Quote:
Originally Posted by MWM400
Hi there, I'm new here and I did some searching, but couldn't find anything related to this. I'm a 42 year old male (hope that's OK), who has had some success with low carb eating in the past and started doing IP about 10 weeks ago. I'm down 25 pounds to date, which I'm happy about, but still have about 50 to go.
However, I'm also someone who has had low HDL labs for years now. A few years ago, I dropped a decent amount of weight from general healthy eating habits and tons of exercise.... I took up tennis. I gained much of that back after about a year once I met my now wife (I call them happiness pounds). That period where I was doing all the exercise was the only time in the last 8 years where my HDL got to 40.
Even while I was slowly gaining pounds back, I still did a decent amount of exercise, but the HDL was gradually dropping, obviously a result of too many carbs.
My concern is that I just had lab work done and I'm still really low at 28, which is exactly where I was when I started. Has anyone else had problems with HDL, and if so, how do you manage it on IP? I do eat fish once or twice a week, so it's not just a matter of eating more fish. I've taken high quality fish oil/Omega 3 supplements in the past and it's had minimal affect on my HDL.
The only thing that has seemed to work for me is intense cardio, which I'm hesitant to do because I don't want to do anything to slow down the fat loss.
Any insights from others' experience would be greatly appreciated.
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Is it familial? Familial HA is a relatively common disorder and is frequently associated with decreased apo A-I production or increased apo A-I catabolism. Another familial deficiency is LCAT. It makes a difference in whether you may have problems with coronary heart disease OR with ocular degeneration and renal failure.
Low levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL), or hypoalphalipoproteinemia (HA), includes a variety of conditions, ranging from mild to severe, in which concentrations of alpha lipoproteins or high-density lipoprotein (HDL) are reduced. The etiology of HDL deficiencies ranges from secondary causes, such as smoking, to specific genetic mutations, such as Tangier disease and fish-eye disease.
HA has no clear-cut definition. An arbitrary cutoff is the 10th percentile of HDL cholesterol levels. A more practical definition derives from the
theoretical cardioprotective role of HDL. The US National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) Adult Treatment Panel III (ATP III) redefined the HDL cholesterol level that constitutes a formal coronary heart disease (CHD) risk factor. The level was raised from 35 mg/dL to 40 mg/dL for men and women. A prospective analysis by Mora et al investigated the link between cholesterol and cardiovascular events in women and found baseline HDL-C level was consistently and inversely associated with incident coronary and CVD events across a range of LDL-C values.[1]
For the metabolic syndrome in which multiple mild abnormalities in lipids, waist size (abdominal circumference), blood pressure, and blood sugar increase the risk of CHD, the designated HDL cholesterol levels that contribute to the syndrome are sex-specific. For men, a high-risk HDL cholesterol level is still less than 40 mg/dL, but for women, the high-risk HDL cholesterol level is less than 50 mg/dL.[2, 3, 4, 5]
A low HDL cholesterol level is
thought to accelerate the development of atherosclerosis because of impaired reverse cholesterol transport and possibly because of the absence of other protective effects of HDL, such as decreased oxidation of other lipoproteins.
The common, mild forms of HA have no characteristic physical findings, but patients
may have premature coronary heart or peripheral vascular disease, as well as a family history of low HDL cholesterol levels and premature CHD.
Therapy to raise the concentration of HDL cholesterol includes weight loss, smoking cessation, aerobic exercise, and
pharmacologic management with niacin and fibrates.
Young boys and girls have similar high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels, but after male puberty, these levels decrease in males, remaining lower than those in females for all subsequent age groups.
Vitamin therapy may be worth a try, and you can exercise fairly heavily on Alternative ('Diabetic style') P1. There is a thread or two around on that you may want to search for. Some runners have trained for races doing it that way.
Liana