High Cholesterol

[girlcat36]

After being on a high-fat diet for a year( for medical reasons), my cholesterol level has dropped 50 points. I was dreading getting tested because I had high cholesterol for the last three years, and I expected it would have gone sky high. To my surprise, my cholesterol was in a healthy range. Just wondering why this would be, if anybody has any insight. Has anybody heard of stress causing cholesterol levels to rise?

[cutastrophe]

There are different reasons to explain it. Basically, the idea that eating fat and cholesterol will make your blood levels of cholesterol skyrocket is a myth. Your body makes it's own cholesterol, way more than what is taken in by food. But when your diet includes cholesterol, your liver doesn't go into overdrive trying to make up for the deficiency. Hence, the blood levels will be lower.

Here's a good article for you. I'm pretty sure it mentions the effect of stress on cholesterol levels too. My opinion on that would be that because cholesterol acts as an antioxidant, higher levels of stress would definately cause higher levels of cholesterol to be produced by the liver.


http://www.womentowomen.com/nutritionandweightloss/fatandcholesterol.aspx?id=2&campaignno=cholesterolfat&adgroup=ag2cholesterol&keywords=cholesterol+myth


Cholesterol is so important to the human body that nature has devised a backup plan in the event your diet falls short — i.e., during a famine. When that happens, your liver steps in to make cholesterol to guarantee your body a baseline level. The high levels of insulin that are released in most low-fat, high-carb diets also trigger the body to siphon off excess blood sugar into the liver to make cholesterol and triglycerides (which are used for energy and fat storage).

In its natural, unstressed state your liver makes 75% of the cholesterol you need. The rest you have to eat — in foods that contain cholesterol like butter, meat, whole-fat dairy products, shellfish and eggs.
If you deprive yourself of cholesterol (and make up those calories in carbs and sugar), your metabolism goes into famine mode and your liver overproduces cholesterol to make up the difference and stock up. This overdrive state can’t shut off until you start eating cholesterol again. So, a low-cholesterol, high-carbohydrate diet can actually lead to high cholesterol!

[girlcat36]

This was interesting, thank you. I always had low cholesterol until I starting having symptoms of a tumor(it went undiagnosed for two years). During the time the tumor was growing, my cholesterol suddenly shot up, and I had no idea why. In hindsight, I think that the stress of my body trying to fend off an undiagnosed cancer caused my levels to rise, because now, a year out of cancer, treatment my levels are healthy again, yet my diet is not as good as it used to be.

[Áine]

There is nothing inherently wrong with a high-fat diet, as long as it is a source of *good* mono-unsaturated fat, and less heavy on the processed sugar and simple carbs. Cuisines around the world have sustained this type of diet, and yet more often than not, they don't have a problem with weight and/or cholesterol levels, and consequently have less heart ailments or strokes for casualties. Drinking a little bit of red wine also is a good pairing for this type of diet, and pushes the "bad" LDL cholesterol even lower while protecting the "good" HDL... though I do not know what is/isn't allowed given your past serious health condition.

I think Cutastrophe did a really good job of explaining the function of cholesterol in simple terms.