The Ketogenic Diet and Fats: What are the Health Risks from Cholesterol?

We’ve all heard the story: a low-fat diet is “the” healthy diet. Furthermore, eating a high-fat diet will clog your arteries with cholesterol and give you cardiovascular and heart disease!

Hold on.

These ideas are not supported anywhere in any context by ANY rigorous scientific study or analysis. The evidence is absent and vapid, like these claims.

“Fats.. are actually good for you?”

Here’s the real story:

Eating a high-fat, ketogenic diet will NOT clog your arteries and cause cardiovascular and heart disease.

Contrary to prevailing nutritional beliefs (they are at best, beliefs), a high-fat, ketogenic diet is GOOD for you. The ketogenic diet will increase your cholesterol levels, but that’s not a bad thing.

 

Let’s talk about inflammation and cholesterol.

Inflammation, not cholesterol, causes cardiovascular and heart disease

The dynamics of cholesterol in the blood are confusing; there’s five different forms of cholesterol in your blood, we only need to focus on two for the sake of this discussion: HDL and LDL.

In the context of inflammation, HDL is the “good” cholesterol, LDL is the “bad”.

HDL decreases inflammation in the body, while LDL increases it.

You can develop sites of inflammation in your arteries from various lifestyle choices such as smoking, eating poorly (i.e going overboard on Oreos), alcoholism, etc.

At these sites of inflammation, white blood cells accumulate to heal that region. If the inflammation is persistent, LDL particles in the blood will accidentally become trapped with the white blood cells at this site, eventually forming plaques.

Accumulation of LDL particles causes further inflammation, which recruits more white blood cells and further reinforces plaque formation.

The primary culprit in cardiovascular and heart disease is therefore NOT cholesterol.. but inflammation.

Cholesterol: not the culprit for cardiovascular disease, who knew?

 

To recap:

A ketogenic diet will raise your cholesterol and it’s not a bad thing because: inflammation, NOT cholesterol is the primary culprit for cardiovascular and heart disease.

In fact, having higher cholesterol levels is associated with a variety of benefits, including a reduced risk for Parkinson’s disease.

There you have it! Eat your eggs and bacon in peace, without worrying about cholesterol.

Happy to be ketogenic

-cikayda