My health markers after 10 years on a low-carb, high-fat diet
In 2006 I started eating an LCHF diet – low carb and high fat – in other words a keto diet. I’ve now been on it for ten years, so it was time for the big checkup.
What has happened to me during these years? Here are the results from my repeated blood work:
Background
I’m basically healthy. But as a 44-year old dad to two small children, with some sleep deprivation and little time for exercise, and who regularly works 60-hour weeks, this is probably the time when my health should start to fail.
If LCHF doesn’t save me.
I’ve eaten an LCHF diet for ten years, at times very strict, at other times less strict. Plenty of butter, eggs, meat and heavy cream – and vegetables.
For the last two years I’ve also done intermittent fasting, 16:8, on most weekdays (I skip breakfast). Very occasionally I also do one or two full days of fasting.
Results
Here’s a summary of my results.
Comment
The wild rumors about how dangerous LCHF is long term don’t get validated in my blood work. After ten years on LCHF they are excellent, just as when I started. There simply aren’t any big changes during these years.
Many things are typical and the trends are also confirmed in studies on low-carb diets:
- Low triglycerides (good)
- Excellent HDL cholesterol levels
- Nice ApoB/AI ratio
- A low fasting blood sugar and a low HbA1c (good)
- Very low insulin levels, measured as C-peptide (probably excellent)
- Low IGF-1 levels (probably great)
- A normal weight and a normal waist circumference
- A low normal blood pressure (excellent)
To summarize, all problems associated with the metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes usually improve on LCHF. Obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high insulin levels and dangerously abnormal cholesterol numbers (high triglycerides and low HDL).
My test results also show that the inflammatory level in my body – as measured CRP – is non-detectible on all test occasions.
With these results in mind the fantasy talk about long-term risks with LCHF doesn’t seem to be valid, at least not in my case. Perhaps you’ll have to put up with me for 50 more years.
Weight
I’ve kept my weight at a normal weight level effortlessly and without any calorie counting during these years. I’ve gone up and down a few pounds within the normal range.
During my experiment with a strict LCHF diet and ketone measuring, I lost 12 lbs./5 kg. They came back when I returned to liberal LCHF, but disappeared again when I added intermittent fasting.
My experience is that the latter is clearly the easier alternative. At least if you’re like me, and not that sensitive to carbohydrates. So I will continue with moderate or liberal LCHF with the addition of 16:8 on weekdays.
What do you think?
What has happened to your health markers on LCHF?
More
Previously
My health markers after eight years on LCHF
Great cholesterol numbers after 4 years on an ultra-strict LCHF diet
What measure of fiber would you consume on a daily basis on average? Do you eat any probiotic foods are take any probiotic supplements? Do you feel your diet is contributes sufficient fiber for your personal health?
One thing I will mention though is that I am part of a group on Facebook called Reversing Diabetes (using LCHF) and most of the people on this group are aiming to get and keep their HbA1c under 5% and prefer their fasting BG to be 80-90mg/dl or even lower. They consider that the targets set for normal blood sugar ranges are actually set too high and that having FBG over 95 mg/dl signals increased insulin resistance and the beginning of the process that leads to Type 2 diabetes.
There is some research that shows that once your HbA1c goes over 5% your risk of heart disease begins to increase.
There is also research that shows an increase in risk for dementia with fasting blood glucose that is at the high end of normal - greater than 95 mg/dl.
Just wondering what you make of this. It i something that worries me as Alzheimer's disease runs in my family and so I am aiming to get my FBG and A1c as low as possible.
Do you think it's time to disconnect
AuthorityNutrition from your Blog
News?:
https://authoritynutrition.com/what-is-spelt/?utm_source=feedburner&#...
How does this post (and many others
he has posted recently) further the goals
of LCHF?
I've had two tests where I fasted for 4.5 days before having the test done, and had fasting blood glucose of 63 and 74. However, my "normal" fasting results (a 12 hour fast) are in the mid to upper 90s.
By the way, don't get your cholesterol tested after 4.5 days of fasting -- It's completely different from "normal" fasting. Check out these results, where 2/29 is after 12 hours of fasting and 3/4 is after 4.5 days of fasting:
Date TC LDL HDL TGs Non HDL Chol
mg/dL mg/dL mg/dL mg/dL mg/dL
2/29/16 168 103 52 65 116
3/4/16 188 121 36 157 152
My own fasting BG varies from about 90 - 99 most of the time now and my HbA1c was 5.2. However, I am just not sure if these numbers are good enough to reduce the risk of early onset Alzheimer's. Perhaps though, keeping ketones high, insulin low and not having any blood sugar spikes may be protective.
I don't think anyone knows the answer to your questions. No one knows what causes Alzheimer's and no one knows whether reduction in blood glucose/HbA1c/insulin resistance will prevent that. The studies you are referencing are epidemiological, meaning they cannot prove causation. And there are no studies I can find that have had people go on low carb diets, reduce their blood glucose/HbA1c/insulin resistance, and follow them for enough years to determine what happens.
