Is There A House in the Doctor?
Inside your gloss and me in mine we twinging twying time
Today I did my annual visit with my cardiologist, who is freaked out that I have an LDL level in the high 200s. My theory is that people with low cholesterol probably eat a lot of refined carbs. Oreos were demonstrated to lower the LDL better than statins in a lean mass hyper-resonder. Am I that? I don’t know, but I do know I have a pattern because of my eating low carb and high fats. The HDL is high and the tryglicerides are low.
I love my cardiologist. I assume from his family name he’s Egyptian, but I saw him in Starbucks with an Eastern Orthodox priest, so maybe Coptic Orthodox, Egypt’s largest minority. He commands great respect, which is why it’s hard to keep telling him I won’t medicate my cholesterol. When I tried to take statins, years ago, I had a grand mal seizure and could have died. It was never reported as a side effect but I had to take a battery of neurological exams. “It couldn’t be the statin,” my doctor said. It was the statins.
I don’t know what they did to me, but I won’t take anything now that fucks with my cholesterol. I am going to trust my body, and in return, I won’t give it crap I’d never feed to an animal. Feeding yourself food you would not feed a dog, because it might kill it, is separation anxiety from reality. Except for chocolate, anything in the onion family, avocados … okay, that doesn’t work. Dogs, and Jordon Peterson, like the carnivore diet.
Reality is not abstract. Chocolate cake is abstract. Even the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake ever served to a man would not be served to a dog, one of pedigree, anyway. It’s lethal.
My working hypothesis is that LDL is a problem when it’s glycated and deformed by widely used processed foods (sugar and flour especially), LDL that shows up at the liver so deformed that the liver receptors don’t recognize it, so they don’t pick it up. It circulates in the blood until the immune system sees it as a foreign invader and attacks it, with the resulting inflammation in the vessels. I assume that’s behind the epidemic level of autoimmune disease as well.
But my cardiologist seems pretty sure I’m headed for the last roundup unless I get the LDL down. I don’t even mention lean body mass as driving high LDL. Like a lot of people, I’ve had to take over my heath care because there is a lot of treatment and no cure for metabolic diseases, characterized by plaque in the arteries, in the brain, and on the teeth. There is an assumption that the plaques are a primary cause of disease, but they could also be sealing wounds caused by inflammation.
And then there are other questions that cross my mind, for example, if the liver receptors won’t pick up the glycated LDL, then won’t increasing the number of receptors lower the LDL by removing the ones that are not a problem? And is the primary advantage of statins the ability to drop from trials anybody who has trouble taking them? Would that not account for the small statistical advantage over a placebo?
It’s goddamned hard to not follow the advice of a doctor you trust and admire. I wish there was no such thing as corporate medicine, churning out studies to justify products that don’t actually cure a disease. They struggle toward statistical significance because that’s where the money’s at.
Yesterday I mentioned Talcott Parsons, and the concept of a gloss. We are all inside a gloss, which is a constructed reality. The reality of doctors is constructed by data in evidence-based medicine. They have studies showing that I have to cut out saturated fats, which I sometimes eat copiously. Yet when I go to the cutting edge source, which, for me, is the National Institute of Health library, I read:
The idea that saturated fats cause heart disease, called the diet-heart hypothesis, was introduced in the 1950s, based on weak, associational evidence. Subsequent clinical trials attempting to substantiate this hypothesis could never establish a causal link. However, these clinical-trial data were largely ignored for decades, until journalists brought them to light about a decade ago. Subsequent reexaminations of this evidence by nutrition experts have now been published in >20 review papers, which have largely concluded that saturated fats have no effect on cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular mortality or total mortality. The current challenge is for this new consensus on saturated fats to be recognized by policy makers, who, in the United States, have shown marked resistance to the introduction of the new evidence. In the case of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines, experts have been found even to deny their own evidence. The global re-evaluation of saturated fats that has occurred over the past decade implies that caps on these fats are not warranted and should no longer be part of national dietary guidelines. Conflicts of interest and longstanding biases stand in the way of updating dietary policy to reflect the current evidence.
Of course, heart disease is just one aspect of metabolic health, all aspects of which seem to have a common ancestor: chronic high insulin levels which cause the storing of fat all goddamned day, all day long, every day, as well as increasing inflammation driven by refined carbs like flour and sugar.
Each time I go to the doctor to “discuss” my latest lipid panel, I begin to lose my nerve. Maybe the cardidologist is right and I’m wrong. I start to have this feeling that I am too focused on my heart, while my balls may be in distress. The first step is to eliminate the metabolic diseases by keeping insulin low most of the time. Insulin drives diabetes. I fast for 16 hours and have a green salad with olives, hemp hearts, pistacios, pumpkin seeds, tomatoes, and, feta, as my first meal. This has a neglible effect on blood sugar, so that for my second meal I can have some carbs if I want to. I love potatoes, sweet or savory, and sometimes I want some rice and beans. But I’ve cut steak down to once or twice a week and eat more fish and cauliflower pizza.
When I decided I had to take over my own health, I had central sleep apnea, A-fib, and obesity. I remember when I saw myself described as obese, by a doctor, I thought it was an insult. I wasn’t obese. But I looked up the definition and I was in the lower ranks of obesity and eligible for promotion, at 220 pounds. I didn’t get back to 170 as yet but I got back to 180, which seems to be where I stay. I eliminated all the issues with a keto diet and exercise, then modified it to include more carbs once I had metabolic flexibility.
Once metabolic syndrome is cured, as opposed to curated, there are other problems for an old man, like prostate enlargement, the gut biome, etc. For example, eating too much meat might be bad for he who (with any luck) stands alone. Who the fuck knows anything that isn’t contradicted? The most overlooked cause of erectile dysfunction is not really wanting to. If the unconscious really wants to, blood will flow, and if it doesn’t want to, better buy a cock pump. But it is treated as something which is supposed to just happen, Mr. Johnson doing his sacred duty. The unconscious, left to its own devices, has its own desired outcomes, and the ego usually isn’t in the loop because its only desired outcome is its own self-importance.
Steak is supposed to be the explosive powder that fires the ball, in the bedroom or in the boxing ring. Jack London wrote a short story about a fighter who lost because he could’t get a piece of steak before the fight. He couldn’t do the last round.
But in contradiction to that long held assumption, that red meat is the manly food, here is an article from Medscape.com, “Meat isn’t manly when it comes to erectile dysfunction.”
It’s an interview with a urologist named Stacy Loeb, who is board certified in Lifestyle Medicine. She seems to be advocating a plant-based diet. Again, the basis of this is that saturated fats cause arterial plaques and reduced blood flow (Good RX). In this case, the NIH agrees that there is at least associational evidence that the closer you are to a Mediterrainean Diet, the more likely you are to get an erection. This is likely true. It happened to me in Parma. I have adjusted my diet in that direction. Just in case. To paraphrase a saying about guns, better to have one and not need it than to need one and not have it.
