Thanks for the knowledge sharing...it helps to be healthy.

Here is a link showing the atherogenicity in mice of different saturated fats in diets with 1% cholesterol. Look at page 1416 of the free full report that can be downloaded here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8409772

On the opposite you can see bread not being atherogenic in baboons here:

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/33/8/1869

By the way you can notice the effect of 0.1% cholesterol at the end of the article = 1 gm cholesterol per kg of food = 5 egg yolks.

Does it look a lot ? "There is evidence from animal experiments showing that if atherogenic dietary factors are reduced to levels comparable to man's intake, the same vessel changes occur as with higher levels, but more slowly."

Download the free full report here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1938976/

In this report you can also see butter to be highly atherogenic to swine without additional cholesterol to their diet.

What about rice?  Does it also increase small LDL particles?

@x.ds: Humans aren't C57BL/6J mice (susceptible to diet-induced fatty streak lesions), baboons or pigs.

@x.ds

The strain of mice in the first study are predisposed to diet-induced obesity, type 2 diabetes, and atherosclerosis.

Likewise, here's an interesting quote from the last paper based on a porcine model: "Whenever there are three
animals from the same litter, they are divided equally among the three groups (ie, "control", "butter", & "egg yolk" groups)  In the present experiment, this occurred once. These three pigs had the most aortic atherosclerosis in their respective groups. The control pig with the most atherosclerosis was the brother of the pigs with the most disease fed egg and butter."  

The group of pigs with the highest rate of atherosclerosis was the egg yolk group - yet at most we see a vanishingly positive relationship, if any, in a large number of human epidemiological studies of moderate egg consumption and heart disease (too many to list here - many are recent and easy to locate, though).  Do we even have grounds to formulate a hypothesis of egg induced atherogenesis based on human observational studies? I don't know, really - though a casual glance suggests, "no".

Looking forward to reading the other study you pointed us to when I get the time.

x.ds:

Often times these animal studies don't translate well when applied to humans.

Also, like Dr. Davis pointed out in his blog, most (LDL) cholesterol lowering research doesn't use advanced lipoprotein testing like NMR so the data is misleading to say the least.

x.ds:

It would be nice for a change to see experiments on other than herbivorous (mice) or mostly vegetarian animals (both pigs and baboons on the wild).

Bobber--

While all carbohydrates increase small LDL, the effect of wheat is the most extravagant.

I generally agree with those who deny the universal applicability of experimental results in mice and rats to men. However, I do so with this one caveat; there is one fact I cannot deny: Many women are convinced that most men are rats.

Doc, does this mean that I ca sorta log my particle size by getting my apoB checked in quarterly labs? I'll never be able to convince primary to do the outright particle size test...yet (working on that). Thnx.

I admit I do not understand VLDL-C. What I would really like to find is a simple range scale. Mine shows up VLDL-C..7  Non HDL ..70
I do not know if that is good or bad. Is there such a chart showing like,  1 good ... 100 bad ??
LP(a) shows up by itself and I understand that because there is a range showing bad ..over 30.
Any help understanding appreciated

LynP -

Bypass your doctor and order your own NMR test. PrivateMDlabs has it for $79.99, minus a 15% discount.

http://www.privatemdlabs.com/lab_tests.php?view=search_results&show=865&category=2&search=nmr#865

Dr. Davis,

I honestly think you are doing God's work and have learned to appreciate the value of heart scans through your site.  However, it still bugs me that so many people in Asia can live off of large quantities of white rice with minimal atherosclerosis.  For instance, this study shows that American Whites have much higher atherosclerosis than Japanese despite the Japanese having much higher LDL-cholesterol, blood pressure, fasting glucose, and smoking rates:

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/34/1/173


This other study (below) tries to explain this difference based on the Japanese consumption of fish. However, if you look at the data, those Americans who consume the most fish oil consume about as much fish oil as those Japanese that consume the least fish oil, and yet between these comparable groups in terms of fish consumption, the Japanese still have vastly lower atherosclerosis on heart scans.  And the Japanese American group consumes more fish than the White American group and has more coronary calcium.

http://content.onlinejacc.org/cgi/content/full/52/6/417


And here is another study showing much lower CAC in Japanese than in Japanese-Hawaiians even after controlling for a bunch of risk factors including fish intake:

http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/166/11/1280


Although in this other study looking at only at Americans, the incidence of CAC appears to be similar to that in Japanese - so maybe there was something unusual about the US samples in the other studies?

http://content.onlinejacc.org/cgi/content/full/49/20/2013

Dr. Davis,
What is your opinion of the LP-Pla2 test for arterial plaque?  If you've used the test, do any elements of your program reduce levels of this enzyme?

However, the effect will not be fully evident if you just look at the crude conventional calculated (Friedewald) LDL cholesterol. This is because restricting carbohydrates not only reduces small LDL, it also increases LDL particle size. This make the calculated Friedewald go up, or it blunts its decrease. Conventional calculated LDL will therefore either underestimate or even conceal the real LDL-reducing effect.

Fascinating and funny. Thanks for the post. I'm glad I found your blog

Jeff Brailey
http://wordworks2001.blogspot.com

Check my blog and find out why I refused to have a quintuple coronary artery bypass in the spring of 2004 and am alive to tell about it almost three years later.

