being superficial, I’ve broken my comments up into a number of posts, each mostly based on a particular slide or group of slides. This post is intended to serve as an index of what I’ve written on it so far and an overview.
This experiment was started in response to the lab tests that concluded my previous diet experiment:
My thought at the moment is, the prudent experiment would be to raise my carbs even a little further (safe since my A1c is at a good place), drop my fat intake a little more and cut sat fat to the bare minimum to see if I can budge that recalcitrant non-HDLc.
So be it; let the next experiment begin. Continue reading
To rule out the possibility of human error, my thyroid function was retested a few days ago, with a test for antibodies added to rule out or confirm autoimmune thyroid disease. Here’s the result:
The lab released these last night. Looks like the wild and crazy ride my cholesterol numbers have been on for the last year might be explained by …
Continue reading
Just as nutritional controversy cannot be discussed without getting into the Cholesterol Wars, so can the Cholesterol Wars not be discussed without confronting The Lipid Hypothesis (LH). Plant Positive provides a great entry point for jumping into the fray. He’s a heavyweight combatant, coming from the left in the top three bullet’d areas of contention I mention in Cholesterol Wars 1, with 137 voice-over slide videos to his credit, both on YouTube and his blog.
Continue reading
Before I can continue telling the Bill Lands story (see Who Is Bill Lands and Why Would Anyone Care?, 1: Intro), I think I have to digress into cholesterol and politics. In case it’s escaped your notice, there’s a huge war raging out there. The battle is for your dollars (to the victor go the spoils!) and for your heart (may the righteous prevail!). The opposing forces can be roughly characterized (alternately) as: Continue reading
OK, now that I’ve presented a little of my personal background, I can get on to the “meat” of this blog.
I have to start with Bill Lands. I consider him to be one of the (if not THE) most important figures on the diet-health landscape. To be sure, there are others, but they are more well known , and besides, Lands was the first island of sanity I discovered back when I was drowning in the sea of dietary confusion.
On the left, still going strong at 81!!
Isn’t reality fascinating — often so different from our expectations! My lab values are back and they are actually a bit mind boggling!
My just ended diet experiment:
OK, finally (!!) continuing the diet history story …
After abandoning veganism and red yeast rice (an over-the-counter statin), my (calculated) LDL cholesterol (LDLc) fluctuated from 92 to 128, mostly reflecting how often I ate out. Then, after 2 years, in Nov, 2007, I moved in with the woman who is now my wife, but who is also an excellent cook and loves to bake almost-irresistible sweet things. Continue reading
I’ve always been way more of a jock than is usual for female-bodied adults living in the USA, although probably no more so than the average healthy male. Nevertheless, for the first 60 years, I was occupying a female body and the result (not counting pregnancies) was I managed to stay at a “normal” weight for my height despite an inordinate love of food in all of it’s most fatty and sugary combinations.
So it was with great surprise that the lipid panel my doctor ordered (Jan 2004) when I told him I wanted to start male hormones came back sorta bad: Continue reading
resolvingthecontroversies 