Hiatus

It’s all Alan’s fault!

He wrote an excellent post on lipids and statins which contained some excellent references.

The references contained further excellent references, which I followed up, along with a whole bunch of papers I’d already downloaded from Hyperlipid, Whole Health Source and elsewhere.

When I got to the stage where I was hitting the same references several times from different directions, I decided my job was done.

Then I upgraded Firefox and lost the sodding lot! Again!

Around the same time my brain imploded, partly through an overdose of biochemistry and partly because my SAD (aka hibernation) caught up with me.

This is one of those annoying conditions, some years it’s relatively mild, sometimes it starts up around September or even August when the daylength becomes noticeably shorter. Sometimes it responds to tweaking my venlafaxine dose upwards, sometimes downwards. Sometimes I can give my neurotransmitters enough of a kicking that they reset, other times I more or less have to wait for February.

This year (OK last year) I was optimistic that BG control and supplemental Vitamin D3 was keeping it at bay, I kept functional until half way through November then crashed and burned. The snow didn’t help any – we had deep long lasting snow from mid December until a few days ago. It came as little consolation that I was not the only person to be affected – or the only species: until the snows finished them off I still had roses, cosmos, nicotianas and other summer flowers in bloom, and a viburnum which shouldn’t flower until May burst into blossom. Even my car died (flat battery). I know just how it felt.

Now in addition to catching up on this blog (and the others I’ve not been reading) I have about three months gardening to do in a couple of weeks before the spring bulbs start to flower.

Long term this was not such a bad thing: since I wasn’t doing much, and had been driving downtown rather than walking in order to take mother, it’s served to give me a data point as to the effect of exercise (or rather lack of it) on my last test results.

A1c went up from my usual 5.6 to 5.8. HDL stayed at 1.4 (55) but LDL went up from 2.4 (94) to 2.6 (101) and trigs went up from 0.7 (62) to 1.4 (124)

Apart from the lack of exercise I had one or two meals which blew my BG – one in the sort of pub where the food would be considered really excellent by any dietician had me at 9.7 (175). I don’t normally eat in places where I can’t select my own menu, but this was another experiment demonstrating that my numbers are controlled rather than cured, and the effect of a “Healthy” Diet can undo the good rather quickly.

Add in some excess 85% chocolate and probably overdoing the fruit a bit – a long strawberry season and some excellent russets and coxes were probably also part of my downfall.

For my last tests I trialled dropping my statin. Depending which labs you look at my HDL either went up to 1.5 (59) or dropped to 1.2 (47), my LDL shot up to 4.0 (156) and my trigs to 1.3 (115) so the statin obviously has some benefits for me and I restarted it.

So I now have numbers for diet plus exercise plus statin, diet and exercise alone and diet and statin alone, all of which were a major improvement on the high carb low fat diet I was previously put on, with or without the statin. So no surprise there then.

This year’s resolution – to beat last year’s numbers.

Gout

This is yet another condition “associated” with diabetes, principally Type 2, and insulin resistance in general.

Curiously if you look at almost any website on the subject you will find little controversy. Most doctors will agree on treatment and will NOT be telling you to “eat more liver and kidneys to stabilise your purine level”, they will almost certainly tell you to avoid food containing high levels of purines. Strange that the same logic does not apply to diabetes.

A useful resource I was pointed to by Quentin, writer of a most entertaining book (and currently in hospital undergoing radiation therapy, having survived not only diabetes but leukemia and another form of cancer for far longer than anyone expected): apparently Dalmations have a genetic inability to process purines, and it would appear from this most comprehensive list that they also suffer from owners who feed them things like Endive.

Seriously though, this is one of the best available sources for purine content.

Excess dietary purines are only one factor though: other things can affect purine metabolism and increase uric acid, one such being fructose. Some people demonstrate chronically high uric acid levels without ever developing gout. Medications such as diuretics may also affect purine metabolism or uric acid clearance.

Update on mother: it turned out NOT to be gout after all but an infection in her toe, as we first suspected. Fortunately we can generally get a GP out quickly when required: she is now on antibiotics and recovering well (and has had her steroids increased again) so kidney is back on the menu! Curiously the last times she had gout attacks it was after eating rhubarb: probably some combination of the fructose and oxalic acid set it off, and she was put on allopurinol which along with the food avoidance had served to keep her gout-free for a long time.

One potential way of identifying gout in its initial stages is that one or more joints become red and swollen and hot to the touch. Unfortunately as we have discovered this may also be a symptom of a bacterial infection! The later stages where more joints are affected and crystals of urate emerge through the skin are more easily identified, by which time the pain is appalling.

