How One Researcher's Experiment with Oreos Shows that LDL Has Many Important Functions Including Energy Transportation
If your LDL is high, take a deep breath before reaching for the statin poison. Then put on your thinking cap and stick with me while we examine some funky, unexptected science.
The “Oreo Lowers Cholesterol” headlines are taking the Internet by storm, and I’m losing count of the number of people who’ve sent variations of the headlines to me (thank you, BTW). Here’s the 7-minute YouTube from the researcher Dr. Nick Norwitz explaining his findings, and here’s a link to his published paper.
As is often true with quick-takes and headlines, many people completely misunderstand the study to be saying that Oreos are healthier than previously thought and should be used to lower LDL cholesterol, which is presumed to be a good thing.
However, the study means nothing of the sort. So you’re going to need to follow me closely here because it’s a FASCINATING study when you understand what the researcher set out to prove. Some background is key.
First, how Dr. Nick Norwitz conducted his experiment:
Norwitz went on a strict ketogenic diet (eating less than 20 grams of carbs/day). This caused his LDL to skyrocket to 384 mg/dL which is considered nearly 4 times higher than ideal since an LDL over 100 is considered high by the medical establishment.
Norwitz then began eating 12 Oreo cookies a day, adding 100 grams of carbs to his diet. In just 16 days, the addition of Oreos caused his LDL cholesterol to plummet to 111 mg/dL (71% reduction).
Norwitz returned to the keto diet for 3 months, and his LDL climbed up to 421.
Lastly, he took 20 mg of rosuvastatin, and his LDL dropped to only 284—not nearly as dramatic as the “Oreo cookie intervention.”
Why he did it: First, he did not set out to prove that Oreos should be used to lower cholesterol! Nick doesn’t believe that high LDL is bad.
Instead, Norwitz set out to prove that when many people go on the keto diet, the body dramatically raises its level of LDL as a way to transport fat for energy. He calls this the lipid energy model.
He posited that if the true purpose of his body creating high LDL was simply for transporting fat for energy, then adding carbs would dramatically reduce his LDL in mere days as glucose immediately becomes the fuel source instead of fat.
This is exactly what happened to Norwitz. It worked because, with the Oreos for fuel, Norwitz’s body no longer needed to ferry as much fat around in LDL “submarines” to use for fuel. He could have achieved the same result with any carb.
Here are two things to keep in mind as we unpack this study:
This study has absolutely nothing to do with the relative health of Oreo cookies. They happen to be every bit as detrimental to health as every other ultra-processed, soybean oil-filled, high fructose corn syrup-saturated, shelf-life-of-37-years fake food product available.
The main point the study set out to prove was that high LDL cholesterol is not a universal sign of poor heart health and that lowering LDL, whether through statins or the highly effective Oreo cookie therapy, is not necessarily a good thing despite medical establishment dogma.
The Burning Question: Is Ketogenic Therapy Dangerous Since It Raises LDL?
The ketogenic diet can be a miraculously healing diet for certain health conditions such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, mental health issues, cancer, migraines, dementia, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.
However, it is very common for someone who begins the keto diet to see their LDL (the supposed “bad” cholesterol) go up—sometimes way up. Since doctors are taught that everyone’s LDL should stay under 100 to prevent heart disease, this may cause the doctor to panic and order the patient to either stop the diet, go on a statin (in my opinion, the drug with the most harm and least benefits in the history of medicine, yet one of the top grossing meds ever), or do both.
This poses a problem for holistic-minded practitioners or patients who do their own research. They may have reversed lifelong bipolar symptoms (see a new NPR article here) or completely cured their type 2 diabetes (here’s a new interesting Guardian article). Blood pressure is down, they feel the best they’ve felt in their life, sugar cravings are gone, they have more energy than ever, plus they’ve lost weight.
But their doctor is having a conniption fit about their high LDL, and telling them to stop this dangerous lifestyle or they’ll die of a heart attack.
Researchers such as Norwitz wonder if sky-high LDL is always a reason to stop a diet with many benefits.
What If Other Important Heart Disease Markers Are Improved but LDL Is Up?
The newest and most reliable heart disease research indicates that the ratio of triglycerides (TG) to HDL (the universally recognized good cholesterol) is the best indicator of whether or not someone will have a heart attack down the road. For trigs, the lower the better, and for HDL, the higher the better. Everyone should aim to get their trigs to equal their HDL or even to have trigs lower than HDL.
For example, this 2021 study published in the journal Nature found:
The TG/HDL-C ratio and the CTA [coronary computed tomography angiography] risk score progressed over time despite increased use of lipid-lowering drugs and reduction in LDL-C. In patients with stable angina, high TG and low HDL-C levels are associated with CAD related outcomes independently of LDL-C and treatments.
In other words, it didn’t matter how much you stuffed people full of statins and lowered their LDL, an increasing TG/HDL ratio led to increased risk.
Here is a study titled Triglyceride-to-high-density-lipoprotein-cholesterol ratio is an index of heart disease mortality published in the Journal of Investigative Medicine.
