20-Year Low-Carber Finds Zero Plaque Buildup In Her Arteries

20-Year Low-Carber Finds Zero Plaque Buildup In Her Arteries
Apparently, she went off the rails a little in low-carb eating and went back to low-carb after gaining some weight. Jimmy Moore blogs:

Do low-carb diets simply cause more harm than good by consuming foods that are higher in fat and lower in carbohydrates? Let's look at the story of one of my readers who has been eating low-carb for the past 20 years and recently had a sophisticated test conducted to see what kind of damage her high-fat, moderate protein, low-carb way of eating has had on her body.

She e-mailed me that she recently had a wellness exam after recommitting herself to a "clean" low-carb lifestyle again starting in May 2010 and she discovered that her cholesterol was slightly higher (36 points up) than normal. However, instead of medication, she was put on a high-quality, pharmaceutical-grade fish oil supplement. Now that's pretty amazing in this day and age of handing out statin drugs like they're candy, but the "best news" is what happened next. At the same time they checked her cholesterol, she had an arterial ultrasound test called Carotid Intima-Media Thickness (CIMT) done as well. It's a sophisticated test where they use a doppler to capture images of the carotid, femoral, and abdominal arteries to see if there is any plaque buildup to be concerned with. Plaque that penetrates the arterial wall can lead to a condition known as atheroschlerosis where the arteries harden and become blocked which can eventually lead to a heart attack or stroke. Dr. Oz was certainly insinuating on his show that eating a diet that consists of fat and very few carbohydrates would lead to this, but check out what happened next when my reader got her results.

The nurse practitioner called me and told me that my results were some of the best she had ever seen! My actual age is 43, but my arteries measured that of a 25 year old!

And although her cholesterol is slightly elevated, we know that most of those tests tend to focus on LDL and total cholesterol rather than the triglyceride/HDL ratio which is a much better indicator of heart health risk than what is typically measured. I have long challenged anyone to prove to me that "high" cholesterol is unhealthy. There's just no solid evidence that exists substantiating this oft-repeated but never proven claim. Even worse, most doctors seem to be so clueless about cholesterol except to pull out their prescription pad to write down Lipitor or Crestor for their none-the-wiser patients. Why does a non-medically trained layperson like myself seem to know more about lipid health than a cardiologist like Dr. Oz? Maybe he likes the money he makes cutting into people's chests (as he bragged so much about in the Taubes interview) while simultaneously taking sponsorship from advertisers who create products that are the real culprit in cardiovascular disease, namely high-carb, grain-based cereals.

I'm a little out of my pay grade on arterial plaque testing, but I can say that Dr. Michael Eades, whom I greatly respect, told my boyfriend and me that the test to have is one that measures calcium to check for plaque in arteries, and he said not to have the one that uses a CT scanner (dangerous radiation) but the rarer/harder-to-find EBT machine. Eades writes in the comments on one of his blog posts:

You, of course, must consult your own physician on this. However, if you were my patient, which you aren't, I would send you for an EBT (electron beam tomography) scan of your heart. If your calcium score were normal, I wouldn't worry about it. I would sent my patients to get EBT scans as screening procedures instead of the other scans out there that most cardiologists recommend because these other scanning machines inflict way more radiation than I think people need simply for a screening scan. I have my patients seek out an EBT scanning center because for screening procedures these machines are as accurate as the others, but with significantly (and I do mean significantly) less radiation. Good luck.

Dr. William Davis blogs at The Heart Scan Blog:

Studies have conclusively shown that:

--Coronary calcium scores generated by a CT heart scan outperform any other risk measure for coronary disease, including LDL cholesterol, c-reactive protein, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, blood pressure.
--Coronary calcium scores yield a graded, trackable index of coronary risk. Scores that increase correlate with increased risk of cardiovascular events; scores that remain unchanged correlate with much reduced risk.
--A coronary calcium score of zero--no detectable calcium--correlates with extremely low 5-year risk for cardiovascular events.
--Coronary calcium scores correlate with other measures of coronary disease. Heart scans correlate with coronary angiography, quantitative coronary angiography, carotid ultrasound (intimal-medial thickness and plaque severity), ankle-brachial index, and stress tests, including radionuclide (nuclear) perfusion imaging.

And here's Davis commenting positively on Dr. Eades' thinking on this and on diet.