Rethinking Red Meat and LDL Cholesterol

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Transcript: 

Have you been told that you need to stop eating red meat to improve your LDL cholesterol?
This is advice that's given out. A lot of times when individuals go to get their cholesterol checked and they find that they have slightly elevated LDL levels. Now honestly, this isn't advice that I would give out myself as a dietician. If I'm looking at your LDL cholesterol, I'm definitely not gonna recommend or tell you that you have to cut out all red meat or go on a completely vegan or vegetarian diet.
This honestly is pretty outdated advice. And today we're gonna talk about what LDL cholesterol is and what you can actually do in order to decrease your cardiovascular risk.
I'm Susan Lopez and this is the Tactical Nutrition and Performance podcast where we help tactical athletes bridge the gap between nutrition, metabolism, sleep stress, and training so they can perform better and live longer.
Now, if you're tuning into this podcast, it's very likely that the title of it piqued your interest, and this is because it's really common for individuals to be told, especially in the tactical community, that they need to improve their LDL cholesterol levels.
Now we're gonna talk a little bit about today what LDL cholesterol really is and what you actually need to do with your nutrition and some lifestyle things to actually improve it.
And we're gonna talk about other measures that you can look at to actually determine what your cardiovascular risk is.
Now it's not uncommon, like I said, for tactical athletes to have slightly elevated LDLC levels or low density lipoprotein cholesterol levels. But what does this really mean?
Your load,
your LDL cholesterol is a measurement of a particular type of lipoprotein or fat and protein molecule that actually transports cholesterol around
LDL often gets a wrap for being the bad type of cholesterol. Uh, but the reality is is that it's not all bad.
When you go to get your levels checked at the doctor, usually what they're gonna tell you is they wanna see this LDL cholesterol level below a hundred,
under a hundred is considered optimal. A hundred to about 129 is considered near optimal, and anything over 130 is gonna be considered borderline high or high. Now, that might run a little contrary to what you've heard before, but these are typically the parameters that I'm gonna use to assess if somebody's LDL cholesterol is really elevated or not. I will tell you that most of the docs that I work with within the tactical community aren't really even going to bat an eye if you're LDL cholesterol is a hundred to 130.
Now what you should know is that this measurement, this LDLC, is not actually a measurement of how much LDL cholesterol or how much LDL particles you have, but rather it's a measure of the col. Is that your phone? Jayden?
Ma'am, are you listening to videos? Yes,
ma'am. Can you put your headphones on please? Yes, ma'am.
So the LDLC that you're getting checked at your doctor's office, it's not really a measurement of how many LDL particles you have. That's completely separate measurement that's known as LDLP or LDL particle.
And when we look at LDL particle, we are looking at a couple of different things. We're looking at the number of actual LDL particles you have.
We're looking at what size those particles are. So are they small and dense? Are they medium? Are they large and buoyant?
One of the, the ones that we worry about,
the ones that we worry about are gonna be those small dense LDL particles because those tend to be the most damaging to the arterial wall.
The other thing we wanna look at is our HDL levels or high density lipoprotein levels. Your HDLC, this is a carrier that's actually going to take some of that LDL and transport it to the liver to be cleared from the body. So this is why HDL is frequently known as your good cholesterol and why When we're assessing your HDL and LDL levels, we wanna compare those two and look at the ratio of LDL to HDL particles.
We wanna compare the ratio of LDLC to HDLC if that's what you're getting checked. And ideally that ratio should be less than two. So for instance, if your LDLC is 130, then ideally we want that HDL ratio to be somewhere between 60 and 70 to uh, lower that risk.
LDL by itself isn't necessarily considered a
risk factor for cardiovascular disease,
even though it's still very common for people to be put on medication. For elevated LDL levels, what
recently a study came out actually indicating that higher levels of LDL in healthy males over the age of 61 might actually be associated with them living longer. Uh, it also might be associated,
there also may be some benefits with higher LDL levels in terms of cognitive function as you age.
So what that really tells us is that we really don't know everything. We don't know everything that there is to know about LDL cholesterol, and we really wanna be careful with blanketing recommendations when we're not even getting a full picture of what our cardiovascular risk is. Typically, what I'm gonna recommend is that you ask your doctor if you can also get your LDL particle levels checked. We also wanna look at triglyceride levels. When
you have a large amount of those small dense LDL particles and you have elevated triglycerides, that's where our risk factors really start to add up.
Additionally, you can ask for things like your lipo A and your A OB, which at some point will probably go a little bit more into depth on, but these are also carriers. Um,
but these are also lipoprotein measurements that we can look at to, again, get that full picture of what's actually going on with our heart health.