And there are also studies out there indicating the opposite:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8463769
In this study, people with Alzheimer's had LOWER blood sugar:
"CONCLUSIONS:
AD was clearly different to other dementia patients. They had lower blood pressure, blood glucose and higher prevalence of hypothyreosis than the healthy, age-matched population. These findings may indicate that AD could be a hypometabolic disorder."
See this, too (though this is for diabetics with low blood sugar):
https://www.alzinfo.org/articles/blood-sugar-trigger-dementia-diabetes/
So, it's unclear to me that reducing blood sugar or HbA1c to very low levels will prevent Alzheimer's (or not cause any deleterious effects -- remember, without long term studies, one could be causing more harm by doing this).
It's time to add some advanced lipoprotein lab numbers. We can actually measure LDL particles ("LDL-P") nowadays, so there's no need to rely on the ancient Friedewald approximation (that falls apart for LCHF anyway).
The standard lipid panel is only about 50% useful. TC and LDL-C appear to be meaningless unless at extreme values. Of the useful lipid values, your HDL is trending adversely. TG could go lower.
I would want Fasting BG below 90 mg/dL. What really matters, postprandial, or a series thereof, is not shown, and would be impractical to post for every meal anyway, so we rely instead on HbA1c, which is trending adversely. I concur with the earlier remark about using a 5.0% target (until we have better data on A1c vs. all-cause mortality in an LCHF context).
TSH is in the TC & LDL-C rank: not terribly diagnostic - it's a pituitary test after all, and not an actual thyroid test. Anything over 1.5 mIU/L suggests that it would be worthwhile to get actual thyroid testing, including fT3, fT4, rT3 and TA. I don't know if those "T3" and "T4" numbers are free or total, so can't speculate on them.
Are you traveling more now? Circadian disruption and the difficulty of finding safe human food on the road could be significant factors here, and explain what are otherwise close to excellent numbers.
Your triglycerides are 43% higher. Your HDL (Helathy) cholesterol is LOWER, but your LDL (Unhealthy) is nearly 50% HIGHER.
Your fasting glucose is also higher than when you started LCHF, and at 97 you're still at the high end of normal. You're only 2 points below pre-diabetes.
Although your labs are all still within the normal range, I would expect all those numbers to go down. Mine did when I was eating low-carb, although I wasn't eating high fat. My test results improved enough that I was taken off cholesterol medication completely.
What your test results show is simply that your labs stayed within normal levels over a span of time, but that can also happen with a low-fat diet. You didn't show significant improvement in any areas, and some got worse.
I believe Andreas was aiming to demonstrate not so much that his numbers had improved as that they had stayed within normal range over 10 years and that his LCHF had not caused the damage that critics predict. His C-peptide and C reactive Protein levels are excellent.
See BobM's fascinating numbers that look "worse" after fasting for days.
The important thing is long term effects and outcomes as these results are simply surrogate markers which may not be relevant to outcome.
To look at the effects of LCHF we would need to follow lots of people over years, and look at disease burden all cause mortality.
In the mean time I think the main thing is to stay healthy, do whatever it takes to keep at a healthy weight, LCHF if carb sensitive /insulin resistant, exercise enough and live the life you have!
http://www.dietdoctor.com/where-the-ancient-egyptians-healthy-while-b...
It is imho one of the and maybe even the best presentation regarding grain consumption?
seem to get it lately. He seems
to be focused on "excess sugar"
and "refined carbohydrates."
He doesn't answer whether he
understands that a potato turns
to glucose in the blood, as does
wheat, processed or not.
I am pretty sure Dr. A E has seen the presentation?
As of January I started LCHF & three months later the results are as follows & my doctor was astounded
High blood pressure now normal
Cholesterol 4.5 low LDL high HDL Triglycerides normal
Fatty liver gone
Pre-diabetes gone
Works for me, I eat as much fat as I can & still drink as much beer as I ever have & still lost 5kg
I can't get the LDLP particle test done in the country where I live and have never met anyone here in the medical profession who doesn't still think low fat high carb is healthy eating! I can pretty much predict what a cardiologist will tell me to do including start swallowing statins.
Would appreciate any comments.
http://www.news-medical.net/news/20161116/High-fat-diet-may-have-nega...
http://www.thelocal.ch/20161116/swiss-study-finds-junk-food-damages-c...
Flo
I only ask this because from what I learned high fat diets can contribute in part to insulin resistance, which is why i'm skeptical for myself. I'm glad somebody showed how it affects them long term but i'm not entirely convinced this is a long term cure all for me.
As to the other numbers, except for CRP and A1c, they've all trended the "wrong" direction, even while staying within normal reference ranges. This may just be a sign of aging, or of a stressful lifestyle and lack of sleep, or possibly early warning signs. Or, it may be a sign that fixating on certain levels doesn't correlate with good health. At the very least, it shows transparency on the part of Dr. Eenfeldt.
