I just read the whole thing. The most important comment the author makes is "absolute risk vs independent risk factors". These were healthy body weight (I didn't see BF % but at ~22-23 BMI and exercising you can assume leaner than G pop at minimum), exercised regularly, no high BP, drugs, etc etc.
So basically it concludes that in really healthy people absolute risk of high LDL is very low. It should come as no surprise that really healthy people are resilient to independent risk factors. This study is important to less than 5% of the population.
Yes and no to the last sentence.
Yes in that the population like us (Lean Mass Hyper Responders) is less than 5%. Way way way less than 5%. Very low to near zero carb lean athletes effectively didn’t exist 30 years ago, and are still rare today. I had an LDL cholesterol of 592, enough to give doctors heart attacks. They’d never heard of such a thing, and were completely shocked and horrified.
But the implications, they are far reaching. For decades, the operating assumption has been that THE big causative indicator for heart disease is cholesterol (first total, then LDL, then particle size, APo B, etc …). And with that eating fat, particularly animal fats (especially red meat and saturated fats) is the driver of LDL cholesterol. That assumption has radically changed our eating habits since the 1950s.
Don’t eat animal products, but load up on starchy carbohydrates and industrial seed oils, because they will lower cholesterol.
Well hooray it worked, cholesterol is lower. Most of America adopted a radical intervention with the best of intentions, what could possible go wrong?
How’s that working out? Has the population’s health improved?
Most people who go to a very low carbohydrate diet aren’t going to see massive increases in LDL cholesterol. But as they pull harder on any of these 3 levers by getting leaner, exercise more, and further lower carbohydrate, then LDL will rise.
The LMHR phenomenon appears that energy transfer system effect. Higher energy demand from fat, and less fat storage available from the body, then higher requirements for LDL cholesterol. That definitely matches my experience to a T. And I’ve tested that pretty thoroughly on myself. I get really high LDL when I’m ripped, working hard and eating 3 lbs of steak and not much else. And I dropped LDL 450 pts by getting fat, lazy and loading up on bread and fruit juice (which tanked my HDL, quadrupled my Triglycerides, and was the worst experience of my life), all to convince the army I was “healthy” enough to deploy. The irony.
You show me a guy with crazy high LDL, but also high HDL and low Triglycerides, and I’ll show you a lean athlete eating very few carbohydrates.
So why does this all matter? If LDL is the bad guy, the CAUSE of heart disease, then shouldn’t the ideal test of that assumption be the Lean Mass Hyper Reaponders? Shouldn’t an otherwise healthy population, but with massively high LDL be rapidly developing atherosclerosis?
It’s almost as though we don’t know what we think we know, and maybe it’s time to reevaluate our assumptions.
