My recent heart scan score was about 50% less than you’d expect from an earlier score. Why the improvement?
During the year between the two tests, I’d made one big change: eat much more animal fat. That’s the obvious explanation. Three things support it:
1. Mozaffarian et al., as I blogged, found a similar result.
2. The animal fat (pork fat and butter) had both produced large immediate improvements when I began to eat them. The pork fat had improved my sleep; the butter, my arithmetic scores. This sort of large immediate effect we associate with the supply of a missing necessary nutrient — giving Vitamin C to someone with scurvy, for example. My brain, at least, needed much more animal fat than I’d been eating. Different parts of the body need different nutrients, sure, but they all must work well with the same set of nutrients. If Nutrient X helps one part of the body, it is more likely to help another part.
3. My initial score put me at the 50th percentile for my age. I’d had an unusual diet for a long time. I stopped eating bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, and dessert 13 years ago. I’d started consuming lots of omega-3 and fermented foods a few years earlier. It was possible that those other changes produced improvement but if so it was a strange coincidence that, as my score got better and better over the years, I happened to measure it for the first time just when it crossed the 50th percentile.
This explanation makes a prediction: If you greatly increase your animal-fat intake, your heart scan score should improve. A commenter said what he’d read on paleo-diet forums supported this prediction: “If you hang out in the paleo/low carb forums, you see this kind of thing a lot.”
I’m finding this 25% per year figure increasingly implausible. By the magic of compound interest, if this had any validity, we would expect a patient measured with 100 at age 40 to reach 8673 at age 60, and 80779 by age 70.
Most expensive study of diet ever conducted.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/nutrition-news/low-fat/
I have tripped over your blog while researching flaxseed. At the expense of sounding COMPLETELY stupid… I admit, I have no idea what I am reading, as the science is all greek to me. BUT, I am seeing key words that resonate with the path I am on. I am seeing a Dr. in Mesquite, TX who did some pretty unorthodox testing but was able to get to the bottom of my symptoms. Too many to go into, and too many diagnosis to list here as well, but I originally saw him for RA symptoms and reflux like symptoms. He requested blood work. The results you are so painfully stumbling upon seem to jive with what he rambled in scientific terms. I have only seen him once and I am on heavy duty regimen of vitamins and plan on talking to him more specifically as I slowly digest what my body is experiencing. I am writing because I wanted to recommend 2 books, Nourishing Traditions and The Maker’s Diet. Both have VERY controversial and interesting information about our food sources and the testimony in Maker’s Diet was amazing. Dr.’s CLEARLY are only in the business of masking symptoms. The doctor I am seeing was able to give me REAL answers. While he is an MD and a PhD, all his schooling was done out of the country and he has received amnesty to treat in the states (not clear about that process), but I know he is highly controversial as the last person he tried to train in his methods was shot in the back of the head. How’s that for modern medicine!!! One thing I do see is that every “new theory” is touted as the end all be all, and for real, we are all individuals with very complex bodies and very different combining systems. Just because something is a “natural” supplement, doesn’t mean it is good for you and certainly not in mega doses! I am getting quite an education and I am just beginning. I may start a blog of my own, people need to feel that there is hope amidst the wolves of medicine. Basics, raw, raw, raw as often as you can from a reputable source/dairy. No white flour or sugar. Some may not even be able to tolerate honey etc. or wheat. Pork fat and butter, brilliant!! Nourishing Traditions does a whole thing on fats and you are SPOT on. I’ve written so much, but I just wanted to put it out there to the stratosphere that what you are doing is commendable and I encourage you to cross reference your sources with other sources and don’t ever believe everything you read from a medical journal, find out who is funding them, it just may be a corn oil manufacturer!!!