Can the Paleo diet really triple your HDL levels?

Can a change in diet to eating only 3 ounces of animal protein at each meal (or less) with vegetables and medium chain fatty acid fats with omega 3 fatty acids actually help to raise your HDL (good cholesterol) levels and lower your LDL (bad cholesterol levels)? Today, Sunday August 21, 2011 on the Sacramento KSTE radio show, Carey Nosler's Wide World of Health, the noon guest speaker, Jonathan Carey, a runner in his mid-forties, tripled his good cholesterol HDL levels from the thirties to the nineties. How did he do it? By switching his diet.

In fact, he has a website with articles and research, "Triple Your HDL Cholesterol." You can check out the diet that worked for him under the link on his website marked 'research.' Carey Nosler's Sacramento radio show each Sunday afternoon features the fitness and health author's guests. See, Listen to The Wide World of Health online.

After a day or two the archived radio show is uploaded as a podcast that you can download and listen to as an MP3 file. Programs are listed by date. Check out this program on how a change of diet tripled this runner's HDL levels and lowered his too-high LDL levels when statins didn't work for today's guest, Jonathan Carey.

Interestingly, Jonathan Carey is tested for cholesterol every 3 to 6 months, also having been tested this way between 2008-2011. If you follow a similar type of testing, perhaps it's one way to figure out what works for you, since everybody's response to food may be individual. In his interview, Jonathan Carey did not mention his blood type, but he did report that he has been a runner for years.

What worked for him in his diet was fiber. For example, he ate psyllium, which is a fiber, and that it raised his HDL by7%. So most people realize that often fiber works to raise your HDL levels. The psyllium also reduced his LDL cholesterol by 7% as well. Another food ingredient often put in canned foods such as coconut milk, to thicken it and often put into ice cream and puddings to thicken foods is guar gum. In fact, his website reports that guar gum also reduced his LDL and raised his HDL by 7%. And there might have been a 'probable' small boost in HDL from taking taurine.

Carey also reports on his site that digestive enzymes reduced LDL by 5% and raised HDL by 5%, according to his blood tests that he gets every three months. He also ate lots of nuts, for example, Brazil nuts eaten for their selenium content and macadamia nuts eaten for their omega 3 fatty acids value. He used the nuts for snacking. But the main emphasis in the radio interview that Jonathan Carey reported was his Paleo diet, which as he writes on his website, "doubled HDL levels, slashed TG and VLDL levels."

His website also reports that he is going to be taking 5,000mg of vitamin D3 each day to increase his levels to normal. And his goal is to optimize cortisol, omega 3, and serotonin levels in his blood. He wants to get tested to find out whether he has sub-optimal thyroid anti-bodies, and he wants to find out whether he needs to reverse his T3 levels. All these might inspire you to get tested to see what you may have to change about your body's response to certain foods.

On his website he notes that he'll be reducing his protein to just 3 ounces per meal. This idea is similar to what appears as a suggestion in the nutrition book, Primal Body, Primal Mind because in that book, the author suggests eating only up to 3 ounces of animal protein at each meal and not a lot of meat.

The reason why you don't need a lot of meat at each meal is that animal protein gets converted to sugar. And you don't want to eat like a Neanderthal eating almost only meat, simply because all that animal protein (called xs protein) is going to turn into sugar or at least the body's response to a 'ton' of meat is going to be similar to what happens if you're eating a 'ton' of sweets. So keep the meat less than or up to only 3 ounces per meal, if you eat meat, fish, or eggs at each meal.

Eating berries is okay, since blueberries are supposed to be 'brain' food. But without eliminating fruit, Jonathan Carey reports that he will be reducing his non-berry fruit. Does this sound like a Cro-Magnon cave man Paleo diet? If it does, there's an exception. He's adding coconut oil and ghee to his diet and will get tested to find out whether the medium chain fatty acids in coconut oil also boosts his HDL and what effects the clarified butter, ghee will have on his body. People interested in butter oil also need to know the difference between butter oil from grass-fed animals and clarified butter, ghee.

Weight lifting and anaerobic exercises will be increased by Jonathan Carey in order to build more muscle. At 47, this works fine. But if you're in the age 70 to 80+ age range as our family is, you wonder whether exercise works without human growth hormone, which we don't take, and which is of course not mentioned on his website or in the Sacramento radio interview, so it's assumed Carey doesn't take it either.

You might want to know what did not work for him as far as raising his HDL and lowering his LDL cholesterol levels. He found dark chocolate addictive. It also made him gain weight. He also did not get any benefit from red wine and found that it did the same as the dark chocolate--weight gain and addictive. With all the ads you hear about polycosanol which is supposed to raise HDL levels, it had no affect on his HDL, according to his website. Polycosanol is extracted from raw sugar cane. And also benechol did not work, according to his website.

The point is that you have to find out what works for your body type at the chemical, molecular, and metabolic levels. The best way to do that is to find out what makes you feel well and what your blood tests reveal when you eat to raise your HDL.

Jonathan Carey did have good results when he eliminated grains and legumes from his diet. He added bison meat to his diet and added psyllium, macadamia nuts, and fish oil with good results. You can check out his results such as a good result from adding fish to his diet and by reducing grains. He cut down his bread intake by 70 percent and stopped eating bagels with remarkable results.

Before, when he was on a very low fat vegetarian diet his HDL was in the thirties with a high LDL cholesterol. After eating more of a Paleo diet his HDL tripled and is now in the nineties, which is almost unheard of among men with a family history of low HDL and genetic predispositions to the issues of individuals having a low HDL and high LDL. But he shows that diet can change the numbers on blood tests for the better, if the diet matches the needs of a person's specific body responses. He did increase vegetables.

The point is not to confuse his diet with a diet that focuses on eating mostly meat. That isn't so. Checkout the website to see what worked for him. Check out his blog, "Triple Your HDL," and read about his family health history, diet changes, and why he switched from a low-fat largely vegetarian to a paleo diet to correct his own genetic predisposition to high cholesterol.

After reading “Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease” in 1992, he adjusted my diet to experiment with low fat, mostly vegan meals. But the results weren't good, and he was prescribed a statin which made his health worsen. Instead, he wanted to show his doctors that nutrition changes alone could change his HDL and LDL levels for the better. As a long-time runner, the part exercise played in changing his HDL and LDL levels didn't really change his cholesterol levels that much until he changed his diet.

That's why you see runners with unhealthy LDL and HDL levels for the various runners in spite of what they eat. Apparently, what changed his LDL and HDL levels for the healthier was the diet change. It's important to get tested to see what's working, and he's tested every three months to see whether what he adds to his diet makes a change in the cholesterol levels. Each person is different. His blog is about what works for him and what the test results reveal. He also has research and footnotes links on his website.