Dr. William Roberts, editor of the American Journal of Cardiology and cardiovascular pathologist, is a perennial source of clever ideas on heart disease.


He's also on the advisory board of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) - an organization with a very clear agenda.

(2) The intestinal tract of carnivores is short (about 3 times body length); that of herbivores, long (about 12 times body length). (Since I am 6 feet tall my intestinal tract should be about 60 feet long. As a consequence, if I eat bovine muscle [steak], it could take 5 days to course through those 20 yards.)

I can't believe a physician thinks the human intestine is "about 60 feet long". At most, it's about 25 feet long.

Provocative thoughts, yes....

By way of full disclosure, the leadership and advisory board of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) includes:

PCRM Board of Directors: Neal D. Barnard, M.D., President; Roger Galvin, Esq., Secretary; Andrew Nicholson, M.D., Director.

PCRM’s advisory board includes 11 health care professionals from a broad range of specialties:

T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. Cornell University
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D. The Cleveland Clinic
Suzanne Havala Hobbs, Dr.PH., M.S., R.D. The Vegetarian Resource Group
Henry J. Heimlich, M.D., Sc.D. The Heimlich Institute
Lawrence Kushi, Sc.D. Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente
Virginia Messina, M.P.H., R.D. Nutrition Matters, Inc.
John McDougall, M.D. McDougall Program, St. Helena Hospital
Milton Mills, M.D. Gilead Medical Group
Myriam Parham, R.D., L.D., C.D.E. East Pasco Medical Center
William Roberts, M.D. Baylor Cardiovascular Institute
Andrew Weil, M.D. University of Arizona

Clearly, as a comment mentioned, they have a viewpoint or agenda, however that doesn't mean they are wrong, anymore than carnivore-type programs may be right for everyone.

In my opinion, there's plenty of room for 'novel' thoughts in the field of preventive cardiology and I appreciate Dr. Davis bringing them forward.

And most clearly of all, there's plenty wrong with the conventional "standard American diet" no matter which end of the dietary spectrum one embraces.

Whatever WORKS to help with plaque reversal!

"However, modern livestock raising practices have substantially modified the composition of meats."

Is patient education difficult on such subject matter?  Curious; had to ask.

And how about the flesh of grass fed beef and wild game?  Is that good, better, more acceptable but still bad?  How about the folks who believe anthropologically we were meant to to eat a hunters and gatherers diet?

Polar bears have the longest intestine of all the bears. I'm like a polar bear.

Hi Dr. Davis,
Your favorite internet TYP promoter checking in. : )  Thought to mention a possible opportunity - a friend of mine mentioned that he printed out and passed on a copy of your latest blog posting, the Big Squeeze, to his friend, Congressman Jim Marshall.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Marshall_%28U.S._politician%29
Don't know if much will come of it, but being an opportunity thought to bring to your attention.  
You might want to delete my mentioning of this.

Just found your blog and am enjoying it.

On this topic, I read such a comparison by a veterinarian who had cared for sheep, dogs and cows for 30 years.  Unfortunately I can't find it at the moment

His take was the opposite.  

Some things I remember were that humans, like carnivores, can swallow very large chunks of food that would kill a herbivore.

Humans don't have 4 stomachs and don't chew cud.

Human stereo vision is much more like all types of predators (eagles, cats, dogs, hawks, predatory fish) than almost any herbivore (eyes almost on the sides of the head)

If you look at human hands, they look a lot like the Bonobo monkey's hands and NOT at all like a gorilla's hands.  Bonobos eat a lot of meat - insects, rodents, birds, and gorillas eat a lot of fruit and vegetables.

That's basically what I remember.

I'll post a link later to the fill thing if I can find it.

Sam in Toronto

Another thing I remember - the intestine length argument goes both ways - some carnivores do have long intestines.

Something that does not go both ways - human intestines have the enzyme systems needed to degest lots of chemicals that ONLY exist in MEAT.

As far as I know, you cannot get these from plants, or from only 1 or 2 plants in the world  

Heme iron (not a big deal these days, but this was huge in the past, where every human, even kings, had dozens of blood-extracting parasites on the skin, in the hair and intestines)

creatine (vegetarians can be synthesize this out of plant methionine)

EPA/DHA (from fish oil - in ancient times, in meat - none in vegetables - there's no plant source for EPA, and only seaweed for DHA)

B12

also, as an efficiency measure over and above the efficiency of digesting individual amino acids, human digestion can grab large chunks of protein, many of which occur only in meat ( very, very large peptices -  but I forget what these are called - globulins or antigens)  

Sam in Toronto (that's me, the author, not a chemical that humans can digest and that does not occur in vegetables)

Robert's comment is interesting, it's also grossly in error.  

We're not rabbits or dogs, we're humans, and we're omnivores.

The anthropological record is quite clear at this point.  We evolved large brains to hunt prey, and the fat of that prey allowed our brain to get larger, making us better hunters.  We sweat because we could outrun our herbivorous prey, using our naked skin as a superior cooing mechanism.  We have smaller teeth because we've been cooking our food for 1.5 million years, or so.

We do seem to need some vegetable matter in our diets.  Even the Eskimos eat some.  But we do fine on a primarily animal diet.  A cow would not.

It'd be nice if a physician was a little more familiar with the species he's treating.  A veterinarian couldn't get away with this degree of ignorance.