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Note that the abstract (since I can't read the full article; not on sci-hub) mentions that he has hypercholesterolemia, and doesn't specify whether this was actually caused by diet alone or because of genetics.

I've likely had orders of magnitude more cheese and butter than this guy, and I've yet to have yellow nodules or the 10 heart attacks I apparently should have had by now. Both of us are N=1 case studies, so basically meaningless outside of identifying a particular clinical condition.




He was having 3kg of cheese per day. You saying that you were having 30kg (orders of magnitude) or more of cheese per day? I don't believe you.


That would be only a single order of magnitude. "Orders of magnitude", plural, implies at least two orders of magnitude, which would be at least 300kg of cheese per day. I think you are responding to someone who was not very concerned with whether what they were saying was true or false.


Listen guys, I don't even drink water, just liquid cheese, and after my daily cheese cleanse (don't ask, too graphic,) I feel great. People always ask where I get this sharp cheddar cologne, but the scent comes naturally.


Something is fishy. How is it physically possible to eat 12,000 calories of cheese per day plus hamburgers and lose weight? Somebody here is lying.


You could give yourself rabbit starvation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_toxicity


This is from lean protein, add fat and your body is okay. You need either fat, carbs, or both. But you can’t just run on protein.


I thought the same, but an open question for me (now) is what happens if you eat 3000 calories of protein and 3000 calories of fat or even carbohydrate. You have sufficient calories that your body doesn't need to metabolize protein for energy, but what happens to all the excess protein you consumed?

I assumed the excess protein would be undigested, but can't back that up with a citation.


There should be enough fat in 12000 calories to avoid rabbit starvation. I did not consider the load of metabolizing all that protein and assumed the body would eliminate what it didn't need. They're might be something in protein toxicity here.


If the ratio of fat to protein is high, and exogenous carbohydrates is relatively low in contrast, insulin levels should be closer to baseline (than a standard diet), as well as blood glucose, thereby keeping the Randle cycle minimized and so consumed energy gets used more by an on-demand basis or it gets dumped (literally). Part of the reason we poop is because, if our bodies literally used all of the mass we consume, we would either get too large in short order or spontaneously combust.

I don't think someone here is lying. There may be some level of exaggeration, as in my experience a lot of cheese (particularly hard cheeses) can lead to extremely painful stools, but calories really aren't as meaningful as one might assume, especially when switching from a diet that directly supplies carbohydrate and one that doesn't.

The human body needs a certain amount of glucose in the blood, but it can't get that from fats (at least as far as I am aware). It can obtain it from protein through a process called gluconeogenesis, but that's a relatively expensive process that requires more ATP than what ultimately results from it. The human body also treats that process in a more demand-driven manner than one where exogenous carbohydrates are consumed. This isn't an absolute, but it's generally less supply-driven. If protein can't be used for glucose or building tissue, it's more likely to become waste eventually.

See "rabbit starvation":

https://hekint.org/2022/01/26/rabbit-starvation-protein-pois...


You've found Gaston.


No, that's not what I was saying. There have been times where I've eaten about that much cheese in a day, but I've been eating abundant amounts of butter and cheese for much longer than that gentleman and have yet to have encountered any hypercholesterolemic symptoms. I did an experiment for maybe ~4 months around 7 years ago where I ate pretty much nothing but cheese and butter, and I consumed substantial amounts of both. I wish I recorded it properly. It would have been in the multiple of pounds. But outside that experiment, it's not uncommon for me to eat more than a pound of cheese alone in a day.

If it were a given that eating lots of fat leads to extremely high levels of cholesterol, my irises would look at bit strange by now at the very least.

Now excuse me while I go eat about a pound of eggs and cheddar cheese for breakfast. (not a joke)


How do you even eat 3 kilograms of cheese in one day?


> How do you even eat 3 kilograms of cheese in one day?

You slice it in small pieces. And add some wine. And a friend to call 911. /s


Ok, so you ate less cheese over a much shorter duration.


During that particular experiment. Without knowing the further details about that subject, I have been eating multiple pounds of highly fatty meat and cheese with the addition of butter daily for several years. It would be surprising to me that 2 to 3 pounds wouldn't show signs of mild hypercholesterolemia but 6 pounds a day would suddenly result in yellow nodules all over the place. It also doesn't make sense for this to happen to someone who isn't hypercholesterolemic based on how cholesterol is normally handled by the liver. It's a tightly regulated system.


Speaking as someone with familial hyperlipidemia / hypercholesterolemia and based on many years of conversations with multiple lipidologists…

Heterozygous FH will typically put someone at a total cholesterol roughly around 500mg/dl, and homozygous will get them closer to the 1000mg/dl mark. Dietary factors for most people will affect their lipids up to +/- 40mg/dl, and medication is generally required for anything beyond that.

For the gentleman with cholesterol nodules, that’s a not-unheard of symptom of homozygous FH and the associated cholesterol levels. I’m sure his diet is exacerbating it, however I would be genuinely surprised if that were the primary cause of his count being > 1000mg/dl. (With homo-FH and an extremely restricted diet, he’d still be unlikely to get below 900mg/dl)


Anecdotal, but if you follow carnivore diet groups on Facebook/IG etc you'll frequently see posts from people with TC over 500mg/dl. For example, the carnivorecringe IG account posted someone's labs in December who had a TC of 669 and an LDL of 558.

It's quite possible that it's a combination of diet and genetics, but people can quite easily get to incredibly harmful LDL levels with diet alone.

Edit: here's a case study of someone getting to TC of 488.7mg/dL. I think you'll struggle to get higher quality data than case studies because these kinds of diets are (thankfully) fairly uncommon and no ethics board is going to sign off on an intervention study that's likely to raise blood lipids by this kind of level.

https://academic.oup.com/jes/article/5/Supplement_1/A37/6240...


It's pretty easy to induce hyperlipidemia in mice by feeding them a keto diet. Wouldn't be surprised at all if it was the same in people

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38948738/


Edit: misread your comment, apologies… I’m not sure about inducing it in people based on diet, as that seems to go against any desirable outcome, but this is a link to another FH case presenting cholesterol nodules:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4498853/


Scihub has not updated their index for years, and is effectively dead. The article is not on Annas-archive either, but at least there is a chance it will show up eventually.


You eat 6-9 lbs of cheese a day plus sticks of butter and meat on top of that?


I am calling BS on this as a daily consumption diet, you would have to have a helluva constitution to pull this off and definite competitive eating levels of body control. You would need to completely override your brain’s satiety center. I eat a keto diet and it’s impossible for me to eat even a tenth this amount daily.


the rest of that sentence is

> …significantly higher than his baseline of [sic] level of 210 to 300

so they measured before and 8 months after the diet change to find a 4x increase in cholesterol




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