IMO it’s important to get this diagnosed as soon as possible as it may come on very quickly and it needs to be differentiated from similar arthritic conditions including pseudogout, and as we now know from infections which in old folks and others with reduced circulation can rapidly turn to cellulitis.

If in any doubt get a second opinion: I now realise I had two attacks in the past, both only in one thumb joint, which my doctor failed to identify even when the tophi (a mix of pus and crsytallised uric acid) burst through the skin. He assured me it was a “trivial skin infection”. Fortunately our local crew are far more competent.

Yet another condition whose incidence can be reduced by tight BG control and especially reducing insulin resistance.

 

This Is What I’m Talking About

Yesterday I got up around 11. Breakfast was a couple of oatcakes buttered and stuffed with smoked salmon, with a large handful of salad and a couple of olives: the balance of high protein, moderate fat and low carbs works well at breakfast.

Aftetr recaffeinating myself and reading a few papers I made a dash down to the bank and a couple of shops (I cheated and went half way by car), made a bunch of phone calls and assembled some new disks into caddies, then put a couple of old disks into new caddies and then into the fridge.

DON’T LAUGH! This was recommended by a disk recovery expert to try prior to using his extremely expensive services. One was a Seagate whose bearing was overheating (not uncommon, I don’t know if more recent ones have overcome this). Curiously the other was a Samsung: these were previously reliable. I’m not sure if there isn’t a problem with the PSU to the external drive box. The problem is that I backed up most of the Seagate onto the Samsung. And although most of the content is backups I need to pull off the stuff that isn’t and put it onto a Hitachi.

I can’t stress enough the importance of BACKUPS. Got that? Backup your backups, it could happen to you! I like disks in external E-SATA/USB enclosures because they will go on any computer and can also be used for transferring files faster than over the network, and keeping backup copies.

Anyway by then mother was pining to go out, so we went for a drive around looking at the autumn colours in the trees and hedges and the fresh green of the growing crops.

I didn’t want to spend too long as I had a big delivery coming tomorrow and needed to clear some space in the garage and chuck a load of empty boxes (recycling day). As we turned into the lane I saw the delivery truck: they’d arrived a day early and wanted to know if they could tip straightaway.

They helped me shift some stuff, mainly empty boxes, and had coffee while I swept the dead spiders and other crud out of the garage. Then I had another oatcake slathered with butter and topped with Wensleydale. This was the first thing I’d eaten since breakfast – it was now after 3 pm. Then we set to work and unloaded several tonnes of boxes. I never even broke sweat, and without testing I could tell my BG was unaffected.

I now have all my books and magazines out of store, and a bunch of nice heavy boxes for lifting. I like lifting, you can do a lot of work in a short time and it is beneficial to muscle development and reducing insulin resistance, and for some reason it’s much easier when there’s an end result rather than when it’s exercise for its own sake. I need something like this to do as the garden has gone crazy and refused to shut down – I have roses still in flower, cosmos about six feet tall still covered in bloom, candytuft springing up everywhere and leaves on many of the bushes I’m waiting to drop before I prune them and renovate the flower beds underneath. Also I haven’t been walking as much as I usually do due to mother’s age and infirmity – she can no longer come and I get paranoid about leaving her for too long.

We ate about six pm – steak and kidney pie without the pie – mother casseroled a pig’s kidney, a bunch of steak, carrots, onions and peppers served with lashings of purple sprouting and followed by a few strawberries. Oh I also had a small slice of brown bread – I try to avoid wheat but she gets all paranoid – and washed it down with some Bordeaux. Followed by a square of 85% chocolate and more coffee.

After a while I went and crashed out for a couple of hours, then worked into the night mainly watching TV programmes I’d recorded – including a sort of restrospective concert by Georgie Fame featuring such luminaries as Guy Barker, Alan Skidmore and Rico Rodriguez, and another concert by Van The Man (Morrison) featuring Georgie Fame – and running backups.

Around Midnight I had another meal similar to breakfast, then around 2 am mother got up unable to sleep with a pain in her toe, which I helped her soak in a bowl of water. Initially I thought it may be repairs from the podiatrist but she soaked the bandage off which caused some relief, and this morning it was obviously an attack of gout.

We risked the kidneys because she hadn’t had gout for about a year. Obviously not a good plan: pity because I’m very fond of kidneys. and liver, but don’t want to annoy her by scoffing them in front of her.

