Month: November 2013

It’s the Holidays! Don’t Be a…YouKnowWhat

Just as a puppy can be more of a challenge than a gift, so too can the holidays. 
–John Clayton

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

As Thanksgiving approaches and Christmas is not far behind, I have been noticing the articles online: including a very grudgingly-written one bout how good manners dictates we provide food at our holiday for the vegetarian, for the people allergic to dairy, for the recovering alcoholic, for the people with nut allergies, for weird Aunt Sophie–and now, to top it all off, we have to accommodate those gluten-free nutjobs.

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Finishing Up Cholesterol

Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.
–Albert Einstein
When I say “finish up” of course I don’t mean that there’s nothing more to say. There’s always more that someone can say. Hence the continued existence of the Internet. And Alex Baldwin.
In the last few posts we talked about what cholesterol is, why you need it, why LDL and total cholesterol levels are not reliable markers for heart health, why HDL and your ratio of HDL to triglycerides is important, and that the real culprit in heart issues is ultimately inflammation.

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Knowledge, Not Numbers #2

…High cholesterol levels are really a symptom, not a cause of cardiovascular disease. Not understanding this fact, a lot of people take medicine to try to lower their LDL cholesterol levels artificially. Attempting to control through medication the enzymes that produce elevated cholesterol is analogous to playing pool with a rope.

–Dr. Doug McGuff

Let’s review.

We’ve already discussed how both LDL and HDL are lipoproteins that carry cholesterol around the body. LDL carries it to areas damaged by inflammation; HDL carries it back out.

When LDL particles are big and fluffy in size, they can easily be carried away by HDL and they are not so susceptible to oxidation, human “rusting,” that damages them and you. Very small LDL, sometimes known as VLDL, is very susceptible to oxidation and cannot be easily carried away by HDL. (Of course all this is very simply put.)

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Knowledge, Not Numbers

A good decision is based on knowledge, not numbers.

–Plato

In the previous post we discussed some important foundational ideas when talking about cholesterol. Today we’ll start going into all this just a bit deeper, starting with what all those numbers mean and why I say that your total cholesterol number is meaningless for you, personally.

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The Earth is Flat and Cholesterol Will Kill You

In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research.
–Ronald Fisher
One of the most pervasive myths out there is that having high cholesterol will give you heart disease, and that eating cholesterol gives you high cholesterol. Like all good myths, there is a kernel–a small kernel–of truth to this. But in the main I’m just going to tell you right up front right now: this is baloney.

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No Hospitality For Trouble II

The world is your cow.  But you
have to do the milking.

–New England Proverb

So what should we eat? There is still a lot of disagreement about that, even within those circles that advocate ditching grains, sugar and excessive fruit and eating lots of healthy fat. So where do we turn if we want to eat like out ancestors used to?

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No Hospitality For Trouble

You can’t keep trouble from coming, but you don’t have to give it a chair to sit on. 

–New England Proverb

When I was visiting Brother #3 in this summer he asked me:

Is there anything your magic diet doesn’t help with?

We both laughed–it was meant in jest, and he himself had seen some real benefits from changing up his way of eating. But what I said and thought at the time is: No. It does help just about everything.

Even though you weren’t there at the time, I’d like to clarify that statement for you. By it, I do not mean that I think eschewing grains, sugars, and Frankenfats and eating lots of saturated fat and meat is a miracle cure of any ailment. There are three things I do mean:

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Sång till Norden

Ensam är stark. “Alone is strong.” 

–Swedish Proverb

Forgive the long silence. I cracked my head on a wall last week and writing has been difficult till now.

My favorite Swedish proverb is actually Det finns inget dåligt väder, bara dåliga kläder. “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.” However there’s no doubt that the Swedes are standing alone just now; they are certainly also standing strong.

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