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This doesn't surprise me. It's pretty clear that a whole foods plant based diet is the way to go if you're serious about your health. (I'm not. I'm vegan, so I get some of the benefits, but I also eat like crap, lots of processed meals and other such garbage, so I'm not super healthy)
But yeah, if you want your cholesterol to decrease, the easiest way is to switch to a whole foods plant based diet!!
The problem with a lot of these papers is they use intermediate endpoints rather than actual hard end points. They're making the assumption that decreasing LDL is a good thing. That's an intermediate endpoint, nobody actually cares about their LDL, they care about their health span and lifespan.
Spoiler: LDL and Cholesterol in general is not a disease, it's poor metabolic health that is the actual cardiovascular problem.
I.e. https://doi.org/10.3390/metabo14010073 Oreo cookie treatment lowers LDL cholesterol more than high-intensity statin therapy in a lean mass hyper-responder on a ketogenic diet: a curious crossover experiment
This stunt paper illustrates how silly it is to focus on a intermediate metric. Oreos are not health food, I should hope that is obvious
Brb. Gonna eat oats for two days then switch to steak, half and half, and candy.
Gonna have to remember this before my next semi-mandatory yearly biometric screening for work. My LDL is the only thing wrecking my score.
My LDL is the only thing wrecking my score.
Cholesterol, and LDL specifically, are not a disease. If you're metabolically healthy, LDL is good for you. Check your insulin sensitivity (homa-ir, or tg/HDL ratio, or fasting insulin) to see what type of ldl you have.
Cholesterol is necessary. You will die without cholesterol. Cholesterol is produced in the liver, delivers fat throughout the body, and then gets recycled in the liver. If something damages the cholesterol during this process, oxidation, or glycation, the LDL will not be recycled by the liver. This is one of the patterns of elevated LDL, it's the damage LDL that's the problem, it's the systematic damage in your body. The LDL isn't the fault. It's a symptom. If your LDL isn't damaged (as seen by insulin sensitivity) then it's really not a problem.
Check your insulin sensitivity (homa-ir, or tg/HDL ratio, or fasting insulin) to see what type of ldl you have.
Unfortunately that's not something measured by the company that my employer sells the data to. Or at least it isn't a stat that's revealed back to me.
Almost all checkups do a lipid panel. You just have to look at your triglycerides and your HDL, take the ratio of them TG over HDL. You want that to be less than two, and for bonus points you want that to be less than one. Anything above two you have room for improvement. This ratio is a fairly good analog for insulin sensitivity and metabolic health.
Signs of poor metabolic health:
So 2 days of eating almost exclusively 300g of oats sounds like a doable bargain for 10% less LDL cholesterol. I wonder how repeatable this is throughout the year.