After that I had yet another oatcake with a big hunk of Emmental and went back to bed.

So that’s around 30 carbs from the oatcakes, maybe 20 from the bread, plus whatever was in the veggies and strawberries and chocolate (not a lot in the latter).

The point of this? On my original high carb moderate fat diet I would have needed to carb up for such unexpected exertion. On the dietician’s low fat high carb diet I would have had to carb up before, during and after and would still have been knackered due to the rapid rises and drops in BG and the ensuing insulin resistance. On what I’m eating now it hardly phased me at all.

Here are some samples of what else I’ve eaten this week: my breakfasts are basically similar but include other fish (and other brands of smoked salmon) or bacon, or sometimes lamb chops, with some combination of salad usually including watercress and often also olives and/or toasted sunfolower seeds.

Evening meals have included (unsmoked) salmon with spinach, stir fry including crab with bacon, coloured peppers, garlic, lime juice and quinoa, and chili con carne made from base ingredients which which I risked a small helping of rice.

Nocturnal meals have included prawn curry with cashew nuts, chillies, ginger and more garlic, chicken fried in coconut oil and encrusted with coconut powder, ground almonds and sesame seeds (and garlic!).

Snacks have included . . . well I don’t need to snack very often but sometimes have an oatcake with some form of cheese, or goat cheese with blueberries, or nuts, or 85% chocolate in a low dose.

I try to ring the changes so I’m eating a lot of different stuff (there’s a pheasant in the freezer and due to mother’s gout tonight will probably be something relatively bland) and to be honest I dont find it at all difficult to eat anatomically correct portions of carbs, fat, protein and assorted veggies such that my BG excursions are minimised, my lipids are normalised and my energy levels stay up.

Here’s Patti’s take on the same dietary issues.

In The Media Again

I just watched a couple of  TV programmes I’d recorded earlier. Both of them almost “got it” but turned away at the last moment.

One was Dispatches which looked at the sugar and salt content of breakfast cereals, but shied away from pointing out the dangers in the cereal content. One sad thing was looking at some of the kids and thinking “wheat face!”

The second was Who Made Me Fat?

Now Channel 4 is fairly competent, but BBC3 is aimed at the sort of audience who needs an instruction manual for an on/off switch but knows the imtimate details of the “lifestyle” of every celebrity. Despite that it took a half decent swipe at the food industry, and pissed off one or two politicians (and several security guards). The Olympics, sponsored by McDonalds, Coca-Cola and Cadburys???

Both programmes rightly slammed sugar, but also fats – and didn’t address other carbs at all, so Conventional Wisdom is still alive and well. George McGovern was right to make Ancel Keys the world’s most successful grain salesman.

One things that emerged from the latter was the truly horrendous Sugar Bureau. Apparently the RDA for sugar is 60g, plus 30g of unrefined sugar already concealed in foods like fruit. Say what??? that’s 45g of fructose alone, I’m pushing it to eat 90g total carbs! The presenter added up her sugar consumption on her low fat diet and found it was over 160g – that’s right, 80g of fructose on top of 80g glucose. Now add her healthy breakfast cereal and brown rice and you start to see why there’s an epidemic of obesity which is worsening as people avoid fats. Something my mother bought the other day had an RDA of 70g for sugar and 230g for total carbs, I’ve seen higher but seldom lower on other packets

Not a few of her interviewees correctly pointed out that extra sugar is added to foods because it’s a cheap bulking agent and replaces more expensive ingredients. Sadly they didn’t take the next logical step of realising this also applies to wheat.

You may think the ongoing saga of the sacking of Drugs Adviser Professor David Nutt, followed by the resignation of Les King, has nothing to do with diet, or diabetes, but I think it is directly relevant: he was sacked because he went up against dogma with facts and information, much as what happens to doctors and researchers who do the same in the dietary field. When cannabis was declassified I said at the time that it was a temporary move designed to induce tokers to be less careful so the Police could build information and make a lot of arrests later when it was reclassified again. Was I wrong? Don’t assume when this lot of eejits are voted out and the other lot of eejits are voted in that any of this will change – except that the Food Industry will probably be given even more carte blanche to increase their profits at the expense of our health. Which makes me ponder whose profit margin is greater, a heroin dealer or a wheat pusher.

And finally . . . some good news.

If they’d used an even better diet they’d almost certainly have gotten even better results. Here’s how to find what that diet is

Test Test Test

The original paper is here

Oops, no it’s not, that’s a different paper.

Subscription only, but you can read the summary.

