This Healthy Diet Spikes Cholesterol

This is the biggest diet trend these days.

People love how easy it is to follow and claim it cures everything from diabetes to cardiovascular disease and even mental diseases.

Best of all, they say it melts body fat like nothing else.

However, a study in the American Journal of Preventive Cardiology reveals a dark side to this popular diet. It spikes your cholesterol, leading to stroke and heart attack.

The ketogenic diet is a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet that is designed to shift the body’s metabolism into a state called ketosis. The goal is to prompt the body to use fat as its primary fuel source instead of carbohydrates.

It typically includes high-fat foods such as meats, fatty fish, eggs, nuts and seeds, oils, avocados, and full-fat dairy products.

It restricts or eliminates foods high in carbohydrates, including grains, sugars, fruits (except for small portions of low-carb fruits), legumes, starchy vegetables, and most processed foods.

Scientists carried out an investigation to find out whether a ketogenic diet was heart-healthy.

They examined the medical records of patients who had visited a cardiology department with a diagnosis of high cholesterol via a blood test. They also checked their doctors’ notes to find out which patients reported following a keto diet.

They found 17 patients, 11 male and six female, who were following a high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet. The patients’ average age was 46 years, and 14 of the patients were Caucasian. Three patients had a history of documented coronary artery disease, and one had experienced a prior heart attack.

Their body mass index (BMI) ranged from 14.83 to 43.87 kg/m2, with an average of 27 kg/m2.

At the beginning of the study, the 17 participants had an average LDL cholesterol score of 129 mg/dL. LDL cholesterol is the unhealthy type that is usually called bad cholesterol.

This is what the scientists found about keto dieting.

1. Those who diligently followed the keto diet for an average of 12.3 months had an average LDL cholesterol score of 316 mg/dL with a range of 210–810 mg/dL, representing a 245% increase.

2. Those who stopped the diet early, at an average of nine months, had an average LDL cholesterol of 142.7 mg/dL.

3. More than half of the participants who dropped the keto diet early managed to reduce their LDL cholesterol by 220% purely from the change in diet, with no exercise at all.

These findings are alarming, as it shows an increase in LDL cholesterol in keto dieters. Worse still, the longer they remained on the diet, the more their bad cholesterol increased, to the point of being 2.5 times higher than when they started.

Fortunately, you can normalize your cholesterol in days by cutting out ONE single ingredient you didn’t even know you were consuming…