Restoring Liver Function with LCHF?
I received an e-mail from Eduarda Castro, whose husband was diagnosed with Gilbert’s syndrome when he was a teenager.
This is a relatively common and benign hereditary cause of sporadic jaundice (yellowing of the skin due to elevated bilirubin levels) caused by the liver not being able to get rid of bilirubin at the normal pace.
Here’s her story on how her husband normalized his liver function:
The Email
Dear Andreas,
Me and my husband have done a Low Carb LOW Fat diet for the last couple of years but for the last month we changed it to an LCHF diet.
We had some blood tests done last week and we were astonished with my husbands results. He was diagnosed Gilbert’s syndrome when he was a teenager and now (he is 36 years old) for the first time, his bilirubin hit normal levels.
His doctor always told him to avoid sugar, fat and not to exercise too much. For years he followed his advice.
For the last two years (on LCLF) the only recommendation he followed was to avoid sugar and fat. He exercised 3 times a week. His bilirubin decreased.
Pink and red lines denote the lab’s reference range for direct bilirubin. Weight stable from 2008 to present.
Over the last month he has changed to a LCHF diet. He started to eat a lot of fat (butter, olive oil, coconut oil, red meat, oily fish, avocado…) and continued to exercise about 3 times a week.
We though this might interest you so I’m including a spreadsheet with the data and a couple of graphs with his results over time.
Please feel free to contact us if you want any more details.
We love the work you are doing and we are planning on creating a blog in Portugal to spread the word. ;)
Kind regards!Eduarda Castro
https://www.facebook.com/castro.eduarda
Comment
Very cool! I don’t know if this is just a fluke or if the LCHF actually helped with the Gilbert’s syndrome. It does help in fatty liver disease so who knows, it might.
Have you heard of anything like this?
PS
Do you have a success story you want to share on this blog? Send it (photos appreciated!) to andreas@dietdoctor.com. Please let me know if it’s OK to publish your photo and name or if you’d rather remain anonymous.
Eduarda: Did the patient also had to go on a starvation diet to get diagnosed? I hated that part.
The whole thing is so simple that most doctors and professors dealing with any kind of liver disease should be ashamed if they cannot prevent gall bladder removal or transplantations.
When the liver cleans the blood it binds the toxins in intricate ways so that it can pass out to the bile without being re-absorbed in the intestines and re-circulate.
But liver excretions - gall or bile - is not taking place just/when the liver is "full" of extracted toxins. Instead it takes place as a response to fat digestion, as this is a "dual functioning organ" allowing emulsification of fat at same time as it cleans itself.... Smart and preserving. But if fat consumption declines, bile flow also goes down....
The intermediate result is a thickening and slower flowing bile, which should indicate that something is wrong. (Bad temper one day will be seen as a warning to increase fat in diet ?) Adding to this as the occasional high fat intake can result in gallstones, directly formed from the oversaturated slow flowing bile, the standard doctor recommendation is to avoid fat even more, something that naturally accelerates the deterioration, and then just one splash out with a little fat can be enough to trigger gall bladder removal. Anyway, wth a continued low fat diet the gall bladder is hardly needed! Yet the liver keeps losing ts functions as its flow output is still triggered by fat...
That the solution is to restore a "normal" fat intake so that bile becomes thinner and cannot any more form stones but instead slowly dissolve them looks like a natural solution, at least for me.
Great to hear a practical good result to these unnecessary and painful sufferings, with and without transplantations!
As you see in the definition, it is not a disease: my wife has the condition and only has a better tan than I do. What I do not understand - and find fascinating - is that according to the textbook definition, "starvation" may increase the bilirubin to the point of producing some jaundice. Starvation is a ketogenic state and yet, so is a LCHF diet (if relatively severe).
I do not question the ability of a LCHF diet to cure fatty liver within days (where a starvation high carb diet will take months to achieve the same results) and Anne Robertson's results are extraordinary. (Bravo Anne, remarquable decision d'etre allee a contre-courant!). This is getting really fascinating.
I am beginning to question the medical dogma. In this "dehydration and starvation", was dehydration the real culprit? Was the ketogenic state actually somehow protective against dehydratation? Would the condition have been worse without fasting (if this was true fasting, that is, please see below). I do not know.
Has anyone with Gilbert's syndrome other than Eduarda done this measurement with either a ketogenic diet or some science-based fasting (and if so, what type of fasting? The 2/5 fast, the daylong fast with all food consumed in one big evening meal versus the religious many days starvation fast (just water or, worse, fruit juices and fruit "fast")...
Fasting is something with many definitions and means very different things for different people. Hindis fast regularly for religious reasons. But their fast includes lots of carbs (fruits and fruit juices). This cannot have the same effect as a low carb fast. So I wonder if Eduarda did not put a finger on a flaw in medical knowledge. If anyone with Gilbert syndrome has done something similar to what she has done, please post it. It would be most fascinating.
And by the way, this "limited exercise" necessity is hogwash. My wife is an athlete who does intense interval training and gruesome cardio every day with no appearance of jaundice. Though she eats a protective LCHF diet, she has not always and even when on a high carb diet, she was never significantly jaundiced despite her exercise. But I'm happy she's now protected by LCHF.
I had this 'harmless' genetic condition called Gilberts Syndrome. Harmless is in brackets because on the bad days, nausea, light headedness, dizziness and other symptoms can be very outspoken. Days without mild nausea are are very rare in my case. Please keep in mind that this is an n=1 observation !
When I started eating Low carb, after watching Andreas talk, I just gave it a try. I did not had to lose weight or anything else but what I noticed after a while is that the nausea went away.
This topic might be an interesting one to discuss with Prof. Richard D. Feinman
1) superior energy source i.e. more ATP produced per unit of O2 used
2) less, let us call it, toxic waste associated with production of this energy from ketones
3) switch to expression of whole plethora of, let us call it (again) health-friendly genes associated with fat (ketones) burning for fuel.
I have over 100 patients on LG-IF and much prefer it over the 5/2 pattern because it establishes a CONSISTENT pattern of eating that is easy to stick to once the person is committed to the program.
Triglycerides normalise very quickly and fat loss occurs in a steady maaner over a few weeks. Greatest result so far- a male of 34 weighing 117 Kg, now 91 and muscular/lean after 5 months on this program and early metabolic syndrome- GONE!
Medicine is being challenged and changed. Thank Heavens.
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http://www.sugaraholics.com
http://highfatlowcarbrecipes.wordpress.com
And if you special fond of Avocados.. make it a veggie to your meals!
One way we have come to enjoy avocado is as a sauce for fish and (with different seasoning, such as minced garlic) for meat. I make an emulsion using raw egg yolk (pastured hen) a citrus juice, the avocado, all hand blended to a sauce and then I blend in plenty of extra virgin olive oil. This makes an incredible emulsion and the yolk and olive oil boosts the fat and improves the fatty acid profile. Grass fed flat iron steak with garlic avocado sauce is divine.
Correctly interpreted also gall stones could then become a rare condition with an obvious solution and gall bladder removals could soon rightly go into the annals of medicine, where good organs were either removed or cut down. The procedure make good neighbor to lobotomi, electric shock treatments, bleeding,... and whatever other strange medical methods could be implemented and backed by the contemporary medical authority at the time.