 

Small Dense Krauss Revisited

I can no longer see the name of Ronald Krauss without immediately thinking “small dense Krauss”.

Bad Peter! Hee Hee.

Actually his whole series of AGE RAGE and ALE posts starting July 2008 are well worth a read.

So is the rest of the blog if you like techy stuff.

Ronald Krauss came up in a couple of other contexts recently so I thought I’d dig up some of his material.

Much of the best stuff is subscription only, but there are several free access papers which I found on PubMed.

Have a look here to see what he’s doing. That page covers his heart healthy reputation, the next page is what he’s working on today.

This makes his dilemma somewhat clearer: if he is less diffident about some of his results he might lose his reputation, if he’s not positive enough he may lose his funding. Such is the Politics Of Diet.

There’s an interview with him which clarifies his position. IMO nutrigenomics and pharmacogenomics are the way forward: too much medicine uses the wrong kind of statistics, assuming a population is uniform and follows a bell curve when it may well be several genetically distinct sub-populations with sigificantly differing responses to food or drugs.

He co-authors this paper

Pharmacogenomics: Challenges and Opportunities (the pdf is free)

The next step after discovering your specific genes is to discover ways to adjust your environment (diet, drugs, exercise) to control their expression – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

He’s spent much time and effort in deconstructing the “lipid hypothesis” and elucidating the complexity of the systems involved, which go far beyond “eating fat makes you fat/gives you cardiovascular disease”

Lipids and Lipoproteins in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes

Smallest LDL Particles Are Most Strongly Related to Coronary Disease Progression in Men

Metabolic origins and clinical significance of LDL heterogeneity

are a selection of papers covering this subject.

Here’s an important passage from the latter

It has been demonstrated in offspring genetically predisposed to phenotype B that a very low fat, high carbohydrate diet can induce expression of this phenotype. Recently, both genetic and dietary factors have been reported to affect LDL size phenotypes in baboons. Thus, LDL subclass phenotypes may result from interaction of multiple genetic and environmental determinants, and the trait can be viewed as a marker for the mechanism underlying these effects.

AHA Scientific Statement

Managing Abnormal Blood Lipids

is a fairly typical bunch of complacency: one wonders if carbohydrates would have been mentioned at all were it not for the presence of Ronald Krauss on the team.

The L-TAP survey revealed that lipid management was suboptimal for all patients with and without CHD. Although 95% of investigators indicated that they were aware of the NCEP guidelines and believed they followed them, only a small proportion achieved the recommended LDL goals. Lack of achievement is likely caused by failure to titrate medications, inappropriate drug choices, limited effectiveness of some medications, intolerance to some drugs, and failure to address patient noncompliance.

Er, no! Lipid management was suboptimal because the diet chosen did not differ significantly from the diet it replaced. How about them apples?

Look at

TABLE 6. AHA Dietary Recommendations for Achieving Desirable Blood Lipid Profile and Especially LDL-C

isn’t this exactly what everyone is told to do, and does – but IT DON’T WORK! Listen to Uncle Ron!

Here he is in a recent paper renovating the reputation of dairy fats and covering the often observed phenomenon that while increased saturated fat intake may (or may not) increase LDL, it also increases HDL and helps reduce triglycerides, thus replacing small dense and oxidisable LDL with decently fluffy particles. I had something of a “Duh!”moment when cheese was found to be more beneficial than milk – well milk is often used as a hypostop due to its carb content, you can’t do that with cheese (or butter)!

Clinical trials in which replacement of saturated fat occurs in the context of reduced total fat and increased carbohydrate have generally not been associated with improvements in CVD is something that passed the other authors of the above AHA paper by, and they didn’t even duck.

One factor he failed to mention was Vitamin K2. Now I go along with some of the Paleo folks in limiting milk (bizarrely I prefer skimmed, but only use it in my coffee) but I have reverted to butter and cheese, partly for this reason and partly because it has rebalanced my HDL and LDL quite nicely.

OK, one last one

Separate effects of reduced carbohydrate intake and weight loss on atherogenic dyslipidemia

He is somewhat diffident about the importance of his results. he’s a bit more gung ho here and the resulting editorial was interesting, but what he really needs is a cheerleader. Step up Jeff Volek (along with Richard Feinman, natch)

 

In The Media

A few items I’ve picked up, some old and from other blogs, forums or elsewhere, one or two more recent.

