Posted on 09/15/2022 8:48:36 PM PDT by ConservativeMind
There's a long-established link between a high-fat, high-sugar diet and fatty liver disease, which can lead to life-threatening conditions such as cirrhosis and liver cancer. Now, new research adds some detail and dimension to this picture.
The lab study is the first-ever to focus on how different amounts of cholesterol as part of a diet high in fat and sugar affect fatty liver disease progression. Modeling the disease in mice, the investigators demonstrated that high cholesterol intake can make fatty liver disease worse—driving inflammation and scarring—and that, importantly, scar tissue can persist even after switching to a diet low in cholesterol. The findings also indicated that a high-cholesterol diet can create long-lasting dysfunction in a specific population of immune cells previously shown to play a role in fatty liver disease.
The researchers fed mice a high-fat, high-sugar diet shown to cause a form of advanced fatty liver disease similar to human illness.
The mice were split into three groups that received different amounts of cholesterol in their food for 20 weeks—midlife for the animals. The low-cholesterol group received one-quarter the cholesterol compared to medium; the high-cholesterol group received 25 times more than the low-cholesterol group.
After 20 weeks, the livers of mice from all three groups showed accumulation of fat, a benign feature of fatty liver disease, but the high-cholesterol group had more advanced disease, with increased inflammation and scar tissue.
For the following 10 weeks, mice from all three groups received low cholesterol as part of a diet that remained high in fat and sugar. At the end of that time, that change in diet had reversed inflammation in the original high-cholesterol mice, but had not reduced scar tissue. This finding shows that damage caused by high cholesterol can be hard to undo.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
This does not appear to be quite the problem it appears. The diet was an souped up version of the Standard American Diet (SAD) with very high fructose, palmitate fat and trans-fat to get the mice into condition. Then, they fed dietary cholesterol equal to 1.25% of the weight (normally using dry weight with mouse diets) of all the food provided to the mice to get the “high” dietary cholesterol diet. That is a massive amount of dietary cholesterol.
From the study:
“Therefore, we have selected an established prolonged fructose, palmitate, cholesterol, and trans-fat (FPC) diet to develop murine NASH and fed mice with different contents of cholesterol in two stages of our dietary intervention, starting with medium (0.2%) or high (1.25%) cholesterol content, and later reducing cholesterol to low levels (0.05%).”
Other studies show that if you keep your dietary cholesterol intake below 1,000 to 1,500 mg a day of cholesterol, which is the amount your body’s liver will otherwise make for you, you do not increase your cholesterol levels. Going beyond that amount can increase blood levels.
So don’t eat more than four to six servings of shrimp or five to seven large eggs a day equivalent of cholesterol to meet the 1,000 to 1,500 mg “limit,” and you shouldn’t increase your blood cholesterol from it. However, saturated fats can encourage some additional cholesterol to be made.
Now, about that Standard American Diet, you should probably stop that.
Since we’ve elimimated most trans fats in our diets, I’m not sure this study is relevant any more.
But I also wonder if the amount of sugar given in all the diets changed when they changed the cholesterol intake.
I’d be more interested in a study on High protein, high fat, low carb and high cholesterol.
The partial trans-fat diet was just to get a bad liver situation that mirrors an inflamed liver in a human.
Yeah, but then does scarring occur with a low trans fat, high cholesterol diet? That's the frustrating thing about that study.
Trans fats have almost been eliminated from the western diet. High fructose hasn't. But many of us are aware of it's dangers and avoid it.
Did anyone else catch the absolute idiocy of the authors?
They discredited their work - and reputations, imho - wholesale with this tripe.
But it sure sounds scary, doesn’t it?
Just wait until the truly ignorant look up the big dietary sources of evil cholesterol... /s
The stupid is strong at Keck School of Medicine of USC.
I read a book called Wheat Belly, by William Davis, M.D. He believes that cholesterol is caused by gluten in wheat, not fats. So I tried going gluten free for a month and my LDL went down 40 points, right back to normal. As he said it would. I cook with good KerryGold butter and sometimes EVOO. Eat beef. chicken, salmon, but not pork..
I occasionally eat a small loaf of sourdough about the size of a soft ball. Buy at Trader Joe. Yummy as avocado toast with poached eggs on top. Sourdough his thought to have less gluten than other bread.
I’d rather do anything than take drugs of any kind. I’m 86 and take only lisinopril. No other prescription drugs. Did a fast mile on the treadmill today and lifted weights. Feel great, weigh 110.
Veto!
(The Girl)
Our brains need cholesterol. In fact, I think they are made up of quite a bit of it.
They keep playing up cholesterol as a a demon, but fail to tell you that the statins they want to “treat” it with can be as deadly as the cholesterol - and that using them has no record of improving life or extending life...
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