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geezer, it's only easy if you are committed to making most of your food from scratch. The moment you start to buy pre-prepared anything you are screwed. Same with most restaurants. Restaurants also like to load up the veggie oils and the sugar, too.
WGH - I read a lot of current research on heart disease and it's pretty clear now what's driving it. In the old days they thought it was elevated cholesterol. But the problem was that half the people with heart attacks had normal or low cholesterol (I had low cholesterol when I had mine). Then they broke it up to HDL, LDL, and Triglycerides. That was somewhat more predictive, but not a whole lot. Then the dived into the LDL a bit more and discovered subfractions. Turns out that large LDL is moderately predictive, but small, dense ldl is highly predictive. Even more recently they have discovered that oxidized LDL is even more predictive than the small dense ldl. So, what drives small ldl? Refined carbs and sugar. What causes oxyLDL? It's still under investigation, but it seems to be that the LDL is not cleared from the system effectively. Actually, to fully explain it, I need to back up a bit. All ldl starts life as VLDL, or Very Low Density LDL (or Very Large LDL). It's job is to transport stuff like fat-soluble vitamins to your cells, along with cholesterol and other fat based nutrients (cholesterol is actually used by your cells to maintain cell integrity). After depositing it, then it becomes IDL, or intermediate density LDL, which still has some payload to drop off to different cells. Finally it becomes plain old LDL, and at that point should be recycled by the liver to become VLDL again. In people with heart disease, this doesn't happen, the LDL particles remain in the blood stream and become small, dense ldl. This small LDL is then highly prone to oxidation, and it is the oxidized ldl which penetrates the artery walls (because it is smaller than the endothelial barrier), and once imbedded there it starts to rot. This rot is seen as an infection by the body, so it sends white T-cells, which attack the necrosis. As part of this attack the become foam cells and leave plaque residue as part of their programmed cell death.Net result, you end up with plaque because your liver stops handling LDL properly. So, the question is, what causes the liver to stop working right? Being overwhelmed by toxins. If you consider that alcohol and fructose act on the liver in the exact same manner, the mechanism becomes clear. If you drink lots of alcohol, obviously it damages your liver and you die young. Well, we now know that fructose acts on the liver in the same manner. To put this in perspective, consider that a 12 oz can of coca cola contains 39 grams of sugar, and about half of that breaks down to fructose, that's 20 grams of fructose hitting your liver hard, and fast. Now compare that to wine - a glass of wine has about 8 grams of alcohol. So, you'd have to drink more than 2 glasses of wine to equal a single coke. And so it goes, with cookies, cake, fruit juice, flavored yogurt, candy bars, etc, etc, etc....Wheat also hits the liver pretty hard via lectins, which are natural pesticides. Modern wheat is bread with higher amounts of lectins, which are toxins to us and are detoxed in the liver. People who have gluten intolerance are actually sensitive to the lectins that are bound into the proteins in wheat. Gluten is one protein (of at least 32!!) that have to be detoxed by the liver. Consider that we eat massive amount of wheat based cereal, pasta, bread, crackers, and baked goods like cupcakes, brownies, donuts, etc... and it's clear that sugar and wheat pack a 1-2 punch that's quite potent and does real damage, particularly since we tend to eat these things several times a day, every day of the week, for year after year. It's amazing our livers don't break down sooner, it's pretty damn resilient when you consider what we do to it.PS, I should also mention glycated LDL - this seems to go hand in hand with oxyLDL in the smLDL subfraction. What is glycated LDL? Well, glycation is protien that has been modified (damaged) by bonding to sugar! This is the reason that diabetics have WAY more heart disease risk than any other group - they produce glycated LDL like crazy. Glycated LDL, oxydized LDL, small dense LDL - it all comes back to sugar (and wheat).
Oh, BTW I am stoked - I just got back some of my most recent round of test results from my cardiologist - I've had somewhat elevated liver function in the past and elevated homocysteine, neither of which are great for you. So I started eating more eggs and liver because the choline in them is used preferentially during the methylation process. Betain (from spinach and other leafy greens) can also be used as a 2nd choice, but betain's conversion leads to higher waste products (ie, homocysteine). Homocysteine is a fairly strong predictor of future heart attacks. I'm happy to say that both my Homocysteine and my liver function tests are at an all-time low. I still eat tons of spinach and other leafy greens, but it looks like the added eggs and liver had a very positive affect on me. Anyway, just wanted to share some good news....
I'm very, very curious to see my VAP since I've been loading up on the butter, eggs, liver, and bacon lately. I still eat lots of fish and take fish oil, so my triglycerides are almost certainly low, but I'm curious to see how the recent changes affect the smLDL and my overall HDL scores.
John,Good points on the dehydrated eggs and milk - that stuff is awful for us. And if you travel and stay at hotels - guess what, the scrambled eggs they serve for breakfast is almost always from dehydrated eggs. Avoid!Re: frying eggs - if you use butter or coconut oil, it resists oxidation and is much better than using a veggie oil. Also, the cholesterol in eggs is in the yolk, not in the white. So as long as you only fry your eggs sunny side up, or over easy, there's almost zero oxidation that occurs.
AVOID SOY AND SOY OIL BASED SUPPLEMENTS!!
geezer,You are luckier than most.
Wonder if you can poach a scrambled egg? Don't see why not. Might try that tomorrow.
Interesting thread!So which are the "least bad" vegetable oils?If I need an "oil" for food, my typical breakdown is:Butter for anything prepared in a pan, not margarine or other similar vegetable based optionsExtra virgin olive oil for anything prepared on the grillCanola oil only for salad dressings (and thus not subject to heat, and even then I usually cut it with some EVOO)And I go out of my way to buy organic (while being very thankful to live in an area where there is more competition to provide organic food than in much of the country, making it less painful to purchase - especially when on sale)
And another thing, my poor niece has developed an allergy to gluten. Try and find some food that doesn't have gluten in it.
Data? Trends? Analysis? D.D.