Prior to this i was on Crestor for Cholesterol. Earlier this year I had a physical while still on a mild dose of Crestor and my numbers were total cholesterol 141 Trig 116 HDL 44 LDL 74
After 4 months with no Crestor and the LCHF diet I went back to my doctor and was retested just recently and as i said about 4 months into the Ketogenic diet and these were my numbers:
total cholesterol 243 Trig 175 HDL 48 LDL 180
This change in 4 months is concerning and my physician recommends going back on Crestor. What can I do to get these numbers back in a better level and what would that level be? It seems that the HDL should have increased more as the LDL did??
How can I go about finding a health care professional who could give me sound advise.
I don't disagree that a LCHF diet is very beneficial for some, I think it should be acknowledged, though, it isn't for everyone. It can actually have long lasting consequences for some people, especially women. There was a study done in 2015 that showed a carbohydrate load lower that 150grams per day will disrupt a woman's ability to produce luteinizing hormone. That was certainly my experience, and as you know, a disputed sexual hormonal cycle reaches into nearly every other system in a person's body.
So for those of you who feel well on this, I say carry on. Just please don't discount the experiences of those of us who have been made vey sick by it. Different people need different things. As a nutritionist, I strongly caution clients before they embark on this path.
Your experience with fertility in relation to carb intake is particularly interesting to me as others report just the opposite. I wonder what the underlying cause could be that your body seems to need carbs for proper hormone production. After all, hormones are a very complex issue. Let one be off and a whole cascade will follow. For me, I've been having symptoms of what would be called pre-menopause since my early 30ies, which is way too early (I'm 36 now). Severe night sweats, bad PMS that got better with taking progesterone, irregular cycles and so on. This year I went to a osteopath for shoulder pain. He noticed some tension over my uterus and reckoned it may actually be the cause of my hormonal problems. He worked on it just once and I breezed through several months of entirely PMS-free cycles and no need for progesterone since then, which remains a miracle to me. No change in diet had ever had any significant effect. However, my last cycle came in with PMS again, possibly caused by slip-ups in my diet I had the weeks before (mostly with baked goods, i.e. grains) which had also caused a substantial and painful inflammation of the intestinal lining.
So, there are so many factors that can mess up your hormones or reversely fix them. It's hard to say, if nutrition is always the only reason for hormonal problems and the fact that people react in opposite directions makes it so much harder to give the right advice. You always need to look at the bigger picture and see what else may be contributing to any problems that arise.
To avoid cardio vascular disease you need to watch your waist circumference, tricylcerides,HDL-cholesterol levels, HBA1C, and your ALT test results.
Please completely change your eating habits and avoid sugar and major carb sources, but of course you can have the odd treat(bread,cake, mars bar) once a week, but keep it at once a week.
People from areas that grow grains have genetically developed a tolerance and need for more carbs to be healthy. My mother is Italian, raised on the Mediterranean diet and was very healthy on that.. till she decided to go low fat along with the fad. She never had trouble with grains or carbs. I seem to have some problems going keto and not feeling well. I can lower carbs but only so much.
Some people do not know this but LDL has also 2 types:
1. Tiny LDL particles = BAD - Dangerous
2. Big LDL particles = GOOD - Safe
Which means, the LDL number you get in your results only show your total LDL and it doesn't show the amount of good&bad LDL! However the technology isn't there yet to show the exact amounts of good and bad LDLs in your blood.
BUT, there's one way you can make sure you have the Good LDLs:
1. HDL: Try to keep it around "55-60" or more ideally
2. TG: Try to have it under "90-100" .
*the closer to each other(HDL & TG), the better & the more your GOOD LDLs are!
Cant say more details but this is it and I think that's enough to know
and forget about the Reference numbers you see in your results! they're all nonsense! they don't mean anything!
Also, when we see our own GP, what exactly do we ask for?
Cholesterol hardly improved over the 30 days. My situation is that my doctor advised going back on statins because my risk factor was 25% and I have high chance of developing pancreatitis.
I am at a loss at the moment, I must admit that I am confused to say the least, I was hoping that my cholesterol/Triglycerides would improve on the LCHF diet, I don't want to let it put a dampener on it.. thank you.
T3 was at 51 below the low end of OK range at 61. With Sea Iodine it is now 71.
Some experimentation with foods for breakfast has revealed that I work fine on a bowl of rice (blood sugar 83) but surprisingly oats put me at around 110
The problem I have with LCHF is that I cannot find any real long term studies of people on such a diet. All the long living groups of people or Blue Zones do not live on a high fat diet
Something I am enjoying with the LCHF community is that, for the most part, there is an understanding that every person's body is different. We need to play around to find the best way of eating for us individually. I am doing well with LCHF. I hope we who are helped by it respect and support those who aren't.