so the question I want to answer today is why would your LDL or even total
cholesterol go up when you start the ketogenic diet it's supposed to go down
okay so let's answer that first thing you need to know is that if it goes up
realize first thing you need to know is that the majority of the time it will go
down it doesn't go up so if it goes up for you it's not as common but it's not
a problem one thing you have to realize is that LDL is not cholesterol LDL is
low-density lipoprotein it's the carrier boat that travels the cholesterol
through the blood and the second thing you need to know is that LDL is not bad
so LDL takes the cholesterol from your liver into the tissues HDL takes the
cholesterol from your tissues back on up to the liver
so we have this exchange with cholesterol we need cholesterol for our
hormones specifically sex hormones testosterone cortisol which is an anti
inflammatory hormone estrogen and we also need cholesterol for all of the
cellular membranes because if you don't have cholesterol for that nothing works
so your body makes cholesterol it makes a lot of it and you also get cholesterol
from the diet typically what happens when you consume more fat or cholesterol
your body makes less cholesterol but then why would it go up when you would
do the ketogenic diet so there's a really interesting study done by Stephen
Phinney MD and PhD so what he did is he did biopsies on fat cells through a
person's ketogenic plan to identify what happens inside the fat cell during this
process and he found some really interesting data one thing he talked
about one thing you talked about is this cholesterol is also stored in the fat
cell in a certain amount and when you do a ketogenic plant and you lose weight
the fat cell shrinks but in the first phases of this process you release the
triglycerides which can be used for energy but the body tends to retain or
hold on to the cholesterol till a certain point which explains why you may
start the ketogenic Plan and your cholesterol or even LDL is good but then
it spikes weeks or even months later what you have to realize is cholesterol
is not used as fuel in the body so the fat cell is mostly triglycerides and
triglycerides are used as fuel in the body but not the cholesterol so here you
have the situation where you start the ketogenic Plan you're losing weight but
the cholesterol in that cell is being retained until a certain point that then
it's released and at that point he found in certain people that release of 300
milligrams of cholesterol that came out and then what happens it goes into the
liver it combines with bile gets dissolved and then it kind of goes
out through the intestine so that would be one reason why your LDL or even
cholesterol can go up during a program now the other reason it can go up is
just for the fact that you're consuming a higher fat diet and you have more fat
circulating throughout the body but this is what you need to know as far
as LDL okay which is consider the bad cholesterol which it's not and you
normally shouldn't even be concerned about this but if you are there's two
types of LDL and these two types are basically the size of this particle okay
so type A is a very large type it's called large buoyant because it floats
type B is more of a small dense type okay this is the type that can
potentially invade the artery walls and create inflammation and damage and then
the response from that the immune response kicks in and then your body
starts laying down calcium cholesterol plaquing and even fibrin which is a
protein to start to form a clot this type which is a small dense type
okay that comes from consuming a high carbohydrate diet this type comes from
doing a high fat diet low carb diet so when you get on a high fat diet you
lower your carbs you may have more of this and so if your LDL is really really
high and you do a regular cholesterol test
they're not gonna differentiate that LDL they're just going to give you the total
number what you want to do is you want to get an advanced lipid panel or a test
to measure the particle size and you're gonna find that most of that is type A
not type B in fact my own wife Karen had high very high LDL and so we got this
advanced test and sure enough it was the majority of it was type A and how the
any type B so do you have to be concerned no but if you are concerned
get this advanced test done so you have the knowledge of really what's happening
and if you're still concerned that it's high in general and you want to lower it
there's a couple things you can do number one you can actually consume more
fiber in the form of vegetables because fiber tends to find with some of these
fats and allow them to be transported through the body
you could also reduce some of the extra fat that you're consuming like butter or
some other fats you can start reducing some of that to some degree but not
below 75 grams I don't recommend that all right so the bottom line is you
don't have to be concerned about this you should get this test and really
understand what's really happening all right thanks for watching