When we're looking at our triglycerides, it's important to understand that
has a much closer relationship to our carbohydrate intake and to excessive sugar intake, particularly in the absence of physical activity. Remember that sugar and carbs are gonna be necessary in order for you to express energy, especially during moderate to high intensity exercise. Whenever we're participating in events that have a huge cognitive demand, glucose from carbohydrates and sugars is gonna be that primary fuel source. So we don't wanna eliminate those,
but when we're consuming excessive amounts in the absence of physical activity or we're taking in excessive amounts of alcohol, this is where our triglyceride levels can actually become elevated. That excess glucose is actually going to be converted to triglycerides. And this is where we can get into a situation where now that small dense LDL particle has done damage to the lining of the arterial wall, and now we're gonna see where you have these lipoproteins, where you have these triglycerides getting stuck in there and causing the narrowing of the artery potentially.
And in the liver, an excessive amount of triglycerides can also accumulate. And now we're gonna see things like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease or HEP hepa,
which has its own set of problems. And there is this tight relationship between,
uh, dysregulated blood sugar levels and cardiovascular disease. And a lot of cases, if you are dealing with blood sugar levels that are not controlled and you do end up having
and you do end up with a diagnosis of diabetes, one of the things to remember is that
the disease process from diabetes to cardiovascular disease, it's a cascade.
The majority of people who have diabetes are not gonna die from diabetes. They're actually gonna die from heart disease. Uh, around 80% of people who have diabetes actually end up with cardiovascular disease. So
it, it's really important that we understand that it's not just a singular thing or a singular picture that's gonna increase that disease risk, but you really need to figure out, okay, what is my genetic risk factors here? What are some modifiable things that I can do if I have an elevated level of LDL cholesterol, what does my LDL particles look like? And
do I have a lot of the small dense ones or do I have a lot of the large fluffy ones that don't really do a lot of damage because not all LDL particles are quote unquote bad for you?
So what are some things we can do with our nutrition
to actually help with our cholesterol levels
besides just
cutting out red meat, red meat and eggs? These seem to be the two most common foods that you people are still being told to eliminate from their diet, even though we know that dietary cholesterol doesn't do much to affect your serum cholesterol, assuming that you're an active, healthy individual.
So some things that we already know are gonna be beneficial are going to be to make sure that you are getting adequate fiber throughout the day.
This fiber is going to be
helping to carry some of that LDL cholesterol out of the body. Some of this fiber is gonna be helping to balance out blood sugar levels so that we're not producing as many triglycerides. Hopefully. Uh,
physical activity is also gonna be a huge component in ensuring that you are not storing up a lot of glucose as triglycerides.
So the foods that I typically recommend to increase your fiber intake are gonna be most commonly your vegetables and your fruits, and then whole grains as needed. And if you've listened to any of my other videos or your someone who's in our coaching program, you know that carbohydrate intake can vary based on your goals, based on your training cycle, based on the volume of training that you're doing and based on the amount of times that you're working out throughout the day when you work out throughout the day, that can vary just based on where you're at in your training program. So we wanna take that into consideration. Most of the time when we're consuming a lot of vegetables, even though some of them contain higher amounts of carbohydrates, you're also gonna get a significant amount of fiber, uh, with those. And so we don't want to skip that piece. Typically, your vegetable and fruit intake is gonna be one of the most important things.
Another compound to take into consideration is going to be your intake of something known as phytosterols.
Another case here for a high vegetable intake
plant phytosterols are
antioxidants.
Plant-based phytosterols are antioxidants that can help actually lower your LDL cholesterol and also have an effect on your small dense LDL particles.
Foods that are gonna be high in phytosterol content are gonna be things like peas, nuts and seeds, macadamia nuts, pumpkin seeds, safflowers, oranges, macadamia nuts. Uh, kidney beans are also high in phytosterols.
When we look at things that have a benefit in terms of your total cholesterol levels, your triglycerides, your ApoB, we have found a huge benefit. There has been a, there has been a huge benefit found to consuming things like strawberries, uh, red yeast, rice supplements, and also berberine supplementation.
So the big takeaways from today are going to be one, see a dietician. If you have
see a dietician, if you have concerns about your cholesterol levels, if you are getting blanket recommendations to remove things like red meat or eggs from your diet without also getting recommendations on what should be adding to your diet, nutrition, and supplementation routine, then that's gonna be a little bit of a red flag.
Ask for deeper lab testing.
Ask for your LDL particle numbers. Ask for your A OB, your lipo A so that you actually have that full picture of risk
if you're having difficult time getting access to those labs. This is something that we do provide within our coaching community and with our one-on-one Coaching
services. So feel free to reach out
to see how you can get started with our coaching program. You can also head over to www.tacticaldietician.com/store to check out all of our options for coaching. And we also have a ton of free resources over there around nutrition, calories, performance, anything that you can probably think of that you would need help with.
So let me know in the comments below if you have ever
been given this recommendation and what you think about it now that we've talked about it. I wanna hear what you guys have to say and we'll see you on the next episode.