There’s a common misconception that eating fatty foods will cause your cholesterol levels to go up. We all know that high levels of cholesterol in the body can lead to strokes, cardiovascular disease and heart attacks.
* But are these problems a result of your diet?
The answer is – yes and no.
To understand why the keto diet will not raise your cholesterol levels, you need to know what causes high cholesterol in the body. For years we’ve been told that foods like red meat, coconut oil and eggs raise our cholesterol levels.
Yet, if we looked at people who lived half a century ago, you’d notice that they ate a lot of these foods and obesity and heart disease rates were a fraction of what they are now. Even our ancestors ate meat and fat in high amounts and didn’t get strokes or heart disease.
So, something doesn’t add up. The question now is – “What’s the missing piece in this puzzle?”
* The truth about cholesterol
The ugly truth is that it’s not fatty foods that raise your blood cholesterol levels. The real culprit is sugar. Sugar is the most dangerous substance on the planet when it comes to wreaking havoc on our bodies.
Sugar creeps into our diet in many ways. It could be the 2 seemingly harmless teaspoons of sugar that you add to your coffee, or the processed high fructose corn syrup that sneaks into thousands of processed foods.
Sugar leads to inflammation in the body. This inflammation will cause the body to release cholesterol… and it’s THIS situation that leads to high cholesterol levels.
Besides sugar, other inflammatory foods cause similar issues too. Your goal is to reduce inflammation. If you can do that, it’s half the battle won and your cholesterol levels will dip to an all-time low.
* How the keto diet helps
The keto diet is rich in fat, but it’s all good fat. Coconut oil, which has had a bad reputation for ages is highly beneficial to the body. At the other end of the spectrum, the hydrogenated vegetable oils that line the supermarket shelves glistening in all their fake glory are highly detrimental to your health and lead to inflammation.
The processed vegetable oils will cause more damage to your health in the long run than any fat you could consume in the keto diet.
The keto diet also requires you to eliminate most processed foods from your diet. To stay in ketosis, your blood sugar levels need to be stable. The moment you consume too much sugar, you’ll be out of ketosis and the keto strips will reveal it.
So, by keeping your blood sugar levels low and stable, you’ll not only be preventing inflammation and high cholesterol levels, but you’ll also be preventing diabetes and unnecessary weight gain.
Consuming lots of healthy fat will make the body ‘burn up’ its fat stores more readily. This will translate to greater fat loss and a lower cholesterol level. The keto diet is not the problem. It is the solution to the problem.
