My Labs Part 2

I just had a checkup with my doctor and wanted to share my lab results. I have been on the carnivore diet for about 3 years.

If you missed my first email about my results you can find it here if you’re interested.

Today I want to talk about the lipid panel results. Maybe one or two others as well. The lipid panel is the way doctors screen for your risk of heart disease. My panel consisted of the following tests and their results:

• Total Cholesterol: 281

• HDL Cholesterol: 66

• Triglycerides: 72

• LDL Cholesterol: 200.6

• LDL/HDL Ratio: 3.0

• Risk Factor: 4.3

• VLDL Cholesterol: 14

All the values were in the ‘normal’ range except total cholesterol and LDL Cholesterol. Triglycerides also almost doubled from last year’s result. It’s interesting how much cholesterol can move. When I was in my vegan phase I had it test as low as 143. In fact the chiropractor who ran the test wanted me to move it up and was worried about how low it is.

I used to fear a high LDL. Then as I did more and more research, I found that a high LDL (Low Density Lipoprotein) reading can be inversely proportional to mortality. In other words, a high LDL may mean you will live longer. One source I have is a study in the British Medical Journal that said so.

My triglycerides went up quite a bit from about 2 years ago as well (37 in 2021).

Frankly I was a bit surprised that all 3 readings went up a bunch.

At least until I wrote on Twitter (‘X’) that I had just had my physical and that I had fasted for about 40 hours before it.

A Scientist named Dave Feldman replied and said he bet all three readings would go up because I had fasted. I did not put my results on the social media platform.

As you can see, he gave me links to the videos explaining why. You can click on them if you want.

His opinion is that your cholesterol scores are very influenced by the movement of fats in your body.

Everyone seems to believe that when you transition to a fat-burning state (absence of carbs such as in a fast) triglycerides in your fat cells are broken down in to free amino acids and glycerol. The free fatty acids go to tissues that need them and also to the liver.

The liver breaks down the fatty acids to create ketones to supply to the cells.

Where Dave gets a little controversial is to hypothesize the liver also reconstitutes some of the fatty acids back into triglycerides and VLDL particles. The VLDL particles go to various cells and create more LDL particles.

Hence your total cholesterol, LDL and triglycerides go up - just as my labs demonstrated.

I may have butchered the scientific explanation of it, but you can watch the videos for more details. My apologies if I did.

The fact Dave Feldman predicted exactly what my test results did, adds some weight to his argument for me.

It beats having a doctor just tell you your numbers are high. And that you need a statin.