Jimmy Moore has lost over 100 pounds and improved his blood lipids. He has a blog, podcasts, hosts cruises, and generally carries the torch for Low Carbing. His latest is about how to respond to the people around you trying to convince you to eat, etc.
It is almost analogous to religion or politics. People (myself included) love to try to persuade others to our points of view. Sometimes we get a bit nasty, pushy, or obnoxious about it! (Not me of course. I'm always completely reasonable.)
Think of the word Jimmy uses: counterintuitive. Why is Low Carb/High Fat counterintuitive? Only one reason: our intuition has been trained and programmed to think Fat=Bad. It's not intuition, it's programming.
One of my favorite books is The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis (author of the Narnia books.) In it he writes letters from a senior devil to a junior one, giving him human weaknesses to exploit in his "patient." In letter 1 he (the Senior Devil) says, near the end:
"But the best of all is
to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it
all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading
is "the results of modern investigation."
I read a lot of science. After all, I'm an MD-PhD pathologist! Even I am guilty of the above. So are all of your family and friends. Be gentle with them all, as the old saying goes, everyone is fighting a great battle.
If Jimmy Moore has extremely high LDL-P, LDL-C just how has he "improved" his blood lipids?
ReplyDeleteHis HDL went from 20's to 70's and triglycerides from several hundreds to high thirties. Those are very dramatic changes. The HDL and trigs are independent risk factors that don't have drug therapies to modify them. As a result, people tend to focus on LDL which CAN be modified with statins. Statins are the number one moneymaker for drug companies. The single minded focus on LDL is oversimplified; there are many factors.
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