I have very low triglycerides, very high hdl, and eat almost vegetarian. Very high carb. Total cholesterol over 460. Any comment?

No manipulation, although I have begun using salmon oil in the past six months. If I remember.

I wouldn’t know without checking of course, but if you’re on high-carb diet you could easily have the small, dense LDL particle type, although your low triglycerides militates against it. Might want to get it checked. Might want to try a different diet.

Who knows what the Nurses’ Health Study says? This is regarded as a terrible study by most legit epidemiologists. Knowing the people involved, I suspect they interpret it that way because they can’t bring themselves to face the facts they would have to face were they to interpret it correctly.

MRE

I don’t know this for an absolute fact, but I would bet that many more have elevated triglycerides than have elevated cholesterol.

Instead of proving the low carb diet with Colpo, how about asking him to prove any long term sustained weight loss from calorie counting? Sure, there was that wierd experiment that Newburgh cited in 1948, who was unique in the annals of obesity literature, but there are no studies that prove cutting calories works. They’ve tried it with marathons and every other type of exercise imaginable but it’s consistently shown not to work in laboratory studies. It has been proven over and over again that fat people eat no more than lean persons. They may underestimate what they eat, but the fact remains that they really eat no more than the lean. Every creature on the planet only fattens with a purpose. Those that fatten for no reason can blame diet and with it comes all the diseases of civilization.

I have enjoyed your books and your blog, and I have an off-topic question for you. You, as I do, believe that our ancestors evolved to eat a diet that included very little carbohydrate and that “excessive” carb consumption can lead to obesity and many other problems. But what about the possibility that our body’s response to carbs could also be an evolved response? Could it be that our ancestors gorged on fruits and berries in the late summer and fall, thus gaining some body fat that could be beneficial in making it through the winter (in colder climes, obviously)? And could it be that those that did not gain fat on this diet were more likely to die in the winter and not reproduce? I am sure I am not the first to wonder about this.

Nope, you’re not the first person to have wondered. Since all animals get fatter in the fall in preparation for winter, it would seem likely that they had been selected by the forces of natural selection to do so. The enzymatic machinery that converts fructose to fat would appear to be proof. In a native diet, fructose wouldn’t be found in very high concentrations until the fall when fruits ripened, which corresponds to the time when animals need to fatten the most. Now we eat fructose all the time and wonder why we all get fat.

MRE

Thought you might appreciate this article regarding gout & sugar/fructose:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/global/main.jhtml?xml=/global/2008/02/01/noindex/ngout101.xml

Regards,

Laurel

MRE

It’s not known for sure whether triglycerides are a risk factor of if they are merely related to heart disease, so there is no way to quantify their risk level. A few people have tried to quantify the triglyceride/HDL levels in terms of risk, and it appears that those who have a TGL/HDL level below 3 have fewer heart attacks than those with higher levels. In practice I found that patients on low-carb diets tend to run TGL/HDL ratios at around 1 or even less.