Confused about cholesterol? Not anymore! Read through these posts to get the facts. What’s the truth about how diet affects cholesterol? Is it really okay to eat red meat, butter, bacon, and other fatty animal foods? What if your cholesterol goes way up on a keto diet? Is high cholesterol dangerous if you’re otherwise in excellent health? Do you automatically need a statin drug if you have high cholesterol? And WHY is cholesterol such a controversial topic?! Find out in this collection about all things cholesterol.
Reviewed by Dr. Eric Westman, MD, MHS: June 2025 For decades, a pervasive fear has gripped our dietary consciousness: the fear of fat and cholesterol. We have been diligently trimming the fat off our steaks, opting for low-fat everything, and viewing a pat of butter as a direct assault on
Introduction Dr. Eric Westman: From time to time, it’s my pleasure to interview people who I think are movers and shakers in the low-carb world. Often they’re doctors, but in this case, this is a mover and shaker, not a doctor. Dave Feldman: No, I’m certainly not. Background: Dave Feldman
In my office, I’m seeing more and more people who aren’t trying to lose weight and they’re not trying to reverse diabetes – they’re worried about their cholesterol. I just want to remind everyone of Ketogenic: The Science of Therapeutic Carbohydrate Restriction in Human Health – the textbook I’m pretty
Cholesterol is necessary for life. I learned that if a baby is born without the cholesterol pathway – the ability to make cholesterol – it can’t survive. Cholesterol is that essential to life. How it became thought of as a bad thing, while taught like it’s truth, it really is
For the new year, I thought I would take a little time to address the most common issue for people coming to me these days. What do you think that might be? The worry about a certain blood test is on just about everyone’s mind. It’s not unsurprising because, for
I’m going to introduce some ideas about cholesterol and it’s probably going to be a regular feature to have live updates on cholesterol because it is on everyone’s mind. There was a really interesting paper, titled “Association of Lipid, Inflammatory, and Metabolic Biomarkers with Age at Onset for Incident Coronary
How did we come to believe that saturated fat was the root cause of increasing blood cholesterol and, more specifically, LDL cholesterol? It’s an interesting story that all started with feeding rabbits cholesterol. There were some researchers who thought through very carefully how to evaluate food. Rabbits developed a lesion
What is the correct term for a cholesterol test? There are many different terms and names, which is why it’s so confusing to people. When you go to your doctor and they check a cholesterol level, really what they do is they order a test called a lipid profile. Lipid
Total cholesterol is checked by testing LDL, HDL, and triglyceride levels. Can you unpack for us the facts of why we test these and how to interpret the results? Sure. It’s important to test a fasting sample, meaning one that’s checked after not eating for 12 hours or so (and
Why is it important to understand your cholesterol profile ratios and which ratios are important to look at? First of all, let’s just go over what a ratio is. A ratio is the division of one number by another. A ratio is a fraction. BMI, for example, is a ratio.
