I was watching a video by Dave Feldman (where he had to keep pausing to eat skittles, it was great) and he talked about fructose malabsorption causing him digestive issues. I don’t think I have that problem which is why I haven’t had really bad problems during this phase. Again it seems that I dodged another bullet for which I’m grateful. I’m still anxious to get back into keto. Yesterday I bought the brisket and ribs for the meetup, they’re currently in the Sous-Vide cooking for a few days and I’ll finish them in the smoker on Saturday.
Got my Coconut Oil week blood tests back – REALLY interesting stuff. I’ve entered the data into the spreadsheet (check it out!) but here are some of the highlights:
- I hit an all-time low LDL-P (particle count): 567. It’s down 43% from 996 the week before. ? (you’re looking for under 1000)
- All time low LDL-C: 56, down from 78. ?
- I brought back down my triglycerides from 148 to 103 ? (you want this below 100)
- My HDL-C went WAY up (52% to be exact): from 40 to 61 ??? (you want this as high as possible)
- A1c is still steady at 4.8 ?
- Fasting insulin went WAY up, from 5.2 to 8.4 – the highest I’ve recorded so far. ?
This test was the first time I saw a departure from the previous inversion pattern of LDL-C and Triglycerides which would go up and down opposite of each other. I don’t know if it was the high amount of MCTs in the coconut oil or what. Regardless, I can handily say that consuming almost entirely saturated fat for a week made my blood tests look AMAZING.
Here are some of the graphs from the spreadsheet:
Interesting results. I’d love to know your opinion on which you think is best to use in KC after all is said and done.
I absolutely still recommend avocado oil and/or heavy whipping cream. They taste the best and seem to produce great results.
How about if I’m already adapted to MCT oil from a GI perspective? I’ve been mixing 1 TBSP of MCT oil in with 1/4 heavy cream and for me, it turns out delicious and after a solid 6 weeks, I’m finally past the ill effects of consuming MCT oil. Any benefits to switching to avocado oil instead of MCT?
Sorry, what I was talking about was using liquid coconut oil or MCT oil for ALL your fat calories (which is what I was doing) – using a tablespoon or so isn’t a problem at all.
Thanks for the data which I find quite interesting. A couple of questions/comments though, it would be nice to overlay the serum ketone numbers with the lipid panel(s)/other data as one could perhaps see correlations that saturated oil (coconut) and other oil source in November provided ketones in excess of 4 mmol/dL or other correlations. It is obviously difficult to manage all variables beyond calorie intake alone, i.e. exercise, timing of meals or fasting periods, etc.
I know that you are considering the variable of fat source for a period of one week, but is there evidence that you are still in an adaptation mode, i.e. not reached a steady state in such a short time period? Or does the body need more time to adapt to different sources of energy material? In particular it appears that the coconut oil provides very good lipid panel numbers but the insulin response has increased? Is it ascending, descending or at steady state? The inflammation marker CRP also improved but insulin went up? Any thoughts?
It’s hard to correlate the two due to the divergent scales and sampling frequencies – you can look at both graphs and see some fun correlations though.
Dave Feldman has demonstrated that is takes about 3 days for diet to massively change lipids: http://cholesterolcode.com/the-capstone-experiment-its-time-to-rethinkldl/ – I figured 7 was giving it extra time to stabilize but unless someone did an experiment where they tested blood (at $300 a pop) every day for 2 weeks it’s difficult to be absolutely certain.