Men were followed up for 581,194 person-years. Triglyceride/HDL-C ratio predicted CHD [coronary heart disease], CVD [cardiovascular disease], and all-cause mortality after adjustment for established risk factors and non-HDL-C. Mortality rates were higher in individuals with a high ratio than in those with a low ratio.
My Labs As An Example
It’s amazing how quickly one can turn your heart health trajectory around.
Here are my cholesterol labs from before I started fasting:
You’ll notice that my ratio of triglycerides/HDL is 2.5 which is not ideal. In addition, I had prediabetes and elevated blood pressure. But my LDL was pretty solid—only slightly over the ideal.
Here are my labs from 2 months ago:
Yes, my LDL cholesterol is up, but did you notice my trigs and HDL? I did exactly what is the most beneficial for heart health: lowered those trigs from 125 to 63 (huge reduction!) and raised that HDL from 50 (which is terribly low) to 76. This means I passed up that sweet spot trig/HDL ratio of 1.0 and knocked it out of the ballpark. My HDL is actually higher than my trigs, giving me a ratio of .83. Um, happy dance.
Yes, my LDL was 107 mg/dL prior to reducing carbs and fasting, and now it is 145. Percentage-wise, this is an almost 40% increase, and that would frighten most doctors. Do you think I’m scared of my LDL? The majority of docs would be hounding me to go on a statin.
Furthermore, my A1C is down from the prediabetic range of 6.1 to 5.0 and my fasting insulin is now down to 3.9 (but I have no record from before fasting, unfortunately).
All of the most important markers for heart disease have dramatically decreased—yet LDL is up.
Note: the way to raise HDL and lower trigs is to eat fewer carbs and increase animal fat such as butter, tallow, and bacon.
The Oreo study shows that the reason LDL goes up, and sometimes WAY up, on a low carb diet and/or fasting, has nothing to do with an increased risk of heart disease. Instead, it happens because the body is using fat instead of glucose as a primary energy source.
Whereas glucose dissolves in the blood, fat does not dissolve in the blood because oil and water do not mix. Therefore, fat has to be ferried around in the bloodstream in little submarines called low-density lipoproteins or LDL. The more one uses fat for energy, the more LDL will be necessary to transport that fat around. One never wants to have energy toxicity in blood with high trigs, glucose, and LDL all high at once. But in the absence of the first two, high LDL is not dangerous.
What is a Lean Mass Hyper Responder?
There’s a class of people who start the ketogenic diet and their LDL doesn’t just raise 50% as mine did, it goes up to 400, 500, and sometimes 600. This is what happened to Dr. Norwitz. Why does this happen?
Dr. Norwitz and a group of researchers have developed the “lipid energy model hypothesis” that says that LDL increases as one uses lipids (fat molecules) for energy instead of glucose. In such cases, the theory posits that these “hyper responders” with LDL levels suddenly of 400+ do not have a higher risk of heart disease than a person with an LDL of 75 (the medical establishment’s ideal). Instead, they are metabolically healthy people (hence the term “lean mass”) whose bodies are simply using LDL to transport fat for fuel around the bloodstream.
And How Did LDL Cholesterol Become the Heart Disease Villian Anyway?
This happened for a couple of reasons. The first is because many people who have medical degrees and PhDs think like first graders—but perhaps I’m being unfair. First graders are bright little people who have not yet been corrupted by insidious groupthink. Perhaps I shouldn’t say such negative things about them.
On the other hand, when one is in first grade and one finds out that a person with heart disease has plaque building up inside the arteries, I wouldn’t fault a little person for raising his adorable pudgy hand and saying, “Did the goopy stuff stick there because there was too much goopy stuff floating in the blood?” I mean, after all, he’s in first grade and he can’t be expected to know much about the intricacies of the human body?
But really now, how is it possible that so many medical doctors and researchers subscribe to the unbelievably simplistic idea that the amount of LDL cholesterol circulating in the blood has a direct relationship to the amount that ends up embedded on the inside of an artery in a pimple-like puss-filled mess oozing with foam cells and inflammation.
Really? The cholesterol randomly bumps into the artery wall and then sticks there for no apparent reason? Is that really the dominant theory? People with fancy degrees believe that someone with an LDL of 200 but is metabolically healthy will have more LDL lining their arteries than someone with an LDL of 100 but who has high inflammation? Is that actually what our medical schools are teaching?
The idea is simply ludicrous. How is it that no doctor in their 4 years of medical school raises his hand and asks WHY the cholesterol ends up embedded in the endothelium (the lining of the artery)?
And if there is a REASON (imagine that) that the body deposits LDL there (such as endothelial inflammation caused by high blood sugar, high insulin, toxins, etc) then how could it matter if LDL were 40 or 400? If the body wants to deposit cholesterol there to put a scab on an inflamed artery, it’s going to find LDL in the blood and put it there no matter how low the blood level is. This is not rocket science, people.
Did you know there are also dead white blood cells called macrophages that make up the atherosclerotic plaque that lines the inside of arteries along with LDL? Taking a statin to lower cholesterol so it won’t end up in the artery wall is like taking a drug to poison your white blood cells so fewer will end up there.
