I clicked the heart by accident and now I can't unclick it. Keto / carnivore are awesome. doc tells me my cholesterol is too high and I look them straight in the eye and say I don't care. My CAC risk score for heart disease is a big fat zero.
I am an open-minded skeptic and I challenge what I think I know, rather than try to confirm it. But that doesn't mean I disagree with the 'establishment' or 'mainstream' on lots of things. Only on a few things. Only where the evidence leads me.
In particular, I agree with mainstream nutrition science. And I know far more about it than I let on (even though I don't practice it). I've followed it since the 70s and have too many books. I was raised a vegetarian by an SDA mother who preached the Ellen White "health message" to us kids growing up. I remember the science even then showing SDAs living something like 9 years longer than everybody else. My great grandmother (an SDA) lived to 99. I'm a member of the CR society and used to post on that newsgroup for years. I let myself lapse in the last 15 years and let myself be convinced by passing fads, articles, and meta-analyses that meat is good for you and that keto is good for you (and I ended up with a property that had sheep on it so I learnt to farm sheep) and I sorta thought the mainstream view had moved past low-fat diets on to low-carb ones. But I dug into it today and... nope. I was just fooled by what has become popular online.
You keto diet people are going to die of heart attacks in your 50s and 60s. You will seem healthy right up until the end. Fit, lean body mass, top form. Then pop, you're dead. The science was in 50 years ago and is only more certain now. Don't be fooled by supplement salesmen or beef industry lobbyists. If you want a social media influencer, listen to nostr:npub108pv4cg5ag52nq082kd5leu9ffrn2gdg6g4xdwatn73y36uzplmq9uyev6 . Veganism is very close to the most healthy diet and he'll probably live past 100. I will still tease him about it though. Fucker... trying to outlive us... how dare he!
Discussion
One of the reasons they don't give people CAC tests generally unless their risk is super high, at least in most countries, is because they might get a score of zero and then think they are safe and go on ignoring their doctor's advice. Studies showed that if you are low risk for other reasons, CAC 0 subjects have low chance of events. If you are high risk by other measures, CAC 0 subjects still have a high risk of cardiac events in the near term. So the whole CAC scoring thing is discredited as not adding any additional value beyond the other biomarkers. Bayes Theorem applies here. If pretest risk was high, a score of 0 does not mean you have low chance of a heart event - it simply doesn't supercede the priors. Anyhow that's what this study says: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.108.767665
Also, lots of research that ApoB levels are strongly positively associated with atherosclerosis progression. A lot of keto people (not all of them) have high LDLs which are representative (but not a perfect measure) of ApoB (which they unfortunately rarely test directly). Huge amounts of study and research went into determining this, that it was ApoB coorelated, not triglyceride or blood sugar coorelated (for example). They might be wrong, but to overturn that would need a lot of evidence of something else.
I forgot to say stack plates and don't draw the short straw genetically.