One from Mark Hyman in the Huffington Post

Why Cholesterol May Not Be the Cause Of Heart Disease

This is quite a good breakdown of the “lipid hypothesis”, though I can’t say I was so impressed with his site which is an irritating mix of good sense and dogma (like most health sites, mine included hahaha)

Richard Feinman has a good go at low fat diets for diabetics

Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin

and

What if Bad Fat is Actually Good for You?

Stop Blaming Saturated Fat

take a whack at some other current dietary myths

Also the reason for such dietary advice is exposed (again), and Regina Wilshire added to that one.

Finally the BBC has more bleating from our own UK eejits

I especially liked the line

In April this year, the government launched a programme of health checks for people aged between 40 and 79 who are not already diagnosed with heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease or have had a stroke.

Doesn’t this make it sound like they are looking for Infidels who are not already ill, in order to make them so? Or am I too cynical?

The aptly named Diabetes UK chief executive, Douglas Smallwood, said pre-diabetes was a “ticking timebomb”.

“It’s staggering that seven million people in the UK have pre-diabetes, which is often a precursor to type 2 diabetes, a serious condition which can lead to long-term complications such as heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, amputation and blindness.

“Identifying and educating people with pre-diabetes is vital as it’s not too late for many to make healthy lifestyle changes, reverse the condition completely and reduce their risk of developing type 2 diabetes.”

Now this is completely true, and as thousands of anecdotes and not a few research papers make plain it is also possible to reverse many of the symptoms of Type 2 diabetes itself  BUT not by following current dietary policy as listed by DUK, the FSA. etc. etc. which is one of the causal factors in the ongoing “epidemics” of disease.

Recently my PCT has introduced a new restriction: HbA1c tests are now FORBIDDEN to all but registered diabetics. Since they also refuse to prescribe test strips this means prediabetics are deliberately refused the ability to monitor their condition, until they become full-fledged diabetics.

What’s wrong with this picture?

And as if by magic. there’s more today about the obesity “epidemic”

Head, meet desk, recursively

 

Now I’m Embarrassed!

Jimmy Moore just listed my blog, along with a  whole bunch of other ones, only some of which I previously knew. There looks to be some excellent resources on there.

I’m already spending so much time reading that I haven’t been doing any writing for a while. Just goes to show how much valuable information is there to be found.

Time to get my ass in gear. I have a few posts I was sitting on until I’ve finished reading some papers. I’ll see if I can finish at least one of them. Well, after I’ve walked to the shops and back and stocked up on meat, fish and veggies.

Today I was supposed to be taking mother to the hospital. The letter cancelling her appointment arrived just before we were due to set off. If the postman had been half an hour later we’d have driven for an hour, wasted our money in the hospital car park and driven back home again for nothing. Plus she may have pooped herself in the car. To say I am annoyed is typical British understatement. Particularly since until recently we have had an excellent relationship with our current doctors ( for a pleasant change from some of the previous incumbents). They have been doing the best they can under circumstances dictated by accountants: I spot yet another manipulation of waiting lists without any patient care actually being provided. Now I have to see if I can keep her alive for another month.

More Of The Same

Seen in Pulse Today

“A CQC spokesperson said: ‘We expect providers always to comply with NICE guidelines and other national guidance unless they can show a good reason to vary from them.’

“‘The steps we can take range from a formal warning notice to prosecution and imposition of restrictions, or even closure of a service,’ said the spokesperson.”

The comments from actual doctors, who actually know a bit about medicine, are worth a read.

I saw something like this several years back: my mother, who was then with one of the few remaining NHS dentists in the area, was dragged off to spend half a day sitting in a Portakabin in a car park waiting to have her teeth examined.

My highly competent dentist had been determined to keep NHS provision as long as possible, and at one stage had so many extra patients he took on a new partner just to cope with the workload. However even he had to admit defeat following further changes in the NHS regime.

His opinion on what happened to mother (and obviously many other patients since this appeared to be a big ongoing operation) was that all NHS patients were being checked to ensure their NHS dentists were only complying with NHS treatments – by then mostly restricted to amalgam fillings and extractions – and NOT providing improved levels of treatment such as non-amalgam fillings, which may be initially more expensive but last a lot longer so are much more cost effective in the long term.

This “money saving” exercise would have cost for the ongoing rental of the Portakabin, rental for the land on which it stood, and salary of a dentist who was not actually providing ANY treatment at all, merely looking for faults with the treatment of real dentists.

I suspect with doctors they can do without some of these expenses merely by data mining: that could be done by a non-medically-trained clerk or three.

“You have diabetics with an A1c below 6? You will be sent for regrooving!”

