jeherohaku

Hi Gary, I've been following keto for a while with great results but I'm honestly afraid to talk to anyone about it because (like this thread demonstrates) it's often met with zealous resistance. How have you found it best to approach the topic with people so engrained in the standard way of thinking? I've recommended your books, but unfortunately a lot of my family and co-workers just aren't receptive.

Interestingly, there is evidence for the ideal range of cholesterol to be much higher than most doctors recommend.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38461-y

If you look at the graph showing all cause mortality vs cholesterol you'll find that the lowest mortality rates are at about 220 mg/dL.

Additionally, cholesterol is vital for many hormone and neurotransmitter production and lowering it could have a huge impact on those. This is just my opinion, but I think a lot of doctors just dogmatically go with the recommendations and don't give thought to the full impact of the advice to lower cholesterol.

It's not a causitive study and I never implied that. But, all cause mortality is one of the few measures to correlate against that I believe has much weight at all. It pretty much eliminates bias from age, sex, lifestyle choices, etc. So many other correlation studies have a self selecting group, this does not.

I replied to someone else about this, but take a look at this study.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38461-y

If you look at their graph showing cholesterol and all cause mortality you'll find the mortality to be the lowest at about 220 mg/dL, which is higher than most doctors recommend. Maybe what they consider "skyrocketing" isn't actually unhealthy at all.

Hi Gary,

I have a question about cholesterol for you. Obviously it raises on a diet like this but high cholesterol isn't nearly the problem people think it is. So how about very low cholesterol, around 100 mg/dL? Have you encountered in your research any indication of the health effects of that?