“But the macrophages have an important role in helping clean up the oozing artery,” one may argue.
So does cholesterol.
“But we can’t lower white blood cells—think what that would do to the immune system.”
Ummmmm…LDL cholesterol is one of the most important molecules in the entire human body and vital to the immune system.
In fact, LDL is so important to the immune system that this 2021 study found that having lower LDL significantly increased risk of mortality from COVID:
Compared with patients with high LDL-C levels, patients with low LDL-C levels were more likely to have immune and inflammation dysfunction, renal dysfunction, liver dysfunction and cardiac dysfunction on admission. The proportions of patients with shock and acute cardiac injury, of those admitted to intensive care unit (ICU) and of those treated with mechanical ventilation were inversely related to LDL-C level. The mortality of COVID-19 patients increased with LDL-C reduction.
The Second reason why the “LDL-causes-heart-disease-hypothesis” continues to this day, despite incredible evidence to the contrary:
Cha-ching. It’s called money. It’s about monetizing and profiting from your fear of heart disease. It’s about profiting from the fact that people want a pill to make them feel like they’re warding off heart disease. And doctors want to give you that pill because then they feel like they’re so useful, and prescribing pills justifies the hundreds of thousands they invested in their education learning how to prescribe said pills.
And the real cause of heart disease—inflammation and high blood sugar—can’t be cured by a pill. So no one wants to talk about those causes. Patients don’t want to hear it, doctors don’t want to harass their patients about eating healthy and losing weight (apparently only I do that), and big pharma sure doesn’t want you to cure yourself with diet.
Statins’ only function is to lower LDL cholesterol. So if LDL were to be disproven as the heart disease villain, statins would have no value. Therefore, the fraudulent medical-study-generators will continue to design their studies to attempt to prove their first grade level theory of heart disease.
Here’s a hot tip: if there’s something that has to do with the human body that is so simple to understand that it can be made into a bumper sticker slogan, such as “LDL causes heart disease,” it’s probably not true. But most people don’t have an attention span long enough to listen to the full explanation, even though heart disease is a top killer. They just want to take their pill.
I’ve made a lot of outrageous and high-handed claims in this post but I can back them up. Every word. If you are so inclined to do further research and check out my claims, you’ve come to the right place.
Do you prefer YouTube videos? Watch this one called High Cholesterol is Healthy with Dr. David Diamond, who has PhD in biology and has published over 150 medical papers, reviews, and book chapters. (Sneak peek [50:00] talks about statins causing dementia symptoms).
Do you prefer high-profile medical studies that include over 12.8 million people? This study called Total cholesterol and all-cause mortality by sex and age: a prospective cohort study among 12.8 million adults found that an “increase in TC [total cholesterol] was associated with 23% lower… mortality.”
Do you prefer books? Well read this one called Fat and Cholesterol Don't Cause Heart Attacks and Statins Are Not The Solution written by ten academic and medical doctors.
Do you prefer to read websites? If so, allow me to direct you to THINCS formed by over 100 medical and academic doctors who all reject the hypothesis that LDL cholesterol causes heart disease and that statins are the answer.
Do you like reading true crime? Well, stay awake until 2 am reading the comments section of this post called Dangers of Statin Drugs: What You Haven’t Been Told About Popular Cholesterol-Lowering Medicines where hundreds of people talk about the debilitating side effects they had from statins.
In Conclusion
The Oreo cookie study was a monumental step in the direction of showing that LDL cholesterol is a complicated molecule in a complicated body. I hope that many people’s minds were expanded beyond a first-grade understanding of LDL to at least a first-grade-month-7 understanding.
We still have a long way to go. The medical industrial complex desperately wants you to take its “magic pill.” Its livelihood depends upon it.
You may think that we’ve progressed beyond using leeches in medicine. I’m sorry to say, leeches are alive today and ready to suck your blood.
[A species of leech named Big Pharma]
I said some disparaging things about doctors and academics but far be it from me to fail to point out the ones who are breaking away from the sick-care system.
The FLCCC (Front Line COVID Critical Care Alliance) is a group of forward-thinking doctors who saw the corruption in medicine that happened during COVID and have banned together to practice medicine a different way through exploring ideas such as repurposed drugs for cancer and other applications. They are also recognizing the importance of diet and fasting as therapy for various diseases such as diabetes. I just love this piece below written yesterday that expresses the palpable excitement about taking back medicine present at a recent FLCCC conference in Phoenix:
Stay off statins and Oreos and do some fasting instead,
Leslie
Your explanation confirms my understanding of the effect fasting can have on my lipid levels...and an increase is not necessarily a bad thing. My doctor freaked out & went straight to the statin recommendation. He and I will be discussing this study very soon!
So interesting! My trigs are low and my HDL is a tad higher than my trigs. Loved reading this and learning more about cholesterol. I watched this video that seems like is on the same lines of what you discuss in this article.
https://youtu.be/fvKdYUCUca8?si=qn8ku82-1oKm4GTP