“Your patients aren’t having enough heart attacks, clearly you are guilty of prescribing a low carb diet!”

etc. etc . . .

Here’s yet another nail in the coffin (literally) of good diabetic control

and a thread or two on the same subject from a diabetes forum

Epiphany

Michael Eades has a new book out.

Personally I’m putting it on my “might buy later” list. On the one hand I don’t tend to gain weight easily. On the other hand, when I do it always goes on around the middle. Last year I ploughed virtuously through the holiday season without putting on a pound – then suddenly gained some weight around January/February, and dropped it about as fast as I’d put it on.

If you’re more prone to doing this it might prove to be a good read.

Meanwhile he was interviewed on Tim Ferriss’ blog

which led to a fair bit of conflict

The best thing that came out of that thread IMO was a link to the transcript of an old BBC Horizon programme about the Atkins diet

Here you can see the epiphany of Eric Westman, one of the current leading researchers in nutrition and metabolism, and Gary Foster. Mary Vernon also makes an appearance.

As the transcript reveals, both Westman and Foster were initially cynical but had the cojones to actually run trials AND believe their results. The result, as they say, is history: Duke University is one of the leading centres for 21st Century  dietary research.

I wonder if the BBC would be permitted to make such a controversial programme today?

The Food Police Are Coming

To close down a blog near to you.

As if this wasn’t disconcerting enough

Healthy food obsession sparks rise in new eating disorder

now comes this

Call to get tough on eating sites

Colour me cynical about “psychiatric” explanations for eating disorders, and many other disorders. I have (or perhaps I should say “had” because knowledge has advanced hugely) a degree in Psychology. In my day everything was “nurture” rather than “nature”, so I guess many people who have reached the top of the profession were similarly trained. This appeared to make little sense even then, I saw not a few babies pop out with many behavioural characteristics seemingly hardwired in, and things like twin studies where the twins were separated at birth and brought up differently have shown some purely freaky patterns.

So I incline to the belief that there may well be physiological reasons for some (probably not all) “eating disorders” which need to be looked into first. The metabolic pathway from food to ATP at the mitochondria is hugely complex and there are plenty of steps where things can go pear shaped.

The current standard dietary advice seems to be making more than a few of these metabolic steps go pear shaped in a large proportion of the population. “Eating disorders” seem to be increasing in parallel to many of the other “diseases of civilisation”.

From a purely psychiatric point of view, NOT following conventional advice becomes a “disorder” in itself, despite that it is worsening health in general: having beliefs or behaviours that differ from those of your social contemporaries can be seen as a personality disorder (completely ignoring the fact that they may be perfectly conventional views in a different society elsewhere in the world, or may actually genuinely be better than those of Conventional Wisdom).

I’d like to see a psychiatric explanation for giving diabetics a diet guaranteed to worsen their condition. Same for the obese, cardiovascular patients, etc. etc.

I like synchronicity: having just read that BBC story I then read Stephan’s blog

I previously had a theory that the dogmatic and often aggressive approach of high carbers in imposing their dietary choices on others and disrupting discussion of alternatives was a function of the high carb load in itself. Now I wonder if it’s the Omega 6 consumption that sets them off. The following series of posts on Omega 6 and Omega 3 are fascinating, rebalancing the ratio and adding more Omega 3s to a level which we (probably) evolved to handle rather than the totally unbalanced quantities of the Heart Healthy Diet has positive effects on not a few “mental” illneses along with the “physical” ones.

Next time your dietician tries to kill you, smile and offer her some fish.

You think she’s NOT trying to kill you? These were my original lipids

HDL 0.63 (24.6) LDL 4.22 (165) trigs 4.29 (380)

This what was happened when I followed a high carb low fat diet

HDL 0.66 (25) LDL 5.16 (201) trigs 3.70 (328)

Here they are after doing the opposite of what I was told

HDL 1.40 (55) LDL 2.40 (94) trigs 0.70 (62)

If you recalculate that LDL according to the Iranian Formula it drops to 1.97 (76) which brings me perilously close to William Davis’ 60 – 60 – 60.

Admittedly I am taking 10mg Simvastatin to achieve that.

Stephan posted his own numbers which are quite astonishing – but the pattern of improvement is not at all uncommon.

I learned how to do this from people on newsgroups, forums and blogs, which is why I’m here passing on what I’ve learned and links to the original sources.

Make the most of it before such blogs also fall prey to the Food Police and Conventional Wisdom and we are no longer permitted access to other than Official Sources.