On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, Ryan Hughes wrote:

> Re: Bacon
>
> I, as well as many of us, eat 'uncured' bacon. (no preservatives)
> It is absolutely delicious!
> After you eat it for a while, cured bacon tastes bad.

Bacon without chemical additives is still cured.  Uncured bacon
is an oxymoron, since bacon is by definition cured pork belly.

> Re: Cholesterol
>
> When you get your copy of Neanderthin you'll find this out: Its a bit more
> chemically complex than this but basically- High fats and red meat generally
> only raise cholesterol in a high carb diet. With significantly reduced carbs,
> cholesterol wont become a problem.

Not necessarily.  There are different ways of doing Neanderthin
and some of them can make your cholesterol profile worse, as I
have discovered.  If you are concerned about cholesterol (Not
everybody believes it is important) than the thing to do is
monitor it periodically as you try the diet.  Another thing to be
aware of is that significant weight loss itself can cause a
transient rise in cholesterol, which later subsides.

> In the modern diet, cholesterol accumulates in the body two ways.
> 1- directly from the food we eat i.e. foods with high cholesterol in them

Dietary cholesterol is no longer considered a significant
determinant of circulating cholesterol, as far as I know.

> 2- The Liver itself can produce about the same amount as in the food, in a high
>    carb diet. The carbs break down into sugar, which the Pancreas converts to
>    insulin. The Liver converts insulin into cholesterol.

This is not quite right.  The liver can and does make
cholesterol, but not out of insulin.  Insulin is a hormone that
can trigger the liver to produce cholesterol, however.  Note,
however, that protein also causes insulin to be released, though
less so than carbs.

> By eating low or no carbs, you can easily reduce the cholesterol conversion
> which will result in fatty foods not having much of an impact on the
> cholesterol levels.

I wish it were so easy, but I have not found it so.  By eating
low or no carbs, I can reliably send my total cholesterol to over
300 and keep it there, with most of the increase being in the
"bad" LDL cholesterol.  This is especially true if I follow the
high-calorie program that Neanderthin recommends.  To reduce that
reading, I have learned that I must restrict calories, use leaner
meats, and favor nuts and olive oil as fat sources, as opposed to
animal fat.  To date, the lowest reading I have obtained by that
strategy (over a 2-year period) is 245.

But my experience cannot be used as the basis for generalization.
Many people have no tendency toward elevated cholesterol to begin
with, and have no problem with the high-calorie, high-animal-fat
("heavy") implementations of Neanderthin.

Bottom line: If you have a tendency to elevated cholesterol and
are concerned about the health implications of that, don't assume
that Neanderthin, however you implement it, will cure it.  It
might do so, and it might not.

Todd Moody
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