I’ll take a brief time out this evening to congratulate yet another person who has transformed his risk profile with the engineering-level science of Low Carbohydrate – fueling the human machine appropriately, and reaping the substantial benefits sans drugs. The person in question is James O’Callaghan, and he’s kindly given permission to present his transformative metrics.
He and I conversed some time back on the science, before he achieved his post-Low-Carb regime results, and as is usual when the hypotheses are actually correct, the results came romping home ahead of expectations (including a bonus 12kg drop in weight, also to be expected):
Ok, so here we go, look and learn:
Test 1: Oct 2013 – Standard Diet Disaster, but trying to Minimize the Fat ’cause ooooh it “clogs yer arteries”
Nasty, nasty Bloods right there – Tot Chol is largely irrelevant without full spectrum of data being analysed; LDL similarly but slightly less so. HDL here is low in context of LDL value though. And here we move to the relevant metrics – TotChol/HDL very poor at 6.23, but this is primarily a proxy for the real killer data in Trig/HDL – the latter being a scary 10+ . Only one thing for it then in the orthodox, “don’t understand the science” view – it’s Statin time baby – and that’s what happened James; in effect he unknowingly sidestepped the engineering root cause entirely, and put a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound….
Test 2: March 2014 – Post Statins and some fitness stuff, and the deck chairs on his Titanic have been moved around a bit….
…best thing to be said is that he has impacted the trigs positively, but the statins while pleotropically reducing inflammation somewhat, won’t have contributed much to that party, more likely the lifestyle/diet tweak and a return of some Insulin Sensitivity delivered. Also, his HDl has depleted somewhat. Still, his Trig/HDL ratio (the only one you’d really go by here), has improved considerably – but still awful to be honest, and if we had an NMR, we’d likely see his LDL subfractions being VERY naughty indeed.
Test 3 – Sept 2014 – After James took real action, gained an understanding of the fundamentals, dropped the Statins, and switched to Low Carb for 6 months.
This was the period where we conversed, and predicted the outcome in advance, as engineers love to do. I have so many examples of this now that I wasn’t on the edge of my armchair to be honest, but James was, ahem, a little more fixated on the impending outcome(!). And there we see it:
- HDL elevated (due to it not being used as a goddamn punchbag having to rescue excessive numbers of Triglyceride molecules from his swollen VLDL, via Cholesterol Ester Transfer Protein (CETP))
- Said Triglycerides now at a respectable 1.23mmol/L, close to the transition point where the small dense LDL subfraction falls away by the way – great job.
- MOST CRITICALLY, ratios now hitting the RELEVANT guidelines, the latter being the sine qua non of health in the blood lipid matrix world.
- You’ll notice I didn’t refer to TotChol or LDL Concentration – because the belief system that deals in these is 20 years out of date, and I’m getting tired of reminding people of this.
So, with the correct scientific understanding, we can breeze past the deckchair formation activity to our real goal – getting the ship, well, shipshape I guess.
For an elucidation of the science, may I recommend 1. The Cholesterol Conundrum, 2. my short version explaining the basics, and 3. an excellent presentation from Prof. Ken Sikaris which says it all (and makes up for the fact that I focused too much on the proxy Tot/HDL, and not enough on the core of Trig/HDL ! ). At the end is a bauble from 1989 sent on to me by Ann Childers MD this evening – along with many other papers over the past 40 years, they were real close to some fundamentals, but no-one could countenance turning away from the (failed) low-fat dogma. And the ensuing cost of this hubris to the world population health has been…………..Titanic.
1989 Close but no Cigar
